The City as a Moral Universe

Bibliographic Data

ID4489357
AuthorsYi-Fu Tuan, Yi‐fu Tuan (corresponding author)
Year1988
Volume78
Issue3
Pages316
Publication date1988-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/215004
OpenAlexW2330895489
LanguageEN
Citations received14

The city is a moral universe in which helpfulness is extended beyond kinsfolk to strangers. In a modern city, public institutions aspire to provide solace or uplift to all, often with a cool efficiency that is rewarding in its way as is the warmth usually credited to small communities. A close reading of the city scene reveals inconspicuous artifacts of consideration such as telephone booths and wheelchair ramps on sidewalks that symbolize the principles of communication and access. In the history of the West, the city has served repeatedly as a powerful metonym for utopian visions of universal brotherhood.' However, the city is built form as well as human relationship-a material place that visibly and tangibly expresses human needs and aspirations, supporting or hinder- ing their fulfillment. Viewed thus, the physical city is a moral document or text. Everywhere in it the alert citizen or visitor can discern wealth and poverty, dullness and imagination, care and indifference, justice and injustice. Even amenities that appear at first narrowly economic, such as streets and bus shelters, or narrowly aesthetic-recreational, such as parks, have a moral- ethical intent, if one looks below the surface: the street stands as a symbol of human communication and exchange, the park as a philosophy of man's place in nature

Astronomy · Environmental ethics · Geography · Physics · Sociology · Universe · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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