**2. Asia: a look toward the East of Eden**

Cities are large cultural and spatial systems, characterised by particular social, economic, and political practices and the power relations emerging from them. Four roles stand out: a) The city as an engine of economic growth, trade and transformation, b) The city as a social change agent and the crucible of innovation and adaptation; cities as centres of successful, dynamic progressive governance; c) The city, facilitating the exchange of ideas, goods and services, community experience and practices; d) The city as leader in healing environmental damage, championing public health, fair food production/distribution, enabling social equity to increase and as focus of global communication.

By the year 1900, only about 15 percent of the population or just 250 million people, lived and worked in urban areas, around 30 percent of India's population today. Over the next 100 years, the 250 million urban dwellers became 2.8 billion (49% of India's population now). This shows the unprecedented pace of urbanization in the 20th-century. It is surprising that the world has been able to cope with this rapid increase, and it is no surprise that the city appears prominently in all kinds of artistic and cultural representations. Geographically, the focus of change is now Asia and Africa. Europe and North-America experienced rapid urbanization in the 19th-century and early 20th-century. Latin-America followed in the second half of the 20th-century. By 2030 about 55% of the total world urban population will be in Asia. Recently, China has demonstrated an unprecedented constructive transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial society, from rural communities to urban settlements, from isolated towns and villages to a system of metropolitan communities. Demography is fundamental because, as history has many times demonstrated, the most populous countries are potentially the most powerful in terms of active workers. This power is correlated to the territorial distribution of the population as in the cases of China and India. History is important in both countries which are also places of very ancient civilizations.

The history of Chinese urbanisation is essentially endogenous (moving from the Yellow River to the Yangtze basin). In India the movement also started in the Indus and Ganges plains but the expansion was mostly determined by invaders coming from central Asia in the 13th century to establish the Delhi sultanate, then by the Moghol empire as of 1526, and the British colonisation from the end of the 18th century to the creation of New Delhi. In both cases the urban wave has moved from north to south. India's demographic growth is much faster than China's, due to a lack of family planning. The present growth rate of the population in India is estimated at 1.4 percent per annum, compared to a low 0.58 percent in China. The rates of urban growth are 2.7 percent per year in China (going down towards 2 percent) and 2.4 percent in India (going up towards 2.6 percent). In 2030, according to UN projections, China should be 62 percent urban and India 41 percent. The two countries have the same number of cities of more than five million people (eight). In China the largest cities are distributed along the coast: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Wuhan and Chongqing. In India the hexagon Mymbai, Delhi Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Pune covers almost the entire country. China and India demonstrate that

Western and Eastern Ur-Topias: Communities and Nostalgia 81

understanding of urban dynamics such as 1) how the relationship between urban scenery may affect people's sense of belonging; 2) how after urban change civic memory may still retain remembrances representative of the community; 3) how the dynamics of change whether environmental, technological, or cultural should ensure social justice and sustainable communities; and 4) how urban issues may affect conflict resolution between individual and communal demands such as mobility, equity, etc. Urban sociologists such as Bridge and Watson; LeGates and Staut; Palen; Keunen and Eeckhout have turned their attention to the artistic representations in order to understand social problems and develop

The space of the city is conceptualized as a dwelling place drawn against its inhabitants and site of relational constructions where the limit or border becomes a constitutive feature, perceived as embodied, physical and territorial, a feature of individual, but also of collective identity: me and the others. The production of spatial finitude and delimitation of both space and time places the individual in the centre of perception. Existing things are felt (seen, heard, etc.) as fixed around us, placed against a particular point of reference. This is how the constructed space acquires a sense of territorial belonging. It is through this sense

Prototypical representations, frequent in advertising and marketing, often construct the city from a range of places, architectural, spatial, social, or cultural images, elected as best to simplify and evoke a prototype easy to remember (i.e. New York the city that never sleeps). Artistic representations, on the other hand, are rooted in people's emotional experiences and seek to map the multiplicity of city life and the diversity of places and spaces, both individual and communal. In the West, work by Seixo; Weiss-Sussex and Bianchini have contributed to the study of city images transported through memory, imagination and cultural representation in different media. Rob Shields, Lewis Mumford, Françoise Choay, Henri Lefebvre, Paolo Sica and Richard Sennett discussed the use of artistic and literary

The 18th-century novel was the point of departure for Morroe Berger's, Oscar Handlin's or Pierre Ansay's studies on urban growth and industrialization (the same can be found in and René Schoonbrodt's volumes). Andrew Lees's volume includes both literature and journalism in the configuration of European and North American city spaces. Other studies include work by Michael Jaye and Ann C. Watts, Arturo Almandoz, or by Richard Lehan, who argues that transformations in the structure and function of cities influenced the form of the novel so that the various narrative methods and trends can be linked to historical stages of urbanization. J. Hillis Miller has proposed that every narrative without exception, even the most abstract one, "traces out in its course an arrangement of places, dwellings, and rooms joined by paths and roads" (10) Thus, streets, squares, arcades, buildings, etc. -- can be interpreted as visible signs of social, economic and political processes, conceptualizing the city as a composite of representational human acts (see also Spiridon; Verheyen; Relph). Recent research shows how that these representations of urban spaces are changing from the evocation of the physical structures of the city –monuments, public buildings, cultural attractions, to signs and meanings shared across the online communities of cyberspace. A clear symptom of the questioning of the communicative space of the city is the emphasis on meta-cognitive articulations of the awareness of limits and their symbolic representations. A certain desire to transgress limits or to articulate 'in-between' and 'third spaces' emerges as

normative theories and ameliorative plans to counter them.

sources to document urbanization processes.

of belonging that the role of history, memory and art comes into play.

cities are simultaneously the cause and consequence of development, that there is a direct correlation between urbanisation and socio-economic progress. (Paul Bairoch 1993)

After history, economy is the second explanatory factor of the urbanisation processes. If the two countries had the same per capita income in 1987, the figure has quadrupled in 20 years in China and doubled in India. At present the purchasing power per capita in China is therefore approximately twice that of India. The Chinese take-off has been much faster than India's, particularly thanks to the dynamism of its cities linked to an enormous investment in infrastructure and reforms. Chinese exports represented 10 times Indian exports during the last few years, but the relative gap will diminish in the coming years because of India's more liberal laisser-faire federal Government and political decentralisation after the passing of the 74th amendment to the Constitution in 1992. However, it is clear that India needs to drastically increase its investments in infrastructure. Monetary or income poverty diminishes regularly in the two countries, but the poverty of living conditions, which has decreased in China, persists in most Indian cities. This "housing poverty" is visible in the larger urbanized areas in India. Social inequities are also striking in India, specifically between unregistered migrant workers and the official urban population. The launch in 2005 of the National Urban Renewal Mission aimed at reducing poverty in Indian cities and was supported by federal budget and the active role played by NGOs in poor neighbourhoods. Regional levels of government and the transfer of financial competences have been essential in view of the immense size of the territory, and India is implementing international recommendations on the incremental upgrading of slum conditions with the participation of communities themselves, although there is an evolution towards high-cost speculative housing and the production of social housing by public agencies has not increased.

Asian cities appear to have in common the abolition of the centre-suburb dichotomy, which constitutes a feature of both European cities (which have a rich centre) and American cities (where the wealthy live in suburbs). In India, urban populations are relocating to suburban areas and satellite towns linked to the main city through commuter networks. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in large Indian cities where ring towns or "bedroom communities" have formed around cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. Urban growth patterns in China, on the other hand, have tended to produce "city regions" along the eastern coastal belt, which are responsible for much of the economic growth experienced by the country in recent years. With some exceptions (e.g. Bangalore), Indian cities are becoming more and more multi-centred, due to investor strategies to promote metropolitan regions or urban corridors associating cities, towns and rural areas and favouring intraregional synergies. Acute regional disparities, insufficient energetic resources and huge environmental problems (air and water pollution, obsolete heavy industries) constitute major constraints and threats. In 2002 the Central Pollution Control board coordinated a project to make eco-friendly the towns of Vrindavan, Tirupati, Puri, Ujjian, Kottayam and Thanjavour. These initiatives fit well within a population that contemplates adherence to Western modes of consumption – private car, fast food, malls, modernist architecture- with an unhidden national pride and a longing for more traditional lifestyles.

#### **3. Western mindscapes**

In recent years, it is significant the number of urban studies that have focused on the cultural ideas of a community since practical outcomes of this analysis further the

cities are simultaneously the cause and consequence of development, that there is a direct

After history, economy is the second explanatory factor of the urbanisation processes. If the two countries had the same per capita income in 1987, the figure has quadrupled in 20 years in China and doubled in India. At present the purchasing power per capita in China is therefore approximately twice that of India. The Chinese take-off has been much faster than India's, particularly thanks to the dynamism of its cities linked to an enormous investment in infrastructure and reforms. Chinese exports represented 10 times Indian exports during the last few years, but the relative gap will diminish in the coming years because of India's more liberal laisser-faire federal Government and political decentralisation after the passing of the 74th amendment to the Constitution in 1992. However, it is clear that India needs to drastically increase its investments in infrastructure. Monetary or income poverty diminishes regularly in the two countries, but the poverty of living conditions, which has decreased in China, persists in most Indian cities. This "housing poverty" is visible in the larger urbanized areas in India. Social inequities are also striking in India, specifically between unregistered migrant workers and the official urban population. The launch in 2005 of the National Urban Renewal Mission aimed at reducing poverty in Indian cities and was supported by federal budget and the active role played by NGOs in poor neighbourhoods. Regional levels of government and the transfer of financial competences have been essential in view of the immense size of the territory, and India is implementing international recommendations on the incremental upgrading of slum conditions with the participation of communities themselves, although there is an evolution towards high-cost speculative

correlation between urbanisation and socio-economic progress. (Paul Bairoch 1993)

housing and the production of social housing by public agencies has not increased.

an unhidden national pride and a longing for more traditional lifestyles.

**3. Western mindscapes** 

Asian cities appear to have in common the abolition of the centre-suburb dichotomy, which constitutes a feature of both European cities (which have a rich centre) and American cities (where the wealthy live in suburbs). In India, urban populations are relocating to suburban areas and satellite towns linked to the main city through commuter networks. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in large Indian cities where ring towns or "bedroom communities" have formed around cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. Urban growth patterns in China, on the other hand, have tended to produce "city regions" along the eastern coastal belt, which are responsible for much of the economic growth experienced by the country in recent years. With some exceptions (e.g. Bangalore), Indian cities are becoming more and more multi-centred, due to investor strategies to promote metropolitan regions or urban corridors associating cities, towns and rural areas and favouring intraregional synergies. Acute regional disparities, insufficient energetic resources and huge environmental problems (air and water pollution, obsolete heavy industries) constitute major constraints and threats. In 2002 the Central Pollution Control board coordinated a project to make eco-friendly the towns of Vrindavan, Tirupati, Puri, Ujjian, Kottayam and Thanjavour. These initiatives fit well within a population that contemplates adherence to Western modes of consumption – private car, fast food, malls, modernist architecture- with

In recent years, it is significant the number of urban studies that have focused on the cultural ideas of a community since practical outcomes of this analysis further the understanding of urban dynamics such as 1) how the relationship between urban scenery may affect people's sense of belonging; 2) how after urban change civic memory may still retain remembrances representative of the community; 3) how the dynamics of change whether environmental, technological, or cultural should ensure social justice and sustainable communities; and 4) how urban issues may affect conflict resolution between individual and communal demands such as mobility, equity, etc. Urban sociologists such as Bridge and Watson; LeGates and Staut; Palen; Keunen and Eeckhout have turned their attention to the artistic representations in order to understand social problems and develop normative theories and ameliorative plans to counter them.

The space of the city is conceptualized as a dwelling place drawn against its inhabitants and site of relational constructions where the limit or border becomes a constitutive feature, perceived as embodied, physical and territorial, a feature of individual, but also of collective identity: me and the others. The production of spatial finitude and delimitation of both space and time places the individual in the centre of perception. Existing things are felt (seen, heard, etc.) as fixed around us, placed against a particular point of reference. This is how the constructed space acquires a sense of territorial belonging. It is through this sense of belonging that the role of history, memory and art comes into play.

Prototypical representations, frequent in advertising and marketing, often construct the city from a range of places, architectural, spatial, social, or cultural images, elected as best to simplify and evoke a prototype easy to remember (i.e. New York the city that never sleeps). Artistic representations, on the other hand, are rooted in people's emotional experiences and seek to map the multiplicity of city life and the diversity of places and spaces, both individual and communal. In the West, work by Seixo; Weiss-Sussex and Bianchini have contributed to the study of city images transported through memory, imagination and cultural representation in different media. Rob Shields, Lewis Mumford, Françoise Choay, Henri Lefebvre, Paolo Sica and Richard Sennett discussed the use of artistic and literary sources to document urbanization processes.

The 18th-century novel was the point of departure for Morroe Berger's, Oscar Handlin's or Pierre Ansay's studies on urban growth and industrialization (the same can be found in and René Schoonbrodt's volumes). Andrew Lees's volume includes both literature and journalism in the configuration of European and North American city spaces. Other studies include work by Michael Jaye and Ann C. Watts, Arturo Almandoz, or by Richard Lehan, who argues that transformations in the structure and function of cities influenced the form of the novel so that the various narrative methods and trends can be linked to historical stages of urbanization. J. Hillis Miller has proposed that every narrative without exception, even the most abstract one, "traces out in its course an arrangement of places, dwellings, and rooms joined by paths and roads" (10) Thus, streets, squares, arcades, buildings, etc. -- can be interpreted as visible signs of social, economic and political processes, conceptualizing the city as a composite of representational human acts (see also Spiridon; Verheyen; Relph). Recent research shows how that these representations of urban spaces are changing from the evocation of the physical structures of the city –monuments, public buildings, cultural attractions, to signs and meanings shared across the online communities of cyberspace. A clear symptom of the questioning of the communicative space of the city is the emphasis on meta-cognitive articulations of the awareness of limits and their symbolic representations. A certain desire to transgress limits or to articulate 'in-between' and 'third spaces' emerges as

Western and Eastern Ur-Topias: Communities and Nostalgia 83

possibly associated to the fact that many of these artists were in exile during and in between

Acknowledging the significance of national context in literary texts, Richard Lehan describes how responses to the modern city varied across space. While feudalism, imperialism, and totalitarianism informed European urban literature, American authors, artists, and architects reacted to and in turn shaped images of the frontier, the transition from rural to urban and with the perceived democracy of the frontier (167). Lehan introduces the category of region into his analysis, noting differences between depictions of the city in the North-Eastern, Southern, Mid-Western, and Western U.S. In late nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations cities are given the role of signs in the economy of consumption. Protagonists in US-American novels are the ethnically marked inhabitants of growing cities, belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. This is the case in many naturalist literary portraits of cities, such as those by Dreiser's *Sister Carrie* and texts works by writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Jack London, Steven Crane, or Frank Norris, many of them committed to socialist ideals in the United States, influenced also by European writers such as Zola. The hard-boiled detective novel, which originated in Los Angeles in the 1930s, displays the image of the perverse city in the detective stories of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy (further examples include such as the technocratic depiction of Los Angeles in which computers, cyborgs, and technology have gained control over society in Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel *Snow Crash* and in films such as *Strange* 

Modern representations of urban communities as cities of things and cities of signs derive from industrial capitalism and post-industrial capitalism. The dominance of commodity fetishism is apparent in works by Warhol and in pop art in general, where objects and things are given a defining role in determining meaning. The next step is the city of signs, where post-industrial media culture replaces "things" for "signs". As Deleuze and Guattari explain "from the moment we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack … a lack of the real object" (25) Thus, consumer capitalism mobilizes desire to produce active subjectivities rather than the passive ones portrayed in Baudelaire's *flâneur*. The spectacle of the city is a cause of discontent because it offers more experience than humans

Malcolm Bradbury writes that the fascination with the city has much to do with its growing size and heterogeneity: "not simply a national capital, but a cosmopolitan city … the capital of an empire and the centre of world trade." (179). Modernist Western perceptions of the city are modular in that they displace undesirable social elements to the periphery or the regions that Michel Foucault termed heterotopoi: the madhouse, the prison, the "red light" districts, the bowery (24). The modularity of city life appears also in early motion pictures, such as Chaplin's *Modern Times* or *Naked City* and in the criss-cross of train tracks, subway lines and continuous movement of the masses in Lang's movie *Metropolis* or John Dos Passos' novel *Manhattan Transfer*. "A fragmented and subjective kaleidoscope, constantly shifting in time" (Pike xiii) the modernist city opens up spaces, inviting audiences to familiar places that are simultaneously archetypical and strange, like "a second poetic geography" that comes "on top of the geography of the literal" (de Certeau, "Walking in the City" 159), "punched and

can assimilate, Restless dissatisfaction and aimless desire ensues.

torn open by ellipses, drifts and leaks of meaning" (160).

world wars.

*Days* or *Blade Runner*).

symptom of structural problems at the spatial-temporal interface of culture and its representations, and it points to the principle of semiotic practice which allows intersubjective formations of signification and meaningful action, negotiated in political, social, economic and technological practice (see López-Varela and Net 2009)

The utopia of an ideal *Ur-image* as a perfectly organized communal space is an enduring theme in the oral and written tradition of all cultures, standing at the crossroads between imagination and experience and forming part of the creation myths in many cultures. For example, sources for the biblical Garden of Eden can be found in earlier Canaanite and Mesopotamian myths accounted for in the *Enûma Eliš*, and in the Iranian and Zoroastrian traditions. In the Western tradition ancient works such as Plato's *Republic*, Saint Augustine's *City of God*, Virgil's *Aeneid*, Moore's *Utopia*, Dante's *Purgatory*, Bacon's New *Atlantis*, or Campanella's *City of the Sun*, include "loci amoeni" of perfect societies, myths that widely circulated between Asia and Europe thanks to travels and conquests of Alexander the Great (356- 323 BC). The idealization of rural communities in the West, has been particularly prevalent at times of fast industrial growth, and accompanying fear of the loss of the individual in mass humanity as well as ecological threats and environmental issues. The theme has frequently appeared in association to issues of femininity as a kind of essence, home, place of shelter and mother earth figure, exemplified in the Greek myth of Gaia. Works by English poets, such as Worldsworth or Keats emphasized the need to recover the appreciation for the bond between natural resources and human habitation. In contrast to this idyllic garden community, cities have frequently been associated with vice, with the earliest references in the West being the biblical mention of Cain as the first city-builder and the fall of Babylon. Dystopic representations of cities prevailed during the Enlightenment in the work of satirists such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but more importantly in the romantic and Victorian imagination. Gothic literature disclosed a criticism of science and technology associated with enclosed and dark places (castles, corrupt cities). Corruption in cities is a theme frequently found in Charles Dickens, Cowper or Thackeray, and even more prevalent in the some early 20th-century representations such as T.S. Eliot's *The Wasteland*, Wells's *The Invisible Man* and *The War of the Worlds,* or Huxley's *Brave New World*. In Chaplin's movies, such as *Modern Times* or, more recently, in Margaret Atwood's novels, the city is again the place where technological advance, works alongside totalitarian regimes and dehumanized capitalist trends to suffocate the alienated individual in the mechanized metropolis. Selfish individual desires and the power of money lead to desolate urban wastelands, and the increasing diversity of the crowd seems to engulf differences into the mass, as Eduard Munch exemplified in 1893 in his famous painting *The Scream.* Modernist representations and their emphasis on the spatial and temporal relativity (the subjective versions of time that we can find in authors and artists as different as Bergson, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Magritte, or Dali) indicate a desire to encapsulate time into space (Woolf's "moments of being", Joyce's notion of "epiphany"; for more information see López-Varela 2004). In many of these works, the metaphor of the journey or voyage, a symbol for movement, openness, freedom and progress becomes an endless cyclic and insecure urban wandering, almost trapping the individual. Y.F. Tuan writes that this open space, with "no trodden paths and signposts … has no fixed pattern of established human meanings … Enclosed and humanized space is place" (54). Why should space become place in modern representations? In the West, interwar existential place becames *Dasein,* a situation in discourse, a place of paralysis where the individual seeks an impossible fixed identity,

symptom of structural problems at the spatial-temporal interface of culture and its representations, and it points to the principle of semiotic practice which allows intersubjective formations of signification and meaningful action, negotiated in political, social,

The utopia of an ideal *Ur-image* as a perfectly organized communal space is an enduring theme in the oral and written tradition of all cultures, standing at the crossroads between imagination and experience and forming part of the creation myths in many cultures. For example, sources for the biblical Garden of Eden can be found in earlier Canaanite and Mesopotamian myths accounted for in the *Enûma Eliš*, and in the Iranian and Zoroastrian traditions. In the Western tradition ancient works such as Plato's *Republic*, Saint Augustine's *City of God*, Virgil's *Aeneid*, Moore's *Utopia*, Dante's *Purgatory*, Bacon's New *Atlantis*, or Campanella's *City of the Sun*, include "loci amoeni" of perfect societies, myths that widely circulated between Asia and Europe thanks to travels and conquests of Alexander the Great (356- 323 BC). The idealization of rural communities in the West, has been particularly prevalent at times of fast industrial growth, and accompanying fear of the loss of the individual in mass humanity as well as ecological threats and environmental issues. The theme has frequently appeared in association to issues of femininity as a kind of essence, home, place of shelter and mother earth figure, exemplified in the Greek myth of Gaia. Works by English poets, such as Worldsworth or Keats emphasized the need to recover the appreciation for the bond between natural resources and human habitation. In contrast to this idyllic garden community, cities have frequently been associated with vice, with the earliest references in the West being the biblical mention of Cain as the first city-builder and the fall of Babylon. Dystopic representations of cities prevailed during the Enlightenment in the work of satirists such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but more importantly in the romantic and Victorian imagination. Gothic literature disclosed a criticism of science and technology associated with enclosed and dark places (castles, corrupt cities). Corruption in cities is a theme frequently found in Charles Dickens, Cowper or Thackeray, and even more prevalent in the some early 20th-century representations such as T.S. Eliot's *The Wasteland*, Wells's *The Invisible Man* and *The War of the Worlds,* or Huxley's *Brave New World*. In Chaplin's movies, such as *Modern Times* or, more recently, in Margaret Atwood's novels, the city is again the place where technological advance, works alongside totalitarian regimes and dehumanized capitalist trends to suffocate the alienated individual in the mechanized metropolis. Selfish individual desires and the power of money lead to desolate urban wastelands, and the increasing diversity of the crowd seems to engulf differences into the mass, as Eduard Munch exemplified in 1893 in his famous painting *The Scream.* Modernist representations and their emphasis on the spatial and temporal relativity (the subjective versions of time that we can find in authors and artists as different as Bergson, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Magritte, or Dali) indicate a desire to encapsulate time into space (Woolf's "moments of being", Joyce's notion of "epiphany"; for more information see López-Varela 2004). In many of these works, the metaphor of the journey or voyage, a symbol for movement, openness, freedom and progress becomes an endless cyclic and insecure urban wandering, almost trapping the individual. Y.F. Tuan writes that this open space, with "no trodden paths and signposts … has no fixed pattern of established human meanings … Enclosed and humanized space is place" (54). Why should space become place in modern representations? In the West, interwar existential place becames *Dasein,* a situation in discourse, a place of paralysis where the individual seeks an impossible fixed identity,

economic and technological practice (see López-Varela and Net 2009)

possibly associated to the fact that many of these artists were in exile during and in between world wars.

Acknowledging the significance of national context in literary texts, Richard Lehan describes how responses to the modern city varied across space. While feudalism, imperialism, and totalitarianism informed European urban literature, American authors, artists, and architects reacted to and in turn shaped images of the frontier, the transition from rural to urban and with the perceived democracy of the frontier (167). Lehan introduces the category of region into his analysis, noting differences between depictions of the city in the North-Eastern, Southern, Mid-Western, and Western U.S. In late nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations cities are given the role of signs in the economy of consumption. Protagonists in US-American novels are the ethnically marked inhabitants of growing cities, belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. This is the case in many naturalist literary portraits of cities, such as those by Dreiser's *Sister Carrie* and texts works by writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Jack London, Steven Crane, or Frank Norris, many of them committed to socialist ideals in the United States, influenced also by European writers such as Zola. The hard-boiled detective novel, which originated in Los Angeles in the 1930s, displays the image of the perverse city in the detective stories of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy (further examples include such as the technocratic depiction of Los Angeles in which computers, cyborgs, and technology have gained control over society in Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novel *Snow Crash* and in films such as *Strange Days* or *Blade Runner*).

Modern representations of urban communities as cities of things and cities of signs derive from industrial capitalism and post-industrial capitalism. The dominance of commodity fetishism is apparent in works by Warhol and in pop art in general, where objects and things are given a defining role in determining meaning. The next step is the city of signs, where post-industrial media culture replaces "things" for "signs". As Deleuze and Guattari explain "from the moment we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack … a lack of the real object" (25) Thus, consumer capitalism mobilizes desire to produce active subjectivities rather than the passive ones portrayed in Baudelaire's *flâneur*. The spectacle of the city is a cause of discontent because it offers more experience than humans can assimilate, Restless dissatisfaction and aimless desire ensues.

Malcolm Bradbury writes that the fascination with the city has much to do with its growing size and heterogeneity: "not simply a national capital, but a cosmopolitan city … the capital of an empire and the centre of world trade." (179). Modernist Western perceptions of the city are modular in that they displace undesirable social elements to the periphery or the regions that Michel Foucault termed heterotopoi: the madhouse, the prison, the "red light" districts, the bowery (24). The modularity of city life appears also in early motion pictures, such as Chaplin's *Modern Times* or *Naked City* and in the criss-cross of train tracks, subway lines and continuous movement of the masses in Lang's movie *Metropolis* or John Dos Passos' novel *Manhattan Transfer*. "A fragmented and subjective kaleidoscope, constantly shifting in time" (Pike xiii) the modernist city opens up spaces, inviting audiences to familiar places that are simultaneously archetypical and strange, like "a second poetic geography" that comes "on top of the geography of the literal" (de Certeau, "Walking in the City" 159), "punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts and leaks of meaning" (160).

Western and Eastern Ur-Topias: Communities and Nostalgia 85

This description shows that in South-Asian traditions, Paradise is not contemplated as a fixed location at the end of a historical journey towards sanctification, but rather as a series of existential planes, traditionally envisioned as a vertical continuum in the shape of a mountain, with heavens existing above the realm of world living creatures. This visualization is directly related to the differences religious conceptions of resurrection and reincarnation, and impacts directly in the visualization of Paradise as ideal community.

Garden-cities may have originated as early as 4000 BC, when the idea of Paradise spread through Persian literature and Hellenic influence into Europe and North Africa. The Persian word for walled-garden *eparidaida* rendered the European "Paradise". Hebrew *pardes*  referred to a park, garden or orchard (see the Song of Solomon 4:13, Ecclesiastes 2:5 and Nehemiah 2:8) In the *New Testament* the word is used in Luke 23:43, 2 Cor.12:4 and Rev.2:7 in a reference to the Gen.2:8 and the tree of life. Besides, the story locates the garden with reference to four rivers (Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, Euphrates) and, as in the Indian tradition, they charted the four different directions North, South, East and West. The garden-myth contemplates location in relation to the birth of sexuality (*locus amoenus*), and therefore community. The enclosed quality of the garden was meant to protect physical and spiritual relaxation, and eventually came to refer to a plantation or cultivated area, not necessarily walled. Gardens were decorated with fountains and ponds and four streams dividing the four areas of the world. The design changed into a central pool with a long axis and a cross axis extending water channels into four gardens, a pattern visible in the garden of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain and in the Taj Mahal. The first Persian garden in India seems to be the work of Ẓahīr ad-Dīn Muḥammad (1483 –1530), a descendant of Genghis Khan, who was the first Mughal Emperor to invade South Asia. He established Aram Bāgh garden in Agra. In the Islamic tradition, the descriptions of paradise are mentioned in significant detail

The different views of Paradise between ancient South Asian and Mesopotamian traditions are related to the distinct conceptions of temporal flow. In both traditions the universe is infinite, but the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, postulate a difference between sacred and profane time, with human creation (Genesis) as starting point. South Asian religions, however, belief that time is infinite, like the human soul, and it follows cycles. Contemporary scientific explanations see time as a dimension of space, in that future events are already there. The simultaneous experience of time cannot be captured from a human perspective. Thus, humans contemplate time as a succession of moments (past, present, future) in relation to perception and memory. The contents of an observation are time-extended but the conceptual observer, being a geometric point at the origin of the light cone, is not (see López-Varela 2004). In religious mythical imagery, a cosmic center or *axis mundi* would help connect the two planes, the sacred (Heaven) and the human world. A frequent element in all cosmologies is the tree or a pillar (ziggurat, temple,

These foundational stories are closely related to the development of communities, cities and nations. Generally, human control implies the removal of the uncontrolled, dangerous and wild, and sometimes the taming of nature. However, the envisioned garden-community also seeks to preserve ecological relations and not degrade human life and nature with polluting and unhealthy habits for the community (among them heavy industrialization, prostitution, etc., frequently associated with urban spaces). The mythical images captured in artistic

in the *Qur'an* (610-632 CE)

etc.) joining the two words.

As the modern approaches the post-modern the construction of spatiality takes a different approach breaking the order/topos-chaos/chora dichotomy. The concept of site (as in website) becomes nomadic and there is a return to bounded-chaos approaches since excessive order is perceived as oppressive. With the introduction of digital media and the widespread use of social networks, relational space is reduced in terms of physical distance but also in terms of physical contact. The post-industrial city offers alienated visions of humanity amid the overload of informational signs, exemplified powerfully in Thomas Pynchon's novels and in Paul Auster's short narrative *City of Glass* (see López-Varela 2012)
