Article

Making sense of absence

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

Abstract

Based on Tsai Ming-liang's cinematic portrayals of cities, I argue for consideration and appreciation of artistic devices in our thinking and writing on cities. Specifically, I look into four types of absence the Taiwanese director engages with: absence of movement, absence of speech, absence of home and absence of infrastructure. Tsai depicts absence by extrapolating what seem to be inherent elements of an urban situation or an urban setting thus disrupting their taken-for-grantedness. Tsai's multi-layered preoccupation with the notion of absence and the visual language he develops to talk about it may be inspiring for urban researchers, especially those among us working with visual methods. After introducing his work and elaborating on its urban contexts, I will investigate Tsai Ming-liang's use of absence as a method of inquiring into various aspects of urban life, particularly those involving interactions with infrastructure. In the spirit of interdisciplinary and inclusive thinking promoted by City, I will conclude by reiterating the validity of cinema—among other arts—as a tool for critical reflection on cities.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

... Our response to new urban developments is affected more by our personal knowledge of cities than written histories, archives and documents [23]. Perhaps the above methodology for photographic urban recording can offer a more informed mechanism for citizens to voice their interpretation of the city. ...
Article
Full-text available
As urbanites continue to experience a broadening emotional detachment with the evolving character and identity of the urban spaces in which they live, the time has come to stop and consider our emotional connection with the built environment. By re-evaluating the subjective methods once applied in the topographic surveys of photographers such as Eugine Atget we can gain a clearer understanding of our relationship with cities. The work of such artists involves us in the imaginary and invites us to assemble our own narrative context of the landscapes which they explore. This unutilised approach reveals the perceived narrative fabric of urban space and it provokes the viewer to place their own psychological and cultural associations onto images of urbanity. I will ascertain whether such methods can be used to express the emotional connection we have to our cities, and identify how these insights can inclusively impact upon design education and the development of new urban spaces.
Chapter
This chapter continues the analytical discussion of seven British films. It begins by examining the cinematic construction of the migrant across the cycle before considering the challenge to the distribution of the urban ‘sensible’ posed by the images of urbanization created by these films. In the first discussion, it is emphasized how the migrant appears as a contradictory figure. Some contradictions relate to issues of citizenship or difference/homogeneity but others relate to the perceived deficiencies or qualities of the migrant. The second discussion, drawing upon Rancière’s notion of ‘horizontal distributions’, is concerned with how images of urbanization, via their cinematic circulation, encourage a hermeneutic fusion of urban horizons.
Article
Full-text available
Visual research methods are becoming increasingly important for qualitative studies. Within this dynamically expanding field, methods for analysing ‘natural’ video recordings have developed considerably over the past decades. In this article we discuss methodological aspects of general importance for any analysis of this type of video data. Being a fundamentally interpretive method, our first argument is that sequential analysis is always a hermeneutic endeavour, which requires methodical understanding. The second refers to data collection. We stress that, in addition to sequential analysis, the ethnographic dimension of video analysis should be taken into account methodologically. Video analysis requires, thirdly, a systematic account of the subjectivity, both of the actors analysed as well as of the analysts. Our arguments are grounded in extensive data from several studies, including the communicative genre of powerpoint presentations, commemoration rituals and public events. Selected data fragments are presented here to support our claims. Building upon this expertise, we propose further improvement of video analysis methodology by reflecting on our own practice of analysing video in data sessions (i.e. the ‘video analysis of video analysis’).
Book
Full-text available
Das Buch bietet eine verständliche Einführung in die videographische Methode. Es richtet sich an Forschende, die „natürliche“ Situationen mit der in ihnen stattfindenden Interaktion und Kommunikation mit Hilfe von Videodaten interpretativ untersuchen möchten. Der Band verschafft einen Überblick über den derzeitigen Stand der in den letzten Jahren aufgeblühten verschiedenen Verfahren der Videodatenanalyse. Dies dient als Hintergrund zur Bestimmung der methodologischen Prinzipien der Videographie als interpretativem Verfahren. Ausführlich wird anhand von Beispielen die fokussierte Ethnographie als Grundlage der Videographie dargestellt, ebenso wie die Videointeraktionsanalyse als Kernstück der Analyse videographisch erhobener Daten. Ausgehend von der Forschungserfahrung der Autoren werden methodische Forschungsschritte sowie praktische und technische Fragen und Probleme behandelt, die im Forschungsprozess auftreten. Der Band bietet außerdem einen Ausblick auf die theoretische Einbettung der Videographie im Rahmen der interpretativen Ansätze der Sozialforschung. Er ist mit ausführlichen Serviceteilen versehen, die weiterführende Literatur, technische Hinweise und exemplarische Studien enthalten.
Article
Full-text available
Article
Full-text available
With this paper I enter the discussion on waste with the example of the cast-off mattress. In Los Angeles, mattresses left out at curbsides and in alleyways are picked up, put on trucks and brought to mattress recycling centers as part of subsistence scavenging. However, some mattresses also end up in local prop houses and eventually are used as set dressing on films. Once brought into the circulation of objects within the cultural industry of Hollywood, a cast-off and often soiled, ripped and stained mattress attains revalorization through its symbolic role as a functional mattress on screen. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the film industry, I use the example of a mattress plucked from the street and used in the film Fight Club (1999) to discuss Hollywood as an alternative waste regime.
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines the much-hyped 2012 Olympic Games ‘legacy’ in relation to the displacement experiences of lower-income East Londoners. The paper begins by outlining the overall context of housing-related regeneration including the reduced role for social housing, especially council (public) housing in London. It then sets out a framework for understanding how regeneration, state-led gentrification and displacement are intertwined, as well as how such processes have been contested. The paper examines these issues in greater depth with reference to case studies of the inhabitants of two working-class spaces in the London Borough of Newham, an Olympics host borough. The first study is based on the Carpenters Estate, a council housing estate in Stratford that is facing potential demolition, and the second focuses on young people living in a temporary supported housing unit. These studies illustrate how the 2012 Olympics, alongside other regeneration schemes, is changing the nature of space and place from the perspective of existing East London residents and how gentrification is implicated in such transformations. Neither the Carpenters Estate residents nor the young people think that the Olympics and other regeneration schemes in Newham are primarily occurring, if at all, for their benefit—indeed, displacement processes may well mean that they are no longer able to live in their current neighbourhood. The Olympics legacy is for others, not for them.
Article
Full-text available
Segregation along lines of race/ethnicity and class has created multi-ethnic and rather class-homogeneous neighbourhoods in various European cities, commonly labelled as ‘disadvantaged’. Such neighbourhoods are often seen as ‘lacking’ community, as local networks are crucial for belonging and mixed neighbourhoods are too diverse to provide homogeneous identifications. However, in contrast to the understandings of the sociology of community, people might still experience ‘belonging’, yet in different ways. This article argues that we have to focus on the under-researched ‘time in-between’ (Byrne, 1978), the absent ties that Granovetter (1973) pointed to, to understand belonging, while moving away from a conception of the anonymous city and from the urban village. This article explores how absent ties affect belonging by empirically sustaining the notion of public familiarity: both recognizing and being recognized in local spaces. Using regression models on survey data from two mixed neighbourhoods in Berlin, Germany, we analyse the importance of neighbourhood use for public familiarity as well as how it relates to residents' comfort zone: people's feeling of belonging and their sense that others would intervene on their behalf. Our findings indicate that research on neighbourhoods could benefit greatly from a careful consideration of the ‘time in-between’.
Article
Full-text available
Conviviality across a number of disciplines now conveys a deeper concern with the human condition and how we think about human modes of togetherness. This collection of essays illustrates some of the ways conviviality can be used as an analytical tool to ask and explore the ways and conditions for living together. This introduction surveys a number of key ideas and meanings of 'conviviality' across various disciplines providing the readers with an overview of usages and understandings of the term. It identifies gaps in the existing literature, proposes how a comparative perspective elucidates the concepts and shows how the articles within this Special Issue contribute analytically to our understanding of conviviality.
Article
Full-text available
O ver two decades ago, the term “restructuring” became a popular label for describing the tumultuous political-economic and spatial transformations that were unfolding across the global urban system. As Edward Soja (1987: 178; italics in original) indicated in a classic formulation: Restructuring is meant to convey a break in secular trends and a shift towards a significantly different order and configuration of social, economic and political life. It thus evokes a sequence of breaking down and building up again, deconstruction and attempted reconstitution , arising from certain incapacities or weaknesses in the established order which preclude conventional adaptations and demand significant structural change instead […] Restructuring implies flux and transition, offensive and defensive postures, a complex mix of continuity and change. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scholars mobilized a variety of categories—including, among others, deindustrialization, reindustrialization, post-Fordism, internationalization, global city formation, urban entrepreneurialism, informalization, gentrification and sociospatial polarization—in order to describe and theorize the ongoing deconstruction and attempted reconstitution of urban social space. These concepts provided key intellectual tools through which a generation of urbanists could elaborate detailed empirical studies of ongoing urban transformations both in North America and beyond. In the early 2000s, such concepts remain central to urban political economy, but they are now being complemented by references to “neoliberalism,” which is increasingly seen as an essential descriptor of the contemporary urban condition. This widening and deepening interest in the problematic of neoliberalism among urban scholars is evident in the papers presented in this special issue of CITY : all deploy variations on this terminology—“neoliberalism,” “neoliberal,” “neoliberalized,” “neoliberalization,” and so forth—in order to interpret major aspects of contemporary urban restructuring in North American cities. At the same time, like earlier analysts of urban restructuring, the contributors to this special issue reject linear models of urban transition, emphasizing instead its uneven, contentious, volatile and uncertain character. Indeed, each of the contributions included here suggestively illustrates Soja's conception of restructuring: whether implicitly or explicitly, each postulates a systemic breakdown of established forms of urban life (generally associated with postwar, Fordist-Keynesian capitalism) and the subsequent proliferation of social, political, discursive, and representational struggles to create a transformed, “neoliberalized” urban order.
Article
Naked City is a continuation of Prof. Sharon Zukin's earlier books (Loft Living and Cultures of Cities) and updates her views on how people use culture and capital in New York. Its focus is on a conflict between city dwellers' desire for authentic origins and new beginnings, which many contemporary megalopolises meet. City dwellers wish to defend their own moral rights to redefine their places for living given upscale constructions, rapid growth, and the ethics of standardization. The author shows how in the frameworks of this conflict they construct the perceived authenticity of common and uncommon urban places. Each book chapter tells about various urban spaces, uncovering different dimensions of authenticity in order to catch and explain fundamental changes in New York that emerged in the 1960s under the mixed influences of private investors, government, media, and consumer tastes. The Journal of Economic Sociology published "Introduction. The City That Lost Its Soul," where the author explains the general idea of the book. She discusses the reasons for the emergence and history of the social movement for authenticity, having combated both the government and private investors since the 1960s. Prof. Zukin also traces the transformation of the concept of authenticity from a property of a person, to a property of a thing, to a property of a life experience and power.
Chapter
In Taipei, walls crumble, ceilings cave in, and spaces portend their impending destruction—or so the city is portrayed by some of its most prominent filmmakers. The directors Edward Yang (Yang Dechang) and Tsai Ming-liang (Cai Mingliang) present two mirroring aspects of urban ruin. Tsai has focused on sites of doom and vanishing cityscapes. In Dong (The Hole, 1998), two residents cope with the growing porosity of their damaged and leaking apartments, while Taipei is under quarantine because of an epidemic outbreak. The short Tianqiao bu jian le (The Skywalk is Gone) focuses on the sky walk in front of the New Railway Station, which was torn down since filming Tsai’s Ni neibian jidian (What Time is it There?, 2001). Bu san (English title Goodbye, Dragon Inn, 2003) takes place in Fuhe Grand Theater in Yong-ho, designated for demolition and razed soon after the shoot. Edward Yang’s Taipei, on the other hand, is mostly affluent and chic. Yet glittering images of the prosperous city provide an ironic commentary on the breakdown of interpersonal relations. The deep unrest is foregrounded against the fashionably designed hangouts of the jet set.
Article
Films about cities abound. They provide fantasies for those who recognize their city and those for whom the city is a faraway dream or nightmare. How does cinema rework city planners' hopes and city dwellers' fears of modern urbanism? Can an analysis of city films answer some of the questions posed in urban studies? What kinds of vision for the future and images of the past do city films offer? What are the changes that city films have undergone? Cities and Cinema puts urban theory and cinema studies in dialogue. The book's first section analyzes three important genres of city films that follow in historical sequence, each associated with a particular city, moving from the city film of the Weimar Republic to the film noir associated with Los Angeles and the image of Paris in the cinema of the French New Wave. The second section discusses socio-historical themes of urban studies, beginning with the relationship of film industries and individual cities, continuing with the portrayal of war torn and divided cities, and ending with the cinematic expression of utopia and dystopia in urban science fiction. The last section negotiates the question of identity and place in a global world, moving from the portrayal of ghettos and barrios to the city as a setting for gay and lesbian desire, to end with the representation of the global city in transnational cinematic practices. The book suggests that modernity links urbanism and cinema. It accounts for the significant changes that city film has undergone through processes of globalization, during which the city has developed from an icon in national cinema to a privileged site for transnational cinematic practices. It is a key text for students and researchers of film studies, urban studies and cultural studies.
Article
How are the political possibilities of film related to urban space? What are the ethical implications of representing urban space on film? How does the use of urban space help to theorise film?. Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities traces recurring debates about what constitutes film's political potential and argues that the relation between film and urban space has been crucial to these debates and their historical transformations. The book demonstrates that in the attempt to follow certain prescriptions - shooting on location, disrupting normalizing time, experimenting with memory, interlinking the spaces of screen and cinema - films invariably use the relation between film and urban space as a kind of laboratory, testing anew received prescriptions but invariably encountering new opportunities and new limits. A wide range of key films, from Dziga Vertov's 1929 Man with a Movie Camera to Jia Zhangke's 2008 24 City, are discussed in depth, each offering an argument for how the encounter between specific manifestations of modern urban space and politically engaged film strategies has served to challenge the status quo and stimulate critical thinking. An insightful and thought-provoking read, Film and Urban Space: Critical Possibilities presents scholars and advanced students in Film Studies with a compelling argument for the impact of urban space in creating film's critical political and ethical possibilities.
Article
City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process - an "anticipatory politics" - that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.
Article
Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa's cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state institutions or dominant cultural norms, these areas have become estuarial zones in which varied communities of convenience are taking shape. Unlike well-documented urban gateways or ghettos, these communities range from radical forms of exclusion to remarkable modes of accommodation that enable people to extract usufruct rights: to live in but not become fully part of the cities they occupy. Using examples from Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, this article explores the nature of these estuaries in ways that challenge the conceptual foundations typically informing debates over migrant rights, integration, and the boundaries of belonging. This means eroding clear distinctions between hosts and guests along with a call to reevaluate the relative importance of state institutions and policies. Most fundamentally, it questions new residents' interests in localized political and social recognition and participation. The article concludes by suggesting the need to reconsider the forms and scale of community through which the newly urbanized claim rights and the nature of the rights they desire.
Article
This book offers a sustained examination of the masculinism of contemporary geographical discourses. Drawing on the work of feminist theories about the intersection of pwer, knowledge and subjectivity, different aspects of the discipline's masculinism are discussed in a series of essays which bring influential approaches in recent geography together with feminist accounts of the space of the everyday, the notion of a sense of place and views of landscape. In the final chapter, the spatial imagery of a variety of feminists is examined in order to argue that the geographical imagination implicit in feminist discussions of the politics of location is one example of a geography which does not deny difference in the name of a universal masculinity. -from Publisher
Article
The London Borough of Hackney is one of the most diverse places in the United Kingdom. It is characterized not only by a multiplicity of ethnic minorities but also by differentiations in terms of migration histories, religions and educational and economic backgrounds, both among long-term residents and newcomers. This article attempts to describe how people negotiate social interactions in such a 'super-diverse' context. It develops the notion of 'commonplace diversity', referring to ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity being experienced as a normal part of social life by local residents. This commonplace diversity has resulted in people acting with 'civility towards diversity'. While in public space people do not change their behaviour according to other people's backgrounds, in semi-public spaces, such as associations and local institutions, here conceptualized as 'parochial space', people's different backgrounds are acknowledged and sometimes talked about. The article discusses how people negotiate their differences in these two different kinds of spaces. It shows how civility towards diversity is used as a strategy to both engage with difference as well as avoid deeper contact. Civility thus facilitates the negotiation of both positive relations and possible tensions.
Article
This article is a response to Bob Catterall's call for urban studies ‘able to listen to, read and touch the sounds, sights and textures of the city’ (2004, 309) and a contribution to the debate on navigating urban space that has been recurring in CITY. I argue that an inclusion of places of urban standstill complements the analyses of navigating urban space that focus primarily on movement and that it allows for a more inclusive understanding of urban space in general. In his portrayals of urban life the Polish hip-hop artist Peja presents the most neglected streets of Jez˙yce, one of Poznań's inner-city neighbourhoods. His gaze pierces through backyards, gateways, and street corners, thus revealing an ‘other city’ behind the polished image of Poznań as communicated through municipal media and place marketing. The MC acknowledges the city caught in standstill and the people who inhabit the urban spaces behind the threshold of visibility. The sites of urban standstill dominating Peja's oeuvre are liminal not only because of their literal in-betweenness, but also because of their inherent potential for transition. An avid observer and chronicler of urban decay, social inequalities and paralyzing inertia, Peja holds unrelinquished faith in human endurance.
Article
As millions of urban residents in the majority world attain middle-class status, there is not only a great deal of ambiguity as to what exactly being middle class is, but also an occlusion of many efforts residents themselves have made to attain this status. Because multiple routes have been pursued to improve livelihoods, as well as different conditions and support, there is also a growing ambivalence about the various implications of this attainment. At times, the performance of such status seems to require relinquishing important livelihood practices. While availed of increased consumption, assets and relative autonomy, many such residents are wary of the heightened vulnerabilities that new forms of livelihood and individuation posit. As increased accumulation has been predicated on both the changing global positions of national production systems and the long-term incremental efforts of residents themselves, how the divergent implications of these distinct routes to middle-class status are negotiated on a day-to-day basis are critical issues for the elaboration of urban politics. Focusing on Jakarta, the paper considers some of the ways in which an emergent middle class have improved livelihoods and opportunities, as well as how they hedge their bets in the pursuit of lifestyles and norms conventionally associated with middle-class status.
Article
One of the most striking developments across the social sciences in the past decade has been the growth of research methods using visual materials. It is often suggested that this growth is somehow related to the increasing importance of visual images in contemporary social and cultural practice. However, the form of the relationship between ‘visual research methods’ and ‘contemporary visual culture’ has not yet been interrogated. This paper conducts such an interrogation, exploring the relation between ‘visual research methods’ – as they are constituted in quite particular ways by a growing number of handbooks, reviews, conference and journals – and contemporary visual culture – as characterized by discussions of ‘convergence culture’. The paper adopts a performative approach to ‘visual research methods’. It suggests that when they are used, ‘visual research methods’ create neither a ‘social’ articulated through culturally mediated images, nor a ‘research participant’ competency in using such images. Instead, the paper argues that the intersection of visual culture and ‘visual research methods’ should be located in their shared way of using images, since in both, images tend to be deployed much more as communicational tools than as representational texts. The paper concludes by placing this argument in the context of recent discussions about the production of sociological knowledge in the wider social field.
Article
Social polarisation theory assumes that the world's major cities tend to divide into dual social strata. However, in the context of developmental states integrated into the Greater South China economic zone, an empirical study of three Asian cities challenges the social polarisation hypothesis and suggests alternative forms of social transformation. Data on changes in employment, occupation and household income in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taipei show that urban regimes and social policies instigated by developmental states play a decisive role in the formation of social inequality and marginal urban populations.
Article
This paper develops a post-humanist account of urban public space. It breaks with a long tradition that has located the culture and politics of public spaces such as streets and parks or libraries and town halls in the quality of inter-personal relations in such spaces. Instead, it argues that human dynamics in public space are centrally influenced by the entanglement and circulation of human and non-human bodies and matter in general, productive of a material culture that forms a kind of pre-cognitive template for civic and political behaviour. The paper explores the idea of 'situated surplus', manifest in varying dimensions of compliance, as the force that produces a distinctive sense of urban collective culture and civic affirmation in urban life.
Article
This paper has been prompted by a journal debate at the start of the new millennium on the future of urban sociology in light of the proliferation of urban studies in many disciplines at a time of increasingly blurred boundaries between cities and the world at large. It was a debate that, inter alia, asked urban sociology to engage seriously with globalization (and contemporary modernity in general) as well as to return to its original concerns with urban social inequality in a new division of inter-disciplinary labour. This paper steers clear of defining a role for urban sociology, principally because it believes urban studies to have become a field of such intense inter-disciplinarity that it makes little sense to demarcate the urban sociology from urban geography, urban planning and politics, and urban anthropology. Instead the debate is used to raise a more basic question of urban ontology relating, firstly, to how cities should be imagined as places, so that due recognition can be given to the radical exteriority that characterizes them and, secondly, to how the urban social should be imagined, so that trans-local influences and non-human associations can be counted as part of the urban social. It is argued that these two ontological inflections imply a different understanding of the geography and sociology of the city to that assumed in the original debate.
Article
Canadian cities are widely recognized for their effective provision of public transportation. Both Montreal and Toronto are often cited as models of public transit, with system performance and ridership figures comparable to the best in the world, including Europe, the USA and Australia. The busway network in Ottawa is internationally acclaimed as an innovative and successful alternative to capital-intensive urban rail systems (Cervero, 2001). In 1996, Vancouver was acknowledged as the North American Transit System of the Year by the American Public Transit Association. These Canadian transit systems experienced their greatest capital expansion as a result of public-sector planning and financing, and each system is currently operated predominantly by public-sector corporations. Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, private-sector involvement in the planning, financing and operation of public transit has become increasingly popular in Canada. Seen as latecomers in experimenting with private-sector involvement in the public transit industry, some Canadian systems have now begun to outsource the operation and maintenance of bus or rail services to private firms.
Article
This paper begins from the assumption that the meanings of a photograph are established through its uses. This point has been well made by a number of historical geographers in recent arguments for the importance of photography as a record of historically-specific ways of seeing the world. This paper, however, extends that argument, and focuses on the relationships between the photograph and the historical geographer. Drawing on my own experiences of working in the Print Room of the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at photographs taken by Lady Hawarden in the mid-nineteenth century, I discuss the effects of that archive both on them and on myself as a researcher. I argue that that archive is a powerful space which to a certain degree allies the visual and spatial resources of the photographs and the research practice of the historical geographer to its own discipline; but I also argue that its discipline can be disrupted by its own contradictory discourses and by other relationships between researcher and the photographs. In conclusion, I ask for more consideration to be given to contemporary research practice in relation to historical photographs. Historical geographers cannot themselves claim to be merely the descriptive recorders of history and geography if they wish to deny this status to photographs.
Article
The paper discusses Taipei's status as a regional global city within the context of the theoretical framework of Hill and Kim. The discussion is based on both theoretical and empirical considerations. On the one hand, theoretical discourses revolving around global cities tend to ignore the possible variations between global cities, so much so that the type based on New York has been regarded as a standard global city and the politico-economic peculiarities of Tokyo and Seoul have tended to be downplayed. On the other hand, Taipei, a Third World city that might gain the status of a regional global city, has not hitherto received extensive examination and observation. Resorting to the binary framework formulated by Hill and Kim to emphasise the salient features of Tokyo and Seoul, the author describes and underscores Taipei's development experiences.
Article
Well over a millennium and a half ago, Augustine distinguished between two cities: the Heavenly City and the Earthly City. While one was the site of all that was holy and spiritual, the place of faith, the other was foul and wicked, the realm of the flesh. Such dichotomies, expanded into a full‐fledged binary logic, persist in the way that we think about cities today. But as Bülent Diken shows in these reflections on João Fernando Meirelles' film—entitled, appropriately enough—City of God, cities today are bound up with the very things they try to exclude: ghettos, slums, and shanty‐towns. Binary urban logics in fact produce more grey than they do black and white. The notorious favela outside of Rio that is the subject of Meirelles' film is simultaneously included and excluded from all that Rio represents. It is at once a dumping ground for the city's byproducts—the (human) waste generated by its own development—and its products. It is a zone beyond the civilized city, which, as the city's inverted, carnivalesque, image, makes the very idea of civilization possible. It is, in other words, the lawless state of exception that proves the law. In this careful and original analysis of Meirelles' stunning film, Diken employs the work of Žižek and Agamben, among others, to illustrate the ways in which the favela—the state of urban exception, the space supposedly outside the law and outside civilization, where life is reduced to mere existence—is not outside the city, but within its very center. ‘All contemporary urban space,’ Diken explains, ‘is organized according to the logic of the favela’.
Article
With a brilliance that captures ‘places photographed in all their fucked‐up grandeur,’ (Alvarez, 2009, p. 414), the HBO series The Wire has seared unforgettable images of Baltimore and American urbanism into the imaginations of a vast, transnational audience. But we have known, ever since Benjamin and Sontag, that cinematography and photography can reinforce stereotypes, appropriate identities, and violate people and places through the assertion of epistemological power. Today, critical visual theory is going mainstream. Almost no‐one views photographs anymore as unproblematic reflections of reality, and popular culture has become a fragmented and politicized media landscape of niche audiences that have learned the lessons of postpositivist cynical sophistication all too well. In this hostile climate, can we redeem the simple, innocent snapshot? I think we should try. Armin Lobek’s (1956) Things Maps Don’t Tell Us provides the inspiration for a simple, constructive, and critical approach that acknowledges the limits of visual representation while avoiding the costs of innovative yet negative theories defined by disillusionment.
Article
A consequence of the unequal power relationship between local communities and key partnership agencies, is that land and property development issues are frequently considered in isolation from social and welfare related issues which directly affect disadvantaged groups. Rather, attention and resources are, for the most part, focused on the most visible outward manifestation of the ëurban problem’. This ‘problem’ itself tends to be viewed in terms of its impact on the interests of the agency or agencies responding to it, rather than as part of a complex web of issues involving a variety of public and private bodies and most crucially, local populations. This process, therefore, tends to reinforce pre‐existing tensions between the social, economic and physical aspects of regeneration, and the marginalisation of the involvement of local communities in planning, delivering and evaluating the services that effect their daily lives.It is this covert dimension of regeneration activity which this paper aims to explore, highlighting the broad issues raised by the growing emphasis placed on partnerships arrangements in the 1980s and 1990s. John Schaechter and Patrick Loftman draw on the experience of Birmingham's Newtown South Aston City Challenge initiative to examine the extent to which social policy issues are relegated to the margins of policy formulation and implementation and the degree of resident involvement in agenda setting and decision making. They conclude with a discussion of the key issues involved in establishing the appropriate consultation and participation mechanisms needed to give residents a meaningful voice in the process of urban regeneration.
Chapter
This chapter contains section titled:
Article
This paper addresses the question of class: its significance, construction, representation in official policies and the changing place and nature of class relations and struggles in contemporary Britain. It argues that both changes in women's labour market participation patterns and a new rhetoric of class condescension and symbolic violence have significant implications both for widening class divisions between women and for the nature of class contacts in contemporary cities. As ties of love and affection and mutual exchange that (purportedly) characterise the home are being transformed by the growing importance of the home as a locus of commodified domestic labour, the home is a new site of inter-class contact and conflict. Thus “private” households are increasingly becoming the sites of class struggle, adding strength to feminist arguments about the inextricable connections between class and gender relations.
Article
This article is an intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies. It seeks to understand and transform the ways in which the cities of the global South are studied and represented in urban research, and to some extent in popular discourse. As such, the article is primarily concerned with a formation of ideas —‘subaltern urbanism’— which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes. Of these, the ubiquitous ‘slum’ is the most prominent. Writing against apocalyptic and dystopian narratives of the slum, subaltern urbanism provides accounts of the slum as a terrain of habitation, livelihood, self‐organization and politics. This is a vital and even radical challenge to dominant narratives of the megacity. However, this article is concerned with the limits of and alternatives to subaltern urbanism. It thus highlights emergent analytical strategies, utilizing theoretical categories that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment such as the megacity, the slum, mass politics and the habitus of the dispossessed. Instead, four categories are discussed — peripheries, urban informality, zones of exception and gray spaces. Informed by the urbanism of the global South, these categories break with ontological and topological understandings of subaltern subjects and subaltern spaces. Résumé Intervenant sur les aspects épistémologiques et méthodologiques des études urbaines, cet article cherche à comprendre et à modifier les modalités d'analyse et de représentation des villes des pays du Sud dans la recherche urbaine et, jusqu'à un certain point, dans le discours populaire. Pour ce faire, l'attention est portée sur une formation d'idées, ‘l'urbanisme subalterne', qui vise la conceptualisation de la ‘mégacité', avec ses espaces subalternes et ses classes subalternes. Parmi ceux‐ci, le ‘taudis' ( slum ) omniprésent est le plus saillant. Contredisant les textes apocalyptiques et dystopiques sur ce lieu, l'urbanisme subalterne apporte des récits du taudis vu comme un cadre d'habitation, de source de revenu, d'auto‐organisation et de réflexion politique. Les écrits explicatifs dominants sur la mégacité sont ainsi mis en question de façon cruciale, voire radicale. Toutefois, l'article s'intéresse aux limites de l'urbanisme subalterne et à ses alternatives. Il met donc en avant des stratégies analytiques nouvelles, avec des catégories théoriques qui transcendent les métonymes habituels du sous‐développement comme mégacité, taudis, politique de masse et habitus des défavorisés. Quatre catégories sont présentées à la place: périphéries, informalité urbaine, zones d'exception et espaces gris. Reposant sur l'urbanisme des pays du Sud, elles dérogent aux conceptions ontologiques et topologiques des sujets subalternes et des espaces subalternes.
Article
Work on film and the city is still in its infancy for Africa. To my knowledge, there is little research on the way that film has contributed to promoting the image of African cities. This article aims to help fill this gap. In doing so, it draws on Giuliana Bruno's observations on the close relationship between cinema and mass tourism. The article reviews existing literature on cinema and urban Africa. It then explores ways in which Cape Town was represented on film before the ending of apartheid in 1994 and the subsequent rapid rise of the city as a mass tourist destination, international film location and centre of a local film industry. A number of films about the city have since been made for tourists and sold as DVDs or aired on the likes of the Travel Channel. They predictably construct Cape Town as a desirably ‘unique’ and exotic, yet sufficiently safe and ‘vibrant’, city of the imagination. Through close analysis of a typical local travelogue, this article analyses how film language is deployed to this end in the context of Cape Town's apartheid past, the reality of extensive poverty, disease and violence in the present, and dystopian imagery in a growing number of locally made films. Résumé Les travaux sur le cinéma et la ville ne font que débuter à propos de l'Afrique. Rares sont, semble‐t‐il, les études sur la manière dont la production de films a aidéà promouvoir l'image des villes africaines. Cherchant à combler cette lacune, l'article part des observations de Giuliana Bruno sur le rapport étroit entre cinéma et tourisme de masse. Il revient d'abord sur la littérature consacrée au cinéma et à l'Afrique urbaine. Il explore ensuite les représentations filmiques du Cap avant la fin de l'apartheid en 1994, donc avant l'avènement rapide de la ville en tant que destination touristique courue, site de tournage international et centre d'une industrie cinématographique locale. Depuis, plusieurs films touristiques ont été tournés sur la ville et vendus en DVD ou diffusés sur des chaînes comme Travel Channel. Bien entendu, Le Cap y est présenté comme une ville rêvée, alliant un intérêt ‘unique’ et exotique à un degré suffisant de sécurité et d' ‘effervescence’. En analysant de près un documentaire de voyage typique de la production locale, l'article étudie comment le langage filmique est utiliséà cette fin dans le cadre du passé d'apartheid du Cap, de sa réalité actuelle de grave pauvreté, maladie et violence, et d'une imagerie dystopique dans un nombre croissant de films réalisés sur place.
Article
Comprehensively revised and updated the Second Edition of the bestselling Visual Methodologies provides a critical introduction to the study and interpretation of visual culture. An introductory chapter contextualises the theoretical approach to working with visual materials. Subsequent chapters each examine a visual method in detail and assesses the method's strengths and weaknesses. The methods discussed in the now include: compositional interpretation, content analysis, semiology, psychoanalysis, discourse analysis, audience studies (new), an anthropological approach to understanding visual materials (new), and on making images as part of social science research (new). New to this edition: a completely new chapter on how to use the book each chapter follows the same structure, making comparisons between methods easier three extra chapters, each discussing a method not covered in the First Edition.
Article
A leading feminist geographer puts forth new ways of thinking about space and place. In these days of global acceleration on the one hand and intensifying local nationalisms on the other, how should we be thinking about space and place? This new book brings together Doreen Massey's key writings on this debate. In it she argues that we have seen some problematical readings of both terms in recent years, and she proposes an alternative approach more adequate to the issues facing the social sciences today. Massey has organized these debates around the three themes of space, place, and gender. She traces the development of ideas about the social structure of space and place, and the relation of both to issues of gender and certain debates within feminism. Beginning with the economy and social structures of production, Massey develops a wider notion of spatiality as the product of intersecting social relations. On this basis she proposes an approach to "places" that is essentially open and hybrid while always provisional and contested. The themes intersect with much current thinking about identity within feminism and cultural studies. The chapters range from studies of the concepts of place employed in debates on uneven regional development and inner-city problems to arguments about the relationship between the conceptualization of space/place and the social construction of gender relations. "This book presents a collection of Massey's writings that have appeared over the last two decades. The volume is, however, more than a sum of its parts, in that Massey uses commentaries throughout the book to delineate an intellectual trajectory in Anglo geography that connects the concerns of economic geography with critiques and extensions by feminist and postcolonial writers. Massey builds a multifaceted argument of the richness of geographical analysis and its centrality for contemporary social theory debates." Professional Geographer "In a compilation of essays spanning over fifteen years, Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey explores the intricate and profound connection of space and place with gender and the construction of gender relations. Spaces and places are gendered, she argues, at once reflecting and affecting how gender is understood." Harvard Design Magazine Doreen Massey is professor of geography at the Open University in the United Kingdom. She is the author of five books, including Spatial Divisions of Labour (1984) and, with David Weild and Paul Quintas, High-Tech Fantasies (1991).
Article
The inner city of Johannesburg is about as far away as one can get from the popular image of the African village. Though one of Africa’s most urbanized settings, it is also seen as a place of ruins—of ruined urbanization, the ruining of Africa by urbanization. But in these ruins, something else besides decay might be happening. This essay explores the possibility that these ruins not only mask but also constitute a highly urbanized social infrastructure. This infrastructure is capable of facilitating the intersection of socialities so that expanded spaces of economic and cultural operation become available to residents of limited means. This essay is framed around the notion of people as infrastructure, which emphasizes economic collaboration among residents seemingly marginalized from and immiserated by urban life. Infrastructure is commonly understood in physical terms, as reticulated systems of highways, pipes, wires, or cables. These modes of provisioning and articulation are viewed as making the city productive, reproducing it, and positioning its residents, territories, and resources in specific ensembles where the energies of individuals can be most efficiently deployed and accounted for.
Article
This article argues that the existing literature on world city formation overlooks geopolitics and political struggles in accounting for a city's transformation. Using Taipei as a case study, the article shows that geo-economics, geopolitics and local politics each played an important role in Taipei's ambiguous world city formation in the late 1990s and are expected to continue to do so in the not too promising future. It is argued that the globalization process in the 1980s and the corresponding restructuring of the Taiwan economy induced the state to adopt a new developmental strategy that enhanced Taipei's competitiveness. However, the democratization process facilitated a new nation-building process in the late-1990s and the newly-elected regime suppressed the city of Taipei's ongoing development, as a consequence of which Taipei's competitiveness as a regional world city has been declining. Geopolitics and local politics are thus found to explain to a large degree the ambiguities currently defining Taipei's world city formation.
Article
Recent years have seen an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the process of gentrification, accompanied by a surge of articles published on the topic. This article looks at some recent literature - both scholarly and popular - and considers the reasons why the often highly critical perspectives on gentrification that we saw in earlier decades have dwindled. Whilst a number of reasons could be put forward, three in particular are discussed. First, the resilience of theoretical and ideological squabbles over the causes of gentrification, at the expense of examining its effects; second, the demise of displacement as a defining feature of the process and as a research question; and third, the pervasive influence of neoliberal urban policies of 'social mix' in central city neighbourhoods. It is argued that the 'eviction' of critical perspectives from a field in which they were once plentiful has serious implications for those at risk from gentrification, and that reclaiming the term from those who have sugarcoated what was not so long ago a 'dirty word' (Smith, 1996) is essential if political challenges to the process can be effective. Copyright (c) 2006 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..
Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real
  • N Alsayyad
Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” In Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic
  • B Brecht