"Time In A Modern City".

When the first studies of urban sociology appeared, city planning experts and intellectuals rushed to affirm the undeniable existence of a real city culture. In a very general sense, it could be said that culture is the way in which a certain time and space relate to each other: the conjoining of a populations's forms and behaviours. The comprehension of a culture then, depends greatly on the definition one has of the space and the time in which one is growing and developing.

"... We all felt that time is different: we were in the city where by definition everything goes faster, especially time. Time flies, it gets away from us, but at the same time it weighs heavily on us and drags its feet...", points out Carlos Fuentes in the novel already mentioned.

Before Christ was born, people perceived time as cyclical. Seasons changed throughout the year. Night and day were two phases of the same circle that appeared not to do anything except spin on its unchanging centre. However, from the moment of Jesus's birth, the West entered fully into historical time. A line of demarcation was drawn before and after and cyclical time disappeared from the human mind. Modernity went even further: 'The Modern Age is the first to exalt change and make it its foundation. Difference. separation, heterogeneity, plurality, evolution, development, revolution, history: all these words can be condensed into one: Future. It is not past times nor eternity, it is not the time that is but rather the time that yet does not exist and is always on the point of being', explains the Mexican writer Octavio Paz in The Children of Mud (Los Hijos del Limo). Modern humans, especially the urban ones, have made future life their goal, something that is by definition unattainable. The life of people in the city becomes one of constant negation. What the person of the past found in repetitions of yesterday, now always brings with it a denial of what happened yesterday and a race towards the future.

With electricity, the differences between day and night dissolve with the flick of a switch. Active time can continue after dark, and so sensory stimulation for the city dweller never stops. Time in modern cities is always accelerating.

With the evolution of capitalism time itself has needed to be rationalised. It has been restructured, and divided, with periods allocated to different activities. When traffic lights are red, cars must stop; when they're green cars can go. At seven in the morning, we talk about the 'rush hour'. On Sunday night all the roads leading into the city are full. 'In this way the technique of metropolitan life is simply unimaginable without an extremely punctual integration of every activity and mutual relationship to the content of an unvarying, impersonal schedule', says George Simmel, an urban sociologist. One arrives at the paradox of a time that is both cyclical and historical: urban routine -- a routine that locks us into schedules and chronologies that are both perfectly defined and have perfectly defined boundaries.

Senosiain, Javier. "The Modern City". Bio-Architecture. Burlington: Architectural Press, 2003. P97-100.