The Multi-Nodal city: Medieval and Postmodern (Essay Blogpost)

 According to Edward Soja, the postmodern city does not have a single central area, but rather has a distributed network of many central nodes. This idea can be seen to be derived from the 1945 multi-nuclei model of urban economic model which was originally based of, as every kind of transportation and urban model before it, on the most modern city, Chicago. Of course, multi-nuclei cities and distributed network cities are now better exemplified by cities like LA, Atlanta, and the Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News Metropolitan Statistical Area. While these cities have a downtown, they also have multiple other areas that act as downtowns. These cities are also very spread out, requiring a car to get around (although places like Tokyo and Milan are denser and can be traveled by train).

I lived in Atlanta for 8 years, but I almost never interacted with the actual downtown and most commonly went to Buckhead to do shopping or get my fill of the city. Similarly, residents of San Gimignano probably do not need to go to the central town square to shop or work. Each square in the city acted as its own node, with a distributed flow of streets connecting each of these nodes up. Instead of a city like Florence or Chicago that revolves around one central district (Il Duomo or The Loop), Atlanta and San Gimignano revolve around many districts, each one able to compete and pull in shoppers and workers. Now both San Gimignano and Atlanta do have main area that attract tourists. For Atlanta, it’s the Centennial Olympic Park and downtown, and for San Gimignano, it’s the main street Via Matteo and Via San Gimignano. Beyond these tourist spots, the rest of the city’s economic activities are spread out over the other squares in both the medieval and post-modern case.

Another way to see this interconnected network is to just compare the subway systems of a modern city with a postmodern city. Milan’s subway has no center, and the lines weave and connect in various locations. Chicago’s has a clear center and the only real way to shift from one line to another is to go to that downtown. If you wanted to go from one neighborhood in the north to one in the west, you have to go through the downtown. Milan has many downtowns and gives equal access to all of them with its transportation system, which has the lines intersect all over the city (in fact based on the subway lines, it looks like Milan has 4 downtowns: Duomo, Garibaldi, Loreto, and Cadorna).  Milan also has many trams, streetcars, and buses to support this system, giving many ways to travel to the various different areas.

Here is the difference between the medieval and the post-modern city: spread and distance. Atlanta might have many different districts, but it is impossible to walk between them, you must drive. Walking has been replaced by other innovations, and thus “geographical spaces have kept shrinking as speed has increased” (Virilio 150). San Gimignano has many districts, but they are all very close to each other and thus it feels like one unified space behind the wall. This is why Tokyo and Milan are better examples of postmodern cities. Public transit works there, and while driving is very individualistic (a key renaissance idea), public transit is very societal and separates those inside the train from those outside and has unique relations with space as it “is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by” (Foucault 23-24). This difference in speed and scale is mostly where medieval and post-modern cities differ on the issue of network distribution.

Both the medieval and postmodern city are cities of places. The renaissance city is a city of routes and movement, where “the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved, as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement” (Foucault 23). Essentially, in a renaissance or modern city, there is only one place: the downtown. Everyone must move through the downtown and the rest of the city spreads out form the center into an infinitely open space (as can be seen by the sprawl of many modern cities like Chicago). As I discussed in my presentation blog post, Leonardo DaVinci begins the process of looking only at moving people and things faster to the point where modern urban planners are not looking at a city as a place but are looking to try to get people to move to and from the city center as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, San Gimignano has four main squares, Atlanta has 3 downtowns, and Tokyo has 26 cities. Milan has a new, postmodern downtown and a renaissance downtown around the Duomo and has three different train stations to center itself on. There are multiple places connected in an interwoven network and bundled together by a wall (for Tokyo, LA, and Milan this wall is the mountains) separating the places inside the city from the country-folk outside the city. Speed and technology have made the distance between places larger in the postmodern city, but the fact remains that these places exist. We no longer see cities with one center and infinite sprawl form the center as sustainable. The renaissance thinking man would think that we would be able to live farther and farther from cities and still make the commute and that we can overcome the limits of nature with our ingenuity, while the medieval and postmodern thinker sees man as limited in his advances and thus build places closer to each other to limit the infinite plane. The postmodern and medieval thinks think of society as a whole group together rather than the individual genius, leading to the development of cities with many places instead of one main place to shine brightest and the development of many smaller communities in the cities with the building of smaller neighborhoods to group around instead of staying as one giant city. The medieval and postmodern city are cities of places, while the renaissance and modern city is a city of movement.

Subway map for Milan- a postmodern city

Subway map for Chicago- a modern city

Works Cited

de Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. New York: Vintage, 2002.

Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.