In this interview, Rob Shields proposes his view of the emerging field(s) of urban studies.

Link: Eurozine - Articles.

How do we "know" the city - under what conditions does the urban come to be "knowable"? Of course, the city is not an object, properly understood. In everyday life we accept and play along with the idea that we can grasp the entirety of a city from a glimpse of one small part of it that we personally witness. Todorov refers to this sort of object as a complex totality. We accept that the city continues on in a stereotypical manner, petering out at some sort of topographical, economic or administrative edge. This may seem odd, but we have been trained from an early age and from experience to accept on faith not only the continuity of landscapes beyond our point of view but the authority of maps and official documents. We might try to retreat to a great height, but as De Certeau pointed out, a bird’s-eye view requires that we sacrifice our knowledge of the intimate detail of city life. It contributes to the tendency to objectify the city, overlooking the extent to which it relies on normative conventions which must be performed again and again by each and every citizen - rules which govern how people drive, or the framework of what Bourdieu might call a habitus of urban behaviour and social interactions which allows the city to operate relatively smoothly.