Category Archives: Future Cities

Starting a new project at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies!

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Excited to embark on a new research project at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, with an affiliation at comparative literature, University of Turku. In this three- year project, I will examine narratives of urban futures, with a specific focus on how the (near) future of cities at the water is negotiated in different textual genres, including literary fiction, future scenarios, and urban planning and policy documents. One of the key issues is the hypothesis that different narrative genres have different abilities (and different limitations) in how they can posit personal and communal choice and agency. At the background of this project is the notion that the stories we tell of the future are in large part responsible for how we see our own possibilities of action towards a possible future.

In this research project, I will focus on Helsinki, New York City, and urban futures in the Low Countries, in the period 1990-2030.

More information here.

If you would like to collaborate or want to hear more, please contact me at lieven.ameel [a] utu.fi – I’m interested in hearing more from other people (academics, policy makers, media) working with similar issues!

Humanities and the City

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Very much looking forward to tomorrow’s “Humanities and the City” conference at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, where I will give a keynote on “City Scales and the Urban Humanities”. Thanks to Nazry Bahrawi and everyone at Singapore University of Technology and Design for making this event possible.

“This one-day conference proposes yet another angle that can possibly inject fresh perspectives to discourses about the city. What if we factor in the humanities? Here, we invite policymakers, academics, scientists, engineers and curious city dwellers to think with us how humanities disciplines such as philosophy, literature, history, art, cultural studies, and others can play a role in the constitution as well as the development of a city. Our conference will attempt to rise to that challenge by engaging with international speakers and Singapore-based researchers.”

Conference Programme

  • 8.30am-9.00am Registration with refreshments
  • 9.00am-9.10am First opening address
    Prof. Sun Sun Lim
    Head of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS)
    Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)
  • 9.10am-9.20am Second opening address
    Prof. Chan Heng Chee
    Chairman, Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities (LKYCIC)
  • 9.20am-10.50am Keynote Discourse/Roundtable Discussion
    “The Good City: Justice and Technology in 21st Century Capitalism”
    Dr. Paolo Di Leo (HASS, SUTD)
    Dr. John Powers (LKYCIC)
    Dr. Nazry Bahrawi (HASS, SUTD)
    Moderator: Prof. Jane M Jacobs, LKYCIC/Yale-NUS
  • 10.50am-11.10am Coffee Break
  • 11.10am-11.50am “City Scales and the Urban Humanities:
    New Perspectives for Developing and Understanding Cities”
    Prof. Lieven Ameel, University of Helsinki
    President, Association of Literary Urban Studies
  • 11.50am-12.30pm “The Communicative City in Asia”
    Prof. Audrey Yue, National University of Singapore
  • 12.30pm-1.30pm Lunch
  • 1.30pm-3.00pm Film screening at Albert Hong Lecture Theatre
    The Sound of Old Rooms (2011), a documentary set in Kolkata
    Post-film discussion with Dr. Sandeep Ray (SUTD HASS), Director
  • 3.00pm-3.40pm “Maps in Post-Reunificaiton Hong Kong”
    Dr. Elizabeth Ho, Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong
  • 3.40pm-4.00pm Coffee Break
  • 4.00pm-5.00pm Panel discussion on literature and the city
    Prof. Philip Holden, NUS (on Singapore)
    Dr. Pallavi Narayan, NUS Press (on Istanbul)
    Dr. Nuraliah Norasid, author of The Gatekeeper (on Singapore)
    Moderator: Dr. Rhema Hokama, HASS, SUTD
  • 5.00pm-5.20pm Closing remarks by Drs. Paolo and Nazry
  • 5.30pm End of conference

Ways of Telling the Future – limits to scientific texts and fiction for describing climate change?

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The New York Times recently published a piece where scientists are asked to comment on climate fiction and to assess to what extent these depictions of the future are realistic.

image source: NYTimes / Jordin Isip

The short piece feels strangely inadequate and limited for a variety of reasons, the first reason being, perhaps, that literary fiction is exactly defined by not having truth-value in the referential world. If the starting point of the article is flawed, the researchers interviewed seem to point at that in their own answers, for example when one answers that “Humans are able to probe these issues in ways that are different through the lens of fiction.” What the article does, then, is have scientists tell us what literary fiction can do, by asking of literature what science can do.

The best point of the article comes in the end, when “Dr. Foley [executive director of the California Academy of Sciences] said that if he ever wrote a novel, it would be one in which “we all do the slow, hard muddling work of just pitching in, but no hero rides in on a spaceship to save us all.” It would be a terrible novel, he admitted. “No one would buy it, and Hollywood wouldn’t make a movie, but it’s the one I want, and it would surely save the world.””

The article is enlightening for the most part by the very questions it asks, emphasizing the difficulties we continue to have in imagining futures emanating directly from our current choices, and the way in which different kinds of texts are able to envision different aspects of such futures, from accumulating effects, numbers and figures in scientific data, to the “qualia” of what change feels like in literary fiction. Questions that are at the heart of much current work in the environmental humanities, and also in my current research project “Narratives of the Urban Waterfront in Crisis“.

“Folding City” at ENN2017, Prague

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Thanks to everyone at ENN2017, Prague, for inspiring presentations and discussions. My own presentation is part of broader research on urban futures, the relationship between imagined and actual cityworlds, and urban (future) crisis. Happy to have had the opportunity to develop ideas ao. with Laura Oulanne, David Rodriguez and Marco Caracciolo, with a view to develop a book project on (ao.) space and non-human presence in literary fiction.

Experiencing the weak house: Modernist interior descriptions beyond domesticity
Laura Oulanne (University of Helsinki)
Folding city: Environmental change, ontological instability, and urban crisis in 21st century literary fiction
Lieven Ameel (University of Tampere)
Aerial description and environmental imagination in narrative landscapes
David Rodriguez (Stony Brook University)

Abstract below:

Folding city: Environmental change, ontological instability, and urban crisis in 21st century literary fiction

This presentation will explore ontological instabil­ity in a range of contemporary New York novels. I am particularly interested in the implications of poten­tially apocalyptic undercurrents in the narrated space for an understanding of how fictional texts come to grips with complex environmental threats and non-human agency. The literary texts are Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (2009), Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), novels that thematize palimpsestic layers of meaning in urban space, as well as ambiguous temporal structures, and that are informed in particu­lar by an interest in the impact of the future on the present. In these fictional texts, a sense of threat and ontological instability is realized in continuous refer­ences to unusual weather conditions (in all four novels), and, more specifically, in Chronic City, the appearance of a gigantic tiger rummaging underneath New York, and in the novels by Rich and Lerner, by the intimations of coming catastrophic flood. In terms of methodological framework and theoretical approaches, my presentation will draw on Gilles Deleuze’s concept (in his work on Leibniz) of the fold (Deleuze 1993), with reference also to Brian McHale’s “flickering effect” (1987) and Bertrand Westphal’s “heterotopic interference” (Westphal 2005: 101). The fold will be one key conceptualization with which to approach representations of urban space in crisis, enabling a connection – rather than a polariza­tion – between inner and outer, immaterial and mate­rial, possible and present.

Moving towards Possible Cities

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Moving towards Possible Cities: Future Urban Waterfronts in Contemporary Fiction
Speaking at the Association for Literary Urban Studies conference (Im)Possible Cities about my current research: future urban waterfronts in contemporary fiction, and what literary texts of the waterfront can tell us about the future and about our possibilities to prepare for and act upon the future. From the abstract:
“In contemporary fictional texts describing the urban waterfront under threat, crossing urban borders is conditioned by competing pathways towards the future, which appears in early 21st century literature as a crucial conceptual and ontological border zone for understanding the present. Moving into this border zone thus also entails becoming aware of questions of agency and moral responsibility, as is exemplified by the trajectory of the protagonist in Odds Against Tomorrow, who moves from the question “What was possible? What should we be afraid of?” (Rich 2013: 7) to asking: what would be “the right thing to do” (Rich 2013: 161)?”

Planning for the Future – Narratives of Urban Waterfronts at Plannord2017

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Speaking today (17.8.2017) at Plannord2017 on the topic of “Planning for the Future – Narrating crisis and agency in literary fiction and planning narratives of the urban waterfront”

From the abstract:

“What can be known about the future, what is there to fear, and what role is there for human agency, individually or collectively – for acting upon the future? These questions are addressed here from the perspective of narrative frames, with a specific reference to the stories that are told of the near future of the New York waterfront in. Drawing on a range of textual sources, from policy documents and strategy texts to literary novels that dwell on the challenges and possibilities of the urban waterfront, this paper wants to sketch a move, in narratives and research, from knowledge to action, from preparing for the future to acting upon the future. In doing so, this paper also traces the narrative limits of policy and planning texts, and of fictional texts, when envisioning slow-burning crises.”

The paper is part of my ongoing research of future visions of cities at the water: more about that here.

Futures of the Urban Waterfront, 23.5., Jyväskylä

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On my way to Jyväskylä for the Finnish Literary Society yearly seminar, this year organized together with the Cultural Studies days, in a themed “Environments” conference.

Speaking tomorrow (23.5.) on the subject of futures of the urban waterfront in literary fiction of New York, with a focus on Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against tomorrow. Examining how knowledge (of the future) turns into experience in fictional narratives, and the importance of assessing present futures and future presents.

Conference programme (in Finnish) below.

https://www.jyu.fi/en/congress/ymparistot2017/ohjelma

“Narrating the Urban Waterfront in Crisis” – Gothenburg University

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Excited to present my research at Gothenburg University 28.2.2017.

Thanks to Linda Karlsson Hammarfelt and everyone at Gothenburg University to make my visit possible!

http://hum.gu.se/aktuellt/Kalendarium/Aktuellt_detalj?eventId=70125920343

Narrating the Urban Waterfront in Crisis. Juxtaposing Futures of the Waterfront under Threat in Literary Fiction and Planning

Urban waterfronts worldwide are currently undergoing eventful transformations: in a range of cities, post-industrial waterfronts are being redeveloped to address changing living preferences and working conditions, while new challenges are beckoning on the horizon in the form of threatening environmental change and rising sea levels. How is the experience of the urban waterfront in crisis, and the uncertainty of possible futures, shaped in and by narrative? In this lecture, I will analyse narratives of the waterfront from two distinct perspectives and looking at two specific case studies. My focus will be on recent developments and literary texts set in New York and Helsinki. I will look, first, at the way in which literary fiction frames the experience of a waterfront in crisis, and how it presents possible alternative futures. In the context of New York City, key texts will be Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds against tomorrow (2013), as well as Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (2009). In the context of Helsinki, I will focus on Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja (The Healer; 2010), Annika Luther’s De hemlösas stad (City of the Homeless; 2011), and Hannu Mäkelä’s novel Hyvä jätkä, a book commissioned by the city of Helsinki to promote the West Harbour development (Good Chap; 2009). Second, and considering narrative and rhetoric models for framing alternative storyworlds, I will examine how, in New York City’s comprehensive waterfront plans (1992, 2011) and in Helsinki’s strategic and detailed urban planning documents, the simultaneous possibility of alternative storyworlds structures policy narratives of the urban future.

My lecture will engage with current debates in literary spatial studies, narrative planning, literary ethics, and environmental criticism. The aim is to foreground the materiality of planning narratives (whose projected futures are intended to be petrified in concrete and glass in due course), while simultaneously drawing attention to the rhetoric and literary antecedents of such narratives. Ultimately, I hope to gain a better understanding of what kinds of paths towards the future are postulated by two very different kinds of texts – planning and fictional texts – and what room they leave for agency and choice in our relationship with our environment.

Futures of the Urban Waterfront at Shifting Grounds, Zürich

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Speaking at the Shifting Grounds conference in Zürich (26.11.2016) on the subject of “Futures of the Urban Waterfront: Narrating Diverging Pathways in Literary Fiction and Planning Documents”. With a specific focus on New York waterfront development in city planning and literary fiction – from the city’s comprehensive waterfront plans to literary novels such as Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow. Unfortunately a subject that gets more timely all the time. One of the key questions: how to move from thinking about “[w]hat was possible? What should we be afraid of?” (Rich 7) to “Doing: finally.” (Rich 202)

Book of abstracts here.

Towards a narrative typology of urban planning narratives for, in and of planning

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Out now!

“Towards a narrative typology of urban planning narratives for, in and of planning in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki”

Published online first by Palgrave’s Urban Design International.

The article is part of a series of articles on narrative in the context of planning – more here.

Abstract:

Urban planning and theory have witnessed an increasing interest in narratives. There remain, however, diverging notions of what is meant with narratives, and of their function and use. This article provides a taxonomy of narratives in the context of planning, illustrated by the redevelopment of Jätkäsaari, Helsinki. Three distinct types of narrative can be identified in the context of urban planning: narratives for, in and of planning. This paper argues that a narrative typology of urban planning that draws on concepts from narrative theory could bring new insights into the discursive urban practices that have appearing during past decades.

Keywords

urban planning /waterfront development / Helsinki / urban form / narrative