The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation. (Urban, Why?).

Edited by Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz, London: E & FN Spon. 2001. [pounds sterling]19.99

The contributions to The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation range from a philosophical discourse on the nature of the lifeworld, via a discussion of musical theatre, an outline of the planning process in Copenhagen, to a discourse on the contradictory phenomenology of New York, from an essay on the Ashcan school of artists to an analysis of the work of Steen Eiler Rasmussen. Most notable among them are those by Gwendolyn Wright on domesticity in postwar New York, Peter Marcuse on the layered city and Jens Kvorning on the changing patterns of urban life in Copenhagen. If one or another contribution stands out, it is to the credit of the editors that unlike so many compendia, articles are generally interesting and well conceived.

At the same time though, there is little sense as to why the essays are together in the same volume: the urban lifeworld is anything from a Jenny Holzer arts installation to the fascination of nineteenth-century intellectuals in Boston and New York with the wilderness in upstate New York. In some broader sense the urban lifeworld may be anything that is associated with making and experiencing the city whether materially, in visual representations or written texts. Such a broad approach in single volume without any broader commentary bringing this wide range of subjects together in some way leaves us with a melange of disparate elements rather than a stew of blended ingredients. We are left asking why make a volume on New York and Copenhagen and what the essays have to do with one another.