Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2015

Saskia Sassen posits the ‘global city’ as the centre of the late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century global agglomeration economy. This article considers that the cities depicted in Salman Rushdie’s novels offer an alternative geohistory of global cities. Rushdie traces the impulse of urban agglomeration to the earliest moments of city formation. He also emphasizes the cities of the global south and the alternate linkages they forged with the world. Edward Soja’s concept of ‘synekism’ is effective in explaining the different trajectory of the formation of the global cities in Rushdie’s novels. Particularly, taking a cue from Soja, this article aims to explore how the different moments of urban agglomeration in Rushdie’s novels reflect a contestation of the matriarchal, nomadic energies and paternalistic, statist, institutionalizing impulses, also evident in a renewed form in the formation of the postmodern global cities.

The well-documented changes that took place in the urban landscapes of fin de siècle Paris and pre-depression New York have seldom been considered in terms of the changes they instigated in their respective cultures of gallery and exhibition space. By drawing on the contemporaneous changes in photographic practices, which suggested new models of engaging with the city, this article seeks to account for the emergence of a new mode of experiencing gallery space, which explicitly drew on the urban environment. This article seeks to interpret the ways of experiencing such space, with particular attention to the Parisian Salon de l’Escalier and the New York-based Julien Levy Gallery, and their use of photographic interiorization, which echoes archival space. By considering the first spaces to exhibit urban photography thus, this article seeks to retrospectively re-occupy the space of the gallery through an imagined mode of experience.

Australia’s Gold Coast typically positions itself as a luxurious, upmarket resort city or a family-friendly, ‘fun in the sun’ holiday destination. At the same time, the Gold Coast lifestyle is often associated with hedonism, sexuality and excess. Yet the city is also home to over half a million residents whose daily lives – work, education and leisure – routinely take place within and against these powerful and familiar representations. Thus, the city’s identity can be seen as constituted by a series of conflicting ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ narratives. The ‘official’ narrative is produced by how the city markets itself to tourists, and comes to include popular imaginaries of place that these representations construct and perpetuate. Beyond this, however, residents produce varied and multiple ‘unofficial’ narratives through their engagements with the actualities of their locality as well as with its metanarratives. Surfers Paradise, as the main tourist hub and entertainment precinct of the Gold Coast, is a site of convergence for these competing narratives. Drawing on Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, this article explores how conflicting narratives and disjunctions in identities of place manifest themselves in spatial practice in Surfers Paradise.

The status as a dynamic urban frontier or periphery of areas ripe for gentrification or in the process of gentrification is illuminated by discursive representations of North Kensington, West London. As part of a specifically 1950s and 1960s localized urban imaginary this district was viewed as part of ‘Grotland’, a zone of transition containing much architectural and social decay but also new social housing and wealthier incomers in the same period. Recollections of one street, Portland Road, W11, mediated by a 2012 television documentary, emphasize frontiers within the street dividing it between a wealthier south and a poorer north. Historical accounts of the area make Portland Road itself into a frontier dividing a prosperous and respectable zone to the east from an extremely poor and unrespectable one to the west. Fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s highlights moments at which life in areas such as this, far from seeming to be in inexorable change towards gentrification, seemed to hold chaos and dereliction together with capitaldriven reformulations. Taking these materials into account, work on gentrification needs to be nuanced by an understanding of individual acts of gentrification in dialogue with structural and environmental change. More than has so far been recognized, urban imaginaries often focus on transitional and highly localized portions of imagined cities.

Scholars of socialist cities have debated the extent to which the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries created their own socialist space distinct from capitalist space or whether capitalist and socialist spaces were simply different versions of modernity. As Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Sonia Hirt and Brigitte Le Normand discuss (each from very different vantage points), architects and planners in the early-to-mid twentieth century transcended the ideological divide and worked across geographical and temporal boundaries. They thus participated in the evolution and development of cities across the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe that have similar formal characteristics yet that function in diverse ways. Their residents have also experienced them differently depending on the intent of the ideological framework under which they were created.

The study of tourism and leisure, once disparaged in the social sciences as a topic unworthy of analysis, is finally getting the attention it deserves. In an increasingly post-industrial, neo-liberal, service economy, tourism and leisure practices have the potential to transform, for good or ill, local social lives. This article examines three recently published books that critically address tourism and leisure in urban contexts and how these practices intersect with multiculturalism, race and ethnicity.

This 2014 interview with veteran engaged artist Krzysztof Wodiczko addresses work that was made in dialogue with homeless people in Montreal. Drawing on previous experience, Wodiczko emphasizes in the process of collaboration the needs of individual participants and their own performance skills in the presentation of self within conditions of marginality and adversity. The subversive humour of Charlie Chaplin and Bertolt Brecht are identified as key components of Wodiczko’s approach to realism.

This article seeks to link the processes of gentrification in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood with its musical history over the past twenty years. A selective chronology of independent music from the neighbourhood is described, beginning with the early years of instrumental rock group Godspeed You Black Emperor! and concluding with the recent output of electronic music label Arbutus Records, via the commercial breakthrough of Arcade Fire’s Funeral album in 2004. Through a discussion of the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Sharon Zukin and David Ley’s interpretation of the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, it is argued that the music produced in the neighbourhood can be seen as unified with its physical spaces in a number of ways under contemporary capitalism; in their parallel trajectories of progression and renewal and in the way they both construct and are constructed by notions of ‘place’. While it is argued that the dynamism of the music scene in Mile End has been intimately connected to broader processes of urban economic restructuring, the article also highlights the challenges an increasingly gentrified Mile End faces in maintaining its status as a fertile centre of cultural production.

In the future worlds of science fiction novels, societal and physical dilemmas are at least as pressing as those we encounter on Earth today. These novels show, by way of far-reaching technology and fantastic creativity, how the human race has overcome extraordinary physical, language and social challenges. Still, no matter how fictitious the portraits of extraterrestrial habitats or space travels, the narratives seem deeply attached to the worst imaginable breaches between affluent and poor. The images of glittering towers that stand side by side with self-made shacks are, in fact, not much different from documented inequalities and distressed living conditions on Earth. This article addresses how a handful of science fiction novels express something of importance about contemporary urban environments. The aim is to spur a consideration of urban sustainable visions, and the discussion delves into two rhetoric questions: what is so tempting about the frequently used settings, with their excessive divides between rich and poor? Further, might such dystopian and frightening fictions possibly be more effective to think about visionary plans for future cities than utopian ones?