Raban reframed the city as producing signs and images, not goods

Evidence

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. … To the thesis that the city was falling victim to a rationalized and automated system of mass production and mass consumption of material goods, Raban replied that it was in practice mainly about the production of signs and images. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 69

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from goods to signs prefigures the consumption-of-signs theme that runs through late-capitalist cultural analysis, connecting to the flexible-accumulation arguments later in the book. — connects to: Raban’s Soft City marks the moment postmodern urban discourse begins — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 67