The cultures of cities (1995)

How do cities use culture today? Building on the experience of New York as a ‘culture capital’ Sharon Zukin shows how three notions of culture – as ethnicity, aesthetic, and marketing tool – are reshaping urban politics and conflicts over revitalization. She rejects the idea that cities have either a singular urban culture or many different subcultures to argue that cultures are constantly negotiated in the city’s central spaces – the streets, parks, shops, museums, and restaurants – which are the great spaces of modernity. Tying these developments to a new ‘symbolic economy’ based on tourism, media and entertainment, Zukin traces the connections between real estate development and popular expression, and between real elite visions of the arts and more democratic representations. Going beyond the immigrants, artists, street peddlers, and security guards who are the key figures in the symbolic economy, Zukin asks: Who really occupies the spaces of cities? And whose culture is imposed as public culture?