Tim Edensor, “Rhythm” in Mark Jayne & Kevin Ward (ed.), Urban Theory : New critical perspectives, Routledge, 2016, pp. 265-275.
Description : This chapter investigates the multiple rhythms of the city, the repetitions, routines and habitual movements that focus on places in myriad combinations. I will endeavour to identify key agents in the production of urban rhythms. I provide a contrast between the looser organization of rhythms in pre-modern places with the more disciplinary rhythms that were forged in the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis to accord with the needs of bureaucracy and capital. However, I emphasize that though they are organized to synchronize the regular working, leisure and mobile patterns of city dwellers, urban rhythms are dynamic, often contested and continually liable to change. New habits of consumption, work and communication, as well as resistance to fast rhythms manifest in the cultivation of slow rhythms, testify to the rhythmic changes solicited by the increasingly globalized world. The chapter concludes by emphasizing that these diverse urban rhythms vary according to geographical contexts and that they are always partly coconstituted by the non-human agents with which we share the city.
