The journal Spiegel der Letteren has recently published my review (in Dutch) of the book Tussen Beleving en Verbeelding, which examines the potential of literary sources for urban studies.
Ameel, Lieven 2015: ”Stadsbeleving en -verbeelding in de negentiende eeuw: nieuwe inzichten uit literaire bronnen.” (“Experiencing and Imaging the City in the Nineteenth Century: New Insights from Literary Sources.”) In Spiegel der Letteren 2015/57:2, 218–220.
“Literature and the Peripheral City”, editors Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, and Markku Salmela, has been published! More at Palgrave’s own website, here:
“Cities have always been defined by their centrality. But literature demonstrates that their diverse peripheries define them, too: from suburbs to slums, rubbish dumps to nightclubs and entire failed cities. The essays in this collection explore urban peripheries through readings of literature from four continents, taking the reader on a journey from global urban hubs such as London and New York to Nordic capitals and cities like Santiago and Johannesburg. The book shows powerfully that peripheral areas are essential to bo th urban fiction and the identities of cities. The urban experience keeps feeding on images from the margins and hinterlands, which help cities and their parts define themselves. Without peripheries there would be no centres.”
An inspiring, two-year project is drawing to a close. Heart-felt thanks to all contributors, to everyone at Palgrave, and to my terrific co-editors!
Content:
Preface
Introduction: Peripherality and Literary Urban Studies; Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch and Markku Salmela
PART I: CITY PERIPHERIES
1. Detroit and Paris, Paris as Detroit; Jeremy Tambling
2. ‘It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?’ Urban Peripherality and the Narrative Framing of Literary Beginnings; Lieven Ameel
3. The Peripheries of London Slumland in George Gissing and Alexander Baron; Jason Finch
4. A Topography of Refuse: Waste, the Suburb, and Pynchon’s ‘Low-lands’; Markku Salmela
5. London’s East End in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem; Aleksejs Taube
6. The Configuration of Boundaries and Peripheries in Johannesburg as Represented in Selected Works by Ivan Vladislavic and Zakes Mda; Marita Wenzel
PART II: PERIPHERAL CITIES, GENRES AND WRITERS
7. Hungry and Alone: The Topography of Everyday Life in Knut Hamsun and August Strindberg; Tone Selboe
8. A Forest on the Edge of Helsinki: Spatiality in Henrika Ringbom’s Novel Martina Dagers langtan; Topi Lappalainen
9. Eduard Vilde and Tallinn’s Dynamic Peripheries, 1858-1903; Elle-Mari Talivee and Jason Finch
10. A Suburban Revision of Nostalgia: The Case of Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra; Bieke Willem
11. From Windowsill to Underpass: Young Women’s Spatial Orientation in Swedish Young Adult Literature; Lydia Wistisen
12. Centrifugal City: Centre and Periphery in Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente; Nettah Yoeli-Rimmer
Bibliography
Index
Talking today at Turku University / “Being There” in Fictional Worlds -seminar about research conducted together with Terhi Ainiala.
https://www.utu.fi/fi/yksikot/hum/ajankohtaista/uutiset/Sivut/presence-cfp.aspx
Abstract below:
Toponyms as Prompts for Presencing Place –
Making Oneself at Home in the Narrated City
Lieven Ameel & Terhi Ainiala
In our presentation, we will examine toponyms as triggers of a sense of place. Place names may act as delineators and activators of a literary storyworld, not only in the way they function as references to spots on a mental map, but also, and perhaps in particular, as moral, socio-economic and aesthetic demarcations.
We will analyse the function of toponyms in a selection of contemporary Finnish novels set in Helsinki, including texts by Rosa Liksom, Kjell Westö, M.Y. Joensuu, and Antti Tuomainen, and drawing on recent writings by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht on presence (2004) and by Sten Pultz Moslund on “topopoetic reading” (2011). The literary analysis will be juxtaposed with a survey of Finnish and non-Finnish readers’ experiences of place names in Helsinki novels. The findings of this two-pronged approach underscore the challenges involved in translating the sense of place evoked by any given storyworld across the confines of a specific temporal, geographical and cultural context.
References
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 2004: The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Pultz Moslund, Sten 2011: “The Presencing of Place in Literature: Toward an Embodied Topopoetic Mode of Reading.” In Tally, Robert T. (ed.): Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 29-46.
Further reading:
Ainiala, Terhi ─ Minna Saarelma ─ Paula Sjöblom 2012: Names in Focus. An Introduction to Finnish Onomastics. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Ameel, Lieven 2015: “‘It’s six a.m., do you know where you are?’ Framing the Urban Experience in Literary Beginnings.” In Ameel, Lieven; Finch, Jason & Salmela, Markku (eds.): Literature and the Peripheral City: Literary Explorations. London: Palgrave, 40-55.
Speaking today at the Urban Studies days in Tampere on the subject of dystopia and utopia in urban planning and fictional narratives. Presenting work on my examination of planning in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki.
http://www.kaupunkitutkimuksenpaivat.net/english-2/
Abstract (in Finnish) below:
Utopistisia ja dystopisia kertomuksia Helsingin Jätkäsaaresta – Tulevaisuusvisioiden retoriikka kirjallisuudessa ja kaupunkisuunnittelun julkaisuissa
Lieven Ameel, Helsingin ylipisto
Missä määrin fiktiivisen maailman tulevaisuusvaihtoehdot kommentoivat tai ohjaavat todellisen maailman tulevaisuusvisioiden suotavuutta? Tarkastelen tätä kysymystä keskittymällä Helsingin Jätkäsaaren suunnitteluun liitettyihin kertomuksiin. Lähtöpisteenä toimii Hannu Mäkelän historiallinen romaani Hyvä jätkä (2009), teos, joka on luotu Helsingin kaupungin tilaustyönä. Romaanissa esitetään 1900-luvun alun Jätkäsaaresta vaihtoehtoisia tulevaisuuksia, jotka on eksplisiittisesti suunnattu 2000-luvun alun kaupunkilaisille. Alueen tulevaisuusnäkemys näyttää Hyvässä jätkässä ainakin osittain tukevan viraston visiota alueesta. Antti Tuomaisen lähitulevaisuuden Helsinkiä kuvaavassa Parantajassa (2012) kaupunkisuunnitteluviraston visioimat futuristiset kaupunkiosat on jo rakennettu, mutta myös jo raunioitumassa. Kalasataman tornitalot palavat, Jätkäsaari autioituu. Molemmat kaunokirjalliset teokset rakentavat merkityksensä suunnitteluviraston tulevaisuusnäkymien varaan. Esitelmässäni tarkastelen näissä kahdessa teoksessa esitettyjen Jätkäsaaren tulevaisuusvisioiden suhdetta 2000-vaihteen Helsinkiin ja suunnitteluviraston suunnitelmiin. Esitän, että myös kaupunkisuunnitteluviraston julkaisut samasta alueesta tukeutuvat kerronnalliseen dynamiikkaan, jossa mahdollisten maailmojen välinen vuoropuhelu ohjaa lukijaa. Tutkimukseni liittyy laajemmin kaupunkisuunnittelun kerronnalliseen käänteeseen, jossa kaupunkisuunnittelun prosesseja ja dokumentteja käsitellään tarinan kertomisena, ja jossa niitä tutkitaan retoriikan ja kerronnallisuuden tutkimusta hyödyntäen.
One of the most concise and thought-provoking essays on the city in recent history is Jürgen Osterhammel’s chapter “Cities. European Models and Worldwide Creativity” in his monumental The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century.
“Urbanization used to be understood in a narrow sense as the rapid growth of cities in conjunction with the spread of mechanized factory production; urbanization and industrialization appeared as two sides of the same coin. This view can no longer be upheld. The definition that is common today takes urbanization to be a process of social acceleration, compression, and reorganization, which may occur under a range of very different circumstances. The most important outcome of this process was the formation of spaces of increased human interaction in which information was swiftly exchanged and optimally employed, and new knowledge could be created under favorable institutional conditions. Cities – especially large cities- were concentrations of knowledge; sometimes that is why people headed to them.” (p. 249)
What constitutes an appropriate form of knowledge in terms of policy and planning? And what forms of knowledge can be reasonably taken into consideration when planning and studying cities? Moving back to Jonathan Raban’s idea of the “soft city” – and at the same time, to the notion that much of that soft knowledge we have of “soft cities” is available in the forms of narratives – and may require specific considerations informed by narrative studies/theory to fully appreciate their layered meanings.
“… living in cities is an art […] The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture (Raban 1975, 10)
Jonathan Raban 1975: Soft City. London: Harvill.
Culture & sustainability in focus in the upcoming conference “Culture(s) in Sustainable Futures” in Helsinki, 6-8 May 2015.
Perhaps surprisingly (from the perspective of my own, urban-biased view on cultural sustainable development), there is a suspicuous absence of urban issues in most of the programme, regardless of the many examples and possibilities in current urban developments.
There are some sessions and several papers, however, involving urban cases, for example session 6. “Operationalizing culture in the sustainable development of cities.”
Currently working on the interplay between literary (and more broadly, cultural) studies and urban studies, I came across Sharon Zukin’s “The Postmodern Invasion”, which takes stock of three key books that chart relationships between the city, city literature, and socio-economic writings of the city: City of Quartz, The Conscience of the eye, and The Sphinx in the city. All three draw on “a rapprochement between cultural studies and urban political economy” in the 1980s, which tended to focus on “cities as cultural artefacts”. One of the points that comes out of this rapprochement is the crucial resonance, in (then) recent studies of Paris, Vienna and Berlin, between “symbols, space, and social power”. Few today would call Mike Davis, Richard Sennett or Elizabeth Wilson “urban hipsters”, although Zukin’s classification of these authors as flâneurs and moral philosophers does ring true. With hindsight, Zukin’s reading of Sennett is perhaps a bit too harsh (I find The Conscience of the eye still refreshing reading two decades later), but the importance of an interplay between cultural studies and socio-economic studies of the city which she discerns remains of indiminished importance.
Zukin, Sharon. (1992). The postmodern invasion. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 16(3), 489-495.
Tomorrow, presentation of our Helsinki University research project on urban layers of meaning on 8 April 2015, at the Think Corner / Tiedekulma. I will be talking about visions and narratives of Helsinki’s waterfront development. Samu Nyström will introduce the research project, Mikko-Olavi Seppälä will discuss 1920s urban culture and identity in Helsinki.
More on my research of Helsinki’s waterfront here.
Update: the video of the presentation can be viewed here. The first part consist of a presentation by prof. Seppälä, the second part, with my presentation on Kalasatama & Jätkäsaari, begins at 36:25. Presentation in Finnish.
Today, the 4th Helsinki Literature and the City Network symposium. Keywords: post-apocalyptic city; urban wilderness and postmodern spatial poetics; city as public space; epiphany; literature and the peripheral city; literary second cities. More here; programme below.
10.15 Welcome Address
10.30-11.30 Petter Skult (Åbo Akademi): ”Periphery versus Centre in the Post-Apocalyptic City”
Sarianna Kankkunen (University of Helsinki): “Urban Wilderness, the City and the Self: Postmodern Spatial Poetics in Maarit Verronen’s Prose Fiction”
11.30 -12.30 Theory Reading
Turmel, Patrick: “The City as Public Space”
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: “Production of Presence” (chapters 6-9)
Turmel, Patrick: ‘city as public space’
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: ‘Epiphany Presentification Deixis’
12.30-13.45 Lunch Break
14.00-15.30 Literary Second Cities –conference (Åbo Akademi 2015) meeting
Literature and the Peripheral City editorial board meeting