Carlos GARCÍA-SANCHO, URBAN MYTHOLOGIES 1/ 13
URBAN MYTHOLOGIES1
THE FANTASTIC AND THE ARCHAIC IN THE GENESIS OF THE CONTEMPORARY METROPLIS. “… It seemed that the sound, that every fabulous chord of the melody got into every cell of my body and transmuted it, its physiology. The beats seemed to glow in the air, reverb as if I were in a cathedral…” (Matthew COLLIN, Estado alterado (Spanish ed.) 2002)
“… In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. (…) You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” (Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in “Fight Club”2)
The project of the modern city presented the urban as an entirely rational environment, a place where science and philosophy had their place, a space for enlightened revolutions to happen. It constituted the real and tangible world, far away from rural fictions and superstitions. However, modern urban culture always stresses the unpredictable and the illegible; it creates products that actively evoke a lost past, like urban tribes, cult trends, pop idols, urban legends. If the ancient civilizations measured their world and time in the movement of stars, contemporary citizens deposit their faith in ubiquitous movie stars. MUF Architects (UK) carried out a project for a new square in Barking (London) in which they placed an artificial wall made up with old stones from different ruins, ironically building history. Soon after the project was finished, the local people had invented new origins for the wall: it now was an ancient part of Barking Abbey that had been unburied – they explained proudly to the tourists. Is thus the myth or the fantastic an essential component of the urban? The main urban feature is that cities are places where we are able to hide: citizens are able to keep their secrets fusing in the unconcern of the metropolis, unlike villagers, who are unable to bear a double life. Our paper in the city is basically that of a voyeur3. We gaze our cities from the window of glazed skyscrapers, taking the role of a new god. It’s precisely the disapproval of some other gods which make those skyscrapers crumble, bringing the real back into the city. Those images of the urban disintegration overlap other myths and legends that bring about a fear of an annihilation of biblical The term ‘urban myth’ or ‘urban mythology’ has been seldom applied as a synonym for ‘urban legend’. However I shall use it as a transposition of the classical mythology into the urban, thus meaning roughly “a body of myths/stories of a particular culture that use the supernatural [fantastic, illusory, unreal] to interpret [urban] events and to explain the nature of [cities].” (Based on the original definition of mythology from Wikipedia). 1
2
Fight Club, David FINCHER, 1999 USA.
Michel DE CERTEAU, The practice of everyday life, University of California Press 1984 BERKELEY and LOS ANGELES, p 92. 3