Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2014

This inaugural editorial launching the first volume of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies details, in two parts, the need for and significance of an urban cultural studies method, broadly conceived. Part 1 (in Issue 1) culls insights from the work of urban philosopher and cultural studies pioneer Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) as a way of exploring the role of philosophy in urban cultural studies research and examining its key terms: cities, the urban, interdisciplinarity and culture. Overall, urban cultural studies (UCS) foments a dialogue between art and society – between textual/representational (humanities) understandings of culture and anthropological, geographical, sociological (social science) approaches. This is ideally accomplished within a reconfigured urban studies paradigm that continues to embrace its characteristic focus on architecture, built environment, city planning, everyday life, identity formation, landscape, space/place, transportation and more, while venturing further into artistic terrain than ever before – films, literature, music, sequential art, painting, digital humanities approaches and more.

Using two post-9/11 films set in New York City, Cloverfield (2008) and The Visitor (2008), this article interrogates the urban space of pre-emptive security practice in the United States. Putting these two films together, and tracing their characters’ paths through the city, offers insights into the relationship between threat imaginaries, security practices and the complex cities within which they are interwoven. While pointing to some of the continuities with longer-standing socio-spatial tactics of urban control, this analysis also draws attention to the particular spatio-temporal landscape of pre-emption, which has come to define post-9/11 security stances. It is argued that pre-emptive security imaginaries and practices are stretched across urban spaces in ambiguous and uneven ways as attempts are made to render urban complexity, uncertainty and circulation visible and knowable. The cinematic paths of the characters in Cloverfield and The Visitor offer points of micro-visibility onto post-9/11 urban security practice as a circulatory process that is not ultimately fixed or fully competent. In this way the article complicates the imagination of a seamless, fully rendered urban battlespace and instead stresses the active process of securitizing potentialities and acts that slip in and out of the innumerable spatial stories that compose the urban fabric.

Multiple strands of early twenty-first-century Tokyo’s gendered narratives find expression in a large body of internationally circulated short stories, novels and films from Japan that figuratively incorporate portions of the city’s actual transportation infrastructure. It is an infrastructure that frames and defines Tokyo – a ‘city of trains’ – as a socially dynamic geographical entity. Urban rail-system-rich texts such as Noboru Tsujihara’s ‘My Slightly Crooked Brooch’ – along with Natsuo Kirino’s Real World, Fuminori Nakamura’s The Thief, Shosuke Murakami’s Train Man, Banana Yoshimoto’s ‘Newlywed’, and Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s Café Lumière – show the illusoriness (especially for women) of the alluring promise of mobility in both life and on the rails. At the same time, they contain hints of newly emerging interventions and choices, along with the possibility of a counter-hegemonic discourse in which women resolutely assert their agency on a rail system built by and mostly for men.

Conflicting narratives about prostitution in Hollywood – from reformers, Hollywood novels and newspapers covering the sensational Hollywood ‘love mart’ case – indicate awareness as well as deep-seated concerns not only about changing sexual norms but also the urban context that generated them. Reformers employed the language of ‘white slavery’ to suggest that the new sexual economy victimized innocent urban newcomers; Hollywood novels suggested the notion of women as sexual agents; and newspaper coverage of the ‘love mart’ case employed both narratives in depicting prostitution. While such contradictory depictions indicate the unevenness of the process by which urbanization ushered in new sexual mores, narratives of prostitution in Hollywood shared the idea that the city was a modern nightmare rather than a dreamy landscape of opportunity.

The article offers an overview of the leisure activities on the Prado Promenade in Madrid (Spain) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that a historical inquiry into the regulation of urban leisure is relevant for understanding the debates that the Occupy movements of 2011–12 opened up: (1) the meaning of mass public gatherings with the purpose of spending free time; and (2) the balance of power between the state, the city and commerce intertwined in the current definition of publicness. The City Council’s decisions about the methods and the scope of its control over leisure spaces such as the Prado reveal the ambiguous nature of municipal authority as a representative of the people as well as a mediator between the state and the vendors.

This article explores the emancipatory potential of misuse. Through the practice of parkour, I investigate misuse as a form of empowerment within entanglements of power demarcating acceptable uses of city space. I critically examine my experience practising parkour on Monument Circle in Indianapolis, Indiana. The research questions include, first, how can we define the misuse of space? What can the misuse of Monument Circle teach us about how architecture communicates the interests of power? Can parkour be a practice of empowerment that challenges spatial expectations of use? Foucault’s discussion of disciplinary power theoretically frames the understanding of discourse, power and the use of misuse. Lefebvre’s theorizations on the production of space ground an understanding of the body in and around architecture. Offered here is an analysis of parkour’s misuse of architecture and its challenge of disciplinary power codified and maintained in the built environment.

This essay reflects on Adam Krims’s Music and Urban Geography. The importance of this particular book, it is suggested here, is that it provides a deeply integrated analysis of the often overlooked interconnections between music and urban spaces. This essay looks across the arguments made in Music and Urban Geography and attempts to outline the key aspects of Krims’s approach and of the form of analysis that he explores. This piece argues that Krims’s book provides a model for developing sonically aware urban cultural studies. It uses Krims’s book as the basis for exploring a situated form of analysis in which the recursive relations between music and the city are understood within a set of complex and interwoven relations. As such, this piece uses Krims’s work as a guide to unpicking the musical city.

Addressing academia’s distrust of Félix Guattari and his difficult language, this short-form article examines the bearing of a Guattarian approach to urban cultural studies on both the social sciences and humanities disciplines.

The physical and digital fragmentation of the Occupy movement makes it notoriously difficult to define politically: in an attempt to analyse one local movement, the author performed convenience interviews with Occupy Pittsburgh participants, noting demographic information and political opinion. Through repeated interviews over several months, Occupy Pittsburgh became increasingly leftist and radical in rhetoric, even after dispersal of the physical camp. A similar trend seems to have occurred nationwide. The author opines that the organizational model of consensus may be the reason for the leftward shift in values and ideology, and ties this to observational research.