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Dossier. La ville, une œuvre ouverte ?

Communication is Inherent to the New Urban Condition

Hervé Marchal et Jean-Marc Stebé
Traduction de Inist
Cet article est une traduction de :
La communication inhérente à la nouvelle condition urbaine [fr]

Notes de la rédaction

This English translation has not been published in printed form/Cette traduction anglaise n’a pas été publiée sous forme imprimée.

Texte intégral

1In general terms, a city is seen as the work of humans insofar as it incarnates a human creation and results from the will to leave a trace testifying to man's existence in both time and the material nature of the world. In this respect, we may cite the trench Romulus dug to define the boundary of Rome, a symbolic gesture which differentiates between nature - a world which man has no power over - and culture - a world, and in this case a city on which man can leave a trace. From this standpoint, cities represent a purely human construct, an artificial world which provides a protective material setting and an environment suited to the development of its political, cultural and economic activities for the human community faced with the constraints of nature. The city, as an artefact, reveals that man is able to impose his laws and rhythms on Nature, humanize his environment, organize his surroundings, ensure his long-term presence and thus put distance between himself and the world's ontological uncertainty (cycles of nature, disease, violence, etc.).

2In this way, man's work as represented in cities show that, while a natural being, he is also, and above all, a cultural being capable of domesticating the world and protesting against the transience of life by constructing institutions and places for his inventions, creations and ideas. As these gradually accumulate, they stand up to the corrosive force of time and eventually give form to a cultural objectivity which allows man to communicate them to subsequent generations.

Communication: one of the necessary conditions for cities to appear

3Cities are an exclusively human achievement and derive from man's gestures and speech and from the intervention of both hand and mind. They are human establishments surrounded by spatial boundaries and organized around social specializations and hierarchization which eventually provide a space for freedom and emancipation. This occurs conversely because of the very social norms, rules of life and cultural values which appear within them and which, though in a state of perpetual change, succeeding in harmonizing individuals' lives or at least making harmony more likely (Stebé, Marchal, 2009). By essence, cities are communication hubs and have always brought people closer and made exchanges, interactions, transactions and of course separations possible.

4The proof of this is that, since the first city-states appeared around 5500 years ago, people have never stopped developing economic and cultural exchanges, endlessly meeting politically or diplomatically, and intensifying human and non-human mobility by moving from one life environment to another. A clear example of this is how the academics of Antiquity used to go from city to city to exchange ideas and debate. For example, in the 3rd century before our era, Archimedes of Syracuse (Italy), Philo of Byzantium (Turkey) or Apollonius of Alexandria (Egypt) exchanged their ideas and met on many occasions. More broadly, while communication does not necessarily require cities, cities cannot do without communication and indeed find their very existence in migratory fluxes, diasporas and networks of exchanges firstly on the basic level of obtaining supplies and essential objects.

5The city = communication equation has perhaps never been so clearly evident as in current times when cities - or at least the most influential among them - are at the heart of global networks in which people, ideas and objects endlessly circulate at increasing speeds as if physical distances were being reduced to the point that they no longer exist. Today's world of cities which we willingly enter is a world of communications and it is indeed impossible for this not to be the case.

Exacerbated communication in the globalized city

6To get a better idea of the current in-depth changes which cities are undergoing, it seems relevant to discuss the tensions to which they have always been the subjected. Regarding this idea, "cities are both a territory and a population, a material environment and a unit for collective life, a configuration of physical objects and a hub for relations between social subjects" (Grafmeyer, 1994: 8). In other words, the idea of cities refers us back to two kinds of reality. Firstly there is the static, even frozen city, or at least the city which is delimited for a given time by a material framework and then there is the dynamic city inhabited by individuals and groups which interact and may even be in a state of tension. Generally cities can be approached as being a favoured focus point between a differentiated and geographically limited space which has been made denser and an aggregated, heterogeneous and specialized population. It is a place for communication between the multiple figures involved in social life and an objectivised, instituted, formalized materiality.

7Henri Lefebvre (1970) was one of the first - in the 1960s - to detect the signs of the transformation of industrial cities into urbanized cities but now it is generally accepted that the pressure of urbanization has caused cities all over the planet to, if not actually metamorphose, then restructure themselves insofar as they are pushed to spread further than their historical limits and out of their initial perimeter to thus disperse themselves in a diffuse urban world with uncertain contours. In this way classical - or historical - cities have gradually become an expression among many others of that which we may call "urban".

8The urban sphere means the extension of agglomerations into agrarian spaces. The retreat of the country in the face of seemingly irresistible economic and social imperatives has led to fields and forests being surrounded or annihilated by out-of-city shopping centres or newly built housing estates. It is also the recurrent and uniform implantation from one city to another of the same hotel and gardening or DIY shop chains on the outskirts of cities (Marchal, Stebé, 2011). But that which is "urban" is also and above all space being challenged in favour of time as if cities as a whole were in movement (Allemand, Ascher, Levy, 2004). Today, no-one thinks about journeys in terms of distance but rather as time spent on transport - no-one knows the exact distance between Paris and New York but we know it takes about an eight hour flight. From this point of view, the urban dimension is greater than the city given that it can exist without cities particularly through a globalized and globalizing urban society with a tendency to deterritorialize, dematerialize and homogenize itself because of the worldwide spread of high-speed transport and the pressure applied by information and communication technologies (ICT).

9In this urban society of hypermobility and interconnection, a static conception of space needs to be questioned or at least put into perspective insofar as individuals organize their daily lives around a multiplicity of places with indeterminate statuses - it is possible to work at home via the internet or phone one's children from an office outside the home. In this sense, Vincent Kaufmann (2009) distinguished three types of space. Firstly, the "area-based" space refers back to a conception based on defined environments which are assumed to be homogenous and delimited by borders. Then there is the "reticular" space which corresponds to a functional layout of lines and points which is both discontinuous and open and in which everyone has access to the network they construct. The literature on the world's cities is based on this conception to a great deal when its aim is to highlight the dependency links between cities based on air routes, railways, satellite networks or telephone flows. Finally the "rhizomatic" space represents a world in which distance no longer counts and space vanishes. Here time radically replaces space which appears smooth, open, undefined and in perpetual movement. This is therefore comparable to a rhizome which is continually being reorganized and is made up of moving redirections which are also opportunities.

10Thus in the era of the "generalized urban sphere" (Lussault, 2007) or, in other words, urban society, do cities have any effects on lifestyles, whether that involves ways of thinking, loving, eating, hearing or communicating?

The communicational city

11Urban society has made communication an essential part of the daily lives of billions of urbanized individuals through the now commonplace use of mobile phones and computers. Communication now also provides support for the development of territories, urban marketing and the promotion of large cities competing internationally. It also appears to be a tool for urban governance both on the level of citizens' participation and on the management of complex urban ensembles. Finally communication plays a role in the generalized urban world's important economic and cultural issues. In this world, it cannot be denied that communication goes hand in hand with movement (Allemand, Ascher, Levy, 2004), frantic mobility (Urry, 2000) and the acceleration of life's rhythms and flows (Rosa, 2010).

12To be integrated into the great game of generalized urbanization, it has become essential to move, travel and go from one metropolis to another. This observation is even truer in a society which promotes leisure pursuits to such an extent and in a job market always demanding increased flexibility. Proof of this lies in the fact that journeys for leisure reasons have increased considerably from an average of 23 minutes per day in 1984 to 50 minutes in 2005 while journeys for work reasons increased from 17 to 23 minutes in the same period (Insee, 2009). Also, more and more city-dwellers have opted for new forms of mobility like multi-residentiality or long distance pendularity. An increasing number of individuals now live in two or more homes which are sometimes at some distance (often for professional and family reasons) or readily travel long distances daily (by car, train, even plane) which has become necessary in multipolar socio-urban organizations.

13In the communicational urban society, mobility is a practice as well as a value or even a right which is why it is important to grasp individuals' true capacities to move themselves, an idea which Vincent Kaufmann (2007) suggested conceptualizing by using the term of "motility". Zygmunt Bauman (1998) similarly claimed the capacity to be mobile was more important than territorial roots for the identity-based definition and legitimization of individuals. The city which emerges is a "mobile city" in which links between an individual and others, spaces and the world are redefined.

14In other words, in the urban society, the legitimate individual is not just connected to near and distant worlds but also consumes space. The renown of the jet-set is founded, as the name suggests, on its members' formidable capacity to consume space, use all sorts of forms of mobility and become part of multiple communicational networks. Isn't the paradigmatic figure then those "spatiophage" (Lussault, 2009) individuals with high economic and communicational capital who define their personal and social identity through a quasi-compulsive consumption of urban spaces and communication tools which are always increasingly high-performance and adapted to the individuals' lifestyles?

"True spatiophages are always moving and the only stops they allow themselves are pre-planned, scheduled, equipped and instrumentalized. They demonstrate their belonging to their social group by mediatizing this bulimic mobility, by putting it into images and words, the most significant stories of which are relayed by gossip magazines and even more serious medias who also stage types of spaces and emblematic practices" (Lussault, 2009: 751).

15Having made that point clear, it is not just individuals who move around. Material and immaterial fluxes have become central in this urban planetary network, a theatre for intense exchanges and communication made up of the world's biggest cities. These cities contribute to the direction of the world and constitute a "world megalopolitan archipelago".

"Here a synergy between the varied forms of the upper tertiary sector and the “quaternary sector” (research, innovation, direction activities) is exerted. The world megalopolitan archipelago jointly marks the articulation between cities belonging to the same region and between the world's great hubs. Whence this emergence of clusters of world-level cities [...]. Megalopolises have excellent links with the world megalopolitan archipelago's other “islands” and concentrate most of the world's air traffic and communication flows between themselves " (Dollfus, 1997: 25-27).

16The existence of the world megalopolitan archipelago reveals the extent to which today's large cities represent an international stage for the development of a globalized and globalizing way of life largely based around frantic communicational activities.

17In this respect, the megalopolises which make up the world megalopolitan archipelago can be considered as one city, a kind of communicational megacity corresponding to a large extent to what Jacques Levy (2009) calls a "World-City". According to this geographer, we have moved from a situation in which most cities, even the largest, could, up to a certain point, mutually ignore each other to a situation in which each globalized city defines itself in relation to all the others in the new globalised urban system. We are witnessing the opening of the fluxes of all the places in the world towards all the "islands" of the planetary archipelago and, by extension, the unprecedented emergence of a vast planetary space saturated with communication of all sorts. The generalization of communication over the whole planet even justifies reference to a "cyberterritory" made up of all the cities linked by thousands of kilometres of cables, numerous channels of wifi wavelengths and infinite electronic networks. Thus the new information and communication technologies structure an increasingly interconnected urban world in which distance tends to shrink starting with a new temporal scale resulting from the speed at which it is possible to move from one point to another (plane, high-speed train, etc.) and the simultaneity with which we communicate today (internet). This cyberterritory can bring together hundreds of millions of individuals sharing the same moment whether it be entertaining, as is the case during the Olympic Games, or dramatic like the 9/11 terrorist attack. This cyberterritory can make the real and virtual worlds coincide - this is the case when several thousand young people gather for a rave party at a country site which had been kept secret until the last minute or when over 10,000 people send text or e-mail invitations to a chic "dressed in white" dinner in a top Parisian location revealed just a few hours before the banquet.

18Arjun Appadurai (1996) insists that the globalization and interconnection of cities both intensifies forms of collective identity-based manifestations and gives rise to horizons of collective senses, "group identity landscapes" which the author calls "ethnoscapes", based on cultural images which are shared across the world (ibid.: 91 sq.). The internet and satellite television, among other medias, enable immigrants to maintain links and des connections with their home countries, construct meaning with other immigrants all over the planet and reconstruct their identity based on the images offered by the world. It is therefore necessary to take into account the multiplicity of cultural origins individuals who define themselves as being - and indeed feel - simultaneously from here and from elsewhere. This new planetary urban context, this communicational megacity as we shall call it, translates the emergence of a true "transnationalism" which demands attention to be paid to a profound cultural dynamic which is spreading through all the world's cities - deterritorialization. This involves multinational companies, financial markets, cultural concerns and the cultural and knowledge-based concerns as much as ethnic communities, religious movements and political formations - all institutions in the broadest sense of the term which do not hesitate to liberate themselves from the specific territorial limits which nation-states incarnate (Sassen, 1991).

19Additionally, one of the effects of the globalization of exchanges and images is to increase our capacity to identify with others who are far away but live on the same "Earth". As Norbert Elias (1987) pointed out in La societé des individus, our capacity to identify with others crosses borders as long as our awareness is raised of their lot in life. The inhabitants of the planet can no longer carry on as if they were all independent of each other because they are now inter-related and linked up to each other as was revealed by the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan which followed on from the tsunami which devastated the country's north-east coast at the start of 2011. Radioactive clouds do not care about national and geographical borders and the temporary closure of Japanese factories (like Toyota) led to French workers being laid-off through a lack of parts to assemble engines. This shows how the world has been brought into a relationship of interdependency and intercommunication which is unprecedented in the history of humanity and explains the notion of a "world risk society" suggested by Ulrich Beck (1999). We are now facing the advent of "cosmopolitan empathy" and a "globalization of emotions" (Beck, 2004: 18) which both demand that we think beyond purely national contexts. International mobility has made it is essential to realize that is it a "historically irreversible (fact) that from Moscow to Paris and Rio to Tokyo, people having been living for a long time in system of interdependencies which truly exists and which, by producing and consuming, they also contribute to making denser in the same way as the resulting risks for civilisation affect their daily lives" (ibid.: 25).

Those forgotten by global communication

20However, not all urban social categories have the same access to international mobility, cyberterritory, ICTs and the resources they need, far from it. Apart from an international kinetic elite, most people continue to live more or less apart from planetary networks. De facto, all urban dwellers do not see the planet from the same standpoint as that of intellectual and financial elites, the politico-media class, fashion and cinema stars or bloggers of all sorts. This is why the ethnologist Jonathan Friedman (2000) insists that the whole world does not have "an aerial view" of the earth enabling them to see the planet as a "multiethnic bazaar". Many urbanized individuals continue to construct their collective or individual identity on territorial or local foundations which more or less limit their access to global culture despite the idea of a "transnationalist vulgate" portraying globally integrated city-dwellers. These observations really do show the extent to which urban life is not as despatialized or de-localized as it may first appear. It is also revelatory of the fact that identities continue to develop within given spaces, even though henceforth more than ever they need to deal with global references derived from world cultural and economic fluxes. Thus the lives of many individuals can only be understood in the light of this tension between local and global dimensions, between stability and movement, between territorialization and deterritorialization. Consequently, it is important not to believe that identity is limited to just the territories which individuals frequent (a localist trap) and not to concur with views positing a hypermobile, hypercommunicating, hyperconnected individual able to easily get over physical obstacles and spatial limitations as though he or she had no home land (a transnationalist trap). Between these two extreme cases, a continuum exists made up of ordinary situations in which individuals live and lead their daily lives attached to their local environment (home, building, street, neighbourhood, etc.) and involved in communication and exchange on networks which link them to the world as a whole (travel, internet, television, books, mobile phones, etc.).

Cities: a work in which communication is multiscaled and multiform

21Given the ideas developed above about the forms communication takes in the cities of today, it is important to understand the role played by architects. They use communication strategies which often involve elements intended to seduce decision-makers and other city figures who themselves use the same architects and their architectural work for communicational reasons aimed at their citizens or at tourists or economic figures. As Olivier Chadoin points out in the article which opens this edition of Questions de communication, cities are now involved in national and international urban competition wherein architectural production - like culture and history - appears to be "resources which can be used to build symbolic capital, a distinctive identity and thus develop attractiveness". The author insists on the fact that in this kind of context, urban marketing increasingly uses the architectural "label", thus creating the conditions for the existence of a "star-architecture". "The little world of the global elite of “starchitects” is now used to help set cities up as major brands or labels […]. Architects have become "trend setters" working on behalf of territorial marketing". As has often been observed throughout urban history, architecture serves political decision-makers by producing monuments, towers and other prestigious buildings which reflect and express the power, grandeur and magnificence of a city Architecture has never just been a simple response to functional requirements (living, moving around, working etc.). Olivier Chadoin concludes that "its forms inform us in that they portray the current state of the social world in both real and symbolical terms ".

22Bruno Cousin uses the case of Milan to show how moving on from architecture in itself, the controversial actions of one man - in this case Silvio Berlusconi - has been decisive in the city-planning, development and construction of a large part of the capital of Lombardy. The author particularly highlights the use of specific strategies for innovation, property promotion, urban marketing and a memorial reinterpretation of neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city. Il Cavaliere used these strategies to help develop new residential areas for well-off Milanese people - Milano San Felice and Milano 2 in the municipality of Segrate. These two neighbourhoods are the result of vast levelling, reconstruction, repopulation and safety (closing off) programmes and offer a legitimate and attractive residential lifestyle involving bourgeois belonging and distancing from 'lower' social categories. In reality, Milano San Felice and Milano 2 were recreated during the 1970s and definitely represent the main exception in Milan's historic centre which was traditionally inhabited by the well-off. However, Bruno Cousin observes that, far from contributing to the development of an alternative urban centre, "these recreated neighbourhoods have brought luxurious residential suburbs and satellites of the main city area to the Milan metropolis and their segregated configuration and social homogeneity immediately provoked the hostility of former inhabitants and surrounding areas thus distancing them further from the city's communal territory". This shows how, despite an aggressive communication policy and intense urban marketing, Silvio Berlusconi and his partners in architecture and property development have not succeeded in changing the bourgeois territoriality of the city centre. This is proof that even today living in redeveloped neighbourhoods and more generally in the suburbs remains the preserve of a small minority of the well-off in Milan. The author notes that "this continues to be criticised by most well-off Milanese people as an inauthentic, artificial way of life involving unjustifiably turning one's back on the city's history and culture".

23Pierre Hamel's article on the democratic dimensions of urban governance takes on its full meaning in the light of a situation like that observed in Milan. The Canadian sociologist's aim is to discuss the underlying importance of communication between those who make up a city - beginning with its ordinary citizens or "man in the street" and not just those with power and political or institutional decision-makers. According to Pierre Hamel, despite a debate about democracy taking centre-stage over the last twenty years, the issue of citizen participation in urban affairs as discussed in works in the fields of political and social sciences does not actually help us a great deal to understand collective choices in the planning, development and design of contemporary cities. It is essential to view such urban affairs in the light of the major transformations which affect cities. These should include involvement in the process of globalization of the economy and human and non-human exchanges, the creation of vast city-regions and metropolitan networks, the impact of icts and "social connectivity" or the evolution of the relations between the elites and ordinary people and between public sector institutions and the private sector. Ultimately the researcher insists that favourable conditions for the ordinary citizens to express themselves and exert any influence are more likely if spaces of trust exist where they can voice their views. He also opines that it is necessary to accord less importance to the views expressed by those in power than to collective action including ordinary communication or in other words citizen participation which involves conflicts, disagreements, consensus and sources of ambivalence.

24The question of citizen participation clearly requires thought about communication and the same is true for the issue of sustainable development (sd). One cannot fail to notice that references to sd are widely used by those working in communication for goals linked to increasing attractiveness, promotion or validation - in other words as part of urban marketing. Philippe Hamman aims to show how urban sd is positively portrayed through fashionable notions like the sustainable, compact, mixed, recyclable, or participative city but also makes us aware of the extent to which a whole discursive repertoire of urban sd is widely used. One only needs to consider the new vocabulary used in communicational strategies linked with national and even international standards e.g. " social and economy", "circular economy", "shared mobility", "social diversity", "eco-districts", "biodiversity", "eco-materials", "co-built cities", etc. As Philippe Hamman writes "the development of ideas in social science literature shows that the sd repertoire corresponds to a plurality of signifiers in terms of contents (by diversely conjugating the three economic, environmental and social cornerstones) and procedures (particularly in terms of democracy and local governance or appeals to active citizens) depending on the stakeholders who grasp them and the territories at stake". However urban sd is increasingly integrated into the multiple statements and other accounts which are linked to cities in one way or another. These are instances of people "putting [ideas] into words" which are comparable to the statements on performance so popular with political decision-makers and the countless experts in search of legitimitacy.

25Apart from official communication which often goes hand in hand with an urban marketing approach and concept, other declinations of communication in cities can be detected through what geographers call "les figures du double" (double phenomenon). According to Paul Arnould and Yves-François Le Lay it appears acceptable to detect different ways of summoning up this notion in cities. For example, when a city neighbourhood is transformed, it becomes the double of the neighbourhood which existed previously and when a city is twinned with another city, the two twinned urban areas each become the double of each other. More broadly, these phenomena make it relevant to question from an unconventional standpoint the forms of the contemporary city, the ways in which these cities evolve and more specifically the communication, whether internal or external or between cities. The authors point out that: "the perfect double is sometimes looked for when developing strategies for twinning towns or setting up town partnerships or networks. Towns can thus come to an agreement to set up real socio-cultural exchanges on the basis of their common characteristics". Extending the metaphor, geographers also refer to "the mirror image" of towns which are doubles and exist on either side of an element of spatial discontuity such as a river, lake or border: "The growth of one town has favoured that of the other and can be evaluated using common criteria that take advantage of adjacent otherness or an original dissymetry". It needs to be understood these "double" towns communicate in one way or another in excess or by default. The double phenomenon is thus particularly precious in helping understand how, today, global cities communicate with each other by becoming doubles - doing things like the other city - or by redoubling each other - doing things better than the other city - with the aim being to surpass the double city or in other words being in front of the other city on the international stage.

26In some ways the double phenomenon incites us to observe a city's interstices and hollows within which informal, silent and even clandestine ways of communicating emerge, Sandro Cattacin and Mary Leontsini have carried out empirical studies of associations of migrants and show how mobility induces people to meet, interact and come into conflict. In these plural spaces of sociality, migrants become aware of their own difference by perceiving the people they come into contact with in terms of otherness because they often mix with different types of people for the first time and become accustomed to the idea of living in a place where they themselves are seen in terms of their otherness. The authors do not hesitate to broaden their analytical focus to help grasp the associations of mobile people as agents of a city's production of which, lest we forget, is always in movement. In this sense, they reiterate the fact that such associations play the role of mediator, producing meaning and urban identity while generating interpersonal and inter-organizational links. Through these spaces of hybrid sociality specializing in the reception of migrants we can see the extent to which "cities regenerate themselves by linking their past to new arrivals and by situating their permanent transformation within a form of social and semantic continuity". This shows how much the presence of this otherness becomes a characteristic of cities and even makes it possible for their inhabitants to live in a context of openness and urbanity. Like Chinatown in London, Porte de la Chapelle in Paris or the working-class neighbourhood of Kreuzberg in the former West Berlin, "neighbourhoods which are different can attract people, become places which are loved by the inhabitants of the city and even become part of a city's urban marketing and the image it chooses to give to tourists". The studies of these two researchers suggest that the mobility of migrants should be seen in terms of communication in its broadest sense whether it be within associations or between migrants and natives or between the city of origin and the new home city.

27Moving on from the example of associations of migrants, it is interesting to note that statistically cities gather together both rich and poor population groups. According to Julien Damon, whose work is covered in the file's final article, it is wrong to consider that in France there are more working-class outskirts of town and richer city centres despite preconceptions to the contrary. On the heuristic level then, it is necessary to move on from the oversimplified vision opposing well-off central territories with poorer peripheral spaces. However the socio-economist goes further and insists that the richer a city is, the larger its underclass population groups. This paradox can be observed in France but also in the European Union and throughout the world: "More generally, cities are like a double-door entrance through which people can potentially go from poverty to prosperity. Cities do not make people poor. They attract people. A city's internal economic dynamics should be taken less into account than migrations between cities of poorer people and households". The author shows he has a good turn of phrase when he claims that to some extent "poverty is the sign of a city's success". Well-off cities are confronted with the problem of poverty among other reasons because they offer those without jobs professional opportunities, possibilities to meet others and services, goods and networks which cannot be found elsewhere. Far from certain rhetorical political statements, the extent to which the presence of poorer people is actually a sign of a city's dynamism and attractiveness needs to be stressed. The paradox is well worth highlighting - while urban marketing's quasi-exclusive aim is to attract the more well-off clients, the most consumerist tourists or the most flourishing companies, the fact cannot be avoided that, despite itself, the very same urban marketing brings in its slipstream a whole population category which is not necessarily desired.

Conclusion

28The articles which make up this file help understand how communication works in, between and against cities. The existence of plural dynamics is revealed behind the word "communication" whether these cover exchange and interaction, conflict and distancing, bringing people together and solidarity, promotion and validation, or competition and rivalry. From the communicational standpoint, the city is an unfinished work because it is the object of multiple definitions, representations, interpretations and actions. It is in no way a finished work, rather an open work to use the distinction coined by Umberto Eco (1962) to define the status of a work of art. In the same way as "enjoying a work of art amounts to making an interpretation, an enactment, bringing it back to life from an original viewpoint" (ibid.: 18), fully enjoying a city amounts to living it, thinking it and feeling it through multiple hitherto unknown viewpoints.

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Hervé Marchal et Jean-Marc Stebé, « Communication is Inherent to the New Urban Condition »Questions de communication [En ligne], 25 | 2014, mis en ligne le 01 février 2014, consulté le 08 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/9494 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/questionsdecommunication.9494

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