齐美尔关于大都市的文本不仅仅为城市社会学奠定了基础，还是齐美尔现代性思想的重要载体，它反应了齐美尔在理解现代性的过程中着重于视觉的方法以及对于现代性偏重于个体体验的理解。事实上，齐美尔通过大都市的景观捕捉现代性体验的特质。本文主要分析齐美尔如何进行这样一种捕捉以及他所捕捉到的内容，并将其关注视觉隐喻的方法放置于视觉中心主义与反视觉中心主义的语境下进行反思，最后总结这样一种理解现代性社会的方式对于当下研究的启发性。

What is "new" in modern society is a theme that all the major social theorists and sociologists since the mid-nineteenth century had tried to delineate.Among which the endeavours and contribution of Simmel are quite seminal.However,researchers and theorists often go for Simmel’s text of the Philosophy of Money when they try to analyse his study of modernity.Few attention has been drawn to his classic essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” ,which has always been seeing as the foundation of urban sociology.Actually it is an important text which carries Simmel’s interpretation of modernity in the sense of experience and his emphasis upon visual in his methodology.For Simmel,modern metropolis is the concentration and intensification of the features of modernity as well as a focal site of money economy.Modernity reveals itself in the cityscape and streetscape of the metropolis.These thoughts are still illuminating in today’s context of modernity and are thus the primary topic of this essay.