Urban Narratives

“Whose City?” / “Kaupunki- kenen ehdoilla?”

Posted on 8.9.2016 by Lieven Ameel

I’ll participate on Friday 9.9. in the panel discussion “Kaupunki – kenen ehdoilla” / “The City – on whose terms?”, organized by the Finnish weekly “Image”, and as part of the Helsinki design week. I’ll be joined by deputy mayor Anni Sinnemäki, Pauliina Seppälä and moderator Niklas Thesslund.

The discussion will take place at the iconic “Three smiths” statue, quite fittingly within a temporarily constructed futuristic dome, starting from 17.30.

http://www.image.fi/image-lehti/image-esittaa-kaupunki-kenen-ehdoilla-keskustelutilaisuus-perjantaina-99-tule-mukaan

kenen ehdoilla

Pressing issues oa: what kind of city do we want for Helsinki, and on whose terms? All relating to my current research on narrative planning.

A Bildungsroman for a Waterfront Development

Posted on 6.9.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Out now! My article “A Bildungsroman for a Waterfront Development. Literary genre and the planning narratives of Jätkäsaari, Helsinki”, published in the latest Journal of Urban Cultural Studies. It’s an integral part of my current research in urban planning narratives of Helsinki’s waterfront.
Abstract
This article examines the narratives involved in the planning of Jätkäsaari (Helsinki), an industrial harbour environment currently being redeveloped. It starts out with an analysis of Hyvä jätkä/Good Chap (Hannu Mäkelä, 2009), a literary novel commissioned by the city to promote the area, arguing that this cultural product should not be seen merely as a piece of cultural branding. Rather, the novel’s fictional construction of the area’s past and future draws attention to the narrative characteristics of planning itself. Using the concepts of literary genre and metaphor, an examination of Jätkäsaari’s planning narratives shows the ambivalent and often contradictory planning visions of the area. This study aims at re-examining the considerable research tradition in urban and planning studies that sees urban planning as a form of storytelling, by applying concepts from literary and narrative theory to the analysis of planning narratives.

Keywords
narrative planning,Bildungsroman,Helsinki,waterfront development,urban regeneration,literature

#Bookhour discussion on “Odds Against Tomorrow”

Posted on 29.8.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Participating August 30 in the US Studies Online twitter discussion #Bookhour. The book this time at #Bookhour is Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich, and the chat session is organised by Christina Brennan. Odds Against Tomorrow is a book I’m examining in my current research on the narration of waterfronts in crisis in US and Nordic fiction.

From the #Bookhour site:

“Dr Arin Keeble, Dr Sebastian Groes and Dr Lieven Ameel will join #bookhour organiser Christina Brennan to discuss the title.

About the book

New York City: The Near Future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of a cavernous office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business in booming.

As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe – ecological collapse, global war, natural disasters – he becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears. Yet he also loses touch with his last connection to reality: Elsa Bruner, a friend with her own apocalyptic secret, who has started a commune in Maine. Then, just as Mitchell’s predictions reach a nightmarish crescendo, an actual worst-case scenario overtakes Manhattan. Mitchell realises he is uniquely prepared to profit. But at what cost?

Discussion Questions

1. Odds Against Tomorrow tells the story of an acute catastrophe. Can literature deal with the challenges of slow catastrophe, especially those related to ecological crisis?

2. What does the Psycho Canoe evoke or symbolise in Odds Against Tomorrow?

3. Which real world disasters does Hurricane Tammy in the novel most strongly evoke?

4. Why does Elsa end up as a New York lawyer?

5. How are agency and responsibility for the future framed in Odds Against Tomorrow, and what can it tell us about literature in times of crisis?”

Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature – now available as open access publication

Posted on 24.8.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Happy to announce that my book Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) is being re-published as a handsome open-access publication, available here.

It is still the only scholarly monograph that examines experiences of Helsinki in Finnish-written literature.

Ameel, Lieven 2014: Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature. Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940. Helsinki: SKS. 241 pages.

http://oa.finlit.fi/site/books/detail/5/helsinki-in-early-twentieth-century-literature/

Reviews of Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014):

“… it is a great merit of Ameel’s study that it shows how Finnish prose is a part of the modern Nordic and European literature of the metropolis, without omitting its characteristic traits. The reader gets a broad insight into a multi-layered and intriguing thematic. Ameel’s book will surely be a starting point for much new research.” (Judith Meurer-Bongardt in Finsk Tidskrift 2015/3-4)

“Ameel combines methods from different research traditions and builds a complex picture of Helsinki’s literature in the early 20th century. He draws, amongst others, on urban studies, urban literary studies and genre studies. This multidisciplinary approach could also be used to examine other literary cities, and Ameel’s work inspires to investigate how, for example, Tampere, Oulu and Kuopio are rendered in literature, or how descriptions of Helsinki in the late twentieth and twenty-first century differ from earlier ones. One of the merits of the study is its stylistic and linguistic clarity and subtlety, which is why this study will hopefully find readers also from outside literary research. “(Hanna Samola in Avain 2015/2)

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Urban History and the Materiality of Literary Narratives at the EAUH 2016 – Reinterpreting Cities

Posted on 24.8.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Today sees the start of the EAUH 2016 conference Reinterpreting Cities in Helsinki, Finland. A staggering range of keynotes, sessions and papers in the field of urban history. Very much looking forward to our own session on urban history and the materiality of literary narratives. Abstract below.

M26. Urban History and the Materiality of Literary Narratives

Literary and cultural representations of cities are much more than the secondary or tertiary responses they are sometimes made to be in urban historiography. Cities in literature (and other media) are not to be understood only in terms of traditions cut off from the actual sites and experiences they appear to describe – although questions of genre, period and literary ethos will always have to be acknowledged. This session wants to examine the materiality of literary representations of the city. To what extent do they reflect on, and (re-) produce the material, as well as the social realities in actual cities in a European and global context? Possible examples of case studies addressing these questions range from reappraisals of slum writing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities to the interaction between utopian city narratives in literature and urban planning, and the literary roots of current rhetoric of public housing, urban redevelopment, and place making.

In addition to the idea of city as performance, notions such as depth, individuality and materiality could be proposed as new ways of understanding the role of literary texts in the writing of urban histories. Within an environment characterized by mobility and ever-shifting, constructed and imagined class relations, literary texts while they have their own economic context and conditions of possibility based on the publishing industry, offer a specific sort of evidence about urban history that cannot be obtained elsewhere. In an important sense, everyone’s individual views are prejudiced and positioned and constructed within traditions. Literary texts are able, perhaps uniquely, to help us understand the lineaments of this reality. At the same time they reveal, in a way that resists reduction, the depth of individual encounters with urban sites as they exist in time.

This session aims at a re-examination of ‘cultural’ and ‘spatial’ turns in literary and social studies, and to explore how innovative sources and methods from literary studies may provide important new insights in urban history studies. Key questions addressed in this session are: How should urban historians evaluate written texts that are commonly labelled literary? How can such texts best be used and interpreted in their research? How do they interact (actively and retroactively) with urban materialities, and how do literary texts relate to other genres of urban writing?

Session organisers:: Lieven Ameel, University of Helsinki, Finland Richard Dennis, University College London, United Kingdom Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Silja Laine, University of Turku, Finland

New publication: DATUTOP 34 / Re-City. Future City – Combining disciplines

Posted on 5.8.2016 by Lieven Ameel

The new DATUTOP (issue 34) has been published under the title “Re-City. Future City – combining disciplines”. The Datutop series was founded in 1982 at the School of Architecture at Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland. The central themes of the Datutop publications are architectural theory and urban planning theory. The latest volume is in part based on last year’s Re-City conference. The publication is open-access:

https://tutcris.tut.fi/portal/files/6896312/DATUTOP_34.pdf

DATUTOP 34 also features my latest article “Emplotting urban regeneration: Narrative strategies in the case of Kalasatama, Helsinki”, part of my ongoing research of narratives in urban planning. Abstract below:

Ameel, Lieven 2016: “Emplotting urban regeneration: Narrative strategies in the case of Kalasatama, Helsinki.” DATUTOP 34. Re-City. Future City – combining disciplines. 222-240. 19 pages.

ABSTRACT

Recent decades have seen an increasing interest in the narrative and rhetorical structure of urban planning. Urban districts take shape based on words as much as on concrete. Narrative elements such as rhetorical figures, storylines and plot structures are relevant not only for the way in which a particular planned area is presented to the general public or framed within local policy discourse, but also for the way in which larger visions of an urban future translate into concrete developments within the built environment.

This paper examines the planning of Kalasatama (Helsinki), an ongoing case of urban regeneration, by applying methods and concepts from narrative and literary theory to the analysis of planning documents, marketing, and media narratives. A key concern is the manner in which planning documents “emplot” a new area, both literally singling out an area within a geographical setting, and framing the development within a “plot”, a story with a specific dynamics and morality. Character, plot and metaphor will constitute the key narrative concepts. This paper draws on the burgeoning field of narrative planning theory, with the specific aim to make concepts from narrative and literary theory more compatible with existing theoretical frameworks from planning theory.

Keywords: emplotmemt, Kalasatama, narrative, urban planning

Narrating the Waterfront in Crisis – Florence 27-28.6.

Posted on 27.6.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Presenting today a paper on narrating the waterfront in crisis at the University of Florence, at the conference “cross-disciplinary perspectives on urban space”. Full programme can be found here. Abstract below:

Narrating the Waterfront in Crisis

Juxtaposing Narratives of New York’s waterfront under threat in Literary Fiction and Planning
Lieven Ameel
dr., docent, university lecturer in comparative literature
University of Tampere, Finland
lieven.ameel@uta.fi

Urban studies has recently seen the emergence of a new paradigm: that of the resilient city, with its focus on urban readiness for disruptive change. The crisis-awareness in urban theory is aptly mirrored in contemporary city narratives, from literature to the big screen, in which urban dystopias as well as more subtle depictions of a city in crisis proliferate, attuning the public to unsettling possible futures and alternative storyworlds. Narrative is a key concept for how people make sense of the possibility of future threats, and for how urban policy projects action in the face of such threats. Following what has been called a ”narrative”, ”deliberative” or ”communicative” turn, city planners are increasingly making use of techniques from literary fiction, projecting scenario’s, and acting as curator’s of sorts between different story lines (Ameel 2014; Cohen 2008, 111-115). This paradigm shift in urban planning simultaneously highlights the importance of incorporating local voices and cultural stories into planning and policy, as well as foregrounding the communicative aspect of planning for the future.

In my paper, I will examine narratives of the New York waterfront from two distinct, but intermingling perspectives. First, I will look at how narrative fiction frames the experience of a waterfront in crisis, and how it presents the possibility of alternative futures. Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 (2014) and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against tomorrow (2013) are particularly revealing texts, but I refer also to other relevant novels such as Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (2009). Second, I will examine how, in the department of city planning’s comprehensive waterfront plans (1992, 2011), the simultaneous possibility of alternative storyworlds structures the way policy is shaped. I am interested in particular in the concept of temporal orchestration, which organizes the elements of the plot around the reader’s interest in alternative storyworlds (Dannenberg 2008).

Sources:

Ameel, Lieven 2016 (forthcoming): “Emplotting urban regeneration: Narrative strategies in the case
of Kalasatama, Helsinki.” In Rajaniemi, Juho (ed.) DATUTOP.
Cohen, Philip 2008: “Stuff Happens: Telling the Story and Doing the Business in the Making of
Thames Gateway.” In Cohen, Philip & Rustin, Michael J. (eds.): London’s Turning: Thames Gateway: Prospects and Legacy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 99–124.
Dannenberg, Hilary P. 2008: Coincidence and Counterfactuality. Plotting Time and Space in
Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Alternatives to High-Rise? Peter Rees on Density, London-Helsinki

Posted on 9.6.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Interesting article in luxurylondon.co.uk (via @OliMould) with an interview with Peter Rees on high density and high-rise in London.

His answer to the question of what alternatives there are to high-rise:

“The idea that to increase density you have to build high is, frankly, bollocks. To achieve high density, you build around the edges of a site, put a nice garden with trees in the middle, five to seven storeys tall. Cities from Helsinki to Naples have developed like that over 100s of years. When you build a high-rise block in the middle of a site, the open space is in the wrong place, it’s around the outside of the site where the traffic is. It doesn’t feel private. You don’t want to sit in your deck chair looking out on Vauxhall Cross.”

I’ve never heard someone sum up the key characteristics of the Helsinki inner/central city so well – or the alternative to such inner-city blocks. The plans for future Helsinki are emphatically designed to have more of such inner-city-like squares, with much urban life and bustle. So how come this will be the result?

pasila2

Picture: Cino Zucchi Architetti

Part of my ongoing research is spent trying to put the pieces of those different story-lines together.

Narrating the Waterfront in Crisis – Helsinki & New York

Posted on 19.5.2016 by Lieven Ameel

How is the waterfront in crisis narrated in urban planning documents and in literature? What kind of alternative storyworlds are described in narratives, how are the decisions leading up to particular storyworlds framed, and how is agency presented in narratives of the urban waterfront?

These are some of the questions I address today, at the literary studies seminar in Turku/Finland, and which I examine at more lenght in my current research project, which juxtaposes narratives of Helsinki’s and New York’s waterfront under threat in literary fiction and planning.

kirsch_nathaniel_rich_050813_620px

[source: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/131724/apocalyptic-visions]

I presented part of this research first a few weeks ago, at the Finnish urban studies days (Helsinki, 28-29.4.2016) and I was not a little bit surprised that a similar theme was taken up just a week later, at an event at Columbia University (May 4). Entitled ”Waterfront Dialogues”, the event presented ongoing waterfront development in Helsinki and New York city, with the goal ”to foster cross-city dialogue and learning between the cities New York and Helsinki”. At the background: the fact that ”urban waterfronts are facing significant transformations world-wide and are among the most pressing urban design challenges of the next century”. Present, ao Meri Louekari of the City of Helsinki and Aalto University, and Thaddeus Pawlowski from Columbia University and the city of New York.

Given the challenges of the urban waterfront, not only in terms of socio-economic changes in the urban fabric of 21st-century cities, but also in the face of growing concerns over ecological crises, how to assess what lies ahead, and the possibilities for mitigation, adaptation or – indeed – action?

I look at these questions by analyzing a range of contemporary novels (including Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against tomorrow; Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer/Parantaja and Annika Luther’s De hemlösas stad) and planning documents (including New York city’s comprehensive waterfront plans). What is the role given to agency? What choices do we have? And what are the odds against stormy futures?

Questions that are also moving onward from my (still ongoing) research on narratives in urban planning.

Agency, crisis and possible worlds in city novels and urban planning

Posted on 29.4.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Speaking today at the Urban Studies Days (Helsinki) about the waterfront in crisis in literary fiction and urban planning, with a focus on Helsinki’s waterfront development and New York pre and post-Sandy.

What alternative worlds are visible, how are readers guided towards specific possible worlds, and what role is given to a sense of agency in describing possible turning points?

Amongst others, in addition to urban plannign documents, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against tomorrow, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, Antti Tuomainen’s Parantja (The Healer), Annika Luther De hemlösas stad (City of the Homeless).

http://www.kaupunkitutkimuksenpaivat.net/tyoryhmat/narraatiot-ja-nimeaminen-arjen-toimijuutena/

http://www.kaupunkitutkimuksenpaivat.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Kaupunkitutkimuksen-p%C3%A4iv%C3%A4t-2016_OHJELMA_valmis1.pdf