The Feel of the City: Experience of Urban Transformation

Nicolas Kenny, The Feel of the City: Experience of Urban Transformation (University of Toronto Press, 2014)The subject of the modern city and the experiences of urbanites that dwell within it has long been a subject of critical attention. However, as Nicolas Kenny's text The Feel of the City argues, 'Large, diverse, and powerfully attractive, cities like Paris and New York garner such extensive scholarly attention that they are widely seen as the archetypes of urban modernity' (4). This, Kenny says, has obscured the fact that 'most city people tended to live in places like the lesser-known cities' (4) of Montreal and Brussels, which become the subjects of interrogation in his work. Kenny's text is a valuable addition to the voluminous existing scholarship on the urban experience of modernity in part because of this illuminating and suggestive reading of Montreal and Brussels as more indicative of the urban experience of the average city-dweller of modernity, whereas much urban studies work focuses on the modern metropolises and world cities constituting the London-New York-Paris triad. Drawing from a litany of sources and documents, Kenny's text documents the experiences of citizens in Montreal and Brussels in impressive detail.In addition to opening up these underexplored centres of urban experience, Kenny's text also challenges the way in which tradition notions of urban subjectivity have been discussed. Kenny's primary impulse is to explore the way in which 'sensorial experience and bodily practices' (4) are constituted in the urban environments of Montreal and Brussels. This thesis rests on the argument that 'the body played a fundamental role in mediating the relationship between city dwellers and urban environments, propelling the tangible physicality of streets and buildings into the realm of individual consciousness and public discourse' (4). By contending 'that the individual body and the shared space of the city were mutually constitutive' (5), Kenny's work draws upon and wrestles with an impressive array of theorists of modernity (including Marshall Berman, Georg Simmel, and Michel de Certeau) to 'build on understandings of the modern urban experience that tend either to understate the body's vitality or discorporate it from the material environment in which its workings and significance were rooted' (11). Specifically, Kenny's text focuses on the sights, sounds, smells and haptic sensorial experiences that an urban dweller experienced in late-nineteenth and early- twentieth century Montreal and Brussels.Rather than focusing on settling the argument of whether language mediates experience or whether experience produces linguistic representation, Kenny 'spans the busy crossroads of corporeal practices and their representations, arguing that the two are inextricably linked in the experience of the modern city' (18). This, Kenny argues, aligns his study with historian Martin Jay's declaration that experience stands, 'at the nodal point of the intersection between public language and private subjectivity, between expressible commonalities and the ineffability of the individual interior' (19). …

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