Urban Narratives

Thoughts on City Literature, Urban Studies and Planning

Presenting “Plotting Possible Futures” at the seminar “Strategic narratives: Framing urban futures”

Posted on 13.10.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Participating 14.10. in the SCENSLECO autumn Seminar
“Strategic narratives: Framing urban futures”
13. & 14.10.2016, Helsinki.

I will be presenting a paper entitled “Plotting Possible Futures: Narratives of the Urban Waterfront in Literary Fiction and Planning Documents” – within the context of my current research on narratives of the urban waterfront in crisis.

Excited to have this opportunity to engage with researchers from planning and policy theory, and bring my expertise in urban narratives, narrated experiences of the city, planning storylines, and literary urban studies to this interdisciplinary audience.

Very much looking forward to meet, amongst others, Kristian Olesen, Kristi Grisakov, Louis Albrechts, Raine Mäntysalo.

“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?”

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.

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

Emplotment in urban planning

Posted on 11.4.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Teaching today on literary tropes in urban planning- metaphors and emplotment in New York’s waterfront development, as part of my course “Space, the City and Literature” at the University of Tampere.

Below, some thoughts on emplotment, taken from my forthcoming article “Emplotting Urban Regeneration” (Datutop 2016).

“Emplotment is proposed here as a first central concept for approaching narratives in urban development, not in the least because of the concept’s semantic double-entendre, encapsulating the meanings of both spatial “plot” (location) and narrative “plot” (narrative intrigue). The use of “emplotment” as a narrative concept outside the field of literary studies is primarily associated with the work of Hayden White and his examination of historiography in terms of their narrative. White used “emplotment” to denote the processes by which events are contextualized into meaning-making totalities, receiving “the formal coherency that only stories can possess” (White 1981, 19). Drawing on the work of Northrop Frye, White distinguishes four “modes of emplotment”: romance, tragedy, comedy and satire. In planning theory, Hayden White’s examination of narrative tropes within historiography has been applied in re-examining planning histories (Kramsch 1998), and its usefulness for an analysis of urban planning has been illustrated by Mareile Walter’s examination of narratives of Karlskrona (2013).

What interests me here most is emplotment as narrative strategy that situates a specific event or events within a larger narrative framework, giving sense, structure, coherency and causality to what otherwise would remain a mere enumeration of actions. Especially when considering non-fictional texts that bear little resemblances to literary narratives, such as policy documents, the analysis of a text’s emplotment strategies – in other words, of how narrative elements direct the reader towards a coherent plot – would seem to be a particularly beneficial method. Unlike texts of literary fiction, few planning documents have strong authorial voice, explicit plot lines or distinct character dynamics. All planning narratives, however, will exhibit some thematic, linguistic and stylistic features that situate the planning area on a geographical map and within a narrative intrigue. These narrative strategies carry out what the literary theorists Paul Ricoeur has called the “mise en intrigue” or “situating into plot”, an “operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession” (Ricoeur 1984/1990, 65, see also Kaplan 1993, 172).”

Source:

Ameel, Lieven 2016 (forthcoming): “Emplotting urban regeneration: Narrative strategies in the case of Kalasatama, Helsinki.” DATUTOP.

Climate fiction & urban utopias/dystopias

Posted on 1.3.2016 by Lieven Ameel

Interesting article by Astrid Bracke here concerning British climate fiction. To what extent are moral or ethical questions involved in contemporary climate fiction? This struck me as a particularly timely post, since I’m just today finalizing abstracts on crisis narratives of the waterfront in Northern American, Finnish and Dutch/Flemish contemporary fiction. What do such fictional narratives teach us – if anything at all? At least, they tend to provide narrative structures for couching our uneasiness about possible (and possibly undesirable) futures.

New Publication out: “Changing Helsinki?”

Posted on 11.11.2015 by Lieven Ameel

The recent book fair in Helsinki saw the publication of an exciting book about culture, planning, architecture and community in changing Helsinki. Proud to be part of the group of outstanding authors, who provide eleven insights into how Helsinki is being transformed at the moment, and what new directions could be taken in the future. Great job of the editors Eeva and Cindy, and the team at Nemo, who have created a beautiful book in three languages (Finnish, English, Swedish).

My own contribution considers the use of narratives in the planning of Jätkäsaari, Helsinki.

What is Helsinki’s future and are there alternatives?

This book is written by professionals who love Helsinki. Each writer has chosen an element of the city that has inspired delight, disgust, sorrow or enthusiasm. The book looks not only at the pasts of the Finnish capital but at what its future might be.

Could vacant office space be transformed into homes? Does building within city limits have to mean clearing away its forests? What might the authorities learn from the residents who have occupied buildings, set up meeting places and worked as volunteers to protect cherished built heritage? What is it that is unique about Helsinki?”

http://www.nemokustannus.fi/kirjat/uusi-helsinki/