City Visions

David Bell, Azzedine Haddour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317881568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A collection of the latest work on the city, presenting contemporary theories, methods and perspectives in an accessible format for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates in geography, cultural studies and sociology.

Chapter 1

---

What we talk about when we talk about the city

David Bell and Azzedine Haddour

Talking about cities has become, at the end of the millennium, a way of talking about lots of different things. ‘The city’ has come to be a symbol – maybe even a symptom – of almost every social and cultural process. Cities are certainly concentrations of those processes: the city is often read as the medium through which modernity (and then postmodernity) gets expressed, worked through, concretized. Yet, as this collection shows, there are in fact an incredible multiplicity of cities, and ways of talking about them. In addition, there are even more multiple and heterogeneous ways of experiencing cities, of living with cities (and in cities). It is not possible (nor desirable) to construct one prescribed way to approach the city – say, exclusively through urban semiotics or urban ethnography – because of this heterogeneity. Instead, what the essays in City Visions collectively attempt to present is a series of glimpses, sometimes of particular cities, sometimes of particular ways of thinking about cities. Each has its own approach, its own agenda, its own emphases, but all are bound by a desire to think and talk about cities and the things that go on in them. Taken together, with their polymorphous approaches, the essays in this collection intervene in the current discourses of city cultures and urban life, investigating ways of working with cities and city visions. This intervention is political, in the sense that it seeks to ask questions about what cities are and how they work (and don’t work) for their citizens, as well as suggesting ways in which cities might be reshaped so that they work better. At the same time, the contributors ask that we challenge the ways that we think about cities, activating new approaches and agendas.

In this introduction, we want to suggest some connections that work between and across the essays; to trace some ways of talking and thinking about cities. Then, in the chapter that follows, the focus turns to a reading of the city from which the collection emerges: Stoke-on-Trent (otherwise known as The Potteries) in the English Midlands. There are a number of motives for placing Mark Jayne’s chapter here. First, much of the work on cities to date has concerned itself either with ‘The City’ in an abstract sense, or with the mightiest of megalopolises, or world cities: London, Los Angeles, New York and so on. So-called ‘second tier’ (or third tier) cities get less of a look-in. Secondly, because the collection has been pulled together from within that city – and has its origins in a conference held here – it would seem some kind of civic disservice not to look at Stoke-on-Trent itself; cities like Stoke embody the processes of urban social and cultural transformation in distinct ways, which are revealing of the mesh of city policies and politics as they interact with everyday urban life. Thirdly, the city is currently attempting to consciously respond to the challenges of the new urban order, most notably via the development of a Cultural Quarter – and so, in sharing the tales of this city, we hope to be able to throw some suggestive light on a number of theoretical and empirical agendas for examining how cities are talked about by some of the key actors involved in reshaping and restructuring initiatives. How, in short, are city visions conjured and promoted in the context of a city like Stoke-on-Trent? To answer this question at least in part, Jayne describes the processes and outcomes of the city’s drive to re-imagine itself on a postindustrial stage, setting this story in the general context of urban restructuring imperatives in the UK as well as the particular context of the Potteries conurbation. Before that, however, we propose to map the collection out. Of course, this introduces a second-order act of reading and representation: we offer our own takes on each author’s take on the city. It is up to the reader to also make her or his own map.

Reading City Visions

The essays that follow in this collection take us away from Stoke, across the globe, and give us many different ways of envisioning the city. In some cases, the writers take someone else’s vision – an author, a film-maker, a choreographer – and re-read it through their own eyes. From Hutnyk’s coin tricks in Calcutta, talked about via City of Joy and with a little help from Marx, to Maley’s tales of Glasgow and Edinburgh as seen in James Kelman and Irvine Welsh’s fictions, or Haddour on Camus; and from Oswell on English suburbia according to Hanif Kureishi to Briginshaw’s danced cityspaces or Stanley’s melding of Antigone and Rachel Whiteread, we can see that one way of talking about cities is to find them in the creative imagination, and then attempt to interpret the act of representation. This has, of course, been a dominant approach to the city – to find it in film or in fiction and to ‘read’ it (see, for example, Clarke, 1997; Jarvis, 1998).

For John Hutnyk, then, the symbolic resonances of gift-giving by Western visitors in Third World cities settle on the coin as a condensed signifier of colonial–capitalist appropriation (or, as he puts it, as ‘the icon of contemporary politics’), tying gift, exchange, market and city together into the logic of ‘development’ that is ushered in behind colonialism. Through a focus on Calcutta, both via experience and representation (City of Joy), Hutnyk begins to unpack and unpick the narratives which refract only certain versions of and responses to the Third World city. The responses articulated in City of Joy (as a story and as a project) centre on the ‘compassionate’ West’s interventions: charity, development … But, as Hutnyk concludes, ‘[t]here is an alternative to the extension of the market to all corners of the planet, and it is not a universal gift service. Charity contributes nothing but the maintenance of the trick. Travellers who don’t go further than the doorstep of their hotel miss the point.’ So, in the end, his essay asks that we rethink our relations to cities like Calcutta; that we question the ways we are scripted into dealing with them; and that we work to find a way to unpack the politics of the coin-trick which, he argues, still structures those scripts and relations.

The spatial logics of the colonial city are at the heart of Azzedine Haddour’s chapter, too. Beginning with a reading of Camus’ La Peste, he maps out the exclusionary logic which expels the colonized body through the rhetoric of plague, setting this against the metaphorical figuring of the foreigner, the nomad or the flâneur in recent theorizations of subject positioning – a series of overlapping tropes that have risen to prominence in discussions of the post-colonial subject and the post-colonial city. As Haddour argues, in his critique of Stuart Hall’s work on subjects-in-process and Iain Chambers’ discussion of migrancy, much post-colonial theory works by side-stepping questions of history, specificity, location. The fetishization of ‘cultural difference’ – something we also see in the work of Iris Marion Young – and the stress on decentred identities (migrants/nomads) symptomatic of the postmodern subject, he writes, produces a paradoxical discourse of decentred sameness. The ‘right to difference’ mobilized in recent discussions of cultural citizenship (see Pakulski, 1997) is here erased under a sign of difference which lacks historicity: instead of the celebrated figure of the ever-moving nomad (a figure who encapsulates a kind of cosmopolitanism driven by a desire to experience difference – but only certain forms of difference – a bit like the tourist invoked by Hutnyk; see also Curtis and Pajaczkowska, 1994), the colonized subject is pushed into a position of homelessness, of exclusion, of pollutant. So, we can see here an overlapping concern in Hutnyk and Haddour with troubling the dominant narratives of (post-)colonial cities and citizens, and with making a political intervention that offers different narratives, rooted in historical mappings of the spaces of capitalism and colonialism.

In many ways, Willy Maley’s essay on the city in James Kelman (Glasgow) and Irvine Welsh (Edinburgh) has parallels to the arguments made by Hutnyk and Haddour. Both novelists can be seen, Maley writes, as revealing a hidden side of their cities, a kind of underbelly largely excluded from dominant representations: as Maley puts it, ‘[w]e see parts of each city through the fiction of Welsh and Kelman that are more likely to crop up in court reports than tourist brochures’ (though, of course, the notoriety of Welsh’s Trainspotting has created a particular representation of Edinburgh that spills over into popular culture, giving it its own peculiar dominance). Both focus on displaced figures and marginal spaces that counter the boosterist images put out by the cities (Edinburgh with its Festival, Glasgow as City of Culture), yet in their championing they both run the risk of overburdening the people and places their characters stand in for with some kind of tag of authenticity. Nevertheless, their characters can serve as leitmotifs of urban transformations spotted elsewhere in City Visions: the busconductor Rab Hines, for example, is on the brink of displacement due to restructuring in the city’s transport network. He must become occupationally (and therefore socially) mobile to survive, like so many caught in the tides of global change – which always has specific local impacts like those felt by Hines.

Of course, cities are more than just maps of social class; they are complex and shifting articulations of social mobility, and – as Haddour so potently illustrates – of social exclusion. The Edinburgh housing projects which Irvine Welsh describes are a particular kind of cityspace; a relic of earlier attempts at reordering which have also resulted in displacement and homelessness. The comparison made by Roy Strang, in Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmares, between Muirhouse and Johannesburg, transposes the spatial logic of apartheid equally vividly, showing how the city is riven by structures of insider/outsider, sameness/difference – structures of inequality. As Chris Stanley writes in his essay, the inner city is so often paradoxically the ‘outside’ city, the place of the dispossessed – which makes the inner city for him the key site for ‘an intervention on the relationship between justice and community practised through the performance of rupturing ethical transgressions’.

In sharp contrast (at least in some ways) to the Muirhouse projects (or to the inner city more broadly) comes the cityspace of suburbia. In its British (or, perhaps more accurately, English) context, suburbia is itself a condensation of similar structures played out in domestic space. Within popular culture, the suburbs are figured in particular ways; the most common motif, seen especially prevalently in sitcoms, has the suburbs as middle-class, white, familial space. It is also Southern – usually Home Counties: the cocktail belt. David Oswell takes us through this construction of the English suburbs in his essay on Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.

Part of this construction is a sexualization, with suburbia mythologized as the site of illicit pleasures (wife-swapping, sex parties) always hidden behind net curtains, of sin clothed in respectability and mundanity (Hunt, 1998); the suburban always has a saucy or sleazy underbelly, but one which is particularly English, all morals and manners and restraint (exemplified, perhaps, in Brief Encounter; see Oswell, 1998). And, as Oswell plots out, ‘popular’ reactions to the television adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia only confirmed the extent to which such a sexualization remains in denial – almost, it seems, because it is ‘un-English’. As such, the novel – and perhaps more importantly the serial (since it was on BBC2) – works at undermining the equation of suburbia with straight white masculinity, producing what Oswell names ‘suburban hybridity’. Unfixing spaces, complexifying associations between places and identities – these are the tasks which a work of fiction like Kureishi’s attempts; to queer suburbia, perhaps.

Other kinds of representation give us access into other ways of talking about the city. This is particularly apparent in Chris Stanley’s use of Rachel Whiteread’s installation House to intervene on the questions of justice and community in urban space (for further readings of and writings on House, see Lingwood, 1995). More precisely, Stanley’s essay works for a ‘community of difference’ togethered ‘in-through a justice of otherness’, and it attempts this by bringing Antigone to Tower Hamlets, the site of House. So, while the motif of togetherness-in-difference resonates with other essays in the collection, the particular strategy Stanley adopts in articulating this works in a very specific context. House stands (or, rather, stood prior to its demolition) as a monument – or an anti-monument, a ghost, a ruin. Read psychoanalytically, House rendered the heimlich into the unheimlich: House is not a home. As Doreen Massey (1995: 41) writes of Whiteread’s piece, it subverts what could otherwise be ‘an all-too-comfortable nostalgia of home and locality’, making it the obverse of that currently dominant mode of ‘preserving’ the urban past, heritage. Instead of filling the house with ‘authentic’ Victorian artefacts and period-costumed mannequins, Whiteread filled it with concrete. And, in so doing, she threw it open to multiple acts of interpretation, rather than casting its meaning in the way heritage sites do. By ushering in Antigone, Stanley re-sites House as a place of mourning in the outside-city that is the inner city.

Valerie Briginshaw brings the dancing body into the city for her essay, offering readings of three dance videos in which the performers enact an embodied relationship to urban space. There are clear links to be made here to both Nigel Thrift’s chapter, which draws on the dancing body in a broader context, and to Tim Edensor’s, which uses dance metaphorically (in the sense of ‘place ballets’ and the like) to consider modes of movement in cities. With, as Thrift writes, dance as an instance of ‘expressive embodiment’ (which means that ‘the body is not just inscribed, it is itself a source of inscription’), there are clear opportunities here for dancers and choreographers to rewrite body/city relationships. The three dance videos utilize different kinds of city space: a flat in Step in Time Girls, empty postmodern office buildings in Duets with Automobiles, and an alleyway in Muurwerk – domestic space, corporate space, (marginal) public space.

Briginshaw’s reading of Muurwerk chimes remarkably, in fact, with work inspired by Michel de Certeau’s famed discussions of ‘pedestrian tactics’ in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). In both Edensor’s and Toon’s essays, such everyday tactics of what we might label either resistance or transgression are practices of embodied subjects in space. Just as Roxanne Huilmand reworks the alleyway, ‘taking possession of the space, [and] reclaiming it for herself’, so the young people on the streets of Tamworth negotiate and reinscribe space (space which is, as Briginshaw reminds us, always invested with power – in the case of Tamworth, power literalized through CCTV). Additionally, we might make a constructive reading of Step in Time Girls alongside Stanley’s discussion of House, since both deal with domestic space; both, too, are about, in some ways at least, reclamation (or at least perhaps reinvestment). The women’s dancing bodies fill the space of the flat, showing that it is lived space – space crisscrossed with power, again. But here bodies memorialize the lives that turn a house into a home.

Duets with Automobiles sets its dancers in the heart of corporate urban space – in office buildings which resonate with capital’s power and with the role of the city as a node in networks of that power. Here the motif of appropriation (or reclamation) has an echo of what Hutnyk talks about, in terms of troubling the histories of colonial capital exploitation which corporate power still bears many traces of. As such, Briginshaw concludes, this piece is perhaps the most provocative as an intervention into the meanings given to spaces by buildings. Office accommodation is space ordered in accordance with a tight script; it is the space of business, of money, of power. Yet even here, resignification is possible.

Tim Edensor’s walking tour finds the moving body in the city, too – a body sometimes cajoled by the ordering flows of urban planning, at other times moving against the prescribed tide. Edensor draws on the notion of performance to frame his discussion of embodied action in space, describing neatly the tension between control and freedom in the term ‘regulated improvisation’ in his discussion of Western city streets. The ordering of urban space, he argues, is in part an attempt at ‘normative choreography’. As we saw with Briginshaw, spaces are scripted to permit (even encourage) certain kinds of performance while limiting (even prohibiting) others. That is why dancers look out-of-place in an office block, and why their movements can produce a critical reinscription that attempts to break away from regulation and regularity. In the context of the politics of so-called ‘new social movements’, such temporary reinscriptions become powerful strategies that bring into relief the lines of power that might otherwise be overlooked since they are so routinized and naturalized (actions like Reclaim the Streets, for instance). In fact, as Edensor shows, there are numerous and ever-shifting reinscriptions enacted by a host of urban dwellers – skateboarders, break-dancers, roadrunners – and there is a kind of politics at work in their actions, too. In the second half of his essay, Edensor focuses on movement through an Indian bazaar, in Agra. His walking tour here finds a very distinct, very mixed space where the logics of ordering and regulation operate very differently – a reminder that we must remember the particularities of place when talking about the city.

Similarly, Ian Toon shows how the surveillance technologies of contemporary cities are transgressed and reappropriated by street-savvy citizens – groups of young people. Teenagers’ use of public space has for a long time been the focus of practices of ordering and regulation in Western cities, with young people being perceived as a ‘problem’ in need of solution. Toon’s interviews with and observations of groups of young people on the streets of Tamworth (a town 15 miles from Birmingham, in the West Midlands) reveal a complex set of negotiations and performances, through which they attempt to carve out a space for themselves, a space in which social identity-work occurs. Their ability to ‘deal with’ new surveillance and security technologies – which are widely seen as straightforwardly, panoptically privatizing public space – shows us that the imperatives to ordering which Edensor outlines always have their limits: here we see an active, embodied engagement with close-circuit television which forms a transgressive or resistive tactic. In Thrift’s essay, which closes City Visions, the ‘city of play’ marks a similarly embodied relation to urban logics. Like ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Chapter 1. What we talk about when we talk about the city
• Chapter 2. Imag(in)ing a post-industrial Potteries
• Chapter 3. Capital Calcutta: coins, maps, monuments, souvenirs and tourism
• Chapter 4. Citing difference: vagrancy, nomadism and the site of the colonial and post-colonial
• Chapter 5. Denizens, citizens, tourists, and others: marginality and mobility in the writings of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh
• Chapter 6. Suburban tales: television, masculinity and textual geographies
• Chapter 7. Ethical transgressions beyond the city wall
• Chapter 8. Dancing bodies in city settings: construction of spaces and subjects
• Chapter 9. Moving through the city
• Chapter 10. ‘Finding a place in the street’: CCTV surveillance and young people’s use of urban public space
• Chapter 11. Cosmopolitanism and the sexed city
• Chapter 12. The new segregation
• Chapter 13. A critique of integration as the remedy for segregation
• Chapter 14. Otherness and citizenship: towards a politics of the plural community
• Chapter 15. ‘Not a straight line but a curve’, or, Cities are not mirrors of modernity
• Index