Cities as Theatre

In this episode, we think of cities as the setting or backdrop to drama and events—ideas connected to Bertolt Brecht's development of Epic Theatre in the 1920s, Henri Lefebvre'sfocus on everyday urban life, and the explicitly theatrical architecture of Edmond and Corrigan. Designers of cities have been consciously creating the elements of theatrical urban life throughout history, and Conrad Hamann explores how quickly cinema took on the task of depicting the city, treating it as a main character—from Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) to countless films that followed. Conrad also speaks to the theatrical elements that have persisted in city design: the composedstreet, the city logo or icon, campus groupings, and triumphal arches—each functioning as a venue for the instant theatre of life. 21st-century cities are now seen through Google Earth by more people than any other means, and evenseeing cities from the air for the first time transformed the scale of urban drama. Yet the small theatrical moment of an encounter on a street corner persists. What does a theatrical reading of cities mean for us today? This episode invites us to consider thecity not just as infrastructure or economy, but as stage—a place where architecture, movement, and everyday encounter combine to produce the ongoing performance of urban life. Check out the references from this episode.