Reimag(in)ing the Urban

Abstract

“Reimag(in)ing the Urban” compares the way in which contemporary German artist Thomas Struth’s four photographic series construct relationships between the urban environment and its inhabitants to contemporary Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas’s employment of various forms of photography to map, image, and analyze the late twentieth‐century city. The article proposes that Struth’s photographic series produce a complex matrix of urban sociocultural production that simultaneously emanates from urban space and envelops it, offering a variegated understanding of the operations that develop between individuals and the urban environment. Koolhaas’s collection of images in the book, Mutations (2000), presents a challenge to such more traditional forms of visualizing the city, which Koolhaas believes have become obsolete, replaced by new urban determinants such as speeds, flows, and GIS systems that require comparable forms of imaging. Comparing Struth’s and Koolhaas’s approaches to conceiving the contemporary city raises important issues about the ways of imaging the city and, with that, concomitant concerns of visuality, representation, history, and subjectivity.