Cities’ Vibes
Rhythms of the City: Unveiling the Dynamic Pulse of Urban Life through Event-Driven Transformations
In Toni Morrison’s Jazz, the City pulses with a vibrant energy that defines the entire novel. It’s a place where every morning feels like a fresh breath of life, charging through you like a rush of excitement that brightens your outlook and fuels your dreams. The City’s allure is irresistible, drawing in people from all walks of life — children, young girls, men, mothers, brides, and even the regulars at the local bars. When they arrive, they feel more alive, more like the people they’ve always aspired to be. The City offers them exactly what they seek: a mix of warmth, thrill, unpredictability, and a community of welcoming strangers. It’s a place that embodies both the promises and perils of their desires, making it impossible to ever let go (Toni Morrison, “Jazz” (Morrison (1993)).
Among the three volumes of Toni Morrison’s trilogy, which begins with Beloved (1987) and concludes with Paradise(1997), Jazz (1992) stands out as perhaps the most expressive. According to Paquet-Deyris, the narrative in Jazz features a deliberately ungendered, unspecific voice that takes center stage against the Harlem backdrop. However, what the novel consistently refers to as “the City,” with a capital C, serves as more than just a historical backdrop. It transcends merely encoding the African American experience, becoming a repository of historical, vocal, and memorial traces. The 1926 metropolis, known as “Black Manhattan” by James Weldon Johnson, emerges as a space of resistance where various cultural practices reemerge despite oppressive conditions. Morrison does not separate the City from nature, ascribing one to shadowy evil and the other to light and purity. Instead, she uses nature imagery to convey the intensity of life in the City. For instance, Morrison describes how the City can transform the night sky into something extraordinary: “Redcaps and dining-car attendants, who wouldn’t dream of leaving the City, often speak at length about the country skies they’ve seen from train windows. But nothing compares to what the City can create in a night sky. It can empty itself of surface and, more ocean-like than the ocean itself, go deep and starless. Close up on the tops of buildings, the city sky presses and retreats, presses and retreats, reminiscent of the illicit love between sweethearts before their affair is discovered.
Morrison’s writing challenges the simplistic view of the City as a mere symbol of human corruption. Instead, the City represents the vibrant and dynamic flow of human life, a place where good and bad intermingle in complex ways. As an ever-evolving space of interaction and lived experience, the City is constantly in motion, embodying the concept of “becoming through circulation, combination, and recombination of people and things” (Crang, 2001, p. 190). It serves as both a context and medium for diverse communicative practices (Netto, 2017).
Urban spaces are shaped by the interplay of time, space, and actions, leading to the creation of places where “multiple temporalities collide” and new meanings emerge (Crang, 2001, p. 189). Every urban temporality can be seen as an “envelope of time-space” through which individuals navigate their daily activities (Crang, 2001, p. 192). While the routine tempo of urban life follows a familiar pattern, it can be disrupted by new rhythmic groupings or events that offer alternatives to the everyday pace. These events, whether planned or spontaneous, have the power to reshape urban spaces, transforming them into event areas with new structural dynamics and meanings (Crang, 2001; Certeau, 1984; Sack, 2004).
Lehtovuori compares urban events to a labyrinth, where the physical structures created for events — such as booths, stages, and fences — alter the scale and form of public spaces, changing their rhythms (Lehtovuori, 2010). Events open up opportunities for reinterpreting public spaces, introducing new meanings and breaking the monotony of everyday urban life. Lefebvre’s concept of rhythm highlights the interaction between place, time, and energy, emphasizing the importance of change, repetition, identity, and difference in urban experiences (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991; Lefebvre, 2004).
In the context of tourism and urban studies, events have been increasingly recognized as key place-making practices that shape the rhythms of the City (Richards, 2015; Richards and Russo, 2016; Smith, 2015). These events create new spaces for exploration, offering unique experiences and opportunities. However, the urban area itself is an “eventful and unique happening,” constantly evolving and opening up possibilities (Crang, 2001, p. 194). Events, as organized modalities of the public sphere, introduce new rules and flows of interaction within these dynamic urban entities, affecting the vitality and publicness of spaces (Netto, 2017; Montgomery, 1995).
The rhythmic flexibility of events generates a “buzz-effect” that influences the speed of movement and communication within the City (Stevens and Shin, 2014). There is a growing need for rhythm analysis to explore the relationship between planned events and urban spatiality, as events reshape the space-time dynamics of the City, creating new conditions for interaction and communication. These events contribute to the unique “eventfulness” of the City, where the interplay of urban landscapes, images, and meanings generates distinctive experiences (Bevolo, 2014; Richards, 2015).
Lefebvre argues that rhythm analysis should be comparative, focusing on identifying specific contrasts between cities (Lefebvre, 2004). He suggests that rhythm analysts should be attuned to time, moods, and atmosphere rather than just spatial or event-based factors (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 87). The physical and lived body plays a crucial role in experiencing urban rhythms, as rhythms are not merely objects but interactions that are subjectively felt (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991).
A phenomenological approach could be useful in studying city rhythms, as urban experiences are shaped by both public and private interactions with space (Lefebvre, 2004; Wearing and Foley, 2017). This perspective emphasizes the importance of time within space, suggesting that we experience urban rhythms rather than space itself. The mediation of rhythms, motifs, and tonalities in event-related changes contributes to the unique dynamism of urban interactions, offering alternatives to mundane urban experiences. Rhythm analysis in event and tourism studies could shift the focus from place-making to rhythm-making, where the amplitude, frequency, intensity, and tension of event-generated forces are explored to uncover new dimensions of lived experiences in the City.
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