The imaginative geographies of twentieth-century New York, a time when the city was considered by many to be the capital of the world (perhaps the last), provide the impetus for discussion in this chapter. While imperialist Europe may have dominated the nineteenth- century's imagination of civilization, in the wake of two world wars, the twentieth century witnessed the dislocation of a geopolitics dominated by European imperialist expansion, and the establishment of a new global political order increasingly dominated by the capitalist market economy and American foreign policy. This shift of power within the West was also fundamental for the establishment of New York City as the pinnacle of what it meant to be modern in terms of Western culture. Modernity, with its attendant discourses of high and low culture, Futurism and nostalgia, internationalism and nationalism, hope and despair, finds an alternative, non-European mode of expression in New York, with the result that throughout the cultural-historical turbulences of the last century, this metropolis has consistently provided a position of difference from which Europe could articulate its modernity.

Western Europe has always been crucial in producing the imaginative geography of New York City and determining its position within a global symbolic order. From Europe's discovery of America onward, one of the processes that scholars identify as fundamental to the European construction of American space is the elimination of chaos and the Otherness of difference through simplification.