The Arcades Project: The City Collage of Walter Benjamin

The paper analyses the diverse components that constitute the image of the city of Paris which derives from The Arcades Project. It contemplates these elements as organizational principles of the book and of the city itself. The technique of collage is applied as a means of understanding the idea of dialectics, which emerges from the book and forms the image of the city. The paper considers the arcades (passages) as an organizational tool in Benjamin’s understanding of history that also suggests a new way of understanding and theorizing the production of the city.