Urban cultural studies

This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, _Moxyland_ (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”, asking how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city. The article charts Beukes’s resolutely mobile characters as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance in
which they are embedded. It explores how Beukes’s futuristic urban setting fuses punitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of social relations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. The analysis relates _Moxyland_ to discussions of African city textualities – a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal [_The Journal of Postcolonial Writing_] to signal the interplay of urban and textual networks in constituting the African city.

By using the heuristic device of transpatialization and the methodology of
urban cultural studies, this article argues that the 1922 serialized novel
Tehrān-e Makhuf (Dreadful Tehran) by Seyyed Mortaza Moshfeq-e Kazemi
(1902-1978), with its distinctly urban modes of imagination and production,
at once reflected and propelled a process that can be termed the
urbanization of the Iranian public. The article analyses the literary
techniques with which Moshfeq contributed to this process; the
circumstances and context in which the novel was produced; and the
ideological change reflected in the author and his work. The article thus
sheds light on a crucial stage in modern Iranian history by unravelling some
of the socio-spatial intertwinements that made that history.

Cities of the Lusophone World addresses diverse literary and cultural representations of urban settings produced in the period from the 1960s to the present day and originating from the Island of Mozambique, Lisbon, Luanda, Macau, Maputo, Porto Alegre and São Paulo. The volume contributes to the interdisciplinary research field of urban cultural studies, which lies at the crossroads between the social sciences and the humanities. The essays gathered here consider the city not only as a geographical configuration, but also as a historical discourse where space and time merge and where different individual and collective practices and actions take place. They explore how memories and identities are framed, how people at the margins create discourses of resistance, and how processes of migration and urban transformation disrupt established social and cultural borders.

AI developments on smart cities, if not critical, risk making a flawed urban model more efficient. Instead, we suggest that AI should challenge the mainstream techno-optimistic approach to solving urban problems by dialoguing with other academic fields, questioning the dominant urban paradigm, and creating transformative solutions. We claim that doing differently, rather than doing better, may be smarter for cities and the common good. This article is part of the special track on AI and Society.

While the simultaneously creative and destructive forces of modernity in Western Europe have been well studied, the case of Spain has often been overlooked. Visualizing Spanish Modernity concentrates on the time period 1868-1939, which marks not only the beginning of the formation of a modern economy and the consolidation of the liberal state, but also the growth of urban centers and spaces made possible by electricity, transportation, mass production and the emergence of an entertainment industry. The authors examine how mass print culture, early cinema, popular drama, photography, fashion, painting, museums and urban planning played a role in the way that Spanish society saw itself and was in turn seen by the rest of the world. Assessing how new cultural forms were instrumental in shaping Spaniards into citizens of the modern world, the authors consider such subjects as the spectacle of the body, notions of race and gender, the changing meanings of time, space and motion, the relationship between technology and everyday life and popular culture.

This article is concerned with exploring the politics of street art and graffiti in Egypt in the aftermath of the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Rather than viewing street art and graffiti as mere by-products of the revolutionary period, the article centres them as important elements of political and social struggle. I put forward a reading of Egypt’s street art and graffiti as sites of politics through both aesthetic and spatial approaches. To do so I draw on Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, a term referring to a political and aesthetic process that creates new modes of perception and novel forms of political subjectivity. In various writings, Rancière argues that part of the work of ‘dissensus’ is the creation of spaces where political activity can take place. As spatially bound practices, street art and graffiti can allow a visible ‘dissensus’ to take place. Through a semiotic analysis of several street art and graffiti works, the article makes...

This article develops the idea of a "territorial dimension of culture" (proposed by Raquel Rolnik) in the context of contemporary grassroots urbanism in São Paulo, in particular in the peripheries of the city. The central argument of the article is the value of culture as an integral element in urbanism, and not as a separate area that is occasionally brought to bear on it. The article examines the use of culture in the construction of public spaces in the periphery-spaces defined not by their formal aspects, but for sustaining a diverse and inclusive public sphere. Culture is understood as urbanism both because it helps in critically understanding urbanization processes, and also because it aids in intervening in these processes concretely. The article also suggests a broadening of the epistemological assumptions of urbanism, so as to include practices and bodies of knowledge by diverse communities and groups, which are not necessarily recognized by official educational and professional institutions. Such a broadened vision has the potential to generate a more democratic, participatory and efficient urbanism, and a more just and humane city.

In the nineteenth century, the bourgeois elites of newly minted national capitals Belgrade and Sofia sought to produce ‘European’ urban space, their first step on a path to industrial modernity and a new relationship with the world. When such designs failed, their execution left real, devastating material consequences. This article explores the underside of elite dreams through Milutin Uskoković’s Newcomers (1910). Set in 1906 Belgrade, the novel’s tragic form emphasizes the futility of bourgeois aspirations on the periphery of global capital. I expand on such themes through archival sources, which consistently describe the post-Ottoman city as a landscape of dispossession. Ultimately, I argue that urban modernity has historically been informed by failed elite dreams and their resulting urban nightmares, particularly in spaces off-centre to capitalist flows.

Naples presents an intriguing case for the study of city and nation in cultural perspective. Historically viewed as a problem city and occupying an ambiguous place in the discursive construction of the nation, it has come to represent Italy in contemporary media and culture. This article reviews the historical construction of Naples in national discourse and interrogates new critical perspectives that re-evaluate the city in the light of postcolonial theory. Identifying the limitations of such theorization with respect to cultural representations of Naples’ relationship with Italy, I draw on theories of cultural accentedness to propose a new approach to Naples, premised upon a reframing of national culture in terms of differently accented practices, discourses and interpretations. The approach is intended as a model for critical interrogation of the relationship between city and nation more broadly.

The volume, Ethics of Life: Contemporary Iberian Debates, considers what the editors Katarzyna Beilin and William Viestenz have referred to as the " Ethics of Life " in contemporary Spain. As Beilin argues in her introduction, the term " life " does not encompass human experience exclusively, but refers more broadly to the many interconnected relationships between the human and the non-human that make up " life " on this planet. Within the framework of this broader definition, the essays in this volume have used a range of approaches to examine the intersection of human culture with the biological and ecological. Taken as a whole, this collection of essays contributes to the re-contextualizing of humanistic inquiry that has come to be known as the post-humanities, avenues of investigation often derived from the theoretical framework of Actor-Network Theory. Post-humanism has been a productive means for deconstructing an Anglo-European tradition that posits the natural world as separate and inert, awaiting human intervention, and, more often than not, exploitation. Therefore, this volume's call to study the ethics of life in contemporary Spain has not only been an opportunity to find points of intersection between literary studies and the life sciences, but also an endeavor to question the disciplinary silos of knowledge that oftentimes structure the modern university. While the focus on environmental degradation found in many of the essays in this volume is, of course, of great interest and concern to us, the argument that we make in our contribution to this volume does not comment directly on the ethical concerns that emerge from the objectification and exploitation of the natural world. Rather, we focus on how biological and ecological processes can be used to understand the production of culture within an urban context. That is, we consider how the production of culture in cities should be understood within material, biological, and social circumstances. This " cultural ecology " paradigm has been a productive one for us as we look for ways to understand how cities are made, produced, and consumed. In our essay, we look at a number of ideas about recycling and

StructView FRAME project, run in Pomeranian Science and Technology Park in Gdynia (Poland), constitutes an attempt to implement public participation tools for spatial planning by means of using immersive, three-dimensional visualisations in Web environment. The project utilises technological and social innovations to hack the system, which usurps the right to the common city space, by creating an engaging communication platform for city space users and emphasising the representation of marginalised groups. Within the digitalized society where all eyes are fixed on city interfaces (de Waal, M., 2014) and where the local is shattered by the Web, the responsibility for the surrounding space seems to be disappearing. Yet, social media and mobile applications are more and more often used to gather around common spatial needs (pop up city) and issues (NIMBY). Since the 1960s, long before their explosion triggered by the Web, methods of communal space shaping have crystallised and spread. In Poland, adapting the tools for participation that have been developed in big Western European and American cities, proves to be a great challenge. After 1989, we have been mesmerized by private property, and as a result of this phenomenon, Polish cities of today are still being shaped by neoliberal powers. Voice of the public is not taken into consideration in this discussion – in fact it has not been until recently that urban movements have started to organise themselves and their voice is still too weak to be heard (this could be seen in their results in previous election). The presented tool uses developers’ needs for marketing in order to promote new ideas and widening the area of public space. This is possible because highlighting the importance of local community (and the knowledge gathered from urban dwellers) as the key figure in the process of urban space shaping is only possible as an element of market mechanism, it is not perceived as saying no to cultural hegemony (Gramsci) and a way towards regaining the right to the city (Lefebvre). There is no getting through to the main discourse without adjusting to the rules of the game.

This editorial questions the accepted view among militant researchers in the academy and radical activists outside of it that activism is not possible within higher education. The notion that theory is not practice fails to see that humanistic inquiry does not take place outside of material reality. Thinking and doing cannot be compartmentalized. They form part of greater cultural processes. This editorial argues that research and courses addressing urban cultural studies can offer the space to imagine activism both inside and outside our classrooms and institutions.

Wieser, Doris (2018): “Urban Transformations in Maputo after Independence: Crónica da Rua 513.2, by João Paulo Borges Coelho”. In: Wieser, Doris / Prata, Ana Filipa (org.) (2018): Cities of the Lusophone World: Literature, Culture and Urban Transformations. Oxford: Peter Lang (Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-Speaking World 10), pp. 237-256.

(Submitted Manuscript)

This article examines three recent publications in the field of urban literary studies. It argues that spatiality has become a key term within this discipline, with the inferences of the spatial turn during the 1980s and 1990s having been firmly assimilated with the methodological procedures of textual analysis today. However, the article argues that the textual construction of the relationship between space and identity has not been fully and satisfactorily articulated within the field, with a hard-headedly materialist account of representational space sitting uncomfortably alongside a cultural materialist understanding of identity. This difficulty, it suggests, accounts for some of the theoretical dilemmas represented in the books under discussion, despite their many strengths.

This article is a proposal to address visual mapping as a means to reveal the interrelationships between a place represented, a place lived and a place perceived. A form of critical cartography called hybrid-mapping is used to interrogate the combined sociocultural and biophysical legacies of the continually changing landscape. This approach expressly facilitates a focused interpretation of the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the nuanced connections between landscape, history and culture. Offering to a larger conversation about landscape representation, this article introduces, situates and analyses the application of hybrid-mapping in a creative research project entitled Chinatown Invisible about Manhattan's Chinatown. The Chinatown Invisible project uses hybrid-mapping to interrogate the quotidian practice of 'making-do' to adapt existing urban structures to fulfil everyday needs. Capturing and understanding making-do is vital because it sheds light on the ways in...

The cultural production These Rooms challenged traditional nationalistic commemorations of war and rebellion during the ‘Decade of the Centenaries’. Created by the Dublin-based ANU Productions and CoisCéim Dance Theatre, and funded by the Irish and UK governments, this series of theatre/dance performances, installations and public outreach projects in unconventional urban venues ran from 2016 to 2019 in Dublin, London and Liverpool, cities with mixed British and Irish populations. Fragmentary, embodied stories about the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin communicated the perspectives of working-class Irish civilian women and confused young British soldiers through intimate domestic encounters that productively disrupted heroic narratives. Audiences were instead invited to create temporary communities of encounter and ‘unlearn’ dominant concepts supporting colonial, imperial and national spaces‐times. As a critical agonistic artistic intervention, These Rooms offered more inclusive ‘potent...

Literary representations of postcolonial subjects’ concrete mobility practices beyond migrancy have not received much critical attention. To fill this void, this article analyses the representations and poetics of urban everyday mobilities in two francophone African diasporic novels, Michèle Rakotoson’s Elle, au printemps (1996) and Alain Mabanckou’s Tais-toi et meurs (2012), through a mobility studies perspective. I focus on the protagonists’ use of urban mobility systems and the narratives’ ways of producing urban cartographies as means for inscribing the newly arrived irregular African migrants in the metropolis, and argue that the texts give articulation to a practical cosmopolitanism. The texts’ poetics of mobility – manifest in their uncanny and thrilleresque qualities – and the protagonists’ journeys to peripheral dead-ends convey the anxious aspects of their attempts to claim Paris as their city through mobility.

This book theorises resorts as distinct kinds of urban milieux, capturing the complexity of destinations famous for 'sun, sand and sex' mass tourism. Drawing on qualitative field research (participant observation, interviews and photography), the book discusses examples from six international resort destinations spread across four continents: the Gold Coast, Australia; Phuket and Koh Phangan, Thailand; Cancún, Mexico; Miami, USA; and Ibiza, Spain.

The book reviews the material and symbolic production of lived spaces in these resorts, considering the mutually constitutive, mutually transformative relations between their spatial formations, built environments, popular imaginaries, representations, narratives of identity, rhythms, and the experiences and practices of both tourists and locals. In doing so, it argues for more nuanced ways of conceptualising tourism, globalisation and spatiality, reimagining how these phenomena unfold in lived spaces.

Taking a cultural studies approach to urban analysis, the book demonstrates the value in embracing complexity, fluidity, partiality and uncertainty. It will be of interest to students and researchers of tourism, geography, cultural studies, development studies, anthropology and sociology.