Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Current Issue

This article examines the representation of walking and the narrativization of borders in Troubles-era Belfast in Anna Burns’s 2018 novel Milkman. I argue that the protagonist, Middle Sister, develops her own narrative form and walking method as ‘tactics’ to challenge the city’s imposed sectarian geographies and as a response to navigating a city of intense surveillance. In her narrativization, Middle Sister replaces place references with her own complex naming system and lexicon and negotiates urban space by ‘reading-while-walking’. As a result, Middle Sister attempts to dislocate the political nature of the conflict by mediating Belfast on her own terms and asserting her own spatial practices. However, as I demonstrate in the final section in conversation with trauma theory, there are limitations to Middle Sister’s walking practice, which is disrupted by the urban hauntings of her troubled city, triggering particular psychosomatic responses and traumatic memories.

The urban scenery that dominated Cairo since the nineteenth century was a spatial superimposition of tradition and modernity, represented in the social and architectural composition of the city. The cinematic medium in Egypt attempted to visualize such overlap through a vivid depiction of spatial transformations occurring within the micro and macro urban levels revealing hidden aspects of social order and organizational behaviour. This article sheds light on Egyptian filmmaker Hassan Al-Imam’s Cairo Trilogy films, based on the critically acclaimed novels by Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz, where the story takes place in the heart of early twentieth-century Cairo spanning from 1917 to 1944. The films’ physical features illustrate the morphology of time and urban space constituting to the socio-spatial narratives of the local setting, a theoretical framework adopted by the authors named cine-spatial representation. Through the examination of such connection within the settings across the three films, the article reveals the influence of non-physical elements on the physicality of architectural and urban space, creating a visual narrative from social collectivism to individualist fragmentation.

Some of the world’s most ambitious urban development projects today are first expressed as hyper-realistic, computer-generated images (CGIs). These fictional worlds increasingly shape megalomaniac visions and collective imaginaries about the future of cities. Digital media about speculative urban environments are often produced remotely by design professionals and subsequently employed to secure investment and finance. Disguising marketing media as planning documents deeply challenges the traditional role and responsibilities of the urban planning practice. In a spectacular and experiential proposition, Qiddiya’s master plan animation celebrates consumption and techno-utopianism, concealing forms of post(colonial) invisible labour and oppressive digital infrastructures. A careful analysis of ‘Qiddiya’s Journey’ illustrates how CGI-generated media doubles as a development strategy and propaganda, ignoring critical implications of building a theme park city in the middle of a desert. Beyond the neo-liberal agenda of tourism and entertainment, Qiddiya’s vision reveals ethical lapses in the use of CGIs for urban planning purposes. Moreover, it exemplifies how seductive aesthetics can enable an authoritarian regime to advance contentious development programmes that discretely launder its image clean of social and environmental controversies.

In her graphic memoir, A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return, Zeina Abirached depicts the city of Beirut during its protracted civil war, relying on her own recollections and those of family and neighbours to reconstruct an urban environment that was radically altered by conflict. This article examines the book’s depiction of Beirut as an embodied space of experience, a city that is full of life not only because of how its inhabitants adjust to the spatial disruptions of the war, but also because it lives in memory. Through both images and text, Abirached’s memoir suggests that while the body of the city reflects the trauma felt by its inhabitants during conflict, it also fosters a sense of identity, illustrating that figuratively reconstructed places can serve to memorialize both individual and collective responses to trauma and its aftermath.