Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2017

Since the early 1900s the city of Geelong has been synonymous with Australian manufacturing. However, the protracted demise of heavy manufacturing, including the city’s renowned automotive industry after the year 2000, highlights the challenges that post-industrial modernity, characterized by economic rationalism, cultural homogenization and globalization, has posed to the city. The year 2014 marked a turning point in the city’s history with major car maker Ford announcing the closure of its Geelong plant in 2017. Yet paradoxically, the city’s mall-and-sprawl pattern of development marches on as though cars will continue to roll off the production line. A few months after Ford’s announcement, a promotional video of Geelong was released depicting the city as a zombie-ridden dystopia, salvaged by magical powers summoned forth by the city’s Mayor. The video’s portrayal of residents as the ‘living dead’ drew sharp criticism and raised questions about what this imagery was really saying about the city and its people. Over the second half of the twentieth century, zombies have become symbols of mindless consumption, alienation and fear. So while Geelong is a city seeking reinvigoration and renewal, the Geelong Reinvented video presents the obverse of its promise. This article explores the identity of the real zombies of Geelong and how they might be brought to heel in order to spearhead a true rejuvenation of the city.

Through a comparative discussion of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (serialized 1989−96, collected 1999), which is now widely marketed as a ‘graphic novel’, and Laura Oldfield Ford’s more self-consciously subcultural zine, Savage Messiah (serialized 2005 to 2009, collected 2011), this article explores the correlation between the gentrification of the comics form and the urban gentrification of city space − especially that of East London, which is depicted in both of these sequential art forms. The article emphasizes that both these urban and cultural landscapes are being dramatically reshaped by the commodification and subsequent marketization of their subcultural or marginalized spaces, before exploring the extent to which this process neutralizes their subversive qualities and limits democratic access to them. In conclusion, however, the article demonstrates that comics artists tend to collect their ephemeral comics and publish them as marketable graphic novels not to commodify them, nor to maximize their profits. Rather, they do so in order to reach a wider readership and thereby to mobilize their subversive, anti-gentrification political content more effectively, constituting radical urban subcultures that resist the reshaping of London into a segregated and discriminatory cityscape.

The article assesses the role of (hyper-)mediatized placemaking on the city of Malmö, Sweden, contextualizing the creation of an imaginary ‘southern Scandinavian city’ on top of a real urban zone with exceptional attributes and serious challenges. Paying close attention to Malmö’s image within and beyond Nordic Europe, I draw on three sets of artefacts to interrogate this phenomenon: (1) the visual and narrative content of the Swedish Danish television series The Bridge (2011–present), (2) tourism development strategies and tactics employed by the city of Malmö and (3) museological interpretations of the interplay between the conceived, lived and perceived spaces and places of Malmö. In doing so, this article seeks to advance and deepen of the discussion of screen tourism in influencing geographical imagination and place branding.

This article examines the touristic consumption of Paris in cinema, through a concept of the cinematic postcard as a commodification of history and place, arguing that film participates in and also illuminates touristic relations to the city. The article proposes two iterations of the cinematic postcard: a ‘glossy’ postcard that incorporates past and present into a cohesively framed urban space, and ‘virtual collectibles’ that encourage the serial accumulation of familiar signs of place. While connected through a nostalgic relation to the urban past, these iterations reflect different anxieties about the city and are emphasized in different aesthetic strategies, which the article pursues through close analysis of two films: Vincent Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951) and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). In the troubled Paris of the early post-war years, the tourist gaze of cinema provided a cohesive image constructed from a selective, cultural past, anticipating a postmodern aesthetic of nostalgia as identified by Fredric Jameson. In the age of what Boris Groys calls ‘total tourism’ and its proliferation of the collection and online display of images of place, the emphasis has shifted from transmission to the virtual collection of desirable, analogue images of Paris.

This article critically deconstructs the notion of the ‘New South’ using the case of Charlotte, North Carolina, a prototypical ‘New South’ city. Using the framework of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, specifically the themes of ‘mobility’, ‘access’ and ‘oeuvre’ (the art of city-making) – the following will argue that the ‘New South’ is a neo-liberal repackaging of entrenched race, class and geo-spatial segregation. The business-friendly repositioning of this former textile city, combined with a sprawling urban form with decentralized employment opportunities, along with disinvestment and re-segregation in public education – have all contributed towards the scattering and division of a coherent working class. Therefore, lack of access, lack of participation and exclusion from centrality mean that marginalized groups (including the LGBTQ, African American and white working-class and poor communities) face difficulty realizing Lefebvre’s conditions of ‘New Athens’, the ‘impossible’ utopian city.

The history of skateboarding’s development is closely connected to water and fluidity, with the birth of modern ramp practice commonly attributed to Californian surfers, who used the undulating asphalt and concrete of the urban LA landscape as a replacement for sea waves when the surf was flat. This fluidity and adaptability is echoed in scholarly and populist discourse, which tends to discuss skateboarders’ abilities to be resourceful and playful within environments available to them, to adopt simulation alongside innovative DIY approaches when building their own environments and to form supportive networks across cultural boundaries. There has also been much growth in recent years of skateboarding development projects, particularly in areas of conflict and political unrest. This article focuses on my experiences with the SkatePal charity – which has been building skateparks and teaching children to skateboard in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2013.

Since the 2008 world economic crisis, new and different ways of community organization, resilience and urban initiatives for provisioning and survival have emerged all over the world in an attempt to create urban spaces and opportunities in areas where institutions and governments are unable or unwilling to devote time and resources. Also, economic and sustainable models have found physical spaces from which to operate in the aftermath of the crisis and outside the ontological frame of extreme neo-liberalism. This article discusses the approximations to these initiatives in three texts addressing urban contexts in the United States (Detroit), Spain (Seville, Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid) and Mexico (Mexico City). These three works call attention to the specificity of these projects and expose recent approaches to community building and organizational solutions in the Hispanic world.

This review looks at three publications that discuss the timeless issue of the relationship between power and space in capital cities located in a broad temporal and geographic framework. By applying Adam T. Smith’s model of interrelation among politics, landscape and civic values, the editors and authors of Political Landscapes of Capital Cities (2016) examine several major cities located in the area between South America and Southeast Asia during the period spanning from the fourteenth century bc to the present day. They elucidate the ways in which power and political authority are constructed and manifested in conjunction with the natural landscape and human-made environment. The edited volume Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe (2010), which covers the turbulent period between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, deals with the capitals that emerged after the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The book reveals the ways in which the architecture and urban planning of capital cities were used to represent the national identity of the newly formed states. The author of the book The Capital of Europe: Architecture and Urban Planning for the European Union (2004) discusses the capital of one state, the European Union, arguing that common values and identity can be constructed by relying on a clear architectural strategy. Together, these three books highlight the importance and necessity of analysing the multiple landscapes of capital cities from diverse angles.