Looking forward to attending ” “Being There” in Fictional Worlds” in Turku in May of this year.
I’m presenting together with Terhi Ainiala a paper with as title “Toponyms as Prompts for Presencing Place – Making Oneself at Home in the Narrated City”.
Bound to be interesting.
http://www.utu.fi/fi/yksikot/hum/ajankohtaista/uutiset/Sivut/presence-cfp.aspx
Confirmed Key Note Speakers:
Prof. Ros Ballaster (University of Oxford)
Prof. Susan S. Lanser (Brandeis University)
Via @Citylab: engaging with the local community through coherent narrative mapping proved to be a successful way forward in the planning of a former power plant in Bayview-Hunters Point. Interesting: the planners and architects brought in experts in storytelling, Storycorps, to contribute with their expertise:
“Inspired by the vivid stories that were emerging, the design team reached out to StoryCorps, the nationwide oral history project that captures stories of under-represented communities, and asked them to start recording at Hunters View. Instead of a bare-bones recording space, the team wanted to have a place where residents would feel welcome and comfortable as they recounted their memories of living in the shadow of the power plant. They created a listening booth, using a shipping container as a quick and economical structure.” (Lydia Lee, Citylab.com)
Full text here.
More emerging documentation of the importance of local stories in planning processes, and the relevance of a coherent narrative mapping of place. A good case for narrative planning as an innovative and important paradigm.
Don’t know whether one should laugh or cry about this: one of the most critical, and revealing, reviews of (sub)urban branding in Finland comes from “graphic designer of the year” Kasper Strömman’s blog, a satirical design blog.
Strömman examines the new branding effort of the city of Vantaa (due north from Helsinki). The blog (in Finnish) carries the title “how to erase a city’s identity by using graphic design” (my translation). I haven’t followed Vantaa’s branding campaign myself, and Strömman’s link to Vantaa’s “brand book” doesn’t work (anymore?), so I have no access to the relevant sources, but on the basis of the material, there may well be some truth in the blog post’s title. Strömman’s key critique is that Vantaa invested in branding because the city felt it lacked a strong identity, but that it turned to generic images instead of making use of genuinely local identity markers in the pictures it used. The campaign images apparently come from international image banks – and what, really, is left of the identity of a city when the very image that wants to display the specific feel of Vantaa can as easily be used to sell an Australian children’s contact centre or an American insurance company, as Strömman points out?
[source: nyt.fi / kasperstromman.fi / http://www.tccc.org.au/]
By way of contrast, I just today reread Panu Lehtovuori’s article on Helsinki’s shorelines, in which Lehtovuori argues for urban planning that embraces differences, place-based solutions, and the uniqueness of a particular place, and emphasizes the stratifications of local meaning as potential cultural resources for the future. Couldn’t agree more.
Lehtovuori, Panu 2012: ”Rannat Helsingin seudun dynamoina.” In Lahti, Juhana; Paatero, Kristiina & Rauske, Eija (eds.): Rantaviivoja. Asuinalueita veden äärellä. Helsinki: Suomen arkkitehtuurimuseo, 20-31.
The latest edition of the Finnish Journal for Urban Studies, a theme issue on culture, design and planning, contains my first article on narrative planning, a short overview of the quite recent “narrative turn” in urban planning. The article was online for a moment, but has apparently been taken offline – the journal policy is to publish online after one year in paper. If you’re interested, contact me for a pdf.
reference:
Ameel, Lieven 2014: ”Kohti kerronnallista käännettä yhdyskuntasuunnittelussa.” (”Towards a Narrative Turn in Urban Planning.” Yhdyskuntasuunnittelu (”Finnish Journal for Urban Studies”) 2014 (2), 62-27.
Listening today to Karl Schlögel at GUST (Ghent). Re-reading European (mid-size, peripheral) cities and re-reading the European project in “Steden lezen” (Reading Cities), the Dutch translation of a selection of his publications on cities.
“… cities are like open books, history books as well as encyclopaedias of daily lives. Their squares, facades and blueprints can be deciphered as a text that is rewritten, over-written, scratched, copied and again rewritten time and again.” (free translation of the introduction to the Dutch translation; Schlögel 8)
For more, see here Ed Taverne’s perspective on Schlögel’s contribution to redefining the European city.
Schlögel is also the author of this fascinating book on Moscow 1937.
Moving on from my previous post: in “Tactical Urbanism: The New Vernacular of the Creative City“, Oli Mould looks at how the “creative city” discourse has gradually become replaced by a new vernacular, that of “tactical urbanism”. De Certeau’s concepts of urban, everyday “tactics” is one of the relevant concepts in this context, and Mould has a rich set of data to work with, with a global outlook.
Is “tactical urbanism” merely the new “quick fix” for urban policy, as Mould suggests? There is certainly a risk that this is (or will be) the case. De Certeau (and Deleuze & Guattari) have in several instances (and, of course, often in fairly complex language) described just how thoroughly totalizing, profit- and control-driven ideologies can incorporate and appropriate small-scale, everyday counter-“tactics”. It is a disturbing phenomenon that could also be discerned in research on parkour conducted by Sirpa Tani and myself on parkour – as we wrote in the conclusion to our article “Parkour: Creating Loose Space?”: “the potential of unexpected and unintended activities such as parkour to foster a positive atmosphere for other loosening activities should be investigated further and … the perceived subversive character of traceurs … will need closer scrutiny and contextualization.” (Ameel & Tani 2012: 28)
What I missed most in Mould’s text was a the sense that small-scale urban tactics are worth the trouble – the sense that these welcome, and in indeed necessary, elements in the contemporary city, whatever their name and the narrative that is being attached to them (often unwillingly). As researchers, we can sit back and point out how (often white middle class) citizens in the urban trenches put up small-scale activities only to have them incorporated in the neoliberal newspeak they were supposed to upset. Worthwile activities are turned into totalizing tools by way of forceful narratives, and researchers have the potential to work actively towards providing people with a vocabulary that enables them to counter (neoliberal) “creative city” (and other) mantras.
Getting acquainted with a rich collection of articles on the historical urban landscape, its preservation and development: Francesco Bandarin’s and Ron van Oers’s (eds.) Reconnecting the City. The Historic Urban Landscape Approach and the Future of Urban Heritage (2014).
(source: wiley.com)
The importance of a rigorous cultural mapping to understand the city’s many layers of meaning is one of the things rightly foregrounded in this volume.
And an interesting (and rare) warning about using GIS: GIS-based mapping “is useful for coordinating visual data and capturing the visual morphology of the city, but has its limitations when recording the urban experience” according to Julian Smith who has a few critical words for “modernist assumptions about mapping and documentation” in this volume (p. 224). Food for thought for the emerging GIS-enthusiasm in literary studies (see my earlier post here).
From the little I’ve seen of the volume so far, nevertheless, there are some points of view I would’ve like to see more of in a book like this. One is the potential of literary sources for a cultural or narrative mapping of place. A second one is the importance of resilient, everyday practices that give meaning to place, and that are so hard to pinpoint in urban heritage discourse. How to preserve and foster everyday spontaneity, in its many forms? And is preservation even desirable? One of the things that came up in the work I conducted with Sirpa Tani on parkour (see here), in particular in our article “Parkour: Creating Loose Spaces?”.
In view of this second comment, I’m increasingly looking forward to reading the upcoming book by Oliver Mould (a fellow parkour researcher), which promises a counter-narrative to the creative city discourse in the form of new interest in forms of urban subversion.
At the 130th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association, Vancouver, a special session entitled “Geocritical Explorations inside the Text” will be organized, with several abstracts dealing with GIS-based literary analysis.
http://moacir.com/talks/mla-15-geocritical-explorations-inside-the-text/abstracts/
Following up on recent geogricitical explorations such as the collected volumes Geocritical Explorations and the volume Literary Cartographies, both edited by Robert Tally. with some articles on city literature.
Recent applications of geographical technologies in literature include Gregory & Cooper’s article on GIS and Victorian literature and culture (2013).
[update] All feeding into what could be called the larger field of geohumanities, the advent of which is briefly touched upon here by Tim Cresswell.
Reminds me I have to take this volume off the shelf and start re-reading: GeoHumanities. Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Michael Dear et al. 2011).
Re-reading Cities of Affluence and Anger. A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (2006), by Peter J. Kalliney. Not only very convincing readings of a number of still highly relevant novels, but also convincing links between literary expressions of the city, and prevalent discourse in urban planning and development.
Source: University of Virginia Press
The 4th chapter, on the Angry Young Men, for example, ‘’reads the Angry reliance on domesticity in the context of England’s postwar reconstruction and alongside contemporary accounts of home” and draws on “vernacular architecture of the period and the welfare state’s urban planning initiatives to sketch the parameters of class and masculinity in literary accounts of family life.” (Kalliney 116)
Kalliney presents here an eloquent illustration of what literary studies can bring to our understanding of city development (and vice verse).
The journal Reconstruction has a special issue out on Spatial Literary Studies, edited by Robert T. Tally. All in all an excellent open-access issue, with plenty of food for thought for scholars involved with spatial literary studies.
source: Reconstructions; photo by Carolina Cambre.
For urban literary scholars: the issue inlcudes, amongst others, an article on Zola’s spatial explorations of Paris and on Country/City dynamic in Kundera.
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/Issues/143/contents_143.shtml