The 'City' as the site of isolation.

The city as the site of isolation

In the view of many of the commentariat, rurality is now regarded as the true incarnation of community and the modern day city is viewed as the site of social breakdown; the site of pure individualism and social anomie (purposelessness)

The city is supposed to be a place of encounters that is how cities like London partly arose, out of a meeting place for the merchant class.  Yet at its apogee, its present day culmination, the city is a fragmented terrain. A city like London is no longer the meeting place of the classes, on the contrary it is the structured place of separation; suburbs, ghettos, thoroughfares, banlieues are organised to keep the 'other' and confrontation at bay.  The social space of the city is organised to keep class relations to an abstraction; the desire for a sense of place becomes all the more fierce in the community of money as the inhabitants endeavour to seal themselves off. London post codes are the Praetorian Guard.

Inhabitants of the 'most desired' areas in the city seal themselves off with all manners of signs and symbols. For in these days of increasing urbanisation, global democratisation; of threatened  population movements, the hordes, the 'other', whether imagined or not, are always in the mind, like a rat gnawing in the skull; the always threatening  ‘have nots’ are at any moment deemed to storm the protective gates of  those citadels of the ‘haves’.

Source  Consciousness and the Urban experience by David Harvey