Authenti-cities: Explorations in cultural meaning and community making

Building on Simmel's idea that space shapes sociability, we explore how sense of community is created through architecture. By examining the work of architects who encode history and culture into architecture and critics who decode their artifacts, we reveal symbolic processes of cultural meaning and community making in Barcelona and Boston from the 1980s to 2006. The two cities exhibit dissimilar perceptions of who comprises them, distinct identities reflected in their architectural styles, and similar mechanisms for creating proximity while differing in the mobility mechanisms, which they employ. These comparisons reveal the symbolic processes involved in communities as institutional venues.