Category Archives: City Imaginaries

Walking Woolf’s London

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New book out on Virginia Woolf’s London, with ample use of maps: Lisbeth Larsson’s Promenader i Virginia Woolfs London.

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Source: Atlantisbok.se

The book is in Swedish, but maps such as the ones here and here, give some idea of the scope of the analysis even to readers with a limited command of Swedish.

Lisbeth Larsson was at the City Peripheries/Peripheral Cities conference in Helsinki last year, where she presented some of her findings on Woolf’s work, creative use of cartographies to provide new insights into literature!

 

Towards new City Imaginaries

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Important article in the Guardian here, advocating a new imaginary on cities, by

Ewald Engelen, Sukhdev Johal, Angelo Salento and Karel Williams.

The article provides a provocative, re-evaluation of Jacobs and Raban, but also of Glaeser, Florida, and Sassen.

Is the city of the “creative class” about culture, or is really about keeping the middle class in?

Several of the insights presented shed light on current developments in my home city, with relevance for similar international projects: Guggenheim Helsinki, but also the complex waterfront development I’m currently working on.

Favorite quote:

“Increasingly, the dreams of urban prosperity through competition have served to legitimate hugely costly – and publicly subsidised – spatial urban interventions in prestige redevelopment. Real-estate investments to keep the upper-middle classes in the city, to accommodate a growing army of international students and young service workers, to attract major corporates and financial service providers to business parks, to persuade the hypermobile cosmopolitan ‘creative class’ to nest locally.”

 

Narrative approaches to the city

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Reading through an interesting contribution to the theory of narrativity and the study of city & city planning: Bond & Thompson-Fawcett’s article “Multiplicities, interwoven threads, holistic paths: The phronetic long-haul approach” in the volume Qualitative Urban Analysis – several other articles in the volume offer insights in the use of narrative approaches for multidisciplinary research.

“The tiny details, often reduced and overlooked in analysis, can reveal the depth of the meaning people have for places and spaces with which they identify. Narratives provide a means to make sense of and understand social phenomena and individual experience (Flyvberg, 2004a). Narratives carry a degree of explanation because they are recalled from memories of events and reconstructed in the telling (Czarniawska, 2004; Eckstein, 2003; Sandercok, 2003). The retelling of stories involves a process of framing, whereby events are characterised, segmented, categorised and ordered through a reconstruction (Bruner, 1990). A narrative approach is co-terminous with a requirement for thick qualitative data, through which the researched speak in their voices to tell their stories.

Via a polyphony of voices, narratives provide a lens through which realities, processes and events can be gleaned.” (Bond & Thompson-Fawcett, 2008, pp. 56-57)

As planning is increasingly conducted by using narrative strategies, the development of a narrative theory becomes crucial for an examination of how our cities function, and Bond & Thompson-Fawcett make an important contribution in this direction. What could be taken further: the development of concrete tools for an analysis. Narrative & literary studies offer promising avenues of research for such an integrated narrative analysis of planning. Something I hope to develop further in my research on narrating urban redevelopment. More about that here.

Source:

Bond, Sophie, & Thompson-Fawcett, Michelle. (2008). Multiplicities, interwoven threads, holistic paths: The phronetic long-haul approach. In P. J. Maginn, S. M. Thompson & M. Tonts (Eds.), Qualitative Urban Analysis: An International Perspective (pp. 51-78). Oxford: JAI Press.