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The Image of the City

Zayde Antrim

in Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World

This chapter focuses on the textual strategy of describing the urban built environment. By engaging the visual imagination, this strategy stimulated the recognition of a “cityscape” distinctive from ... More

This chapter focuses on the textual strategy of describing the urban built environment. By engaging the visual imagination, this strategy stimulated the recognition of a “cityscape” distinctive from other landscapes in the discourse of place. Describing or depicting the built environment was intended to make cities legible, or comprehensible in terms of their written or graphic representation, and thus to make them compelling as categories of belonging for people whether or not they had firsthand experience of the city. Central to a city’s legibility was often the evocation of a monumental structure, one that dominated the cityscape because of its great size, lavish adornment, powerful patrons, or ritual function. This chapter considers contrasting claims to “insider” and “citational” authority in describing urban built environments and analyzes a variety of texts, including images and poems.Less

Mnemonic Detours

Lisa Yoneyama

in Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory

This chapter examines how the cultural criticism strategy called mnemonic detours operates over the cityscape through the storytellings of Hiroshima survivors, explaining that the stories of the ... More

This chapter examines how the cultural criticism strategy called mnemonic detours operates over the cityscape through the storytellings of Hiroshima survivors, explaining that the stories of the survivors include nonteleolological, detoured courses of their thoughts and lives before and after the bombing. It also discusses the unsettling effects of the frozen time that appears in the storytellers' retellings of the moment of destruction.Less

Out on the Town

Anna Cottrell

in London Writing of the 1930s

All roads led to the West End in interwar London. The area of roughly one square mile in the metropolitan Borough of Westminster boasted London’s brightest street lights, the largest concentration of ... More

All roads led to the West End in interwar London. The area of roughly one square mile in the metropolitan Borough of Westminster boasted London’s brightest street lights, the largest concentration of electric advertising, the most lavish restaurants and cinemas, and the biggest crowds. This nocturnal cityscape could rival Paris or New York, and for any writer set on modern London life as her subject matter, it was the place to be. Above all, this was where one went to look at quintessentially modern Londoners – the office workers and suburban commuters, the women and men who laboured in London’s offices and shops by day, and walked the streets of the West End by night.Less

Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing

Bharat Tandon

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

This chapter explores The New Yorker's distinctive relationship with the Manhattan cityscape within which it was conceived and produced. It suggests ways in which both the magazine's treatments of ... More

This chapter explores The New Yorker's distinctive relationship with the Manhattan cityscape within which it was conceived and produced. It suggests ways in which both the magazine's treatments of the value of readable social indicators, and the larger cultural cachet of the magazine itself in the 1950s and 1960s, offered the young Philip Roth an early engagement with ideas that were to become defining imaginative preoccupations across his fictional and critical oeuvre, from Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis. The chapter shows how there remains an important difference between textual cityscapes and Times Square in the middle of the twentieth century. Reading a nineteenth-century poster or a handbill may have been fascinating or disorientating to a passerby, but for the most part, the implicit power relationship of conventional reading would not have been challenged.Less

Untangling the “Messy” Asian City

Jeffrey Hou and Manish Chalana

in Messy Urbanism: Understanding the "Other" Cities of Asia

This chapter outlines the rubric of “messy urbanism” in terms of its significance, threats, and theoretical frameworks. Messiness is simultaneously a range of urban conditions and a notion that we ... More

This chapter outlines the rubric of “messy urbanism” in terms of its significance, threats, and theoretical frameworks. Messiness is simultaneously a range of urban conditions and a notion that we attempt to unpack and challenge in this work. Here, messiness denotes urban conditions and processes that do not follow institutionalized or culturally prescribed notions of order. It suggests an alternative structure and hierarchy as well as agency and actions that are often subjugated by the dominant hierarchy, including notions of spatial and visual orders as well as social and political institutions and cultural norms. In this book, by examining a range of cases and contexts that span from Northeast Asia to South Asia, we are interested less in the distinct spatial and formal properties of specific locations and structures per se, but more on the social, spatial, and institutional politics of messiness, and the context in which messiness has been constructed. More precisely, we are interested in the questions that messiness raises with regard to the production of cities, cityscapes, and citizenship.Less

The cityscape

Garth Myers

in Urban Environments in Africa: A Critical Analysis of Environmental Politics

This chapter centers on the actual physical-natural substances of African urban environments, but also on the imaginary – the symbolic and spiritual conceptualizations of those landscapes, as seen ... More

This chapter centers on the actual physical-natural substances of African urban environments, but also on the imaginary – the symbolic and spiritual conceptualizations of those landscapes, as seen for instance in place-names - with Zanzibar as the featured city. Conceptually, the chapter builds from both African studies scholarship and from what was once called the ‘new’ cultural geography. It examines the cityscape physically, politically and metaphysically, arguing for the significance of spiritual cityscapes to everyday cultural understandings of urban environments as well as the generally common pattern of risk in terms of physical settings (emphasizing vulnerabilities to climate change). Emphasis on the importance of religion and spirituality in African cityscapes is not about further exoticising urbanism on the continent but instead a crucial space for using insights from African urban political ecology to speak back to UPE in other parts of the world. The Zanzibar case builds an understanding of the structures of feeling in the cityscape as manifestations of the Swahili term, fitina, meaning discord. The chapter shows that the development of a critical analysis of environmental politics requires recognition of the depths of complexity in socio-environmental conflicts such as those in Zanzibar.Less

Visualizing Strasbourg

Catherine Tatiana Dunlop

in Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland

This chapter employs a number of visual sources to analyse the urban transformation of Strasbourg, the administrative and cultural capital of disputed Alsace-Lorraine. The kinds of visual evidence ... More

This chapter employs a number of visual sources to analyse the urban transformation of Strasbourg, the administrative and cultural capital of disputed Alsace-Lorraine. The kinds of visual evidence examined include two-dimensional images of Strasbourg in form of maps, panoramas, lithographs, and photographs, as well as Strasbourg’s three-dimensional cityscape in the form of streets, residential neighborhoods, military garrisons, walls, ports, and historical monuments. Especially important to understanding the role of Strasbourg within broader French and German visions for Alsace-Lorraine are the urban plans—blueprints for the future development of the city—which provide material evidence of nationalists’ utopian schemes for the future layout of the border space. In addition to examining urban plans with nationalist motivations, this chapter also explores how Alsatian regionalists turned to the concept of the “local image” to promote Strasbourg’s independent Alsatian identity. As visual narratives of nationalist, regionalist, or internationalist agendas, Strasbourg’s competing cityscapes help us to trace shifts in collective mentalities toward the French-German border over time.Less

The Urban Landscape

Jan-Christopher Horak

in Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design

Cityscapes were a major inspiration for the work of Saul Bass, yet his depictions of urbanity sometimes appeared reductionist. On the one hand, the grid structure in his design work mirrored the ... More

Cityscapes were a major inspiration for the work of Saul Bass, yet his depictions of urbanity sometimes appeared reductionist. On the one hand, the grid structure in his design work mirrored the perpendicular lines of urban architecture in the twentieth century, just as his visualizations of cities privileged vertical-horizontal movement. On the other hand, Bass was fascinated by urban nightscapes and their perpendicular arrangement of spots of light, reducing a city’s architecture to the light spectacles on Broadway theater marquees. Bass employed a variety of strategies to depict the urban landscape in his title sequences: the pure modernist art abstraction of Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch (1955); the indexical abstraction of Four Just Men (1959); the live-action geometric designs in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Something Wild (1961), and Alcoa Premiere (1961); the visual chaos of big-city graffiti in Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961); and the flashing lights of his two Las Vegas movies, Ocean’s Eleven (1960) and Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995).Less

The City and the Pagoda: Buddhist Spatial Tactics in Shanghai

Francesca Tarocco

in Handbook of Religion and the Asian City: Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century

This chapter explores the multidimensional relationship between exceptional sites and the contexts in which they function by focusing on the emergence of the so-called Shanghai buddhascape of the ... More

This chapter explores the multidimensional relationship between exceptional sites and the contexts in which they function by focusing on the emergence of the so-called Shanghai buddhascape of the 1920s and 1930s and its influence on the contemporary urban fabric. It describes Shanghai as a privileged site for understanding Buddhist-inspired self-fashioning and, more generally, the spatial tactics of Buddhist practitioners in the context of colonial modernity as well as global capitalism. It also considers the sensitivities of the urban cultural elite toward Buddhism and its presence in China's modern cityscapes. It argues that ordinary Shanghai urbanites find solace and purpose in Buddhist technologies of salvation.Less

The garden of the world: Byron and the geography of Italy

Mauro Pala

in Byron and Italy

This chapter concentrates on Byron’s relation to Italy as geography and landscape. It demonstrates that, while reading his poetry confronts us repeatedly with the poet’s digressive, fluid mobilité, ... More

This chapter concentrates on Byron’s relation to Italy as geography and landscape. It demonstrates that, while reading his poetry confronts us repeatedly with the poet’s digressive, fluid mobilité, studying his relationship to Italy repeatedly confronts us with his capacity for sustained attention to the given. Yet, as this chapter contends, in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, attending to the given is not simply a matter of ‘seizing’ the ‘colouring of the scenes which fleet along’ for Byron. By contrast, his depictions of Italian cityscapes and landscapes are ‘complex, heterogeneous and personal negotiations’ not just with ‘real places’ but also ‘their attendant histories’. In Byron’s poetry about Italy, these negotiations not only cast place as an essential component in the consciousness that observes it, but also make that consciousness ‘an essential element of place’.Less

Gutter and Skyline: The New Verse and the Metropolitan Cityscape

John Timberman Newcomb

in How Did Poetry Survive?: The Making of Modern American Verse

This chapter examines the little magazines' shift to a poetry of modern life between 1910 and 1925 by discarding long-standing generic strictures of style and subject matter in favor of themes ... More

This chapter examines the little magazines' shift to a poetry of modern life between 1910 and 1925 by discarding long-standing generic strictures of style and subject matter in favor of themes dealing with the industrialized metropolis. Soon after 1910, many poets such as T. S. Eliot, Claude McKay, and Carl Sandburg began to write verses about life in the modern city. This turn toward urban subject matter marked a decisive change in American poetry's relationship to modernity and an epochal departure from national traditions. This chapter considers the integral connection between verse and the visual arts as many American poets focused on investigating urban modernity as a subject. It also discusses the different ways that these poets learned to represent the machine-age metropolis after 1910 and challenged the aesthetic and ideological verities of class, ethnicity, and gender underlying their romantic-genteel inheritance; acts of observation in American cityscape verse that operate at both microscopic and panoramic levels; and poems of gutters, street pavements, and skylines that are complementary within an emerging poetics of urban materiality.Less

Hard-Boiled Tradition and Early Film Noir

Homer B. Pettey

in Film Noir

Hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir are almost exclusively aligned with the desires for money and sex, two mirrored conditions of a fragile human economy. The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double ... More

Hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir are almost exclusively aligned with the desires for money and sex, two mirrored conditions of a fragile human economy. The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944) certainly rely upon economic issues in their adaptations from the Hammett, Cain, and Chandler novels. All three novels and their film adaptations deal with sexual exchanges for material possessions: Brigid's erotic enticements to Spade for the mysterious falcon; Phyllis's promise of amorous reward for the monetary compensation from the indemnity policy; and Mrs. Grayle's lubricious invitations to Spade in order to guard her jaded secret and thereby her social position. Of course, this concupiscence as capital outlay is hardly limited to feminine desires in film noir, since Spade, Neff, and Marlowe engage in this kind of self-interested manipulation for profit. Emerging during the era of the international Great Depression and the rise of global fascism, film noir often addresses the complex, paradoxical interrelationship of economics and passion. Excess—financial, sexual, material—serves as a central motif in all of these films as it had in the development of the hard-boiled detective genre. While Hammett, Cain, and Chandler established a new style and aesthetic for hard-boiled detective fiction and for film noir, their art also reflected the pervasive economic troubles that plagued Depression-era and early post-war American culture.Less

Navigating the City Interior

Linda Rui Feng

in City of Marvel and Transformation: Changan and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China

“Navigating the City Interior” demonstrates that when Tang narratives follow their examinee-protagonists into the city walls of Chang’an, the liminal status of the protagonists becomes imbricated ... More

“Navigating the City Interior” demonstrates that when Tang narratives follow their examinee-protagonists into the city walls of Chang’an, the liminal status of the protagonists becomes imbricated with Chang’an’s urban space, and the itineraries their wanderings trace out shed light on its spatial logic. The neophyte in Tang tales, frequently represented as being put to the test by the city’s extra-official and extra-familial networks, show that literati personhood in the latter half of the Tang was a distinctly metropolitan one, and was colored and inflected by the distinctive and unruly configuration of space and social alliances found in Chang’an.Less

Demolition

Jie Li

in Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life

This chapter chronicles the transformations of Shanghai's cityscape. The late 1980s and 1990s saw a gradual easing of the housing crisis and an emptying out of old alleyways as many work units built ... More

This chapter chronicles the transformations of Shanghai's cityscape. The late 1980s and 1990s saw a gradual easing of the housing crisis and an emptying out of old alleyways as many work units built and allocated housing to their employees. After Shanghai's economic renaissance in the early 1990s, private real estate developers remolded the city's housing landscape by building thousands of high-rises with spacious condominiums. By the 2000s, most remaining residents of alleyways in the Yangshupu area were of an older generation with little social or economic capital, mainly workers retired or laid off from bankrupt state-owned enterprises. In 2005, the Shanghai municipal government announced plans to “renovate old neighborhoods” through the demolition of several large patches of land filled with old alleyways. The biggest of these neighborhoods was Pingliang West Lots and Xikuai, consisting of 0.33 square kilometers and sixteen thousand households.Less

Introduction: In Search of Things Past: Mapping Rio

Bruno Carvalho

in Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro

This book offers new perspectives on the cultural history of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital from 1763 to 1960. Drawing on concerns and approaches from a variety of disciplines, as well as multiple ... More

This book offers new perspectives on the cultural history of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital from 1763 to 1960. Drawing on concerns and approaches from a variety of disciplines, as well as multiple sources such as music and literature, censuses, transportation records, maps, memoirs, family archives and scientific treatises, the book explores how Rio’s cityscape gave rise to urban forms, social relationships and cultural expressions in Brazil. In the context of Rio de Janeiro’s urban history, it looks at Cidade Nova and its past. It also examines how multi-ethnic encounters and a permeable cultural life were able to flourish in a country known for its inequality and asymmetrical exchanges, where slavery was abolished only in 1888. Finally, the book explains how Rio came to be known as the cidade partida, which means ‘split city’, ‘broken city’ or ‘divided city’.Less

Autobiographical Landscaping

Iván Villarmea Álvarez

in Documenting Cityscapes: Urban Change in Contemporary Non-Fiction Film

This chapter discusses the “autobiographical landscaping” film, which develops a personal reading of the territory based on the filmmaker's own experiences of it. The images are accompanied by a ... More

This chapter discusses the “autobiographical landscaping” film, which develops a personal reading of the territory based on the filmmaker's own experiences of it. The images are accompanied by a first-person commentary that makes an explicit link between the filmmaker and the landscape. In these films, the depicted space is always a lived space, whose current appearance allows filmmakers to return to the cities they knew at a particular time of their life. The ultimate purpose of this type of landscaping is the same as that of urban self-portraits—the device discussed in the second part of this book—but its main formal strategy is still the direct record of the cityscape. Accordingly, autobiographical landscape films never include reenactments, archival footage or the filmmaker's on-camera presence, because their main subject is space itself rather than urban change, the passage of time, or the filmmaker's memory.Less

Cityscapes: Panoramas and the Mobile Gaze

in Film, Mobility and Urban Space: A Cinematic Geography of Liverpool

This chapter examines archive footage of Liverpool waterfront shot by tourists and other visitors to the city in the 1920s and 1930s. It suggests that archival film practices provide a means to ... More

This chapter examines archive footage of Liverpool waterfront shot by tourists and other visitors to the city in the 1920s and 1930s. It suggests that archival film practices provide a means to explore and ‘navigate’ the dialectical processes which inform the social and cultural production of space in the city, and that that cityscape panorama represents a powerful form of urban spatial expression which has come to define an increasingly contradictory image of the city. The chapter also contends that juxtaposing contemporary representations of the waterfront with these earlier images shows the shifting cinematic geographies of a post-industrial landscape which has become increasingly virtualized and disembedded from everyday social and material landscapes.Less