I

This is a book about a city and its inhabitants. Cities have long captured the human imagination with writers and philosophers waxing lyrical on the triumph of urbanity over rural backwardness, framing cities as the embodiment of civilisation, symbols of a perfect cosmic order, even as the earthly manifestation of godliness and purity.Medieval and early-modern writers did not uniformly praise cities however; like God and the Devil, cities had their nemesis. In phrases redolent of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Thomas Dekker described cities as dangerous, corrupting places full of sin, as wanton and lewd as the female sex; tropes that were common to early-modern readers and playgoers.

Urban inhabitants were thus exposed to contradictory intellectual traditions that muddled with their own, often just as ambiguous, micro experiences of city life. Every urban street, every building or open space had been shaped for purpose by countless generations of users who, in the process of living urban space, had inscribed meaning onto each and every part. This process, which can be referred to as the dynamic creation of space, had a reciprocal effect on urban inhabitants. Spaces and places imbued with specific socio-cultural meanings acted to shape the human exchanges subsequently enacted within those places, often without people’s conscious realisation.

In turn, those human exchanges shaped urban development and the values attributed to places and spaces: a continuous cycle of cause and effect.As Martha Howell writes ‘the city … was a spatial being – not just a creation in space but a creation of space’.

The concept of ‘city’ was informed therefore by a series of available public images, and the mental pictures of the cityscape shared by groups of inhabitants. Central to this text is the existence of concomitant spatial identities within the overall public image of the urban landscape: the communicentric city.These identities were fashioned from cognitive maps: the foundation of how inhabitants’ conceptualised and navigated their city. These maps were essentially subjective, changing according to the personal circumstances of the beholder but it is possible, by exploring the ways in which people used and spoke about city spaces and places, to detect the presence of cognitive maps shared by individuals with common interests.