The city is, historically and presently, regarded as the centre and epitome of modern life. It is in the city that the various self-images of modernity (freedom, rationality, wealth), as well as the various critiques of modernity (decadence, alienation, poverty) find their exemplars. The city constitutes the focal point of many ambivalences about modern life. Still, if it is thoroughly disputed what modern urban life stands for, the dispute also evidences how the city is thought to constitute a certain way of life, to engender some or other general mode of being. As René Boomkens (in this volume) puts it, the city amounts to a cultural reality of sorts, forming a “collective framework of meaning” that renders it a “centre of knowledge, power, imagination, ideology and fantasy”. This “cultural reality” has, in the course of the past two centuries, elicited different sorts of discourses that frame our knowledge and experience of the city – ranging from technocratic to anthropological angles on urban life. In these discourses on the city, the various arts have occupied a seminal, though variable role. This role has not escaped the attention of cultural philosophy. For cultural theorists in the early twentieth century, like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, art was indeed a main source of insights into (the ideology of) urban life. In their footsteps, I will attempt to further delineate how art contributes to our knowledge and experience of the city.

The arts have been actively occupied with city culture and the city's public spaces. They have done so in ways that overlap with, but also often add to, the more mainstream intellectual and ideological discourses on the city. Art adds to these, inter alia, by providing its proper modes of knowing urban life, which differ from those provided by technology, science and academic theory. My research has focused on the visual arts, a choice that ensued from the belief that visuality constitutes a prime dimension of living in cities and interacting in public. In studying the visual arts, we may be provided with new angles for understanding the scopic aspects of urban relations. What images and tropes co-direct and/or frustrate the encounters of urbanites in public space?