Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Current Issue

‘Yes in My Back Yard’ (‘YIMBY’) movements, which have garnered increased attention for advocating developer-friendly ‘solutions’ to crises of affordable urban housing in the United States and Canadian cities, are inventive interpreters of popular culture. This article adds urban cultural studies and affect-theoretical threads to recent Left critiques of YIMBYism, building on Robert W. Lake’s critique of ‘planners’ alchemy’ – the fantasy of converting always-already parochial ‘NIMBY’ opponents of development into enlightened ‘YIMBY’ supporters. Drawing on the work of queer-feminist affect theorist Lauren Berlant, who warned against ‘positivizing the ambivalence’ that necessarily accompanies contradictory forms of social change, it makes a case of Swedish novelist Fredrick Backman’s novel A Man Called Ove (2012) and its Swedish (2015) and US (2022) film adaptations. Although claimed as YIMBY texts, I argue these works also attend to oft-ignored spatial and affective displacements resulting from both welfare-capitalist initiatives like Sweden’s Million Homes Programme and contemporary neo-liberal urbanizations.

The representation of Mumbai in the Netflix adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s novel Sacred Games (2018–19) is structured around a binary between the magical urban and the criminal underworld, positioning the city simultaneously as a site of aspiration and of decay. In the 2018–19 Netflix adaptation of the novel, safety is not the absence of violence but a narrative mechanism that sustains the coherence of a caste-Hindu middle-class imaginary of Mumbai. This imaginary operates within a framework I term chronotoponormativity – where time and space coalesce to structure the visibility and mobility of marginalized bodies, particularly those that challenge the normative social order. This article explores how the character of Cuckoo, a transgender bar dancer, is framed through the logic of cinematic safety, in which her labour and mobility are carefully curated to uphold dominant spatial governance. Drawing on scholarship on urban underworlds, the criminalization of bar dancers and the gendered architecture of safety in neo-liberal Mumbai, the article situates Cuckoo’s visibility and eventual erasure within broader patterns of how trans and working-class bodies are made hypervisible as spectacles but systematically excluded from state protection. This article argues that these dynamics are not incidental but central to how Mumbai’s urban future is imagined – one in which normative femininity, caste privilege and middle-class respectability define who is safe and who must be contained or sacrificed.

This article examines United States of Banana by Giannina Braschi through the theoretical lens of spatial production and ideological displacement. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s triad of perceived, conceived and lived space, alongside Marc Augé’s concept of non-place and Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, the article argues that Braschi’s novel deconstructs imperial spatiality through a linguistic and theatrical narrative artefact that operates as a dispositif. By analysing figures such as Segismundo, Hamlet and Nietzsche, the study reveals how Braschi transforms the national imaginary into a post-spatial, post-narrative terrain marked by polyphony, parody and collapse. The result is a radical critique of both colonial and democratic fictions.

I offer a reading of two photographs of Agrasen ki Baoli, a fourteenth-century stepwell in Delhi, India. First, a photograph by the acclaimed Raghu Rai published in a book titled Delhi: A Portrait (1983) and second, an uncredited photograph on the Delhi Tourism Website (n.d.). Both commissioned and circulated by (iterations of) the Delhi Tourism and Transportation Development Corporation (DTTDC). I contend that these photographs yield rich insights into the DTTDC’s work towards producing Tourist Delhi and towards generating tourist desire for this city. I suggest that the DTTDC’s aim with these photographs is to train the tourist’s gaze on Delhi in a way that produces a specific kind of desire for a specific version of the city.

This article reconsiders the riot scene central to Don DeLillo’s novella Cosmopolis by foregrounding the material infrastructure through which the protest unfolds. Rather than reading the riot as metaphor or as a critique of cybercapitalism, the argument draws from Nicole Starosielski’s work on undersea cables and Swati Chattopadhyay’s theorization of street space to frame the scene in terms of spatial and architectural disruption. By attending to how infrastructure is inhabited, repurposed and made visible, Cosmopolis offers a space to think more deeply about narratives around material infrastructure. This critical approach, which blends literary close reading with architectural analysis, offers up new analytic vocabularies for understanding the connection between narratives and the built material reality of infrastructure.

This short-form article interrogates how productions of cinematic and public space in the Southern United States can both perpetuate and resist long-embedded, often exploitative frameworks depicting racial trauma prevalent in popular media portrayals of the region. Citing their personal experiences in film production, the author engages with critical geography, historiography and spatial theory to contrast how mainstream cinematic productions have reproduced past events at historical sites of racial violence with recent media and sculpture-based installations at The Legacy Sites in Montgomery, Alabama. Engaging with the scholarship of Trouillot, Hall, Gordon, McKittrick and McPherson, this article situates identity and place as ongoing processes being presently negotiated through spatial production practices in which innovative modes of historical production and remembrance unsettle long-standing hegemonic narratives.

Whereas the contours of the kitchen are location–time–culture specific, the kitchen stands as a universal signifier. However, the kitchen manifests diversely across geographies, and its programmatic aesthetics, logics and representation can be read heterogeneously. Dividing the short-article into two parts, namely, the kitchen in the camera and the camera in the kitchen, the article will try to read the leitmotifs of food, filth and fornication in Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Jeo Baby’s 2021 film The Great Indian Kitchen, that both thematically and formalistically converse with each other. The techniques of camera movement and stasis not only trace the architectural implications of the kitchens but also teach, by way of comparison, the ethical innovations of ‘capturing’ and archiving the gendered subject in the space of the kitchen.