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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2023
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2023
Volume 10, Issue 2, 2023
- Editorial
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The scholarly journal as puzzle: On time, collaboration and closure
More LessAs the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (JUCS) closes its tenth year of publication, this second instalment of a two-part editorial turns towards questions regarding the nature of scholarly journals. Building from Part 1’s exploration of comics artist Chris Ware’s tactile puzzle Building Stories: Vortex of Anamnesis, the central metaphor of journal as an intellectual puzzle is considered. Specific aspects of time and collaboration are addressed as fundamental concerns for the puzzle of journal editing. After considering, in passing, challenges to editing in the twenty-first century, final comments address the notion of closure, drawn from comics theory.
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- Articles
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Decolonizing a museum: Exhibiting Mexican American mythologies of place in Los Angeles’s historic Plaza District
More LessThis article examines how the disciplinary technologies of land use, zoning laws, immigration policy and urban renewal were utilized in the creation of LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (LAPCA), Los Angeles’s first museum dedicated to Mexican American arts. I analyse the methods used by LAPCA’s founders, curators and city planners who have deployed the museum’s location adjoining the city’s historic Plaza to situate this institution within the symbolic and spatial jurisdiction of a historic place. In this case study, I begin with an exploration of the earliest foundations of ethnic tourism in Los Angeles’s historic Plaza district to situate LAPCA within a long history of governmental interventions used to create and reframe Los Angeles’s ethnic cultural spaces. I draw upon two theoretical strands – Foucauldian governmentality and Henri Lefebvre’s dialectic of urban implosion/explosion – as my primary tools of genealogical critique. In this article I provide new practical applications for using governmentality as a lens through which we can examine how the ensemble of administrative techniques and procedures used in the governance of populations shape the spaces they inhabit.
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Framing utopia: Following Warren and Mosley from urban site to textual practice (and back again)
More LessThis article concerns interconnected works by artists Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley, with various collaborators: Planning for Utopia (2007–08), Beyond Utopia (2012) and Utopian Talk-Show (2012–14). It follows their initial proposal to construct an open timber framework tower on a small site near Smithfield Market in London. Discussions with the planning authority there faltered in 2008. In 2012, aspects of the initial project were revisited as a collectively authored, polyphonic book and follow-on instruction-based performance piece. The article will focus on how an initial desire to challenge accepted uses and values of city space was transposed from a real urban situation into the multiple sites of textual practice and how the relationships between representational space, utopia and reality were put into play. Maintaining an explicit conversation with utopic conceits and motifs, these projects test how far an extended critical spatial practice might develop within the specifics of a given urban situation.
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The sociality of driverless cars in Life on Wheels
Authors: Nasim Naghavi and Carmela CucuzzellaThe ubiquity of automobiles has made it so that a considerable amount of space is devoted to them in cities. In the past, urban scholars considered these car-dedicated spaces to be ‘non-places’ that hindered place attachment and social life in cities. This article investigates new place-making efforts in these spaces by examining the documentary film Life on Wheels that offers alternatives. Within the ‘new mobility paradigm’, social space is considered an assemblage of social interactions, objects (e.g. technologies), geographical locations, emplacements and communication networks. Through the analysis of the film, this article investigates the social opportunities and challenges that driverless cars may bring to the urban space. More specifically, in this article, the film shows that the technoscape of driverless cars can direct the city towards a shift in socio-spatial urban design and planning. A profound analytical reading illuminates the need for further social development of this technology. While the technoscape of driverless cars in the current state is in its infancy, its produced social space is yet to be scrutinized; However, at this stage of technology development, the film shows that the driverless environment can help us work towards a new way of understanding mobility spaces and their socio-technological characteristics. This article identifies the social urbanism in car-dedicated spaces projected in films and how this social urbanism can be attainable via new technologies or a transformational shift in mobility.
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On subaltern urban historiography: Locating Nona Fernández’s Mapocho between decolonization and urban social movements
More LessThis article makes a triple intervention into discussions about the relationship between subaltern collective memory, urban historiography and urban social movements. First, and more theoretically, I argue that grassroots urban social movements require a corresponding history to unite people into a collective urban social agent. In short, there are no urban social movements without a shared urban history to bring them together. The cultural struggle over defining a city’s urban meaning is waged not only by material political fights, but also over how we represent the past of our cities. Second, I argue that ruling urban classes circulate and popularize their own urban history in order to disrupt autonomous grassroots urban history formation. Third, and lastly, said historiographical struggle manifests itself in how we represent the pasts of Indigenous peoples in the cities of the Americas. I make this argument through a critical reading of Nona Fernández’s representation of the Indigenous past of Santiago de Chile in her 2002 novel Mapocho.
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Seeing the city through the lens of newspaper poetry: An analysis of Milwaukee, 1967–731
More LessThere is a strong connection between cities and literature; they inhabit and shape each other. Sociologists have studied the relationship between them, looking at how literary meaning is developed and how it shapes urban and social milieus. While there is a large body of poetry-based research, newspaper poetry remains largely unexplored in the United States. Drawing on discourse and content analysis of a new and never-used set of poems published in Milwaukee’s two major alternative newspapers between 1967 and 1973, this article analyses poetic representations of Milwaukee’s social, institutional and urban dimensions. Additionally, it examines variability and continuity in the focus of these poems, as well as the factors that might shape these patterns. The results show multiple technical and rhetoric mechanisms used by poets when representing that historical period poetically and reveal that even in periods of intense social upheaval, ‘love’ and ‘death’ appear to be the primary themes in which poets focus on. This article also devotes particular attention to the relationship between poetry and the urban space, and the implications of platforms of distribution and consumption in poetic representations of cities’ historical periods and change building on literature on the connections between local environment and cultural production.
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The city in film: Reading Dhobi Ghat and Island City as cinematic representations of Mumbai
Authors: Glynis Machado and Ujjwal JanaUrban spaces harbour the capacity to embody varied social relations that constantly interact to form lived experiences. As the society has gradually transformed from a collection of rural settlements to a largely metropolitan space, urban fiction as a literary genre set in city landscapes has become increasingly popular. In a century dominated by new media technologies, the changing contours of contemporary societies became widely visible in the images and interpretations available through cinema. Cinema as one of the predominant modes of cultural expressions has played a performative role in encapsulating the changing lifestyles, attitudes and landscapes. The city as a mosaic of complexity, diversity and contradictions has consequently become an inseparable part of the world’s largest film industry – Bollywood. The Indian megacity of Mumbai has thus become a site of ‘glocal’ interconnections and polyphonic voices. Not only has the city contributed to the production and dissemination of films, but its increased influence has also allowed it to feature as a ‘character’ in many films. This article seeks to evaluate select cinematic narratives to foreground the living realities of the megacity of Mumbai. While examining the representation of Mumbai in two films released post-2010 – Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries) and Island City, the article intends to interpret the implicit and explicit meanings in the cinematic language of these films. It seeks to argue that cinematic representations of Mumbai help to characterize ways of perceiving the city as a complex, multi-layered urban text. Rather than visualizing the city as an empty space that simply holds the narrative together, the article aims to show how cities in films become characters themselves, engulfing those of flesh and bone.
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