INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO CITYSPACE: FROM THE POSTMODERN TO THE GLOBAL CITY

Cityspace has been the topic of urban and cultural studies for at least two decades and has opened a variety of ways to approach the city, from historical and cultural perspectives to socio-geographical, economic, religious, literary, postmodernist, post-colonial and, more recently, geo-critical ones. The article looks at the European and American city from the 1970s to the present through the lenses offered by the theoretical approaches by Edward Soja, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, Frederick Jameson, Bertrand Westphal, Manuel Castells, among others, while highlighting the specific characteristics of cityspace and citizenship, the use and misuse of living and imagined spaces in the period mentioned above. The shift from the modern city to the postmodern metropolis and global megalopolis has entailed essential changes in the views on cityspace both from the architectural perspective and from the city dweller’s perception of space in the city. How these changes have affected our lives and what the city of the future will look like are two core questions this article attempts to answer.