Urban culture characteristics and contemporary expressions

Urban Culture

What is urban culture(s)?

Hear the words 'urban culture,' and quite often one thinks of hip-hop, the music that is a fusion of black city culture with other ethnic elements of various cities, from Jamaican to Latino sounds. Of course, this is a single example of modern urban culture. What hip-hop shares in common with other urban cultural expressions of the past is that hip-hop is the product of fusing the diverse cultural elements of a variety of new ethnicities into a new culture. Urban culture is the result of tightly packing people into close apartment structures, neighborhoods and blocks that often allow them to be ethnically or racially 'isolated' from mainstream modern culture, yet creates a proximity that forces urban residents to adapt to a new American environment in a socially 'sharing' way.

The notion of urban culture is older than such modern-day constructions as hip-hop however. According to urban historian Stanley K. Schultz, the beginnings of formal city planning or "urban culture" began in the at Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the First National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion in 1909. However, Schultz traces the beginnings of what we think of as the urban environment as early as the 1820s, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the first floods of Irish and German immigrants into port cities such a New York. (Schultz, 1989)

Urban culture, Schultz argues, is a situation of rapid population growth in a concentrated area usually spawned by technological innovation. This creates an anonymous climate, combined with the mechanization of the human body in factories and offices, and marks the end of traditional community structures such as the family farm. In urban culture, individuals live in accommodations they do not own, are transported en masse, and spend their days living and working with individuals from areas other than their own native culture. This creates a fused identity, a conglomeration of cultures and ideas about the world, yet also estranges individuals from older ways of life and can make them feel lonely and anonymous in the midst of many.

Ever since the first industrial revolution, Americans have found themselves forced to think in new ways about their quality of life and the quality of the physical, social, and moral environments in which they lived. Thus urban culture was born.

What is the historical significance of visual communication in urban culture?

Thus, being seen in the presence of such anonymous space, of communicating one's ideas in a large geographic area where it is easy to be ignored as poor, faceless, and powerless, has elevated the importance of visual communication or art in urban culture. Take graffiti, where individuals use spray-painted words, often on public buildings to mark their informal territory and to communicate personally directed or publicly directed messages. Graffiti is an urban art form that is unique to the city, but one in which anyone can participate as an artist.

The significance of fashion, of wearing one's clothes as art is also an element of urban visual culture. The reason that so many fashion trends spring from the city is not simply the location of wealth and talent in these areas, but the fact that individuals are more often driven out onto the streets, out of small apartments to 'show themselves' to one another. Who one is in such an anonymous environment is not immediately known, as in a small town, how one looks and what one wears defines who one is on the street, at any moment.

It is also noteworthy that there are a diversity of visual texts in various neighborhoods -- for instance, the presence of street or commercial signs in a foreign language or alphabet are an act of visual communication particular to cities that 'say something about the neighborhood's composition and sense of identity.

Whose Culture, Whose City?