Toward a Networked Urbanism

Abstract

The metaphor of networking informed practices of urban spectatorship in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. Hugh Ferriss famously represented a future Manhattan in his book The Metropolis of Tomorrow as a careful grouping of distinct nodes unified by the perspective of an individual spectator. In his drawings, a lone figure seems to assemble the disparate parts of the city into a comprehensible whole. The networked urbanism to which Ferriss alluded was first explored in the built environment during the long construction process of the midtown Manhattan development Rockefeller Center. By focusing on its construction plans, public artwork, and publicity, this essay traces the development of early networked urbanism in New York City. It investigates the rhetoric of the network in real space and imagined and explores how this metaphor influences the relationship between the urban spectator and the developing urban landscape.

Keywords

Hugh Ferriss Rockefeller Center radio network spectatorship New York

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