Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2017

This editorial opens the special issue of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies titled ‘Cities in the Luso-Hispanic World’ by suggesting that these introductory pages are transparent panes of glass on a vehicle of transportation passing through and linking the research articles that make up this special volume. The editorial’s narrative movement is not unlike that of a car driving through the urban spaces of a city, and the eight authors’ analyses are not unlike the moving images of cityscapes flashing before the car’s windows. The above metaphor of the narration as a ride through urban space serves to situate a variety of topics (movement, visibility, images, representations, rhythms, noise, heritage, reified capital in the form of buildings, and circulation of people and cultural products) as part and parcel of specific urban contexts, including Lisbon (Portugal), Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil), Mexico City (Mexico), and Madrid and Córdoba (Spain) through poetry, novels, film, sound and architecture. Running through each contribution is the ongoing enquiry on how urban processes manifest culturally in Luso-Hispanic regions, and at a variety of scales, with special attention to bodies moving in, through, and around specific urban centres.

Through the example of the Portuguese poet Cesário Verde (1855–86), this article interrogates the relationship between the space of the nineteenth-century European capital city and the literary figure of the flâneur. Specifically, it considers in the first place the role of this aimless, noctambulist observer in a city (Lisbon) that differs in numerous ways from the better-studied locales of Paris and London. Second, it argues for an expansion of the understanding of the flâneur as passed down since Walter Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire. Specifically, Cesário, owing both to his career as a physician and to his extremely understated, self-effacing poetic style, allows readers to glimpse the otherwise unnoticed psychological and physiological effects of the wandering, nocturnal observations that characterize the flâneur genre. Using Jacques Derrida’s concept of the pharmakon, a drug that both cures and poisons, this article makes the case that the flâneur, rather than a potentially subversive optic for social observation, represents instead an unending, constraining and addictive practice that is dictated by the very social and technological forces that enable his noctambulism. In this light, the otherwise free-wheeling and plotless text of the flâneur can instead be read as a narrative of capture, confinement and obligation.

This article analyses Pedro Costa’s 2006 film Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) vis-à-vis Portugal’s Special Rehousing Program, especially as it was carried out in and around the Amadora municipality outside central Lisbon in the 1990s and early 2000s. The film focuses on the experience of a Cape Verdean named Ventura as he moves from a squatted neighbourhood set for demolition to new governmentbuilt housing. I examine the ways and extent to which the inhabitants of both the old and new neighbourhoods, like Ventura, exercised and continue to make claims to power. Power, in this context, is related to speech – that is, the ability to tell one’s own story – as well as to freedom of movement and association – that is, the ability to choose where and how home is determined. I argue that the film subtly urges viewers to question racist motivations for rehousing plans while at the same time repeating to an extent the same sort of silencing of underprivileged residents (immigrants, blacks and/or the poor) carried out by government authorities, and thus both reflects and affects residents’ exercise of power.

This article offers an analysis of Autran Dourado’s short novel Uma vida em segredo (1964), and specifically of its protagonist, Biela. Inseparable from the ideological structures of her specific social location in the state of Minas Gerais at the turn of the twentieth century, Biela gradually becomes what Maria Lugones defines as ‘la callejera’, a female streetwalker of tactical, strategic and active subjectivity. Bielare rearticulates dichotomies of domination and subdual at multiple scales (body, house, city, region, nation) to reveal human experience as ‘grounded’ in specific time and place, and part and parcel of urban processes spanning from the Velha República at the turn of the twentieth century to the start of the dictatorship marking the novel’s publication in 1964.

This article discusses the crowdfunded Brazilian webdocumentary project Domínio Público (produced by the audio-visual collective Paêbirú Realizações Cultivadas), which portrays urban transformations in Rio de Janeiro in the run-up to the city’s hosting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, with a particular focus on the impact in the city’s favelas. It argues that Domínio Público can be understood as a snapshot of a key moment in the recent history of Rio de Janeiro and of Brazil, which intertwines Rio’s urban transformations with digital audio-visual culture, fundamental for the circulation and visibility of these processes in Brazil and abroad, as well as with national political processes and crises which would go on to take unforeseen directions and proportions after the film’s release. The article shows how circulation and visibility were embedded in the project from the outset, and became an intrinsic part of its critical narrative on urban transformations.

In dialogue with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ‘rhythmanalysis’ and Giuliana Bruno’s notion of ‘haptic cinema’, this article examines the ways that Brazilian director Lina Chamie’s 2007 film A via láctea explores imagined and material experiences of everyday life in the megalopolis of São Paulo. It suggests that a rhythmanalytic approach to the study of film spectatorship can offer new perspectives on multisensorial engagement with the cinematic city that move beyond the traditional focus on gaze in film studies. Via close ‘readings’ of the form and content of the film, the article explores how the cinematic apparatus (e.g. camera placement, editing, soundtrack) can create a haptic filmic space for viewers, where the multiple, contradictory temporal and spatial rhythms of urban environments can be felt and ‘touched’. The article contends that by placing the notions of rhythmanalysis and haptic cinema into a productive dialogue, we can explore new ways to link socialscience-based urban studies and humanities inflected film studies in critical engagement with both the imagined and material city.

By means of an auto-ethnography, I problematize the category of ‘noise’ in the context of Iztapalapa, a stigmatized borough of Mexico City. Informed by the interdisciplinary fields of sound studies, aural studies and urbanism, I propose a comparison of two sound maps: the ‘First Map of Noise for the Metropolitan Area of Mexico’s Valley’ and ‘Mexico’s Sound Map’. I argue that the creation of both maps is a symbolic instrument that assists processes of social classification. I historicize the concepts of ‘noise’ and ‘soundscape’ and analyse their uses in official discourses. Paying attention to the concept of ‘sonic heritage’, I discuss the role of official institutions in educating and managing forms of aurality. My investigation is informed by the concept ‘division of aural labour’ to explain asymmetries between people’s urban, aural experiences. I conclude that these two maps add to the social stigma that burdens certain areas historically marginalized by the model of urban segregation.

Córdoba, Spain is currently at the centre of a national, and increasingly international, dispute surrounding its most recognizable symbol: the Mosque-Cathedral. Built for Muslim worship beginning in the eighth century, and consecrated as a Catholic church in the thirteenth century, this temple is protected as a World Heritage Site (WHS) and is widely promoted as a symbol of religious coexistence. Contemporary conflicts, arising as Córdoba began promoting an economic development model based on cultural tourism, revolve around the appropriate restoration, ownership, and cultural meaning of the monument. The local chapter of Catholic Church, in an attempt to cement its claims of ownership, has increasingly minimized the building’s Muslim past and used the site for evangelization. Exploring contemporary conflicts surrounding this monument offers a paradigmatic case to examine the political economy and cultural politics of urban heritage and the importance of discourse in shaping political agendas around memory, identity and ownership.

This article reads Alex de la Iglesia’s La comunidad (2000) as an act of resistance to urban transformation in Madrid and its deleterious consequences. Crucial to the arguments advanced in these pages are the idea of community and the importance of place. The former is one of the five formative elements of urban consciousness in David Harvey’s project of explaining the urban process under capital. The film presents an extended, problematic, examination of how a grouping that should bind people together can be skewed by money and capital to do the opposite. These pages also underscore the filmmaker’s deep engagement with urban issues in a way that makes the places in which the members of the community interact help form the arguments in favor of resisting the abuses of the urban process that he weaves into its narrative structure.

Brazilian film Mate-Me Por Favor (Kill Me Please) centres on the lives of four rebellious teenage girls against the backdrop of a series of brutal murders in the wealthy suburb where they live. I argue that the neighbourhood of Barra da Tijuca in the west of Rio de Janeiro provides both the necessary socio-spatial conditions for the drama, as well as a rich symbolic canvas for exploring key themes like innocence, transgression and violence. Barra emerged in the 1970s as a ‘solution’ to Rio’s urban crisis, providing a large, unexploited space for the middle classes to insulate themselves from the growing disorder and violence of the inner city. Designed using rational modernist principles, it grew into a landscape of gated condominiums and shopping malls connected by car-strewn expressways. The area thus embodies a tension between innocence and desire that is shared by Mate-Me Por Favor’s four protagonists. In recent years, meanwhile, the hosting of the Olympic Games and other mega-events has brought a massive wave of speculative development to the area, producing new liminal spaces and intensified flows of people that have jeopardized residents’ sense of control. The film suggests that Barra’s alienated youth are determined to venture beyond the walls that were designed to protect them, thus exposing them to new, unknown threats.

This article presents a survey of some of the most recent theories in the fields of cinema and the city. A series of Latin American movies have been analysed from the perspective of urban space, with special attention to Edward Soja’s notion of ‘postmetropolis’. Contemporary filmmakers capture cities like Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City as spaces in transition, deeply fragmented and made from layers of previous cityscapes. Finally, I revisit the idea of cinema as a way of life, drawing from Louis Wirth’s essay ‘Urbanism as a way of life’, and of cinematisation of social life by Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy.

Barcelona has long been equated with the discourse of urban modernity. Considered a global city – and even a ‘top-model’ city – the capital of Catalunya invites interested students, scholars and critics to investigate and synthesize various strains of urban discourse. From the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, themes of city planning, parks and green space, architecture and design, health and medicine, science and electricity, class and migration, and spectacular tourism and gentrification have all been on display for travellers. Readers/viewers interested in cultural production can find no shortage of films and prose publications that engage the city’s spatial form. The collaborative ‘Digital Barcelona’ (2017) project brings these discourses together in an Omeka exhibit and allows viewers to interact with them spatially in a Neatline map. This short-form article explores the potential for social sciences and humanities approaches to combine in a site-focused, interdisciplinary approach to urban culture. At the same time, it also documents the potential of digital projects on cities to involve students and faculty in collaborative research.

This article discusses the cultural mediation, memorialization and representation of Ground Zero, New York. It considers the site not only in terms of its materiality, but also as a powerful thought concept and outlines how the space and its reception have been treated in other scholarly literature. It contextualizes this special section, which interrogates the ideologies and practices that shape the area, for not only do these craft dominant images of the space, they also challenge hegemonic representations of it. The article also points to strengths and weaknesses in extant work on Ground Zero and introduces the contributions to this special section, in order to situate them within a larger scholarly framework.

This article examines how the National September 11 Museum – and particularly its core Historical Exhibition – tells a specific narrative about 9/11 and also signals to viewers how to respond to that narrative. The museum’s design strategies are ‘read’ as an expression of one version of the September 11 narrative reflecting distinctive sensibilities and susceptibilities in post-9/11 American culture. Through a descriptive walk-through informed by the museum design team’s behind-thescenes commentary, the article explores how the museum achieves its effects and their wider implications. At every level, the museum is deeply rooted in contemporary national conversations about security. Far more than a tourist attraction, the museum is also a powerful spatial, physical reflection of the current shape of the September 11 narrative in America as well as post-9/11 America’s deepest anxieties and challenges.

This article analyses three comics series: writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Tony Harris’ Ex Machina (August 2004–August 2010); writer Brian Wood and artist Riccardo Burchielli’s DMZ (November 2005–February 2012); and writer Garth Ennis and artist Darick Robertson’s The Boys (October 2006–November 2012). Taking literary critic Laura Frost’s concept of ‘archifictions’ as its starting point, the article discusses how these series frame the September 11 attacks on New York and their aftermath, but its primary concern is with their engagement with the larger social ramifications of 9/11 and with the War on Terror, and with how this engagement is rooted in and centred on Ground Zero. It argues that this rooting allows these comics’ creators to critique post-9/11 US culture and foreign policy, but that it also, ultimately, serves to disarm the critique that each series voices in favour of closure through recourse to recuperative architecture.

The area surrounding New York’s World Trade Center was politicized immediately after the 9/11 attacks and named ‘Ground Zero’. This article discusses how orientalist tropes as well as narratives of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and ‘sacred space’ came to be embedded there. It uses two examples to examine how such spatialized politics have impacted Arab and Muslims New Yorkers: the Park51 community centre (popularized through media as ‘The Ground Zero Mosque’), and the lesserknown Little Syria district. It sheds light on Ground Zero’s significance for Arab and Muslim belonging in the United States – specifically, how Arab and Muslim claims to space around the World Trade Center subvert Islamophobic rhetoric that casts them as outsiders and enemies, and position them instead as fully American.

Buildings are metaphors for particular cultures and times. They are ‘frozen thought’. The World Trade Center complex in New York was a global hub of financial, insurance, and banking companies. The Twin Towers were the primary symbols of that hub. This article describes the changes in Lower Manhattan that occurred after 9/11, partly as a result of the attacks that September day, partly because the nature of communication and business transactions changed regardless of 9/11. The purpose of this area, as well as the narrative that expressed its global dominance, have both been altered. Physical aspects of financial power represented by large corporate offices and trading floors are no longer necessary. The financial firms in the World Trade Center diversified their offices, moving to Midtown (the ‘new Wall Street’) and to other states, at the same time that publishing and advertising companies, looking for cheaper rents, moved to Lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center buildings now have a different purpose, and a different narrative.