It may be argued, however, that Los Angeles is not unique in its ability to confound perception and defy description. The Tokyo-Yokohama-Nagoya triad stretches laterally instead of unfolding sequentially; New York is constantly in motion; Mumbai generates conflicting images; Chongqing confounds historicization; Shanghai is never still enough to encompass, and Jakarta is too filled with others’ spaces to be described informatively. All mega-cities resist conventional description, but are unique in their forms of resistance.
How can we, then, express the complexity and the limitless simultaneity of cities, if language is inadequate to the task as Borges and Soja suggest? Art, broadly defined, and creative enterprises generally, are cultural activities through which a thirdspatial imagination that can encompass conflicting epistemologies may be developed. To know aesthetically, as Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp point out, is to perceive through something beyond reason, beyond ordinary language. It is through art that the beguiling mysteries of the city can be perceived, or sensed, by fusing the imagined with the real in a thirdspace. Artistic and imaginative responses may be a key feature of our re-imagining of urban life, but the city’s ability to defy adequate description also precludes predictability of responses. As Amin and Thrift put it, each urban moment can spark performative improvisations’ (2002: 4).
There is no need of being startled at this consequence. Anaheim Subway Map It is very harmless. There is no absurdity at all in it. Distinct states may be Anaheim Subway Map united under one king. And those states may be further cemented and united together by a treaty of commerce. This is the case.
