2 Representing and Imagining the City Regan Koch and Alan Latham INTRODUCTION Imagine you are approaching a city. What’s your mental image? A skyline seems quite likely. Approach a city by plane, train or automobile and when you see the skyline you know you’re getting close, right? Countless films open with an aerial scan of towering buildings, steel and glass skyscrapers, apartment blocks or clusters of shanty houses to set the scene. Search the word ‘city’ using Google Images and you’ll find millions of these images – page after page of skylines. All cities have a skyline, and at first glance they are merely a repetition of buildings and other big things that form an outline against the horizon. Yet many are remarkably distinct. They serve as powerful representations of particular places. New York City is probably the most widely known, but others are immediately recognisable too: Shanghai, Dubai, Hong Kong, London, Rio, San Francisco, Prague and so on. But if we consider skylines a little more deeply, we realise they are much more than just silhouettes; an awful lot goes into producing them. They are a tremendous amalgamation of raw mate- rials: bricks, mortar, wood, stone, steel, glass and cement – literally tons and tons of this stuff. Running beneath and through them are vast infrastructural systems of wires, cables, tubes and pipes that allow them to function. These are only rendered possible by the much larger networks that bring these materials in to, and other materials out of, the city. Of course, underpinning all of this is the labour, technological know-how and human ingenuity that makes possible the construction of all the individual buildings, towers and monuments that collectively form the outline we see when looking at the city from a distance. Skylines, then, can be thought of as an assemblage of many things. STARTING TO THINK WITH REPRESENTATIONS It is the philosopher Manuel DeLanda who sparked our interest in skylines. He notes that they are more than just brute materials: they are also expressive. As assemblages of all sorts of materials, skylines become representations, and as such, they do things. 02_Paddison & McCann_BAB1403B0048_Ch-02.indd 14 10-May-14 2:22:14 PM