Why we are fascinated by the destruction of cities
"At a very deep level, the city seems to express our culture's restless dream about its inner conflicts and its inability to resolve them. On a more conscious level, this ambivalence expresses itself in mixed feelings of pride, guilt, love, fear, and hate toward the city. The fascination people have always felt at the destruction of a city may be partly an expression of satisfaction at the destruction of an emblem of irresolvable conflict."
What happens when experiencing the city in real life
"The basic problem is how to reduce a cacophony of impressions to some kind of harmony. … The inhabitant or visitor basically experiences the city as a labyrinth, although one with which he may be familiar. He cannot see the whole of a labyrinth at once, except from above, when it becomes a map. Therefore his impressions of it at street level at any given moment will be fragmentary and limited: rooms, buildings, streets. These impressions are primarily visual, but involve the other senses as well, together with a crow of memories and associations. The impressions a real city makes on an observer are thus both complex and composite even without taking into account his or his culture's pre-existing attitudes."
The impossibility and necessity of imagining the city
"The city is, on the one hand, incomprehensible to its inhabitants; as a whole it is inaccessible to the imagination unless it can be reduced and simplified. But on the other hand, any individual citizen, by virtue of his particular choices of alternatives for action and experience, will need a vocabulary to express what he imagines the entire city to be."
Cities provoke clash of contradictory feelings
"Clashing contradictions: perhaps the central fascination of the city, both real and fictional, is that it embodies man's contradictory feelings—pride, love, anxiety, and hatred—toward the civilization he has created and the culture to which he belongs."
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Source: All quotes from Burton Pike, "The City as Image" from The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton University Press, 1981) as quoted in The City Reader edited by Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout (Routledge, 1996), p. 244-245, 249.