Body Movies: The City as Interface

The city would not exist as a modern urban society without the urban public domain. This is the central claim of a large number of theories of urban culture. 1 After all, urban life is defined by the fact that we are forced to share the city with a multitude of strangers from disparate backgrounds and with diverse identities and interests. For this reason it is of great importance that there are public spaces where we encounter these “others”, are confronted by them and must relate to them. In each of these theories, the urban public domain in which people negotiate their everyday practice, cultural identity and political ideals has a physical character: it takes place on the agora, the boulevard, the street or in the coffee house.