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- Volume 3, Issue 2, 2016
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2016
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2016
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Wu Jianren’s New Story of the Stone and interrogating turn-of-the-century urbanist ideology in China
By Tom MarlingAbstractChinese cities experienced both significant material and conceptual changes in the late nineteenth century, but this was not well represented in popular fiction. The influence of an emerging discourse of urbanism does however make its presence felt, and novels like New Story of the Stone turned a satirical eye towards such a discourse. This article considers how New Story comically inhabits the contrast between the ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilized’ cities that was shaping proto-urbanism in China, but in doing so engages with more complex issues of ‘inhabiting’ and ‘habitat’. By considering the polyphony inherent to the concept of urban barbarity, and contrasting this with the anodyne homogeneity of civility in the city, Wu Jianren leverages his own personal engagement with ‘writing’ cities to undermine a burgeoning functionalism and positivism surrounding the city in modernizing China.
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A Bildungsroman for a waterfront development: Literary genre and the planning narratives of Jätkäsaari, Helsinki
By Lieven AmeelAbstractThis article examines the narratives involved in the planning of Jätkäsaari (Helsinki), an industrial harbour environment currently being redeveloped. It starts out with an analysis of Hyvä jätkä/Good Chap (Hannu Mäkelä, 2009), a literary novel commissioned by the city to promote the area, arguing that this cultural product should not be seen merely as a piece of cultural branding. Rather, the novel’s fictional construction of the area’s past and future draws attention to the narrative characteristics of planning itself. Using the concepts of literary genre and metaphor, an examination of Jätkäsaari’s planning narratives shows the ambivalent and often contradictory planning visions of the area. This study aims at re-examining the considerable research tradition in urban and planning studies that sees urban planning as a form of storytelling, by applying concepts from literary and narrative theory to the analysis of planning narratives.
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Urban segregation, game arcades and codified porn: Representations of youth in Madrid (1980–1995)
More LessAbstractThis article studies how Spanish film depicts the everyday life of youth from the beginnings of democracy to the mid-1990s. I start off with youth-centred films from the early 1980s that captured previously censored occurrences of everyday living, displaying a commitment to the representation of social reality. I then move on to cinematic works stemming from a post-1992 ideological ‘present-centredness’. First, I focus on the relationship between subject and urban environment since it is one of the key representational strategies in portraying the unprecedented transformations in Spanish society during this time period. Second, I analyse the emergence of audiovisual forms of consumption and how they relate to the leisurely practices of youths as they navigate the cityscape. Finally, I explore how young people interact with the early 1990s scenario and the kind of behaviours that define their engagement with the social. This analysis demonstrates how films encounter an unfolding social real, codifying it in a variety of ways, becoming thus active recording devices of the practices of the everyday.
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Imagining the pavement: A search through everyday texts for the symbolism of an everyday artefact
By Megan HicksAbstractAn interconnected system of paved surfaces is an omnipresent feature of the urban environment. The author contends that, because of its ubiquity, this ‘pavement’ impinges on the thoughts of ordinary urban dwellers in ways they might not consciously recognize. Evidence of feelings that may otherwise remain unexpressed has been sought from deliberate and incidental references to the pavement in the works of journalists, poets, memoirists and artists. Such works reveal that the pavement is a repository for private urban imaginings that may coalesce into shared public imaginaries. As a consequence the pavement can assume diverse symbolic roles and even fulfil the function of a monument onto which people project their own meanings.
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Housing for whom? Wole Soyinka’s Beatification of Area Boy and the audacity of a new Nigeria
More LessAbstractGrowing urban Nigerian cities like Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt continually record millions of poor immigrants from rural areas looking for a new survival space. To be poor in Nigeria is to be a target. Soyinka’s Beatification of Area Boy is primarily a response to the upheavals within the Nigerian society; a dramatic documentation of the different manifestations of power at different historical periods in Nigeria. Soyinka queries a manipulative ordered Nigerian society based on a pervasive and binding morality. He firmly traces this anomaly to the doors of the military, who have ruled Nigeria for a number of years after independence. A dark reminder of the journey the underprivileged has made from independence to date, Soyinka’s play is also a longing to recover Nigeria’s moral territory.
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Festival and tradition in contemporary Florence
More LessAbstractCertain sectors of the heritage and tourist industry argue that cities with art historical significance should be re-categorized as ‘museum cities’ because visitors intent on acquiring particular limited ‘consumer’ experiences outnumber the local population. Using the Feast Day of San Giovanni in Florence, Italy, as a focus this article questions this assumption. By evaluating the form of the feast day events and their relationship to the urban landscape, some of the historical conditions that have shaped the city are revealed. These conditions, understood as civic praxis, are accessible to everyone (to different degrees) and suggest Florence is anything but a museum.
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Tracing the Politics of Urbanism and Abjection: Space and Identity in Trainspotting
More LessAbstractGiven the fundamental role cities play in the experience of modernity and postmodernity, this article studies the interaction existing between urban space and the individuals who inhabit it in the context of Irvine Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting. A multidisciplinary approach combining theories on the city and queer theory explores the subject/space dialectics by which each of them intervenes in the construction of the other. The analysis of this process centres around three main issues – urbanism, abjection and movement – and their underlying ideology.
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‘Reading the territory’: Psychogeography and urban intertextuality
By Ella MudieAbstractThis review article looks at three recent publications that manifest the intertextual nature of psychogeography, focusing on how the influence of place cuts across disciplinary boundaries to critical effect. In London Overground: A Day’s Walk around the Ginger Line (2015), Iain Sinclair continues to harness the oppositional power of conceiving of the city as inherently intertextual. A new volume edited by Tina Richardson, Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015), is largely concerned with psychogeography as method yet its contributions reveal the extent to which the literary character of psychogeography resists supersession. And notwithstanding his disdain for the term, Patrick Keiller’s The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes (2013) is nonetheless suggestive of the mutual imbrication of quotation, literary association and the critique of urban space. Revealing contradictory attitudes towards the literary dimensions of psychogeography, these publications raise timely questions about the capacity of psychogeographical texts and methods to effect social change.
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