Raban’s Soft City marks the moment postmodern urban discourse begins

Evidence

Jonathan Raban’s Soft city, a highly personalized account of London life in the early 1970s, was published in 1974. It received a fair amount of favourable comment at the time. But its interest to me here is as a historical marker, because it was written at a moment when a certain shifting can be detected in the way in which problems of urban life were being talked about in both popular and academic circles. It presaged a new kind of discourse that would later generate terms like ‘gentrification’ and ‘yuppie’ as common descriptors of urban living. It was also written at that cusp in intellectual and cultural history when something called ‘postmodernism’ emerged from its chrysalis of the anti-modern to establish itself as a cultural Unlike most of the critical and oppositional writing about urban life in the 1960s (and I here think primarily of Jane Jacobs, whose book on The death and life of great American cities came out in 1961, but also Theodore Roszak), Raban depicts as both vibrant and present what many earlier writers had felt as a chronic absence. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 67

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that postmodernism emerged from the anti-modern, framing the whole periodization argument.
• XREF: connects to: Raban reframed the city as producing signs and images, not goods — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 69

Broader Connections

• Raban reframed the city as producing signs and images, not goods #expands (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 69