Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2016

This concise editorial explores the current disciplinary gaps between geographical and humanities analyses of cultural production through consideration of a specific example. American comics artist Chris Ware’s Building Stories, considered a masterpiece of comics art, has attracted attention from both humanists and geographers on account of its urban theme and its intriguing architectural form. This interest raises two sets of questions for a proper cultural studies analysis. First, to what degree are humanities scholars approaching the work without attending to geographical issues of space/place that inevitably figure into its architectural form? And second, to what degree are geographers approaching the work without addressing the humanities issues of artistry and representation that figure into its comics form? Surveying the criticism on this work may provide some initial answers to these questions and in the process speak to larger issues of interdisciplinary research in urban cultural studies.

Most major Canadian cities have displaced existing indigenous settlements and gathering places. The city of Edmonton, Canada today includes what will soon be the nation’s largest urban Aboriginal population. Though urban space and planning reflect colonial relationships, it has launched progressive initiatives preceding and following the work of the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This article examines material and intangible traces of Aboriginal history and cultural presence in a theoretical context concerned with public spaces promoting transformative, dialogic, cross-cultural encounters. Case studies consider urban spaces as gathering places in terms of their relevance to indigenous practices of metissage. What is at stake for settler colonial cities in the recognition and inclusion of indigenous presence and historical relationships? Aboriginal cultures can and must play a critical role in the development of a mature civic identity rooted in a complex mutual history, with implications for urban social and ecological sustainability in the future.

Focusing on the return of the real in contemporary art, the article examines how Lluïsa Cunillé’s play, Barcelona, mapa d’ombres (2004), and Ventura Pons’s 2007 film, Barcelona (un mapa), apprehend the urban landscape as ‘composition’, and how they bring into dialectical relation modes of apprehension and representation traditionally perceived and pitched as ideologically opposed or mutually exclusive. Like modernist art (cubism), these works beget oppositional and counter-hegemonic ways of imagining the urban landscape within what remains ‘the ongoing dominance of the “hegemony” of capital’. As a mode of analysis, composition does not only interrupt the ‘delirious equivalency’ of late capitalist abstraction, but it also becomes a deliberate intervention in self-fashioning and city-making endowed with a political, if not also an ethical, component.

This article proposes an analysis of Barcelona’s metro system following David Pike’s threshold concept, key to the topography of the ‘vertical city’. This will be done through reading maps and literary texts that illustrate three closely related issues: an interpretation of Barcelona’s metro network and its meanings; the disappearance of some metro stations and underground spaces, such as hidden connecting corridors, which create a shallow presence of the past into the present, examples of urban spaces that are buried and forgotten; and subway life as portrayed in some literary texts with particular emphasis on the use of mythology.

This article compares three recent publications, which engage with questions of urban transformation in times of economic and social crisis in global film. Although the three publications consider a heterogeneous corpus of films, they share a sensibility for the intricate interrelationship between the medium of cinema and urban space, especially in connection to social marginalization and urban degeneration. This article examines the underlying assumption of these publications that film is a spatial medium, which not only representationally captures urban transformations, but also partakes in them. By challenging notions of narrative agency, film can likewise explore one-sided notions of agency and urban space, extending the scope beyond the primacy of human agency and considering non-human forms of agency. The three publications and the films they explore are thus expressive of a posthuman and new materialist sensibility in the study of urban space.

The question of how to appropriately commemorate a city’s past in the process of urban transformation is a task that is not exclusively reserved for urban planners. In the case of Berlin, it is a particularly complex challenge because of the city’s turbulent history in the twentieth century. This article explores three treatments of a modern urban landscape that incorporates a web of historical layers. Today, Berlin reveals its past in semi-hidden, yet visible, surfaces that Andreas Huyssen aptly considers elements of a palimpsest. The historical layers embody wounds of a scarred city. German filmmakers have reinvented Berlin as a cinematic city that is looking back and forward simultaneously, oftentimes impacting or even anticipating socio-aesthetic trajectories. For Wim Wenders, the city has always been more than a mere setting, or extension, for fictional characters. Wenders’ cityscapes serve as protagonists in their own right, allowing the audience to see the films as unique historical documents of a moment in the history of the city. Finally, Brigitta B. Wagner’s Berlin Replayed: Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era (2015) explores the interplay between the built urban environment and virtual versions of Berlin with a focus on feature films from the 1920s to present.

Space has often been relegated to time in contemporary Spanish Peninsular studies, where the issues of memory and the past have surfaced as a primary political and aesthetic concern in recent criticism. Writing both against and within this grain, monographs by Ann Davies, Nathan Richardson, Stephen Vilaseca and Lorraine Ryan underline the importance of space and spatiality in conceptualizing contemporary Spain. Through a multifaceted examination of literature, cinema, and visual arts, these scholars trace the development of the nation through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the Civil War to the destape, and from the transition to the economic crisis of 2008. While not the earliest works on Spanish urban cultural studies, these texts do serve as a strong foundation for any future work in the area.

This article examines three recent publications in the field of urban literary studies. It argues that spatiality has become a key term within this discipline, with the inferences of the spatial turn during the 1980s and 1990s having been firmly assimilated with the methodological procedures of textual analysis today. However, the article argues that the textual construction of the relationship between space and identity has not been fully and satisfactorily articulated within the field, with a hard-headedly materialist account of representational space sitting uncomfortably alongside a cultural materialist understanding of identity. This difficulty, it suggests, accounts for some of the theoretical dilemmas represented in the books under discussion, despite their many strengths.

Hong Kong, a hub of cultural exchanges and transnational funding, resources, ideologies and people, is often seen as an economic miracle. The dominant economic discourse of capitalism has reduced Hong Kong to a mere product of financial systems and structures, and deprived it of the possibility of enchantment. By analysing textual practices such as film aesthetics and metacultural criticism, Esther M. K. Cheung developed a unique approach to Hong Kong and other global cities. Her interest in urban culture was not confined by geographical boundaries. In a unique and remarkable way, Cheung analysed the intricate relationship between everyday life, creativity, and moments of crisis. Her readings of, and intense preoccupation with, understanding cities have inspired scholars to seek the abandoned and hidden small events and narratives of our everyday life.