Urban Mindscapes of Europe (European Studies 23) (European Studies: An Interdisciplinary Series in European Culture, History and Politics)

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Author: Godela Weiss-Sussex (editor); Franco Bianchini (editor)

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EUROPEAN STUDIES

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EUROPEAN STUDIES An Interdisciplinary Series in European Culture, History and Politics

Executive Editor Menno Spiering, University of Amsterdam [email protected]

Series Editors Robert Harmsen, The Queen’s University of Belfast Joep Leerssen, University of Amsterdam Menno Spiering, University of Amsterdam Thomas M. Wilson, Binghamton University, State University of New York

EUROPEAN STUDIES An Interdisciplinary Series in European Culture, History and Politics

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URBAN MINDSCAPES OF EUROPE

Edited by Godela Weiss-Sussex with Franco Bianchini

Amsterdam, New York, NY 2006

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation – Papier pour documents – Prescriptions pour la permanence’. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence’. ISBN-10: 90-420-2104-7 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2104-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

NOTE FOR CONTRIBUTORS European Studies is published several times a year. Each issue is dedicated to a specific theme falling within the broad scope of European Studies. Contributors approach the theme from a wide range of disciplinary and, particularly, interdisciplinary perspectives. Past issues have focused on such topics as Britain and Europe, France and Europe, National Identity, Middle and Eastern Europe, Nation Building and Literary History, Europeanisation and Euroscepticism. The Editorial board welcomes suggestions for other future projects to be produced by guest editors. In particular, European Studies may provide a vehicle for the publication of thematically focused conference and colloquium proceedings. Editorial enquiries may be directed to the series executive editor. Subscription details and a list of back issues are available from the publisher’s web site: www.rodopi.nl.

Acknowledgments This volume is based on papers presented at the ‘Urban Mindscapes of Europe’ conference held in Leicester on 29 April 2004. Godela Weiss-Sussex and Franco Bianchini would like to thank Paul Brookes (Director of Leicester Revealed) and the International Cultural Planning and Policy Unit at De Montfort University, Leicester, for their financial support for the conference, as well as Margaret Barton and Lucy Norman (from De Montfort Expertise Ltd., De Montfort University, Leicester) for their work on promoting and managing the event. Our thanks also go to Dr Morwenna Symons for her help in the process of editing and proofreading.

CONTENTS

Authors in this volume FRANCO BIANCHINI Introduction. European Urban Mindscapes: Concepts, Cultural Representations and Policy Applications

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METHODOLOGY AND CONCEPT FORMATION ROLF LINDNER The Gestalt of the Urban Imaginary

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JUDE BLOOMFIELD Researching the Urban Imaginary: Resisting the Erasure of Places

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BETTY NIGIANNI ‘An Avenue that Looks Like Me’: Re-presenting the Modern Cityscape

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GIANDOMENICO AMENDOLA Urban Mindscapes Reflected in Shop Windows

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NICOLAS WHYBROW Encountering the City: On ‘Not Taking Yourself With You’

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CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CITY NEAL ALEXANDER Strange City: Belfast Gothic

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KEITH WILLIAMS ‘Seeing the Future’: Urban Dystopia in Wells and Lang

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BARRY LANGFORD Strangers (to) Themselves: Cityscapes and Mindscapes in 1980s European Cinema

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HUGH O'DONNELL Once in TV’s Royal City: Television Coverage of Royal Media Events

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MATTHEW REASON Cartoons and the Comic Exposure of the European City of Culture

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LEVENTE POLYÁK Drifting Bridges: Semantic Changes of the Bridge Metaphor in Twentieth-Century Budapest

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STUART PRICE Reconstructing the Ancient City: Imagining the Athenian Polis

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APPLICATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF URBAN MINDSCAPES KLAUS SIEBENHAAR The Myth of Berlin: the Imagined and the Staged City

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GODELA WEISS-SUSSEX Berlin Literature and its Use in the Marketing of the ‘New Berlin’

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DORIS TESKE Sites and Sights: the Urban Museum in a Changing Urban Structure

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LIA GHILARDI Identity by Invocation or by Design? How Planning is Conjuring up a New Identity for Malmö

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PAUL BROOKES, interviewed by FRANCO BIANCHINI Confessions of a Place Marketer

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AUTHORS IN THIS VOLUME

NEAL ALEXANDER is Lecturer in English at Trinity College Carmarthen. His research interests are primarily in modern urban literature and theory, and he is currently at work on a critical study of literary representations of Belfast. He is co-editor (with Shane Murphy and Anne Oakman) of To the Other Shore: Cross-Currents in Irish and Scottish Studies (2004). GIANDOMENICO AMENDOLA is Professor of Urban Sociology in the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence. He served as President of AIS (Italian Sociological Association) from 2001 to 2004. He is author of several books, the most recent of which are La Città postmoderna – magie e paure della metropoli contemporanea (1967 – 2005, fifth enlarged edition); Uomini e Case : I presupposti sociologici della progettazione architettonica (1991); Culture & Neighbourhoods: Perspectives and Keywords (1998). He is editor of Scenari della Città Prossima Ventura (2000); Paure in città (2003); Il governo della città sicura (2003); Anni in salita – paure e speranze degli italiani (2004). FRANCO BIANCHINI is Director of the International Cultural Planning and

Policy Unit (ICPPU) at De Montfort University in Leicester. His publications include Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: The West European Experience (co-editor, M. Parkinson, 1993), The Creative City (with C. Landry, 1995), Culture and Neighbourhoods: A Comparative Report (with L. Ghilardi, 1997) and Planning for the Intercultural City (with J. Bloomfield, 2004). He has acted as advisor and researcher on urban cultural policy for organisations including the Arts Council England, the Council of Europe and the European Commission. JUDE BLOOMFIELD is an independent researcher on urban cultures, planning and citizenship, specialising in multiculturalism and interculturalism, and is also a translator/interpreter and poet. For many years she has been research associate of the International Cultural Planning and Policy Research Unit at De Montfort University, Leicester and is currently methodology advisor and researcher on the Comedia/Rowntree Foundation project The Intercultural City. She is author with Franco Bianchini of Planning for the Intercultural City (2004). PAUL BROOKES was Director of Place Marketing for Leicester Shire Promotions from 2003-2006, and Director of the Leicester Expo, a five day street festival. Previously, he was Director of Bradford’s 2008 European Capital of Culture bid programme (Oct 2001 - May 2003). He had been Director of Arts for the Yorkshire and Humberside Arts Board (1991 -

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1995) and Chief Executive of Photo 98 (1995 -1999), the charitable trust established to run the 1998 Year of Photography and Electronic Image. He led the re-positioning of Photo 98 into a new agency, The Culture Company, and was its Chief Executive (1999 - 2001) until taking up his appointment in Bradford. LIA GHILARDI is Director of Noema Research and Planning Ltd, an inter-

national consultancy specialising in cultural planning action research projects. Following a career in urban sociology research and teaching, over the past fifteen years Lia has gained an international reputation through her work as facilitator and catalyst for high profile cultural development projects. Since 1994, she has worked regularly as a member of the special committee of advisers for the selection of projects concerning the regeneration of cities through cultural initiatives for DG XVI of the European Commission. She writes on issues of cultural policies, identity, heritage and diversity. Her publications since 2000 include: ‘Cultural Planning and Cultural Diversity’, in the Council of Europe publication Differing Diversities, Cultural Policy and Cultural Diversity, ed. by Tony Bennett (2001), ‘The Culture of Neighbourhoods: a European Perspective’ (with Franco Bianchini) in Cities of Quarters, ed. by D. Bell and M. Jayne (2004), and ‘Cultural Planning: Thinking Culturally about Diversity’ in Under Construction: Cultural Diversity, Cultural Identity and Audience Development (Arts Council England, 2005). is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Recent publications include Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press) and essays on a wide variety of subjects in film and media studies and critical theory, including Chris Marker’s politics; revisionist Westerns; narrative temporalities in The Lord of the Rings; images of disaster in the urban theory of Michel de Certeau; American identity in 1970s Hollywood; modernity and trauma in Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer; and the political unconscious of TV sitcoms.

BARRY LANGFORD

is Professor of European Ethnology at the Humboldt University Berlin. His research interests are in the fields of Urban Anthropology/Urban Studies, Cultural Studies and Science Studies. He is a member of the Culture of Cities Project: Montreal, Toronto, Berlin, Dublin, and a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Cultural Studies. Recent publications include the monographs Die Stunde der Cultural Studies (secROLF LINDNER

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ond edition 2002), and Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung (2004). trained as an architect at the Technical University of Athens and studied history and theory of architecture to MA degree level at the University of East London. After working in architectural practices, she started dividing her time between teaching architectural theory and studying for a PhD degree on the city in literature. She has recently published an article entitled ‘Corporeality and the Metropolis: Dissolving the Body in Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy”’ in Gramma. Journal of Theory and Criticism, vol. 11. BETTY NIGIANNI

HUGH O’DONNELL

is Professor of Language and Popular Culture at Glasgow Caledonian University. He specialises in cross-cultural analysis of popular cultural products on a European level (and occasionally beyond), and has published widely on mediated sport (World Cups, Summer and Winter Olympics, Wimbledon, the Super Bowl), domestic soap operas and telenovelas in all Western European countries, and representations of monarchy in the European and American media. More recent projects have included cross-cultural analysis of the news and of advertising. He is currently working with a colleague on the internationalisation of the sitcom.

LEVENTE POLYÁK has completed a degree in architecture and aesthetics, and has now turned to the study of the social sciences to complement his competences in visual and urban cultures. Living and studying in Budapest, he also works in the NGO field: with his association Lokal he is engaged in the public discussion of urban affairs. Recently he has led several research projects on the role of institutions and the media in the shaping of urban image and identity. STUART PRICE is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Production and a Research Associate of the International Cultural Planning & Policy Unit at De Montfort University, Leicester. He is the author of a number of media textbooks, together with articles and book chapters on a variety of subjects, including masculinity and film, citizenship, rhetoric, politics, ideology, security and the War on Terror. Other writing includes journalism and opinion columns. MATTHEW REASON is

a Research Fellow at York St John College, having previously worked at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow. Publications include a special edition of the Edin-

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burgh Review on ‘Theatre in Scotland’, articles in journals including New Theatre Quarterly, Performance Research and Dance Research Journal, and a forthcoming monograph on the representation of live performance. KLAUS SIEBENHAAR is

Director of the Institute of Arts and Media Management (Institut für Kultur- und Medienmanagement) at the Free University, Berlin. He is also a publisher and Head of the Development Department at the Berlin Jewish Museum. He has published widely in the fields of literary, cultural and theatre history of the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and in the area of arts management.

DORIS TESKE, who currently teaches at the University of Education in Weingarten, Germany, has published several articles and a monograph on various aspects of urban perception and urban representation. She has also published a German-language introduction to the study of British cultures, focusing on cultural analysis. Her current research projects are on the teaching of Cultural Studies in the classroom and on the development of early nineteenth-century British museums. GODELA WEISS-SUSSEX is Lecturer in Modern German Literature at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London. Her main research interests lie in the culture and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the following areas: the representation of the city in literature and the visual arts; the relationship between literary text, contemporary aesthetic theory and the visual arts; and the works of German-Jewish writers produced in Germany and in exile. She has published on Adalbert Stifter (as co-editor), Theodor Fontane, Georg Hermann, Clara Viebig, and German exile writers (1933-45). NICOLAS WHYBROW is Director of Practice and Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. His monograph Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin appeared in 2005 and he is currently beginning a further book about art, performance and the city. KEITH WILLIAMS did his DPhil at Oxford on ‘Reportage in the Thirties’, on the relations between writing and the documentary movement. He is currently Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee, but has also taught at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds. He has published widely on forms of intertextuality between literature and film (including a monograph on British Writers and the Media 1930-45) and also on James Joyce, modernism and the city. He is currently completing a book on H. G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies.

EUROPEAN STUDIES 23 (2006): 13-31

INTRODUCTION EUROPEAN URBAN MINDSCAPES: CONCEPTS, CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND POLICY APPLICATIONS1

Franco Bianchini

Abstract This volume brings together a collection of essays, most of which were presented at the ‘Urban Mindscapes of Europe’ conference at De Montfort University in Leicester on 29 April 2004. At the centre of the volume is an encounter between explorations of urban mindscapes, and their application to urban policy generally, and more specifically to city marketing and tourism promotion. This introductory essay provides an overview of the concepts of ‘urban mindscape’ and ‘urban imaginary’, and of a selection of key themes emerging from the contributions to the book. It ends with a discussion of a range of issues for further research and for policy-making. Concepts of ‘Urban Mindscape’ and ‘Urban Imaginary’ Magoroh Maruyama, who coined the term, defines a person’s or a community’s operative worldview as a ‘mindscape’: a structure of reasoning, cognition, perception and conceptualisation (see Maruyama 1980). An ‘urban mindscape’ is a structure of thinking about a city. It indicates something which exists between the physical landscape of a city and people’s visual and cultural perceptions of it. Mindscape can also have the 1

I would like to thank Jude Bloomfield and Godela Weiss-Sussex for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter, and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for their support for my work on this book, through an award under their Research Leave Scheme (September 2005-April 2006).

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meaning of ‘landscape of the mind’. In this sense, a city’s mindscape can be represented as an urban ‘image bank’. This consists of local and external images of a city, which are manifested in forms including the following: – media coverage; – stereotypes, jokes and ‘conventional wisdom’; – representations of a city in music, literature, film, the visual arts and other types of cultural production; – myths and legends; – tourist guidebooks; – city marketing and tourism promotion literature; – views of residents, city users and outsiders, expressed, for example, through surveys and focus groups (adapted from Bianchini 1999a). In her contribution to this volume, Jude Bloomfield highlights the importance of other components of urban mindscapes. These include: – the special knowledge of ‘environmentally sensitive’ groups like cyclists and city walkers, or of ‘confidantes and gossip mongers like hairdressers and taxi drivers’; – urban symbols and memorabilia, including ‘religious and civic rituals and celebrations’; – ‘the institutional filters which operate as gatekeepers of collective memory’, including local history museums and published histories of the city; – the spatial practices of different individuals and social groups. Giandomenico Amendola reminds us that, in order to understand a city, the mindscape, which he defines as ‘the landscape of the soul and of the cultures of a city’ is as important as ‘the physical cityscape’ (1997, 7). In a similar vein, James Donald argues that the ‘imagined environment’ of the city, and ‘the discourses, symbols, metaphors and fantasies through which we ascribe meaning to the modern experience of urban living’ are as relevant for the social sciences as ‘the material determinants of the physical environment’ (1992, 422). The concept of ‘urban imaginary’ is closely related to Donald’s idea of the city as an ‘imagined environment’, and to the notion of ‘urban mind-

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scape’. The specific components of both urban mindscapes and imaginaries include media and cultural representations of meanings and memories. The two concepts have in common the fact that they are mental constructs of the city. However, the notion of ‘urban imaginary’ emphasises desire, fantasy and imagination, and it is different from ‘urban mindscape’ in this sense. Jude Bloomfield’s chapter explains that Armando Silva, in his pioneering study of Latin American cities (2003), defines urban imaginaries as ‘symbolic, psychic indicators of unconscious desires and social constructions impacting on urban reality’. The idea of ‘urban mindscape’ tends to imply that it is visual: mindscapes are manifestations of the inner work of the mind. This is one aspect of urban imaginaries, but not necessarily the most important one. As suggested in Bloomfield’s chapter, many contemporary bodily practices in cities (also by artists) have challenged the dominance of the eye, and have emphasised the importance of other sensory dimensions such as smell, taste and touch for people’s experience of a city. In Imagining the Modern City James Donald argues that ‘we do not just read the city, we negotiate the reality of cities by imagining “the city” (…). It is imagination which produces reality as it exists’ (1999, 18). One of the earliest formulations of the idea that the urban imaginary is a factor which constitutes the city is found in Jonathan Raban’s Soft City (1975; see also Patton 1995). Raban writes: (…) it seems to me that living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture (1975, 10).

Similarly, Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, argues that when people walk the streets of a city they engage in illegible improvisations. The ways in which people creatively negotiate the urban environment produce a different space, which de Certeau calls ‘an “anthropological”, poetic and mythic experience of space (…) (a) metaphorical city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city’ (quoted in Donald 1992, 436). James Donald concludes that the central role of the imaginary in forming our experience of the urban dimension is due to the fact that the city is

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Franco Bianchini (…) an environment shaped by the interaction of practices, events and relationships so complex that they cannot easily be visualised. That may be why it is an environment imagined in metaphors (the diseased city, the city as machine), animated by myth, and peopled by symbols such as the flâneur, the prostitute, the migrant, the mugger (1992, 457).

One of the main theoretical influences behind the concept of urban imaginary and its uses in the discourse of the radical Left, is that of Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s use of the concept of ‘imaginary’ is similar to that of Cornelius Castoriadis, who from the 1950s had developed his idea of the ‘social imaginary’ as part of his critique of the economic determinism of mainstream interpretations of Marxism. Through the idea of the ‘social imaginary’, Castoriadis underlines ‘people’s potential for creative and autonomous self-activity’ (Curtis 1997, viii). In Lefebvre’s theory, l’imaginaire urbain is essential for constructing an ‘experimental utopia for a new urbanism’. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas explain that for Lefebvre an experimental utopia is ‘the exploration of what is humanly possible (…) constantly subjected to critique and referring to a problematic’ which is derived from the analysis of reality (1996, 15). Lefebvre’s idea of the urban imaginary is linked with his concept of the oeuvre, of the city as a work of art and beauty, in which there is a constant conflict between the logic of the market and the importance of ‘the urban’ as ‘a place of encounter, (…) assemblage of differences and priority of use over exchange value’ (Kofman and Lebas 1996, 18). Urban mindscapes and imaginaries can indeed disclose utopian aspirations and hidden desires. In this sense, they have a potential similar to that of poetry. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his classic The Poetics of Space, defines poetry as ‘a commitment of the soul. Forces are manifested in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge’ (1994, xxi) which are controlled by the rational mind. Bachelard explains that poetry works through resonances and reverberations. The latter ‘invite us to give greater depth to our own existence (and) bring about a change of being’ (1994, xxii). The poetic quality of many urban mindscapes and imaginaries can raise people’s sights beyond the existing and the given, and conceive alternatives to the present. Questions of Methodology, Theory, Cultural Representations and Policy-Making The chapters in this volume discuss how urban mindscapes and imaginaries interact with the changing physical, economic, social, political and


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cultural landscapes of different cities. The book pursues three main strands of inquiry. The first is directed towards questions of theory and methodology of researching urban mindscapes and imaginaries. The second strand investigates some of the representations, symbols and collective images that feed into our understanding of cities. It discusses representations of the city in literature, film, television and other cultural forms, which constitute – in James Donald’s words – ‘archive(s) of urban images’ (1999, 63). Contributions belonging to the third section of the volume, lastly, discuss the role of the collective mindscapes and imaginaries of cities in the professional discipline of place marketing and promotion, and, more generally, in urban policy. Rolf Lindner’s chapter echoes James Donald and other scholars in arguing that the city is a culturally coded space, soaked in history. It is a place of imagination which overlaps with the physical space, to the extent that the latter is experienced through images and symbols. By a process of continuous inter-textual cross-reference the cultural codings have a cumulative effect which forms the urban imaginary as the mental gestalt of the city. According to the founder of gestalt theory, Max Wertheimer, the gestalt is an organised unity where the part processes are determined by the nature of the whole. Conversely the whole must already be revealed in the parts. Lindner usefully introduces Richard Sennett’s idea of the city as a ‘narrative space’ and the notion of the ‘characterological unity’ of urban cultural representations. It is interesting to note that gestalt theory’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of phenomena has become in recent years fairly mainstream in urban policy and in other forms of public policy, as witnessed by the growing currency of such concepts as ‘integrated planning’ and ‘holistic’ or ‘joined up’ government (see Everitt 1997; Perri 6 1997). Jude Bloomfield reviews research debates on globalisation, to revise the balance between arguments on de- and re-territorialisation, disembedding and re-embedding. The chapter considers a number of research methods and their appropriateness in capturing the intangible, qualitative aspects of place attachment, and conflicting, alternative memories and representations of the city. She highlights the importance of contestation between different urban mindscapes and imaginaries to place-making. Bloomfield discusses the definition of urban imaginaries produced by Armando Silva (2003). She welcomes Silva’s adoption of an approach which recognises the plurality of the imaginaries of different individuals and social groups in a city. She argues that Lindner’s notion of the gestalt

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of the urban imaginary, by contrast, is too totalising and shaped by the economic activities which are dominant in a particular place, and does not pay due regard to the politics of symbolic contestation. Hugh O’Donnell’s contribution discusses the contestation of urban mindscapes by exploring the TV coverage of seven high profile royal events – six weddings and one funeral, held between March 1995 and May 2004 in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and the UK. The chapter examines the differences between the experience of these events by people as media consumers and as direct participants. Especially in the case of the funeral of Princess Diana in London on 6 September 1997, O’Donnell’s study shows how people taking part constructed a ‘parallel’ and unofficial festive happening. The often anarchic, irreverent and carnivalesque atmosphere created by ordinary people in the streets contrasted with the organisers’ intentions to construct a specific urban mindscape, which – in O’Donnell’s words – ‘returns the city to an (entirely fictitious) earlier version of itself signifying the permanence and continuity of national state power’. Hence ‘the relentless focus on pastness’ in all these royal events. O’Donnell adds that this ‘can lead to organisational decisions which at times almost border on the comic’. In the case of the royal wedding in Copenhagen in May 2004, for example, the bridal procession through the city’s streets noticeably sped up while going along ‘a large and generally unexceptional thoroughfare with no obvious visual links with the past (…) only to slow down again once it entered the narrow lanes and squares of the old part of town’. The chapter by Levente Polyák adds to the debate on the political and commercial struggles over the control of urban mindscapes, by considering the changing fortunes of two bridges crossing the Danube, the Chain Bridge and the Elisabeth Bridge, as symbols of contemporary Budapest. Bridges are often among the most popular buildings, because of their nature as gateways, their visibility, iconic power and spectacular views. Polyák explains how, after the fall of Communism, political parties vied for their ‘exclusive identification’ with the Chain Bridge, which ‘symbolises tradition and a European flair at the same time’. Over the same period, the Elisabeth Bridge (which in the years immediately after its opening in 1964 had acted as an icon of modernity, a Hungarian version of the Brooklyn Bridge) had a far lower status as an official symbol of Budapest. It maintained an important presence in the city’s collective imaginary, however, through its role as a ‘political message board (…) host to flags


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of diverse kinds of political resistance, appearing or remaining only for a few hours or days, before being taken off by the police’. Matthew Reason’s contribution also highlights the difference between the ‘official’ city narratives developed by policy-makers and the ‘self-narratives’ of local people, a discrepancy which is explored in depth by Ruth Finnegan’s study (1998) of stories told by Milton Keynes residents about their experience of life in that city, and of how they contrast with the urban narratives of academics and policy-makers. Reason examines the irreverent and politically incorrect cartoon images of Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture in 1990, and the possible motivations behind such cynical representations, which enact a comic exposure of the event’s grandiose claims, and articulate continuing scepticism and prejudices about the legitimacy of ‘culture-led’ city marketing and urban regeneration exercises. Stuart Price’s chapter explores the cultural and political centrality of the Acropolis to Athens’s urban mindscape. Price explains that the Periclean ‘architectural purity’ of the Acropolis is in fact the product of deliberate interventions such as the removal of mediaeval dwellings during the nineteenth century. The current process of gradual reconstruction of the Parthenon, the Nike temple and the other buildings of the Acropolis can be interpreted as a denial of historical complexity. This, as Price makes clear, is motivated by the Greek government’s overriding priority ‘to draw attention to the moral case for the repatriation of Greek cultural artefacts’. The chapter also argues that the widespread currency of the narrative about the site as the cradle of democracy ‘does not reveal the traumatic conflicts which produced the Athenian state nor the hierarchy of values which animated its citizens’. Price’s contribution shows how urban mindscapes can be produced by elites as the result of the manipulation, and in some cases the downright invention, of history and tradition (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Betty Nigianni’s chapter considers the story ‘I Think That Syngrou Avenue Looks Like Me’ by Manos Kontoleon, which describes the peculiar identification of the writer with a busy road linking central Athens with the seaside. Nigianni adds to the book’s discussion of urban mindscapes and imaginaries an exploration of the relationship between the city and the human body, and intervenes in a debate to which Mazzoleni (1993) and Lefebvre (1996), among others, have made significant contributions. The permeability, porosity, tolerance and inclusiveness of the life of Syngrou Avenue are the convincing reasons for Kontoleon’s identifi-

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cation with it: the avenue – as Nigianni points out – is a space for creativity and transgression, ‘where anything is possible’. The essay by Giandomenico Amendola examines the links between shopping and urban life and form, which are now so strong and indisputable as to seem embedded in the very nature of the city. The chapter shows that in fact this is a relatively recent phenomenon, pioneered by the arcades in nineteenth century Paris. Amendola then discusses the emergence of the department store as a new monument in the bourgeois city, and the transformation of entire city centres into shopping malls in today’s post-industrial societies. The 1970s idea of designing cities with people in mind has increasingly been replaced by the idea of designing them with consumers in mind, in a situation of increasing competition between an ever growing number of shops. The trend towards the transformation of European cities into narrow, consumption-oriented mindscapes poses problems for local distinctiveness, urban imaginaries and for the future of cities as democratic public spaces. Some of these problems are highlighted by John Hannigan’s Fantasy City, a study of the emerging phenomenon of the ‘theme park city’, drawing mostly on US examples. Hannigan asks: (…) are we prepared to overlook the cultural diversity in the community in favor of pre-packaged corporate entertainment destinations? Will there be no room for leisure activities other than those which can be branded, licensed, franchised, and rolled out on a global scale? And, finally, are we prepared to designate our inner cities no-go zones except for the heavily fortified themed attractions which welcome a constant flow of tourists embarked on leisure safaris into the depths of the postmodern metropolis? (1998, 200).

Similarly, Mark Gottdiener, in The Theming of America, raises the concern that (…) our environment is dominated by the space of consumption-consumer communion which has replaced the public-private duality that was once the cornerstone of the early modernist city and the cradle of modern democracy. Our themed environments are only limited substitutes for the kind of rich public spaces that are nurtured in a healthy society with open cities and a strong public sphere of action (1997, 159).

The rise of the ‘theme park city’ and the trend towards the transformation of city centres into shopping malls are related to a more general phenomenon – the fact that we spend more and more of our time in transit in spaces which French ethnologist Marc Augé defines as ‘nonplaces’:


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(…) if a place can be defined as relational, or historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place (1995, 77-78).

Augé sees non-places as typical of a world ‘surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral’ (1995, 78) and argues that, to understand non-places and their effects, ‘there will soon be a need – perhaps there already is a need – for something that may seem a contradiction in terms: an ethnology of solitude’ (1995, 120). Nicolas Whybrow, in his contribution to this volume, adopts the perspective of a Benjaminian flâneur to reflect on an aeroplane journey from London Heathrow to Berlin Tegel. He explains that, in Augé’s theory, non-places such as supermarkets, motorways, airports and aircraft are a central aspect of the condition of ‘supermodernity’: ‘a modernity that is over-determined, containing an excess of information which no longer allows human beings to recognise themselves’. In supermodernity – according to Augé – the world becomes ‘abstractly familiar’. Whybrow argues that this notion recalls the Freudian concept of ‘das Unheimliche’, which is usually translated as ‘(the) uncanny’. However, Whybrow explains that this translation is somewhat incomplete, as it does not fully convey the German term’s connotations of ‘unhomeliness’, insecurity, foreboding and fear. Augé’s interpretation of the effects of non-places is rather pessimistic. He sees them as inextricably linked with the passivity ‘of contemporary individualism, the individualism of the consumer’ (Augé 2002, 89). Whybrow, however, highlights some positive features of the Unheimlichkeit of the experience of transitio, of travel ‘through non-place to unknown-place’. He quotes Italian architect and anthropologist Franco La Cecla, for whom ‘getting lost (…) is a condition of beginning’. In short, fear and the other uncomfortable feelings of Unheimlichkeit are, for Whybrow, essential to produce an attitude of openness and to avoid the ‘colonisation’ by travellers of the places they visit. Neal Alexander’s essay returns to the theme of fear as a key component of urban mindscapes and imaginaries. Kevin Robins observes that fear and other collective emotions are all too often ignored in the discourse about cities and their future: (…) most forms of urban discourse that are available to us have been shaped by the rationalist tradition. In consequence, our ability to deal with the collective emotional life of cities is rather limited (1995, 59).

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Alexander discusses literary representations of Belfast as a secular, materialistic, industrial, money-making and therefore ungodly, un-Irish, bleakly utilitarian and ‘infernal’ city. The chapter argues that these representations of Belfast have to be understood in the context of the wider European tradition of urban gothic, in which the city is the favoured location of the Freudian Unheimliche. Drawing on Tönnies’s work, Alexander links the tradition of fictional images of Belfast as unheimlich with the traumas of urbanisation, and with the uprooting and alienation caused by the shift from a rural, communitarian Gemeinschaft to an urban, industrial Gesellschaft. He shows how the subject matter of various examples of Troubles fiction deals with attempts, through the practice of sectarian intimidation and violence, to fragment the disorientating Gesellschaft of the city into distinct ‘urban villages’, where a condition of Gemeinschaft can be simulated. Fear in urban mindscapes and in cultural representations of cities is often linked in the literature with the theme of urban dystopias. Keith Williams’s chapter discusses H.G. Wells’s ‘scientific romance’ When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), and its complex relationship with Fritz Lang’s silent epic Metropolis (1926). Lang’s film is a classic of the genre, and has influenced important urban dystopia sci-fi films like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), set in 2019 Los Angeles. Indeed Amendola maintains that Metropolis is the masterpiece of the cinematic urban sci-fi of modernity, and Blade Runner its equivalent for postmodernity (1997, 54). Continuing with the theme of urban dystopias in contemporary cinema, Barry Langford’s contribution discusses three European films of the 1980s: Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing (Great Britain, 1980), Alain Tanner’s In the White City (Portugal/Switzerland, 1984) and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (Germany, 1987). Langford argues that these films constitute European alternatives ‘to the version of the postmodern metropolis popularised by Blade Runner and its ilk’. Europe’s ‘urban apocalypse’ in Wings of Desire, for example, is ‘a fact of living memory rather than a projection of paranoid fantasy’. In place of Blade Runner-style ‘large-scale realisations of the dystopic metropolis’, Wenders’s Berlin is ‘unavoidably fragmented and individuated’. Bad Timing and In the White City similarly offer symbolic and psychological explorations of the fashioning of the mindscapes of Vienna and Lisbon respectively, and of how these are affected by historical events and by the male protagonists’ different attitudes to female sexuality. Langford’s conclusions about the differences between urban mindscapes in European cinema and American urban dystopias like Blade


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Runner chime with the findings of Arnaldo Bagnasco and Patrick Le Galès (2000). They highlight the differences between contemporary European and US cities – for example in terms of morphology and age, political and social structures, and traditions of State intervention – and lament the fact that European urban studies are too influenced by a notion of the city which is largely American. The chapters grouped in the book’s third section, as suggested earlier, focus on the role of urban mindscapes and imaginaries in city marketing, cultural planning and urban policy in general. One interesting issue, which is discussed in Doris Teske’s contribution, is how a city’s cultural institutions interact with urban mindscapes. The chapter focuses on museums in today’s Berlin and Liverpool. Teske explores the different ways in which internationally oriented art museums, on the one hand, and museum institutions more focused on local history and heritage, on the other, relate to both the city’s physical landscape and its mindscape. Her conclusions are that – with regard to the two cities’ physical landscapes – both kinds of museums are interacting insufficiently with neighbouring areas and local planning strategies. However, as far as urban mindscapes are concerned, Teske argues that ‘local museums’ (like the Museum of Liverpool Life, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin) have been more successful than internationally oriented museums in taking up ‘the challenge of connecting to the city and its various meanings’. Sharon Zukin’s study of the role of internationally prestigious art museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim) in processes of urban change in New York confirms Teske’s conclusions. Zukin writes: ‘as universalistic high culture institutions, museums stand completely outside a specific urban context of neighborhood constituencies and local identities’ (1995, 133). The contributions by Ghilardi, Brookes, Siebenhaar and Weiss-Sussex deal with practices which provide glimpses of innovative alternatives to traditional approaches to urban regeneration strategies, and to the promotion of cities in particular. Lia Ghilardi discusses the use by policy-makers in Malmö of large scale events and infrastructural projects like the European Housing Expo Bo01 and the wider plan for the regeneration of the city’s Western Harbour, undertaken from 2001 onwards. These projects were part of a strategy to respond to the crisis (between the mid-1970s and the late ‘90s) of staple industries like construction, shipbuilding and car manufacturing,

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and to the contraction of public sector employment. The opening in 2000 of the Öresund Bridge linking Malmö with Copenhagen encouraged the city’s policy-makers to develop more imaginative regeneration strategies. Malmö became part of an emerging transnational European urban region, and this required new ambition and vision. Ghilardi writes that ‘urban transformations on a grand, utopian scale have a privileged position in Malmö’s history’. However, she adds that ‘in the past such transformations were the result of a shared, carefully planned vision’, while in the early twenty-first century Malmö’s policy-makers chose ‘big projects and events to mobilise new meanings about place, in the hope that these will become reality’. This way of operating recalls John Pløger’s notion of ‘discursive planning’, a type of urban planning which creates ‘images, symbolic representations and fantasies discursively’ (2001, 63). In his interview in this volume, Paul Brookes argues that city marketing is in many cases seen as a panacea to address complex and multidimensional urban problems. Therefore one of the crucial and most difficult aspects of a city marketing process is managing the different expectations of local citizens, enterprises, politicians, policy-makers, the media and the third sector. Brookes also emphasises the increasingly central role of local cultural life in city marketing campaigns. Because of the growing importance of city marketing in urban policy and politics, Brookes rightly emphasises the issue of the legitimacy and accountability of unelected place promotion agencies. Chris Philo and Gerry Kearns (1993) confirm that one of the main factors which complicate the task of city marketers is the existence of many different ideas and views of local culture, associated with different identifications on the basis of ethnicity, gender and class. Brookes discusses the pioneering ‘Leicester Revealed’ initiative, which he led from 2003-2006 on behalf of Leicester Shire Promotions. Leicester Revealed was influenced by a book by Chris Murray (2001) which rejected mainstream product marketing-based approaches to place marketing and promotion. Murray was in turn influenced by the discipline of ‘cultural planning’, intended not as an attempt to plan culture, but rather as a culturally sensitive approach to different types of public policy, including place promotion and marketing (see Bianchini 1999a and 1999b). Continuing with the theme of city marketing, Klaus Siebenhaar, in his essay on Berlin, implicitly agrees with Rolf Lindner’s thesis about the existence of a gestalt of the urban imaginary. Siebenhaar argues that place


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marketers, in Berlin and elsewhere, have to work with the dominant myths characterising a city. He defines ‘myth’ as a blend of concrete views, dream images, knowledge born out of experience, wishes, traditional tales and archetypes of attitude, thus forming a unique kind of truth (…) The myth’s system of information creates a distinctive web of stories, serving as the (self-)interpretation of a city’s history and thus helping to create meaning.

Siebenhaar argues that there is a remarkable recurrence in the history of the German capital of the myth of Berlin as a young, upstart, pioneer, energetic, adventurous, unconventional city of constant change. He examines how this myth has influenced not only literary and media representations of the city, but also urban policy and place marketing strategies. He discusses the four main initiatives in Berlin’s city marketing strategy during the 1990s. These are ‘New Berlin’, ‘Berlin Open City’, ‘Schaustelle Berlin’ (‘Showcase Berlin’, but also a pun on Baustelle Berlin, ‘Building Site Berlin’), and ‘Young Berlin’. The four themes are linked with the idea of Berlin as an urban laboratory, after the Stunde Null of reunification, including innovations like the spectacularisation of the process of rebuilding the city, with several building sites being stage designed by specialists. Another innovative feature of place marketing in Berlin during this period is – under the ‘Young Berlin’ theme – its positive attitude to youth subcultures, including the Love Parade and the city’s club scene. More generally, like Paul Brookes, Siebenhaar emphasises the importance of the link between city marketing and cultural policy, and the role of cultural events in fleshing out and communicating all four strategic initiatives for the promotion of Berlin. Godela Weiss-Sussex, in her chapter on the potential role of literary representations in the marketing of the ‘New Berlin’, agrees with Murray’s emphasis (2001) on the need for place marketers to recognise the complexity and multifaceted nature of cities. She takes issue with the scepticism about the value of literary representations which is widespread among place marketing strategists in Berlin. Weiss-Sussex argues that there is great potential to build on the city’s wealth of literature festivals, grassroots literary activities, new writing and productions by authors from immigrant backgrounds. The chapter criticises the relentless focus on ‘newness’ and the bias against the past which characterises the ‘New Berlin’ marketing strategy, discussed by Siebenhaar in his essay. WeissSussex argues that focusing on ‘the new, the hip and the cool’ can lead to

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a loss of strategic direction, and produce vacuous claims and bland messages. The essay criticises also Siebenhaar’s use of the notion of the Berlin ‘myth’. Weiss-Sussex quotes Roland Barthes’s definition of myth as ‘surreptitious faking’, and points out that the Berlin myth, as used in the ‘New Berlin’ strategy, has denied the city’s historicity. She stresses the fact that ‘the city’s eventful twentieth-century history’ is the main reason why tourists visit the city. The essay argues that literature has the potential to convey Berlin’s nature as a ‘palimpsest city’, characterised by major historical changes compressed in a short period of time, from the second half of the nineteenth century. Weiss-Sussex calls for a more imaginative and better co-ordinated approach to linking cultural policy with city marketing, which would draw on international examples of good practice. Conclusions and Issues for Research and Policy Debates The essays collected in this volume offer a wealth of theoretical insights and suggestions for research and policy development. This section will identify and briefly discuss only some of the issues which are worthy of more detailed consideration. There has not been much research done on urban mindscapes and imaginaries in Europe to date, especially with regard to small and medium-sized cities. Urban policy-making is largely based on physical and socio-economic data, and, as far as qualitative information is concerned, it is founded mainly on the analysis of the citizens’ needs and on surveys of views, opinions and attitudes (particularly of ‘influential’ people, like investors). Urban mindscapes and imaginaries tend to be largely untapped and unanalysed resources, which, as several of the authors in this book show, could act as catalysts to attune urban policy to popular needs and aspirations. The ‘cultural planning’ approach – briefly discussed earlier with regard to Paul Brookes’s contribution – is an attempt to develop an alternative practice, which reveals the inadequacy of narrowly-based professional specialisations in urban policy. These make it harder for policy-makers to capitalise creatively on the cultural resources of their cities. Advocates of cultural planning argue that ‘cultural cartography’ – using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods to identify and describe local cultural resources – is an essential precondition for culturally sensitive urban policies. A city’s pool of ‘cultural resources’ encompasses the following elements:


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– arts and media activities and institutions; – the cultures of youth, ethnic minorities and other ‘communities of interest’, including local festivals and other celebratory events; – the tangible and intangible heritage, including archaeology, gastronomy, local history, dialects and rituals; – the local ‘image bank’, as defined earlier; – the natural and built environment, including public and open spaces; – the diversity and quality of places where people socialise, including street markets, bars, clubs, cafés and restaurants; – local milieus and institutions for intellectual and scientific innovation, including Universities and private sector research centres; – the repertoire of local products and skills in the crafts, manufacturing and services (adapted from Bianchini 1999b). A variety of methodologies may be necessary to audit these resources and their potential applications. For example, for the analysis of local and external perceptions of a place it may be appropriate to use content analysis or discourse analysis, as well as historical reconstructions of how the image of a locality in film, literature, music and other cultural forms has evolved. The cultural cartographer can engage also in the ‘mapping’ of different characteristics of a city’s cultural scene, including milieus of artistic imagination and innovation, and their relationships with milieus of economic and social innovation. To return again briefly to the specific field of city marketing, Murray (2001) and other advocates of ‘culturally sensitive’ approaches maintain that it is not appropriate directly to transfer to a city strategies used for marketing products like cars, chocolate or shoes, as often happens in mainstream professional practice. This critique of city marketing could be applied more generally to urban policy. A city is a complex and multifaceted entity, which combines a local economy, society, built environment, eco-system and polity governed by an agreed set of rules. Urban policy, to capture the spirit and quality of the place, has to touch on all these dimensions. This can only happen if urban policy becomes a creative rather than a mechanical, formulaic process: it should therefore be more holistic, interdisciplinary and lateral, through greater collaboration between people with a range of different skills and types of knowledge. This collaborative work would involve not only architects, planners,

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engineers, economic development specialists, place marketers and tourism and cultural development officers, but also specialists in urban mindscapes and imaginaries, including urban historians, sociologists, anthropologists, semiologists, psychologists and artists. Knowledge about urban mindscapes and imaginaries can help make urban policies more open to innovation and experiment. In order to achieve this, though, there would need to be an urban R&D strategy, with a more extensive use of pilot projects, and creative approaches to public consultation, through workshops, ideas competitions and exhibitions, forums and discussion groups. These would involve citizens of different ages and social backgrounds, to identify and build on their mindscapes and imaginaries, and understand what are the factors which stimulate or hinder creativity and imagination (see, for example, Landry 2000, on the idea of the ‘creative city’). In her chapter, Godela Weiss-Sussex argues that city marketing – and, again I would add, broader urban strategies – should consider the complexity of a city’s history as an asset. Urban mindscapes and imaginaries play an important role in cultural and historical continuity: in linking past, present and future. How can one ensure, though, that the mindscapes and imaginaries of a city are open to the future, and that historical memory is not a dead weight, an obstacle to creativity and change? This is particularly a problem for cities whose ‘official’ mindscape is dominated by the cultural representations of a particular historical period. These tend to be cities in which (as in the case of Renaissance Florence, or Mozart’s Salzburg) there are powerful vested economic interests, related to tourism, which demand the continuous reproduction of a certain mindscape, also through the programming of high profile cultural events (e.g. concerts, exhibitions or festivals) and through their influence on the mainstream media. It is important to ask how a city’s mindscape can be open to newcomers and new cultural influences. One of the ways of overcoming closure is to show that local culture has already incorporated and embodied elements of foreign culture, and that there are traditions of progressive cosmopolitanism and openness in the history of the city (see Bloomfield and Bianchini 2004). The impacts of globalisation on European cities, which could further erode local distinctiveness, underline the importance of seeing urban mindscapes and imaginaries as resources for future urban policies. Models of urban development conceived in countries like the US, Canada and Australia – which have different traditions of urbanism and, largely be-


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cause of the amount of space at their disposal, a different relationship between the city and the countryside from that characterising European history – are becoming popular also in Europe. For example, the trend to urban sprawl (which is driven by the dispersal of urban functions and by lifestyle preferences, rather than by population growth) has resulted in the creation of dull and standardised environments, such as many out-oftown shopping centres and multiplex cinemas, which tend to be drearily functional and similar all over Europe. They are often badly designed sheds, located in the vicinity of soulless motorway junctions and surrounded by car parks. The trend towards the museumisation of heritage cities, and crass approaches to creating themed bars, restaurants and shops pose other significant threats to local distinctiveness (see Bianchini 2004). Several contributions to the book explain that some urban mindscapes and imaginaries are more visible or more hidden than others. This imbalance often reflects power structures in a city. There is a need for empirical research on the politics of the production and communication of urban mindscapes and imaginaries in different cities. This should include the analysis of the motivations for action by urban elites, and of the complex relationship between political parties, urban policy-makers (including those in charge of place promotion), business, the media, community groups, intellectuals, artists and cultural sector organisations in this process. By opening itself to dialogue with a city’s mindscapes and imaginaries, urban policy-making could become more critical and questioning. Its objective should not be to construct a fake consensus by glossing over or denying the existence of real conflicts. Rather it could become more effective by openly acknowledging conflicts, divisions and problems, and by exploring and problematising them further, in an attempt to find alternative solutions. Jude Bloomfield argues in her chapter that one of the objectives (…) of the research into the pluralism of urban imaginaries is to draw out the different civic viewpoints they express and to highlight where these overlap and where they diverge – to take into account the viewpoints of environmentalists, the working class, different ethnic minorities in poor marginalised neighbourhoods, the bohemian and professional middle classes, women, the elderly, young people or children.

Levente Polyák, also in this book, asks important questions on how ordinary citizens can contribute to revitalised forms of local democracy:

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Franco Bianchini (…) what are the ways for citizens to participate in the process of attaching meaning to urban space? (…) How to encourage citizens to use a more detailed, responsible and differentiated set of meanings in their identification with the city?

Urban mindscapes and imaginaries are certainly important for our understanding of what makes a city tick, what the citizens’ hopes and dreams are, what is significant to artists and intellectuals, how different social groups and generations (particularly individuals and groups who suffer from economic, social and political exclusion) remember places and experience spaces, think about the future and see each other in the city. Perhaps, in fact, it is too reductive and instrumental to talk about the ‘use’ of urban mindscapes and imaginaries by policy-makers. It would be better to explore their ‘relationship’ with policy, to encourage policymakers to enter into dialogue with the collective imagination.

References Amendola, Giandomenico. 1997. La città postmoderna. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso. SSS. 2002. Diario di guerra. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri (original title: Journal de guerre. 2002. Paris: Éditions Galilée). Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Bagnasco, Arnald, and Patrick Le Galès. 2000. Cities in Contemporary Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bianchini, Franco. 1999a. The Relationship between Cultural Resources and Tourism Policies for Cities and Regions. In Planning Cultural Tourism in Europe, eds. D. Dodd and A. van Hemel, 78-90. Amsterdam: Boekmanstichting. SSS. 1999b . Cultural Planning for Urban Sustainability. In City and Culture. Cultural Processes and Urban Sustainability, ed. Louise Nyström, 34-51. Karlskrona: Swedish Urban Environment Council. SSS. 2004. The Cultural Impacts of Globalisation and the Future of Urban Cultural Policies. In New Horizons in British Urban Policy, eds. Craig Johnstone and Mark Whitehead, 215-28. Aldershot: Ashgate Bloomfield, Jude, and Franco Bianchini. 2004. Planning for the Intercultural City. Bournes Green: Comedia. Curtis, David Ames. 1997. Foreword. In Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and transl. David Ames Curtis, vii-xv. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.


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Donald, James. 1992. Metropolis: The City as Text. In Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, eds. Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson, 417-61. Cambridge: Polity Pres in association with Basil Blackwell and The Open University. SSS. 1999. Imagining the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Everitt, A. 1997. The Governance of Culture: Approaches to Integrated Cultural Planning and Policy. Cultural Policies Research and Development Unit – Policy Note 5. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing. Finnegan, Ruth. 1998. Tales of the City. A Study of Narrative and Urban Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gottdiener, Mark. 1997. The Theming of America. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press. Hannigan, John. 1998. Fantasy City. London and New York: Routledge. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds.). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Kofman, Eleonore, and Elizabeth Lebas. 1996. Lost in Transposition – Time, Space and the City. In Writings on Cities, ed. Henri Lefebvre, 3-60. Oxford: Blackwell. Landry, Charles. 2000. The Creative City. London: Earthscan. Lefebvre, Henri (ed.). 1996. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell. Mazzoleni, Donatella. 1993. The City and the Imaginary. In Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, eds. Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires, 285-301. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Maruyama, Magoroh. 1980. Mindscapes and Science Theories. In Current Anthropology 21: 589-608. Murray, Chris. 2001. Making Sense of Place: New Approaches to Place Marketing. Bournes Green: Comedia (in association with the International Cultural Planning and Policy Unit, De Montfort University, Leicester). Patton, Paul. 1995. Imaginary Cities: Images of Postmodernity. In Postmodern Cities and Spaces, eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, 112-21. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Perri 6. 1997. Holistic Government. London: Demos. Philo, Chris, and Gerry Kearns. 1993. Culture, History, Capital: A Critical Introduction to the Selling of Places. In Selling Places: The City As Cultural Capital, Past and Present, eds. Gerry Kearns and Chris Philo, 1-32. Oxford: Pergamon. Pløger, John. 2001. Millennium Urbanism – Discursive Planning. In European Urban and Regional Studies, 8:1, 63-72. Raban, Jonathan. 1975. Soft City. Glasgow: Fontana (first published in 1974 by Hamish Hamilton, London). Robins, Kevin. 1995. Collective Emotion and Urban Culture. In Managing Cities. The New Urban Context, eds. Patsy Healey, Stuart Cameron, Simin Davoudi, Stephen Graham and Ali Madani-Pour, 45-61. Chichester: John Wiley. Silva, Armando, ed. 2003. Urban Imaginaries from Latin America. Documenta 1. Kassel: Hatje Cantz Publishers. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.

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METHODOLOGY AND CONCEPT FORMATION



THE GESTALT OF THE URBAN IMAGINARY

Rolf Lindner

Abstract In our age of fragmentation it is quite an uncommon idea – perhaps even one out of step with the spirit of the times – to think of the gestalt of something. Indeed, the idea of gestalt refers to the very opposite of fragmentation, the supposed sign of our times: namely to the interconnectedness of phenomena. Nevertheless this essay suggests that we think of the urban imaginary as the mental gestalt of the city. According to the founder of gestalt theory, Max Wertheimer, the gestalt is an organised unity where the part processes are determined by the nature of the whole. Conversely the whole must already be revealed in the part. The basic theme of a city’s imaginary – product of the historically formative economic sector – is our case in point. As we all know from everyday life, we never experience a space as ‘empty’, as mere fact, as it were. Rather, the city is a culturally coded space, soaked in history, which becomes a place of imagination, a symbolic space filled with meaning. This place of imagination overlaps the physical space, to the extent that the latter is experienced through the accompanying images and symbols. ‘The city in our actual experience is at the same time an actually existing physical environment, and a city in a novel, a film, a photograph, a city seen on television, a city in a comic strip, a city in a pie chart, and so on’ writes Victor Burgin in Some Cities (1996, 48). Admittedly the double determination of the city as product both of the real and the imaginary is ultimately exclusively of analytical value. In fact, as James Donald suggests, the imagined city is the city in

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which we actually live: ‘The city we do experience – the city as state of mind – is always already symbolised and metaphorised’ (1999, 17). When we talk about the urban imaginary, two arguments are regularly introduced, both of which are equally inadequate: first, the idea that the imaginary is opposed to the real, or is at least detached from it, and second, the equation of the imaginary with an image, with a sign system which can be arbitrarily invented and changed. Both these misconceptions understand the imaginary solely as a product of the imagination, whether active or passive. I, by contrast, find myself in agreement with the French anthropologist Pierre Sansot, who claims that the imaginary, far from constituting a flight from reality, is another way of connecting to it (see Sansot 1993). To put it in less poetic, more pragmatic terms: for Edward Soja the urban imaginary refers to ‘the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in the places, spaces and communities in which we live’ (2000, 324). But there is even more to it: the imaginary gives the real greater depth and goes beyond it in the sense of adding something extra. In other words, the imaginary gives a place meaning, sense, ‘lends it a spirit’, which ‘touches’ us, in the words of the French anthropologist Bernard Cherubini (1995, 80). It is this supplement which makes a city not only a lived place but also a dreamed one. The imaginary of the city, in Pierre Sansot’s poetic formulation, is the reverie of the real. Therefore it cannot be invented arbitrarily. Like a dream the imaginary is latent and deeply rooted. It is antecedent to any wilful act of imagineering. This does not mean, however, that images disseminated by campaigns cannot become part of the imaginary; but the images must correspond to the imaginary, i.e. be culturally homologous. ‘What is the meaning of this city, what kind of a place is it?’ That is the question Anselm Strauss asks himself and his readers in his Sourcebook of Urban Imagery (1968, 24). In taking up the urban imaginary as a theme, anthropology is returning to a neglected sociological approach, that of ‘cultural representation’, which Richard Wohl and Anselm Strauss introduced in 1958 in their seminal essay ‘Symbolic Representation and the Urban Milieu’: ‘If, as Robert Park suggested, the city is a state of mind, then people must, to some extent, attempt to grasp the meaning of its complexity imaginatively and symbolically as well as literally’ (Wohl and Strauss 1958, 523). Wohl and Strauss were the first to raise the question of the meaning of the city for its inhabitants, of its evocative and expressive qualities, the gist of the imaginary. It is certainly an ironic comment on


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our supposedly post-local age with its nomadic lifestyles that in Pulp Fiction, a work celebrated as a minor masterpiece of postmodern film, the reference to the place of origin of one of its heroes (Cass from Inglewood) is enough to vividly convey a whole character. Origins still matter, and, as we well know, sometimes in a painful way. Strauss’s sourcebook and Wohl and Strauss’s essay ‘suggested a whole new line of research in urban sociology’ (Lofland 1991, 207). Wohl and Strauss regarded the characterisation of cities by means of an ‘indigenous symbolism’ as necessary in order for their inhabitants to be able to digest, connect and fit in the wealth of impressions and experiences to which they are permanently exposed. It is not only the key symbols which stand for the whole, the landmarks and emblems such as the skyline of New York, so well understood as a symbol ‘that a movie can establish its locale by doing no more than flashing a picture of these skyscrapers on the screen for a moment and then directing the camera into the opening episodes of the film’ (Wohl and Strauss 1958, 526), which help citizens to formulate the uniqueness of their city in comparison and in contrast to other towns. It is the entire ‘vocabulary’, from the allegory to the analogy, from the anecdote to the popular song, from the urban legends to the poem. As is well known, the idea of gestalt derives from psychology as a critique of tendencies to reduce the psychic structure to its elements. According to the advocates of gestalt theory, to break down this structure into its elements is mechanical and inevitably misleading. A whole is in every case greater than its component parts and can only be grasped by an approach which takes account of gestalts, i.e. of organised unities. In a lecture to the Berlin Kant Society in 1924, the founder of gestalt theory, Max Wertheimer, expressed the fundamental formula of the theory as follows: ‘There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole’ (Wertheimer 1938, 2). As is evident from Margaret Mead’s autobiography Blackberry Winter, gestalt theory was very soon an influence on cultural anthropology in the United States: ‘Sapir was in New York for part of the year [1924], enjoying the poets he met and developing a new interest in pattern, an outgrowth of our interest in Gestalt psychology’, she writes in her memoir. ‘I read and lent him Koffka’s Growth of the Mind. We are still writing poetry with as much intensity as we were working on anthropology’ (Mead 1975, 135). The somewhat disjointed final sentence becomes comprehensible if one remembers that for the first generation of cultural anthropologists,

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genuine cultures in Edward Sapir’s sense have their own aesthetic, which finds expression in their gestalt. ‘[The genuine culture] is inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory’ (Sapir 1948, 314). As the quotation shows, to the cultural anthropologists poems and cultures are related to one another, just as they themselves are poets and anthropologists in one. From this perspective gestalt psychology and cultural anthropology prove to be culturally homologous, and it would be a worthwhile undertaking, although not one that can be pursued here, to find out what might be the common source of this relationship. In the present context, however, it is important to establish that cultural anthropology, too, is concerned with something more than individual elements, patterns as it calls them. It is interested in the question as to whether these individual patterns yield a texture. To show that the urban texts – the allegories, anecdotes and legends – do indeed form a texture in which the city is truly enmeshed has been the contribution of Gerald D. Suttles, one of the few urban researchers to pursue the symbolic-representational approach of Wohl and Strauss. In an essay with the programmatic title ‘The Cumulative Texture of Local Urban Culture’ (1984), Suttles rejects an urban sociology which looks at city life exclusively in terms of the economic end points of production and consumption and sees local culture merely as the source of minor deviations, an element in economic retardation or simply a set of exogenous factors. The biography of a city cannot be adequately understood if reliance is placed exclusively on economic explanatory models; to achieve a ‘thick description’ of the specificity of a city it is necessary to take into account the cumulative texture of the local culture as expressed in images, typifications and collective representations. What makes Suttles’s essay a seminal text, even today, is less the fact that it points to a research deficit (which is by now a somewhat banal conclusion), than the wealth of material which he suggests to the researcher (from dirty lyrics to pejorative nicknames, from cemeteries to telephone books) and the specific logic by which, in his view, the pattern is woven into a fabric. In his opinion, research will usually yield three interrelated series of collective representations: firstly the founding or discovering figures of the place; secondly the economic and political elites who, ‘by hook or by crook’, have contributed to its ‘spirit’; and thirdly material artefacts (such as monuments) and immaterial ones (such as sayings, songs and stories), which express the ‘character’ of the place (Suttles 1984, 288). Though there might be a certain US bias in the choice of important items (e.g. the


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founding figures), the list nonetheless gives us an idea of what we can look for. There are places, for example cemeteries, in which significant elements of the local culture are condensed: a comparison of Vienna’s Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) with Père Lachaise in Paris, together with the myths associated with them, would tell us a great deal about the special character of these two cities. Suttles sees the representations as directly linked to a distinct economic regime. In his examples, these are the merchant families of Boston, the financial empires of New York, the joint-stock companies of Chicago, the ‘dream factories’ of Los Angeles, and the oil companies and space exploration enterprises of Houston. The relationship is especially clear in popular ‘characterology’: ‘Proper Bostonian’, ‘New York’s city slicker’, ‘Chicago’s hog butchers’, ‘Los Angeles stars’ and ‘Houston’s wildcatters’ (Suttles 1984, 291). For Suttles, local cultural representations display a remarkable durability. Their number certainly increases over time, but they do not fundamentally change. That is what is meant by the cumulative nature of local culture, which is not least the result of a process of continuous intertextual cross-reference. Writers and/or literary genres play an essential part in the development and consolidation of the image of a particular city; indeed, the texts are actively constitutive of the city. There are cities which resemble a penny novel, whereas others are more likely to call a classics edition to mind. Some cities are reminiscent of science fiction, while others make us think of sentimental rural narratives. Some cities are true fairy tales, whereas others remind us of accounts of a bookkeeper. Cities have their authors just as authors have their cities: James Ellroy seems only to be conceivable in Los Angeles, Nelson Algren only in Chicago, Tom Wolfe only in New York. Thus literary works which aim at a unity of place and plot appear to be especially interesting sources for an urban ethnography, as Suttles demonstrated: ‘Boston may have its Sister Carries and Chicago its George Apleys, but they are implausible literary characters’ (Suttles 1984, 292). The plausibility of a literary figure is a fine indicator of what is imaginable and above all what is unimaginable with regard to a particular city. Nothing is more telling than what is not evident, what is taken to be impossible, what seems to be unthinkable. The category of plausibility, of credibility, is one of the strongest indicators of the compatibility of place and plot in fictional, literary or cinematic representations of urban life. We have a very vivid expression to describe a possible discrepancy, one that alludes directly to place: something – the protagonist, the plot, the scenery – is obviously out of place, etwas ist

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deplaziert, quelque chose est deplacée. The feeling that creeps up on us that something doesn’t fit is simultaneously a striking argument in favour of the idea of the gestalt character of our perception. The images, narratives and stories of a city ‘migrate’ across genres of writing, as James Donald has put it (1993, 457), and the ‘varieties of text’ which both reflect and perpetuate the image of a city are manifold. They include not only literary works, but also TV series, movies, pop music and comics, not forgetting those numerous ‘instructive texts’ such as local newspapers, listings magazines, guide books, tourist leaflets, postcards, or ‘grand narratives’ like local histories and commemorative publications of every kind, from the anniversary volume of a company to the jubilee programme of a football team. What must be kept in mind with respect to these texts is the ‘characterological unity of local cultural representations’ with its mnemonic relatedness (Suttles 1984, 294). This unity results from the manyvoiced variation of a basic theme (or basic themes) and leads to a stereotypical and firmly established image. It is the characterological unity of local cultural representations which manifests itself as the mental gestalt of a city. Let us go back for a moment to Wertheimer’s formulation of gestalt theory. If the part-processes are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole, then conversely the whole must already be revealed in the part. This principle is present in gestalt psychology’s rule ‘to select one part of the whole and work from that towards an idea of the structural principle motivating and determining the whole’ (Wertheimer 1938, 11). This principle is evidently also valid for interpretive anthropology, when, for example, Clifford Geertz (1983) looks for the part (e.g. the Balinese cockfight) which embodies the whole (e.g. Balinese culture). It is less well known that another contemporary of Wertheimer, Walter Benjamin, was also an advocate of this idea. In his Arcades Project Benjamin was concerned ‘to discover the crystal of the total event in the analysis of small individual moments’ (Benjamin 1983, vol. 1, 575). The basic theme of a city’s imaginary, on which variations are played, is a case in point. This theme is by no means arbitrary, but is produced by that sector of the economy which has dominated the city historically. Let us take an example of this. Out of the literary translation of the dominant sector of Chicago, the stock yards, into ‘hog butcher’, into the ‘butcher to the world’ by Carl Sandburg, is created an image of Chicago which even today, more than thirty years after the demolition of the stock yards, still makes Chicago appear as ‘stormy, husky, brawling’, as ‘a tall bold slugger set vivid


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against the soft little cities’, as it says in Sandburg’s poem ‘Chicago’ from 1915. Over the decades the poem has become a formula of pathos for the city, which gives its inhabitants that sense of place described by Wohl and Strauss. This has happened by way of correspondences of the most diverse kind: from the letters of Polish immigrants who proudly took over the image of the ‘City of the Big Shoulders’ as a kind of self-description and self-celebration, ‘proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat’ (Sandburg 1948, 24), via Saul Bellow, who in an interview calls Chicago ‘ruder, cruder, noisier, dirtier, grosser, wildly energetic’ (Bellow 1995, 2), to the city’s promotional campaigns (in the 1990s), which flirt with being tough but honest – contrasting the ‘honest Chicago guy’ with the ‘arrogant New York upstart’. Up until today Chicago boasts that the city is more informal and less mannered than New York. Cities are not empty pages, but narrative spaces (Richard Sennett), in which particular (hi)stories, myths and parables are inscribed. Public and private institutions – from libraries to museums to sports stadiums – have served as surfaces for inscription, just as have the streets, squares and parks whose names shape the collective memory of the city. We find parts of these stories again in local history, as in the anniversary volumes of companies and associations. Not least, however, we encounter them in what, analogous to folklore, we may describe as citylore, in the stories about founding figures, about heroes and ‘celebrated wastrels’ (Suttles 1984, 284), about the ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’, and about the familiar ‘eccentrics’, in popular characterology and finally in anecdotes, proverbs and sayings. These cultural codings have a cumulative effect, to which even those who want to distance themselves from what are seen as clichés involuntarily contribute as they reiterate them in a critical context. This way the codings constitute a texture in which the city is truly enmeshed (see Suttles 1984).

References Bellow, Saul, by Janis Bellow. 1995. Cloudy Yearnings. In An Unsentimental Education. Writers and Chicago, ed. Molly McQuade, 1-12. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1983. Das Passagen-Werk. 2 vols. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Burgin, Victor. 1996. Some Cities. London: Reaktion.

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Cherubini, Bernard. 1995. L’ambiance urbaine: un défi pour l’écriture ethnographique. Journal des anthropologues 61-62: 79-87. Donald, James. 1993. Metropolis: the City as Text. In Social and Cultural Forms of Modernity, eds. Robert Bocock and Kenneth Thompson, 418-61. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press. SSS. 1999. Imagining the Modern City. London: Athlone Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. Dichte Beschreibung. Beiträge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Lofland, Lyn H. 1991. History, the City and the Interactionist: Anselm Strauss, City Imagery, and Urban Sociology. Symbolic Interaction 14: 205-23. Mead, Margaret. 1975. Blackberry Winter. My Earlier Years. New York: Pocket Books. Sandburg, Carl. 1948. Guten Morgen, Amerika! Ausgewählte Gedichte. Berlin: Herbig. Sansot, Pierre. 1993. L’imaginaire: la capacité d’outrepasser le sensible. Sociétés 42: 411-17. Sapir, Edward. 1948 (1924). Culture, Genuine and Spurious. In Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum, 308-31. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Soja, Edward. 2000. Postmetropolis. Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell. Strauss, Anselm. 1968. Some Varieties of American Urban Symbolism. In An American City. A Sourcebook of Urban Imagery, ed. Anselm Strauss, 19-35. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Suttles, Gerald D. 1984. The Cumulative Texture of Local Urban Culture. American Journal of Sociology 90: 283-304. Wertheimer, Max. 1938. Gestalt Theory. In A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, ed. Willis D. Ellis, 1-11. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Wohl, R. Richard, and Anselm L. Strauss. 1958. Symbolic Representation and the Urban Milieu. American Journal of Sociology 63: 523-32.


RESEARCHING THE URBAN IMAGINARY: RESISTING THE ERASURE OF PLACES

Jude Bloomfield

Abstract Place, locality and urban resistance have been neglected in studies of globalisation. Urban imaginaries are the symbolic sphere in which space and places are contested. They project unconscious social desires and construct imaginary social alternatives which form part of a long utopian tradition. Even though the visual and virtual predominates in modern media, the assertion of bodily practices in contemporary art underlies the continuing importance of face-to-face experience in the public sphere. Memory plays an important role in framing urban imaginaries, because it is constructed in the present. Consequently, struggles around memorials, museums and the built environment embody different visions of the meaning, history and identity of a place. Cities should draw on the diversity of social perspectives through research on citizens’ narratives to forge a more democratic, pluralist and inclusive urban imaginary. The Marginalisation of Place in the Globalisation Debate Urban imaginaries have emerged from the debate on globalisation. In particular it is widely assumed that ‘deterritorialisation’ has resulted from the globalised electronic communications transmitting information, especially financial information and media images, instantaneously across space. Thus it is argued, time has ‘overcome’ space in virtual reality. This has caused disembedding of local social relationships and their enmeshing in global, long-distance relations, whether in the sphere of information, ideas, images or interpersonal networks as well as those of capital

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and goods. Although globalisation theorists refer to ‘reterritorialisation’ and ‘re-embedding’, these receive relatively scant attention (see Giddens 1990; Castells 1996; Tomlinson 1999). The global has come to be seen as unmoored, as though inhabiting virtual space. The problem with the way virtuality is treated lies in marginalising the places that people inhabit where everyday life is lived out (see for example Featherstone and Lash 1999). Research on urban imaginaries has to counter this displacement of the spatial. The life world, including that of international businessmen, the senior executives of multinational companies (see Sklair 2001; Martinotti 1993; Tarrius 1991) is always located. Even those who posit a transnational, ‘multilocal’ society tend to downgrade the importance of face-to-face social interaction and the civic aspect of city life. Beck, for example, defines transnational co-existence as ‘social proximity in spite of geographical distance – or social distance in spite of geographical proximity’ (2000, 105), which implies that migrants are closer to the people they know far away than they are to the strangers with whom they live cheek by jowl. Whilst this may be emotionally true, it changes over time, and, furthermore, it ignores the social and spatial rupture of transnational migrants from the home they have left behind and their impact on the city they have moved to. After all, migrants are propelled into social relations with the local people and institutions around them, and thus are both mobile and situated (see Albrow 1997; 1996). The global is misconceived as a locus in the nether sphere, not as a set of relationships which is always embedded in real places and localities, however small and whatever the social disjuncture. Whatever impact transnational migration and electronic media have on identity and relationships, the site of connection, meeting and social interaction, if not integration, remains local, in the city or town (or village to which migrants or their remittances return). The presence of the global in the local has not been thought through consistently because the global has been conceived of as ‘out there’, the ‘virtual other’ in the ‘space of flows’. Power and Contestation over the Global and the Local Furthermore, the debate has often slipped into conceiving the global as a purely geographical relation of distance, rather than as an unequal power relationship in which social distance from the centres of power determines how peripheral and subordinate a city or locality is in the global urban

RESEARCHING THE URBAN IMAGINARY

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hierarchy. Global cities are therefore situated, local places, seen from within, but enmeshed in global market forces, in the tentacles of powerful global financial institutions and multinational corporations to which profits are repatriated. The fact that such cities are located in physical spaces of real places impacts on their property prices, morphology and social composition and constrains their political decisions (see Sassen 1991; 1994; Martinotti 1993). The spatial impact of globalisation on cities has been seen very much as a one-way street, as power imposed from outside. The global is thus conceived as foreign rather than as being present within the local context, imposing severe constraints on political choice through local political advocates and support structures, in friction or outright conflict with counter globalisation forces and movements. While there is controversy over the degree of income inequality in the social division of labour of global cities, the hierarchical distribution of differential functions across a network between global competitor and secondary level cities, as Borja and Castells describe, is less contested. They argue that ‘the space of flows’ – of capital, finance, information, communications – is globally integrated, but the ‘space of places’ – where people actually live – is locally fragmented. Accordingly they argue: Cities can only be recuperated by their citizens to the extent that they rebuild from top to bottom, the new historical relationship between function and meaning through articulating the global and the local (Borja and Castells 1997, 44; see also Castells 1996).

In Castells’ thought, the city’s function within the world order, the international division of labour and global network determines its position and relative power. This comes into conflict with popularly understood ‘meaning’, the subjective, collective memory, histories and identities that make sense of people’s lives. In this perspective, function is globally determined and meaning is locally given. However, memory, history and identity have to be reconceived as not simply ‘local’. As Gupta and Ferguson point out (1997), the local is neither natural nor given but socially constructed and contested. The sources of meaning come from experiences in the city that integrate the self and others who come from inside and outside, and from ideas that come from all over of the world. Therefore the memory, history and identity of a city are not the emanation of an enclosed, hermetically sealed, ‘pure’ group and their past, but the ongoing social construc-

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tion of people with diverse histories whose lives intersect in a specific place. Therefore the urban imaginary is also inherently intercultural but located, cosmopolitan but rooted. What Are Urban Imaginaries? The argument for urban imaginaries is for the recognition of non-material, symbolic and psychological dimensions to the constitution of cities. Urban imaginaries focus on sensory and emotional experience and practices, on the imprint of collective memory on imagining how the city could be, on the different, often conflicting, social constructions of the city’s future. Armando Silva (2003), in his path-breaking study of urban imaginaries in fourteen Latin American and Spanish cities, defines them as symbolic, psychic indicators of unconscious desires and social constructions impacting on urban reality and – in this sense – political. Thus urban imaginaries have important material manifestations and effects. However, he also claims that electronic communications have deterritorialised identities, so they have become imaginary and subjective, seen in terms of the individual’s lifetime, rather than being bound by an objective place, historical time or memory, and thus oriented to the future, not the past: We are witness today to a very new phenomenon such as the non-correspondence between city and urbanism (since urbanism surpasses the city centres), imaginaries appear as a strategy that, more than being spatial, is of a temporal nature (…). While the city concentrates multitudes of inhabitants within precise geographic limits, the urban comes from the outside in order to break the physical limits of the city and, in a certain way, to deterritorialise it. The urban, thus understood, corresponds to an imaginary effect that, above all, makes us citizens of the world. Radio, television, the Internet, highway systems, sciences, and art; in sum, technologies represent some of the means (...) (Silva 2003, 23).

Habit and Habitat Yet the theoretical ground for urban imaginaries was laid before the globalisation of electronic media. Bourdieu (1979) has shown that social reality is always mediated through a mental world of cognitive processes which organise and categorise perceived reality and that this habitus is itself an internalisation of social place within a hierarchical order. Thus, these mental representations shape and inform practice, tending to reproduce social distinctions in culture. Habitus incorporates both social and physical place – habits and habitat, through internalisation of the bound-


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aries of appropriate behaviour, dos and don’ts, where you are allowed and forbidden to go, what you can and cannot do in specific places, the liberties and taboos accorded to different positions in the social order. According to Bourdieu, space has no meaning without practice. Habitus is constituted by and constitutes actors’ positions and possibilities of movement in physical and social space. The Urban Imaginary in Reinventing the City In his work on the imaginary construction of society, Castoriadis makes a distinction between symbolic representation, where the symbolic signifier refers to a real object – an external referent – and the imaginary, where the object referred to is invented. In this case, something new enters thought which has not previously existed, does not, and may never exist, except in the imaginary plane of thought, such as a deity or, to give another example, natural rights. This imaginary produces symbols and images that inform and transform practice, even though they are mythological inventions (see Castoriadis 1987, 125-8). For Silva (2003, 40), the analysis of symbolic urban events makes explicit unconscious desires and social intentions that are projected in imaginary spatial and literary forms, media and cultural representations. It is this imaginary, set in urban space, and the creative practices it spawns, the unconscious or hidden desires it gives expression to, and the diverse subjects it gives voice to, with which research into urban imaginaries is concerned. Memory and Re-Invention Memory plays a significant part in the urban imaginary, not simply as the dead weight of tradition, dragging the future into the mould of the past. Halbwachs (1992) has highlighted that memory is always constructed, and reconstructed in relation to the present and is, therefore, always contemporary. Individual memory is also always constructed in relation to social membership of a group and varies according to different generations as well as being layered through representations of the past. Thus memory is not set in stone but an ongoing process of social reconstruction that is subject to change and collective contestation. Live Art and Electronic Media in Public Space As Tuan (1974, 11) has noted in his comparison of the four senses invoked by a medieval cathedral with the singular sense of sight which a

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skyscraper calls upon, the visual has come to predominate in the contemporary period. The emergence of new fields of study based on the social impact of images and cultural representations, such as visual sociology and anthropology, indicate the heightened importance of the visual relative to the written word. However, the emergence in the visual arts of sensory and bodily practices of urban exploration such as walking, looking, listening, smelling and site-specific installation and performance indicate a counter tendency, to retrieve the city as a lived experience that cannot be commodified. This process runs counter to received experience and consumption of pre-packaged images; it focuses on the migratory movement rather than static occupancy (see Phillips 2005), and allows a re-engagement with the spirits of a place, opening up its imaginative possibilities (see Brennan 2003; 2001; Cardiff 1999, 2002; Curious 2004a, 2004b; e-Xplo 2003, 2004; Kwon 2004; Phillips 1997, 2004). While the ubiquity of electronic media make visual communication more crucial in politics and policy-making, they cannot displace cities as the site of everyday life and social interaction nor conjure away space into a virtual reality (see Albrow 1997). The media have an impact on public space, creating new forms of perception, information and experience. However, while almost everyone is on the receiving end of their messages, signs and symbols, very few actually participate in shaping or transmitting them; less than 1% of the globe actually has access to the Internet. Cities are only just beginning to experiment with telematic communication and electronic forms of democracy, but these projects aim to enhance access to the public space, giving information about facilities, welfare entitlements, educational opportunities, ‘what’s on’ listings, or to engage deprived and dispersed groups in intercultural and intergenerational exchange. Maverick Productions’ project, Aston Pride, produced websites, live animation and local broadcasting and created a mechanism for participation in local planning (see Bloomfield and Bianchini 2004, 91). Electronic communications offer the means of projecting an image, and the occasion for meeting and getting to know others and for participating in real space and time in changing their environment. Urban Imaginaries in Contestation If urban imaginaries predate the current era of globalisation and the rise of electronic communications, they have nevertheless become salient in an era of contestation over the global restructuring of cities, because of


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resistance to cities being reshaped from the outside, often by diktat, with only weak or absent political alternatives and inchoate desires unexpressed from within the city itself. In such an era, the urban imaginary can become a strategic force to resist monolithic, unequal globalisation imposed by powerful economic and political elites, which have no democratic mandate to determine the city’s future. In shaping an alternative vision, in keeping with the aspirations of its people for whom it has cultural meaning, the urban imaginary can help remake the city in the image of its citizens. I use the term ‘the urban imaginary’ as a collective project, or ‘urban imaginaries’ in the plural to underline the multiple and pluralistic perspectives that go to make up a city’s imaginative projections of its future. This is in contrast to the conception of the urban imaginary as a gestalt whose manifestations are evident in all of its varied, microcosmic expressions. This conception posits a coherence and singularity of image and vision of the city, derived from its predominant economic activity, such as Glasgow under the upus of shipbuilding1, Birmingham as the car city, or Chicago as the meat packing city (as outlined by Rolf Lindner in this volume). This singular, coherent vision may have been applicable for the industrial city in the modern era, but even then, it was not total. Moreover, a similar gestalt is difficult to attribute to cities without a dominant raw material or manufacture, or where the dominance of a particular economic activity leads to conflicting symbolic orientations such as London (global financial centre and post-imperial multicultural city), or with a politically determined image such as Berlin (the divided city rather than proletarian city although it remained heavily industrialised far longer as a result of the division into West and East). While the image can operate like a gestalt, its formation is quite different, as the image is always contested and therefore, many contributors to the symbolic domain do not produce a microcosmic blueprint of the predominant image in their work. This approach is also reductive because it conflates the symbolic and the imaginary – seeing in the urban imaginary a symbol with a real referent, namely the dominant industry or service that comes to embody the 1 The image, taken from Pollard 1979, points to the overwheening influence of the upus tree that spreads its branches so wide and grows so densely that nothing can prosper beneath it.

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ethos of the city and its inhabitants. But the imaginary has no necessary external referent but is concerned with desire, with what the existing reality – here the city – leaves out and what cannot therefore be re-presented in the imaginary. Rather it has to be invented, just as art magically creates something out of nothing. In addition, the urban imaginary as a gestalt attributes the emanation of the imaginary to the dominant economic form, without paying due regard to either the symbolic contestation between different visions and images that takes place in the local media, in literary and artistic imaginings of the place and through political campaigning –or to the role of the city authorities, their policy makers and advisors in shaping the dominant image. Thus the urban imaginary, the one that wins out, results from political conflict and processes, and does not simply arise pristine from the economic like a genie implanted into the psyche of artists, intellectuals and citizens. However, the symbolic and immaterial nature of urban imaginaries has vital material effects in reconceiving the city, and so should not be taken as more significant than the material, as Silva suggests (see Silva 2003, 11-43). Rather the two go together – the material hardware of the city: its production base, built environment, housing, habitat, even roads and sewers, cannot be rethought or redesigned without reconceiving the city as a whole. The methodological consequences of recognising the multiple and conflicting desires in urban imaginaries chime with Silva’s approach of gathering multiple ‘urban points of view’ and parallel or alternative representations as he did in his study of graffiti (see Silva 2001). Openness and Rootedness in the Urban Imaginary In exploring the implications for place making and remaking in this era of globalisation, the question arises whether resistance to dictatorial and unequal global forces by reasserting the local and enhancing the city’s autonomy inevitably leads to defensive closure, parochial or racist territorial exclusion? How open, cosmopolitan and innovative can civic resistance be? How can the alternative practices found in the everyday life of citizens, that go against the dominant logic and forces of globalisation, be articulated as an alternative vision of the city? What symbolic and imaginative resources does the city have, in the stories, memories, and desires of its citizens to create a more democratic and inclusive civic life?


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By researching the popular imaginary, it will be important to discover which foreign cultural elements have become incorporated into local traditions, outlook and ways of doing things, from previous eras and migratory waves. Drawing out the intercultural history of the locality that still has resonance in the popular culture and practices of the city’s inhabitants would retrace the city’s cultural history and reconnect it with formative foreign influences, international affiliations and inspirations of the city and underline the cosmopolitan derivation of many elements of national cultural identity. Intercultural rediscovery and reinterpretation of the city’s culture would facilitate the development of the ‘rooted’ or ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanism that Anthony Appiah (2005), Homi Bhabha (1996), Sidney Tarrow (2005), and others have proposed. Such cosmopolitan practice would not celebrate ‘diversity for its own sake but (…) understand the other and take seriously the value of particular human lives and cultures’ (Appiah 2005, 222). This would give full weight to moral obligations to strangers, while also giving space to the specific identities and attachments that arise from participation ‘in a community founded in a shared past or “collective memory”’ (Appiah 2005, 230). Rooted cosmopolitanism, while not seeking to undermine commitment to a specific community, recognises the historically contingent and composite influences that have formed it and thus seeks to open up membership of it. Openness to the world in this sense does not entail reasserting the local past defensively but reconnecting the city to the places of supply of raw materials, trade and labour so that the history of migrants becomes integrated in the history of the city. So research into and rediscovery of intercultural sources that constitute current urban cultural practices contributes to a cosmopolitan dialogue within the city and to creating an alternative urban imaginary which includes ‘the other’. These findings contribute to establishing an alternative concept of globalisation and an urban imaginary that is open to the outside world and welcoming to newcomers. Contested Space A physical space only becomes a cultural place when symbolic meanings are attached to it which derive from the practices and interpretations of the socially diverse groups of people who inhabit it. Space is contested when different groups conflict over history, memory and entitlement –

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over access to and control of resources and collective myths (see Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003, 19). What kind of place is it or should it be? Whose place is it? Who has the right of access to inhabit or use it and who should be excluded? As many studies show – such as Low’s case of the changing composition of the Plaza in Costa Rica, or McDonagh’s on the demonisation of the Barrio Chino in Barcelona as a centre of crime, drugs and prostitution in the dominant discourse of the urban bourgeoisie, with the aim of enforcing clearance of the neighbourhood (see Low 1992; Rotenburg and McDonagh 1993) –, places change with shifts in the economy to services, the growth of the informal sector and marginalised peripheries, international cultural influences from Americanisation and global commercial youth culture and shifts in policy and dominant discourse of local political and economic elites. So places as physical, economic, cultural entities change and new tensions and conflicts arise. While attachment remains to the place, the changes are contested in the name of the past, through claims for new uses of the space, or for access by new users and outsiders. According to Gupta and Ferguson (1996), the relations between places are also unstable and shift as a result of political and economic realignment of space within the world system. If cities are bound to contest the imposition of an inferior and marginal position in the global economy and urban hierarchy, the symbolic correlate requires that they reclaim themselves as cultural places, connected to the histories, memories and identities of their citizens and reassert their collectively self-defined distinctiveness and openness against the global monolith of commercial standardisation. Simmel (1971) argued that the dominance of money in the modern metropolis had destroyed the distinction between things by levelling everything to its exchange value, undermining vital impulses and the possibility of autonomous judgement. The efforts to defend and redefine local distinctiveness within the new global framework may contribute to forming that counter movement, anticipated in Simmel’s work, to re-sensualise and re-enchant the city. Place Attachment In urban imaginaries, place attachment – individual identification with cities and specific places within them – plays an important role in developing the resistance of citizens as subjects (see Gupta and Ferguson


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1997). Low (1992) argues that place attachment is not only a matter of sentiment or affect, but as Bourdieu defines it, also of cognition and practice. Therefore, place does not act just as a physical environment or container but as the context for social relationships and action. As such it is marked by time and history, of memories both personal – such as the memories of childhood and rites of passage – and social – such as those of historical events or recurrent civic rituals. Urban imaginaries research needs to investigate the sources of both heterophilia, the love of difference (see Vertovec and Cohen 2002), and its place-related correlate, topophilia, the love of place (see Tuan 1974); for little is known to date about the psychology of openness, or, more precisely, the factors that breed openness to places and to others who are strangers in them. Chawla (1992) identifies three kinds of satisfaction which places offer: security, social group affiliation and a space for creative expression and exploration which figures most strongly in memory. She has drawn on Schachtel in her research, who criticised the over-emphasis in psychoanalytic theory on the pleasure principle in childhood at the expense of the reality principle. For Schachtel (1959) two modes of perception are present in childhood, the autocentric, a lower form based on emotional, subjective, bodily pleasure, focussed on self, and the allocentric mode, based on information about reality from sensory contact with external forms in space. While for Freud, the pleasure principle was operative in early development and the reality principle superimposed itself later, for Schachtel, desire for external sensory contact is present from birth. Thus, the pleasure from sensory excitation coexists, albeit in a secondary way, with the desire for pleasurable release of bodily tensions. Allocentric, or other-centred perception, ‘opens itself to the object, trying to discover the characteristics that define its general form and its unique identity, which brings intellectual pleasure’ (Schachtel 1959, 70). As the child progresses from autocentric to allocentric perception, ‘(t)he embeddedness principle yields to the transcendental principle of openness toward the world and of self-realisation which takes place in encounter with the world’ (ibid., 157). Chawla (1992, 68) points to the neglect by psychoanalysis of same sex friendships in the development of the middle years of childhood when environmental exploration comes to fruition and the neighbourhood becomes the site of individual challenge, the place to prove yourself, and the centre of group play which has a vital role in the development of self-

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identity and social reputation. She concludes from her research, as did Lynch several years before, that unprogrammed spaces that offer scope for exploration, surprise and self invention turn out to be the most cherished places. All attachments imply permanence and stability of relationship although the object of attachment – in this case a place – changes over time. How place attachments are sustained through rapid transformation of cities constitutes a key question for the study of place attachment in a rapidly changing world. Likewise it poses a challenge to cities of how they can foster heterophilia and an allocentric relationship with public space and the urban environment as a whole. Memory and Forgetting The collective and individual memories of a city, key events in its history, moments of celebration and commiseration, inaugurations and burials, give resonance to the urban fabric and inform desires for the city’s future. Connerton (1989) claims that ritualised ceremony and festivals are better ways of remembering than material objects or memorials. This gives an important research indication of the value of studying rituals and festivals for living memory, as past events or stories are re-enacted and reinterpreted in the light of present needs and perspectives. However, there is value in studying monuments. According to Augé (1995, 60), ‘without the monumental illusion before the eyes of the living, history would be a mere abstraction’. Spatial construction can exert a magical effect by embodying and transcending conflicts that precede and outlive the individual human body. As Adrian Forty argues in his Introduction to The Art of Forgetting (1999), the embodiment in material objects/memorials of transient lives may indicate weak ties to the original historical event or simply reflect ‘a diffuse sense of time passing’. On the other hand, monuments may exercise a more active role in both selective remembrance and suppression of distressing or shameful aspects of a conflict. Mike Rowlands points out that monuments can transform memory: A wasted destroyed life that has proved to be of no importance is humiliating to the living. In Castoriadis’ sense of society as the imaginary, this cannot be allowed; people have to be given the means to reassert their mastery and to reconcile the trauma through the assertion of higher positive ideals. An active process of forgetting (the realities of actual deaths) in order to remember (the purpose of sacrifice) creates a realm of ideas and associations that may attach


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themselves to any object. What puts this reconciliation beyond doubt is the fixing of these ideals in the enduring form of a memorial and the social context in which this is done (Rowlands 1999, 136).

This highlights the way war memorials necessarily mythologise by transposing the individual onto a collective, symbolic plane where (s)he becomes a symbol of something bigger than him/herself. Thus war memorials, in their inauguration, are often highly contested – especially where the event commemorated is linked to a contentious national past, such as the division in Continental Europe between collaboration and the Resistance or in Britain, the triumphal portrayal of imperial power, without acknowledging the primary wealth accumulated through slavery. What should be forgotten and how memory is reframed in the present remain crucial concerns for the victims of history, the losers who are excluded from the dominant collective memory. The voices of the excluded are now being raised in debates about memorials. Contested Historic Sites, Monuments and ‘Memorial Landscapes’ In Germany the struggle over the Memorial to the Dead Jews of Europe condenses such struggles. In its long drawn-out planning stage, the organised Jewish community was deliberately excluded. At a later stage, Roma and Sinti joined in the protest over the exclusively Jewish dedication of the memorial (see Bloomfield 2002). In his study of Potsdamer Platz, Howard Caygill shows the political character of architecture and design in creating public space which operates in a present ‘riven by competing and perhaps irreconcilable hopes and memories’ (1997, 25), mobilising conflicting versions of the past, present and future. The fate of Potsdamer Platz acted as a synecdoche for the fate of the two Germanies, the divided city standing for the divided nation: Once again Potsdamer Platz was called to embody the challenges and risks facing the German polity: it became the site of encounter between different visions of the German future (…). It is also a stretch of derelict land in the middle of a capital city about which a decision must be made, whether to build or not to build, and if to build, then how? This is a ‘decision’ haunted not only by a history of past failures, but also by fundamentally different imaginations of the future. Potsdamer Platz is again a site of ambivalence, haunted by ghosts of the past and perplexed by desires of the future’ (Caygill 1997, 29).

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According to Caygill, the architectural competition aestheticised the conflict, emptying it of politics. This process determined the outcome, namely the triumph of the SPD- solicited strategy of Daimler Benz and Sony to turn Potsdamer Platz into an outlet of the corporate global market place, wrapped up in the bland international style, over the Green vision of a local, democratic transformation of the area. Here the link between contested understandings of the past and divergent imaginings of the future is clear. Methodologies 1. Narratives The methodologies for the study of urban imaginaries have, of necessity, to capture subjectivity, the voices and viewpoints of citizens. So the biographical methods of oral history which uncover narratives of self are of great value (see Passerini 1987). However, the subjectivity with which urban imaginaries are concerned is of a particular kind: it is a civic subjectivity which requires ‘civic points of view’ (Silva 2001, 3) viewpoints composed from a structured sample of subjects, drawn from not only different social classes, ethnicities, genders, ages and neighbourhoods, but also from organised political movements of environmental activists and civic campaigners for public access and services. In order to capture environmentally sensitive spatial relationships, the structured sample could be expanded to include ‘environmentally sensitive groups’ such as cyclists and city walkers. It would be enriched by including those who, like Mamma Roma in Pasolini’s film, cross over borders and enter liminal areas, like prostitutes. It could also include those who carry the secrets of the city, confidantes and gossip mongers like hairdressers and taxi drivers. 2. Symbols and Memorabilia In defining different kinds of place attachment, Low (1992) identified a range of signifiers which are methodologically significant for research on urban imaginaries: environmental symbols, narratives of place and place names, family ties, property rights and land inheritance, symbols of destruction and loss through war, cosmological myths and spirits of a place, religious and civic rituals and celebrations. Psychologically charged events linked to a place that have a strong resonance and salience in personal


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memory provide valuable insights into the relationship of the physical to the historical and social sense of place. Silva (2003) and his research team have used family albums, personal collection boxes, scrapbooks and postcards as sources of urban imaginaries. Personal memorabilia can also be found in the spoken language and dialect - jokes, sayings, stories and legends or songs as well as responses to happenings and events. As Low points out, story-telling about a place reproduces the generational sense of belonging to a place: ‘(n)arrative based forms of place attachment further reinforce the genealogical aspects of attachment’ (1992, 168). 3. The Gatekeepers of the Archive However, collective memory is not just a compilation of individual memories but is structured by agencies – such as the media, the educational system which defines the curriculum and canon, the broadcasting system, city promotion and marketing. So the institutional filters which operate as gatekeepers of collective memory have to be identified. By taking a comparative historical approach, changes in representation of key events in popular memory or legend can be traced through the local press, city photographic collections, national photojournals (such as planning, architecture and public art journals which do features on the city), the local history museum and its changing display of objects and narratives, urban histories of the city, city brochures, newsreels and promotional films. 4. Mapping and Interrogating Spatial Practices In researching space in the urban imaginary, Bourdieu’s concept offers a rich line of inquiry into the different uses and attachments to places, landmark buildings and lieux de mémoire of individuals from different social groups and neighbourhoods, including the alternative routes taken against the prescribed ones, claims of access to places of exclusion, and places that are resonant with personal or social memories (see Bourdieu 1977). Chawla refers to three methods of discovering place attachment: firstly, environmental diaries which evaluate places which have subsisted ‘through the sieve of memory’; secondly, ‘behaviour mapping’ which traces where groups congregate (where this is combined with narrative methods you can also find out why); and thirdly, favourite place analyses which investigate the subjective reasons for preferences (Chawla 1992, 65).

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Observational methods combined with favourite (or least favourite!) place surveys can uncover the socially and ethnically differentiated use of public spaces such as the city centre, monuments, the central library, museum and art gallery, local parks, swimming pools and clubs. Topographical sketches can be drawn up which trace patterns of travel in the use of locality and city centre for work and leisure. As part of the methodology for the study of urban imaginaries in Latin America, Silva traced ‘sketches’ of official maps and their transgression, showing ‘(n)ot what is imposed (as border) so much as how much I impose myself (as desire)’ (2003, 34). Such cognitive mapping can also be used to explore the structure of relevancy for informants of certain routes and sites – both favourite and taboo – in the city centre or locality. 5. Cultural Representations of Place Chawla defines the arts as ‘an integral part of efforts to intensify, articulate or measure feelings’ about a place (1992, 83). This applies not only to the visual but also to the literary arts – period novels of the city such as Jonathan Coe’s Rotters’ Club and Closed Circle on Birmingham or Bali Rai’s novels on Leicester, and urban poetry, like Roy Fisher’s work on Birmingham. Equally it can be extended to films which have a strong influence on the popular imagination, by symbolising places, linking them, for example, to war and criminal greed, like Vienna in The Third Man, or to multiculturalism and riots as in the case of London in My Beautiful Laundrette and London is Burning, or to a metaphysical transcendence of history, as in the case of the angels’ benign occupation of the Berlin Siegessäule2 in Wings of Desire. 6. Policy Analysis Finally if urban imaginaries research is to relate to the political sphere and inform and transform civic politics and policy-making, then it needs to address and evaluate policy for the urban imaginary that informs it. Within local economic development, tourism and place marketing, transport, communications, libraries, museums, parks and public art, sport and leisure strategies, technocrats and bureaucrats have shaped policies in accordance with a vision and concept of the city and its future development. Part of the research into the pluralism of urban imaginaries is to 2 The Berlin Siegessäule [victory column] was erected in 1873 after the war against France in 1871, to celebrate Germany’s national power.


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draw out the different civic viewpoints they express and to highlight where these overlap and where they diverge – to take into account the viewpoints of environmentalists, the working class, different ethnic minorities in poor marginalised neighbourhoods, the bohemian and professional middle classes, women, the elderly, young people or children. Only through contrasting alternative visions to the current dominant one, can urban imaginaries draw on the rich variety of conceptual and practical experiments in changing the city and make it the citizens’ own. Only in this way can urban imaginaries realise the potential for wider democratic change and a rooted cosmopolitanism to the outside world.

References Albrow, Martin. 1997. Travelling beyond Local Cultures: Socioscapes in a Global City. In Living in the Global City: Globalisation as Local Process, ed. J. Eade, 37-55. London: Routledge. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso. Beck, Ulrich. 2000. What is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1996. Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. In Text and Nation: Cross-disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, eds. Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer, 191-207. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House. Bloomfield, Jude. 2002. Public Art in the Rebranding of Berlin. Public Art Journal 1, no. 6 (April): 40-45. SSS. and Franco Bianchini. 2004. Planning for the Intercultural City. Bournes Green: Comedia. Borja, Jordi, and Manuel Castells. 1997. Local and Global. Management of Cities in the Information Age. London: Earthscan. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SSS. 1979. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London and New York: Routledge. Brennan, Tim. 2001. 3 Manouvres. mysite.wanadoomembers.co.uk/manoeuvre/index.html www.curatingdegreezero.org/t_brennan/t_brennan.html SSS. 2003. Performing Northumbria. www.navigatelive.org/timbrennan.html SSS. (undated). My Sunderland.

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my.sunderland.ac.uk/web/schools/adm/research/artsdes_research/brennan/ Cardiff, Janet. 1999. The Missing Voice (Case Study B). London: Artangel. SSS. 2002. Walks. hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/description.asp?Type=&ID=20 www.ps1.org/cut/press/cardiff.html Castells, Manuel. 1996. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 1, The Rise of Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. SSS. 1997. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. 2, The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Caygill, Howard. 1997. The Futures of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz. In The Limits of Globalization: Cases and Arguments, ed. Alan Scott, 25-54. London and New York: Routledge. Chawla, Louise. 1992. Childhood Place Attachments. In Place Attachment, eds. Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low, 63-86. New York and London: Plenum Press. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curious. 2004a. Essences of London. www.placelessness.com/essences/video.ph SSS. 2004b. On the Scent. www.placelessness.com/essences/on_the_scent.phpeXplo SSS. 2003. Found Wanting. www.e-xplo.org/projects.htm SSS. 2004. Something About Repetition. www.e-xplo.org/projects.htm Featherstone, Mike, and Scott Lash, eds. 1999. Spaces of Culture: City – Nation – World. London: Sage Publications. Fernandez, J. 1988. Andaluzia in our Minds. Cultural Anthropology 3: 21-35. Forty, Adrian, and Susan Küchler, eds. 1999. The Art of Forgetting. Oxford: Berg. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, eds. 1997. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kwon, Miwon. 2004. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Low, Setha M. 1992. Symbolic Ties that Bind: Place Attachment in the Plaza. In Place Attachment, eds. Irwin Altman and Setha M. Low, 165-85. New York and London: Plenum Press. SSS. and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga. 2003. Locating Culture. In The Anthropology of Space and Place, eds. Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, 1-48. Oxford: Blackwell. Martinotti, Guido. 1993. Metropoli: La nuova morfologia sociale della città. Bologna: Il Mulino. Passerini, Luisa. 1987. Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, Andrea. 1997. A Path Is Always Between Two Points. Performance Research 2, no.3, 9-16.


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SSS. 2004. Walking in the city. www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/lwpf/seminars/walking.html SSS. 2005. Walking as Knowing and Making. A Peripatetic Investigation of Place. www.walkinginplace.org/converge/index.htm Pollard, Sidney, and Paul Robertson. 1979. British Shipbuilding Industry, 1870-1914. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Rotenburg, R., and G. McDonagh, eds. 1993. The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Rowlands, Mike. 1999. Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials. In The Art of Forgetting, eds. Adrian Forty and Susan Küchler. Oxford: Berg. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo. New Haven: Princeton University Press. SSS. 1994. Cities in a World Economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Schachtel, Ernest G. 1959. Metamorphosis: On the Development of Affect, Perception, Attention and Memory. New York: Basic Books. Scott, Alan, ed. 1997. The Limits of Globalization:Cases and Arguments. London and New York: Routledge. Sklair, Les. 2001. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Oxford: Blackwell. Silva, Armando. 2001. Methodologies: Urban Imaginaries. Unpublished paper. SSS. ed. 2003. Urban Imaginaries in Latin America. Documenta 11. Kassel: Hatje Cantz Publishers. Simmel, Georg. 1971. The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903). In On Individuality of Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine, 324-39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tarrius, Alain, and Geneviève Marotel. 1991. Les Fourmis d’Europe: Migrants Riches, Migrants Paupers et Nouvelle Ville Internationale. Paris: INRETS. Tarrow, Sidney. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomlinson, Jim. 1999. Globalisation and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia. A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Vertovec, Steve, and Robin Cohen, eds. 2002. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


EUROPEAN STUDIES23 (2006): 63-80

‘AN AVENUE THAT LOOKS LIKE ME’: RE-PRESENTING THE MODERN CITYSCAPE

Betty Nigianni

Abstract This article looks at the representation of an Athenian avenue as it appears in a contemporary Greek short story, in an attempt to trace the profile of the place as an ultimately modern space called into question, however, by transgressions. The story ‘I Think That Syngrou Avenue Looks Like Me’ by Manos Kontoleon describes the unique relationship developed between the writer and the high-speed avenue that connects the centre of Athens with its coastline: initiated by and experienced via an embodied approach to space, this relationship allows the writer to identify himself with a particular part of the city. The discussion of Kontoleon’s portrayal of Syngrou Avenue focuses on the relationship between space and subjective experience, a relationship that has been a subject of investigation in modern European art and architectural theory over the past century. The paper specifically draws on psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories, which reflect this particular sensibility towards modern space, aiming in this way to contribute further to the discussion of European cityscapes and urban mindscapes. Cities have always represented and projected images and fantasies of bodies, whether individual, collective, or political (Grosz 2001, 49).

An avenue and a story about it This essay is about a modern avenue and a short story written about it: the avenue, named Syngrou Avenue, is one of the main fast links between the centre of Athens and its coast, as well as the first to be

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constructed, in 1904. The story bears the title ‘I Think That Syngrou Avenue Looks Like Me’1 and in short deals with the inextricable connection that is developed between the writer and the road, eventually forming a relationship that fuses the borders between space and the subject into an indispensable entity.

Figure 1. ‘I think that Syngrou avenue looks like me.’

Following his growing attachment to the place from his childhood years, through his youth and finally to maturity, contemporary Greek writer Manos Kontoleon unfolds an autobiographical narration through memories of the road, verses of poetry inspired by the avenue and descriptions of its contemporary state.2 These diverse illustrations of the avenue all reflect, however, a similar attitude towards space that is oriented around the subject: from the beginning of the story, space is approached in an embodied way that becomes a non-visual, almost haptic experience; the 1 The story was written in 1999, under the Greek title ‘Nomizo pos he leoforos Syngrou mou moiazei’, and published in the same year in the collection of short stories Athena, diadromes kai staseis, edited by Michel Phaïs. All translations into English in the article are my own; I gratefully acknowledge the help of literary translators Iraklis Padopoulos and Katerina Sykioti. 2 Kontoleon wrote this short story in response to being asked to write a piece about his experience of his home city, Athens (see Kontoleon 1999, 147).

RE-PRESENTING THE MODERN CITYSCAPE

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writer goes on to investigate the relation between space and eroticism by retrieving a sensual memory of the avenue; and ends up by portraying the modern avenue as a living body. Bodies and cities ‘Cities look like people’ my father used to say and I listened to him and I thought I could believe him – my father himself looked like a whole city’ (Kontoleon 1999, 37).

Figure 2. ‘Cities are like people.’

In the very first sentence, the writer opens a discussion about what is also mentioned in the title: his idea of a fundamental and essential relationship between urban space and its inhabitants. He goes on to describe his family’s physical features: he writes about his father’s ‘boldly curved eyebrows’ and ‘eyelids that added a sense of mystery to his look’, as well as his grandfather’s ‘fingers which had taken that yellow colour of tobacco’ and the ‘marks of an old illness’ that ‘scarred his nostrils’ (37); then he intermingles these features with the city: ‘Well – I used to wonder –, can a city be sometimes the eyelids that hide a mystery, sometimes the scars an old illness leaves on the nostrils (…)?’ (39)

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This idea of an intertwinement between body-space and cityscape has been discussed by Elizabeth Grosz in her essay ‘Bodies-Cities’. For Grosz, there is a ‘constitutive and mutually defining’ relation between the body and the city (1992, 242) that escapes all ‘causal’ or ‘representational’ models: this is neither a purely external relation between the body and the city, nor a simple mirroring of the body in the built environment. Instead, it suggests that space correlates with the subject: rather than being an empty receptacle, space is closely dependent on its ‘contents’, while the ways in which it is perceived and represented depend on the subject’s relation to those contents. As Kontoleon’s story develops, it becomes clear that this interconnection between spatiality and the embodied subject makes possible a dynamic, even transgressive being-inspace, confirming Grosz’s argument that ‘space makes possible different kinds of relations, but in turn it is transformed according to the subject’s affective and instrumental relations with it’ (Grosz 1995, 92); that is, the body is marked by the city, but the body in turn also shapes the city. Exploring the city-box The author narrates how he was introduced to that vital connection between the embodied subject and space while still very young. The first part of the story is dedicated to a detailed description of an early spatial experience, which involved the blind exploration of a wooden chest, filled with family belongings that were salvaged during the war:3 My mother would open – especially at nights with a full moon – an old wooden chest decorated with thin iron bars. ‘Look, look!’ she’d invite me, and I’d stick my whole face into a wooden tip filled with foxed books, colourful flowers made of starched fabric, hats in strange shapes, dresses in bright colours and then I’d stretch out my hands trying to reach the bottom (…) Gently, softly, my hands were fumbling and trying out touches and shapes, till they’d reach that circular object, the one wrapped up in a cotton cloth (…) (Kontoleon 1999, 38).

The young child is engaged in a tactile search through the space of the timber box in order to find his way to the special souvenir, a stone from one of the roads of his mother’s abandoned home city – an object to 3 I refer here to the Greek-Turkish war in Minor Asia in 1912. After the defeat of the Greek army, the Greek population was forced to abandon the area and seek refuge in Greece.


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which she would refer as ‘her country’ (Kontoleon 1999, 38). Space is therefore approached through an embodied subjectivity that operates in a twofold way: as a bodily practice, through a partial disabling of vision and the prioritisation of other senses; and as a practice of the imagination, since the chest refers symbolically to the lost city. For Gaston Bachelard, that is actually the only way to approach the ‘intimate dimension’. In The Poetics of Space, he discusses the experience of intimate places, demonstrating how the feeling of ‘intimacy’ is related to certain domestic spaces that also function as places to ‘hide’, to ‘shelter’ memory, such as the drawer, the chest or the wardrobe.4 Most importantly, those spaces can only be experienced through an embodied imagination: ‘I alone, in my memories of another century, can open the deep cupboard that still retains for me alone that unique odor, the odor of raisins dying on a wicker tray’ (Bachelard 1994, 13). The idea of experiencing space not as architectural, geometrical, but rather as dreamed, imagined or remembered, based however on tactile spatial experience, is interestingly not limited to domestic spaces (see Casey 1997, 291); for Bachelard, any space can be inhabited as ‘intimately’ as a house: ‘(…) every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves’ can be ‘a symbol of solitude for the imagination (…) the germ of a room, or of a house’ (Bachelard 1994, 136). Accordingly, in our story, the writer will soon discover that his experience of navigating through the space of the city is surprisingly similar to the one of searching through his mother’s wooden box of memorabilia: ‘The city I wanted to be like, would have – I imagined – all the small corners where we stash away our toys, all the small terraces from where we can gaze far off towards our dreams, all these hidden alleys that carry the smell of our loved ones’ (Kontoleon 1999, 41). Syngrou Avenue becomes just such a ‘corner’, a shelter for memory and imagination. After the initial descriptions of his early spatial experiences, the author goes on to recall the eventful discovery of his favourite avenue during one of his investigative journeys out in the city as a young boy: The day would come then, when I’d discover and love Syngrou Avenue, this long and straight road which headed to the sea. (…). 4 In the chapter devoted to ‘Drawers, chests and wardrobes’, Bachelard writes: ‘“We shall never reach the bottom of the casket”. The infinite quality of the intimate dimension could not be better expressed’ (1994, 86).

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Betty Nigianni When was it that I first thought I had the desire – and the ability – to be like it? It must have been in those years when I would quiver at the sight of a naked female arm and my whole body was convinced that it was carrying inside it a victorious army commander. The boy was becoming a man, and sitting at a table out on the street, surrounded by flowerbeds, little ponds and ducks, the elegant lady was sipping her ice cream soda, leaving on the white straw the mark of her red lips (Kontoleon 1999, 42).

Figure 3. ‘The day would come when I’d love Syngrou avenue.’

Spatial apprehension is sketched once more primarily as an experience of the body and of the imagination: the writer’s sexual awakening coincides with his introduction to the road. Moreover, a certain incident charged with eroticism will trigger off his feelings of attachment to the place and further initiate his decision to identify with it: (…) – that same woman led me to the big hall, through huge automobiles, full of shining nickel and perfectly round lights and bumpers. I asked to know the name of that road in front of the big hall, the one full of cars. A straight, wide road it was, and no matter how much I stretched and stretched, I couldn’t see its end. ‘Tell me, how’s this road called?’


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‘Syngrou Avenue’, the lady with the red lips smiled and bent over me. ‘Do you know where it leads to?’ My eyes started their journey at the dimple of her neck, jumped over the shiny obstacle of a little cross and tried to follow the line which seemed to separate her two breasts. ‘To the sea!’ and her arm stretched out over the beautiful bright blue of a car and pointed to one direction (…). Under her short sleeve, the colour of her armpit peeked through, a timid pink. ‘Break Ariadne’s thread and look! The blue body of the mermaid’. I shivered. Syngrou Avenue – just like my gaze – started mere steps from where I was standing and disappeared towards some unknown beach. And so I thought – no, I decided – that this was the road I should be like (Kontoleon 1999, 42-43).

The phenomenological privileging of an embodied experience of space also relates to the idea of a particular ability of the body to get us ‘back into place’ (Casey 1997, 291), to localise us ‘in the spaces of our intimacy’ that allows further for ‘a knowledge of intimacy’ (Bachelard 1994, 9). For Bachelard, that operation turns architectural space itself into a body; the ‘house’ one takes shelter in becomes bodylike: ‘(…) the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins’ (46). Similarly, to revisit an inhabited room, in reality or in memory, is to return to an organic part of a body: the room ‘“clings” to its inhabitant and becomes the cell of a body with its walls close together’ (46). It is not surprising, then, that Kontoleon’s subjective appropriation of Syngrou Avenue leads to its being experienced as a body. ‘Double’ avenue The avenue is approached as a body for the rest – and largest part – of the story, which is mainly preoccupied with the tracing of its contemporary profile. The writer describes it as a living organism that has grown along with him: ‘As I was changing, the avenue was changing’ (Kontoleon 1999, 43); and that has ended up incorporating and reflecting its inhabitants’ – and his own – ‘double’ existence: predominantly an office area during the day, Syngrou Avenue is also an entertainment place at night, well-known for its lap-dancing bars and the prostitution that takes place along its side streets:

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Betty Nigianni During the day, the road dons the suit of an entirely respectable business and locks itself up in air-conditioned offices or shines behind squeakyclean shop- windows. It exchanges money, sells tickets – the smell of lager but a distant memory for now –, it advertises cars and, as the trees shed a useless shadow, faceless tourists cannot decide on whether or not they should use their cameras. Syngrou Avenue has nothing worth seeing to offer them (…). Ah, how right I was – I say to myself – on my choice of the road that looks like me. Everything this road does, I do too (…). And I do it eagerly and with conviction. But alas, the night always returns. And with it, so does my guilt (…). The avenue is not fond of bright lights. A couple of distant neon lamps along with the headlights of the cars whizzing by are all it needs. Nevertheless, every now and then, the passer-by will come across the big bright billboards of the live-music venues (…) (Kontoleon 1999, 45).

The avenue is represented as a commercialised, banal modern space, where nothing is worth seeing and photographing. Nevertheless, it has another hidden side related to the body and its pleasures: a repressed spatial ‘other’, an ‘unconscious’ part, not quite visible during the day, but inseparable from and dependent on the morning routine. Dominant discourses on modern space have relied on the notion of the separation of the mind from the body (see Longhurst 1995, 97-98).5 Psychoanalysis has constituted an exception to these discourses, playing a major role in conceiving and representing space as inseparable from the embodied subject (see Grosz 1995, 85).6 Freud’s investigation of the role of the body in the formation of the ego7 and his understanding of the psyche as

5 In her essay ‘The Body and Geography’, Robyn Longhurst notes that social sciences were developed in the nineteenth century according to the dominant conception of the separation of the mind from the body. About the science of geography in particular, Kristin Ross has further argued: ‘Its object of study is “landscape”, which is constituted under “natural”, non-historical conditions that bear nothing of the social and economic contradictions that contribute to the formation of space’ (Ross 1993, 360). 6 By considering the sexual drives and erotogenic zones of the body as ‘instrumental in the formation of the ego and the positioning of the subject in the structure of society and the family as a whole’, psychoanalysis recognised the body as a spatiotemporal being (Grosz 1995, 85). 7 Freud argued in 1923 that ‘the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego’, adding four years later that ‘the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body’ (Grosz 1995, 85).


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having a spatial dimension8 have been very influential in this respect. Bachelard’s suggestion of a ‘topoanalysis’ in accordance with psychoanalysis draws on a conception of place as ‘psychic’: as not only and necessarily physical, but as a ‘surface’ on which images with a localising quality appear.9 Topoanalysis, therefore, would look for the ‘placial properties’ of certain images (Casey 1997, 288) – such as the house – and their role in our inhabiting the world: objective and subjective reality merge to create a spatiality of ‘intimacy’.10 Modern Greek literature has demonstrated a particular sensibility towards the relation between urban space and subjectivity,11 which has often been translated into the image of the modern city as body. Athens is persistently represented as ‘a living organism, an erotic body’, which interacts with the sensibilities of its writers (Papageorgiou 2000, 525). Kontoleon refers to that tradition by repeatedly quoting the poet George Seferis in his story about Syngrou Avenue. Seferis belonged to the socalled literary ‘generation of the 30s’, largely influenced by symbolism, surrealism and psychoanalysis,12 and has referred to the avenue as a place with a latent eroticism on a number of occasions. In ‘A Word for Summer’, he describes the avenue as an escape from the urban labyrinth to the sea, symbolically associated with sexual pleasure (see Koliva 1985, 198): ‘And yet I used to love Syngrou Avenue/ the double rise and fall of the great road/bringing us out miraculously to the sea/the eternal sea, 8 In 1938, Freud wrote as a note: ‘Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant’s a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus, psyche is extended; knows nothing about it’ (2001, 300). In the posthumously published An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud further adopts ‘the hypothesis (…) of a psychical apparatus extended in space, expediently put together, developed by the exigencies of life’ (2001, 196). 9 Located in a philosophical tradition that draws on Aristotle’s concept of place as ‘surface’, Bachelard’s definition however moves away from the Aristotelian sensebound notion of place (as a container and as sensible). Instead, Bachelard draws on Freud and Jung to suggest that the soul is a place or set of places, in this way also opposing Descartes, who recognised no psychic spatiality (see Casey 1997, 287-88). 10 Bachelard calls topoanalysis ‘the systematic psychological study of the localities of our intimate lives’ (1994, 8). 11 Greek literary production from the 1920s on – after the early writings influenced by romanticism and neo-realism – has been largely inspired by the phenomenon of urbanism, which was represented through subjective narratives following the technique of the ‘stream of consciousness’ (as employed by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf) (see Vitti 1978, 387-89). 12 Along with poets Andreas Empeirikos and Odysseus Elytis; for more on this see Vitti 1978, 393-411.

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to cleanse us of our sins’ (Seferis 1995, 89). Similarly in ‘Syngrou Avenue, 1930’, ‘when you let your heart and your thought become/one/with the blackish river that stretches, stiffens and/goes away:/Break Ariadne’s thread and look!/The blue body of the mermaid’ (Seferis 1995, 41).13 Seferis’ depictions of the road as an indifferent modern space with a sexual quality becomes more significant when viewed in the broader framework of the modernisation of Athens that took place between the 1930s and the 1950s14 and was welcomed in the literary production of that period (see Papageorgiou 2000, 517-19). Literature is consequently filled with references to the ultimate modern space, the avenue. Philologist Vasiliki Koliva comments: ‘The avenues play a major role in the novels of that period’, and ‘they indicate passage, transition, wanderings related to a psychological trial’, as well as ‘a wish to escape’ (Koliva 1985, 198). In that context, Syngrou Avenue is celebrated as the embodiment of modernity: the ‘straight road, direct and unswerving’ (Kontoleon 1999, 46) becomes a powerful poetic image, symbol of the modern pleasures of the car and of speed;15 its heading towards the sea only comes to reinforce the associations with masculinity and sexuality that these pleasures have: So, out of a whole city, I chose one road. The straightest, the longest, the dullest, least remarkable one. But nonetheless favoured by the stunning cars; one bold enough to fall into the sea’s embrace! Into the blue body of a mermaid! I chose a man’s road (…) (Kontoleon 1999, 43).

13

Both these poems are quoted by Kontoleon in his story. This was a period of most intense urbanisation in Greece, after a number of world-shaking historical events had taken place (the Balkan Wars, the Asia Minor expedition and disaster, World War I), with a subsequent influx of refugees to the country. There was also a parallel increase in the number of internal immigrants heading to the capital. From then on it became obvious that Athens would never be the city-symbol that the neo-romantics of the nineteenth century dreamt of; instead, it is fast growing into a modern fragmented city, expanding chaotically in all directions (see Papageorgiou 2000, 517-19). 15 Novelist George Theotokas, celebrating the ‘concept of the modern element of culture’, wrote about Syngrou Avenue: ‘Day and night Syngrou Avenue flows toward the coast of Phalero, carrying along the newborn and as yet unexpressed rhythms of a strong lyricism looking for strong poets’; Seferis would later on subtitle his own poem about the avenue ‘To George Theotokas, who discovered it’. Both quotations are taken from: Papageorgiou 2000, 519-21. 14


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Henri Lefebvre’s critique of modern space as ‘abstract’ and ‘phallocentric’ also draws repeatedly on a psychoanalytical framework.16 In The Production of Space, Lefebvre employs Lacan’s theory of the mirror-stage – which deals with how corporeality and spatiality are related to the formation of identity17 – in order to describe the formation of modern space through processes of visualisation and decorporealisation (see Gregory 1997, 220). Lefebvre discusses modern space as a collective Lacanian mirror, a space not unlike Lewis Carroll’s ‘looking-glass’, through which the subject, deprived of its traditional conjunction with the body, ‘passes (…) and becomes a lived abstraction’ (1991, 313-14): a mere ‘sign’, its mirror reflection.18 For Lefebvre, the ‘abstract’ space of modernity takes the form of a homogeneous, controlling entity that works by relegating the body, more specifically the sexual body, and celebrates in its place the ‘phallus’, the abstract symbol of power and masculinity.19 Phallocentrism is present in various qualities of modern space, for example in the dominance of vertical spatialisation or in the constant expansion of the scale of things that reinforces the visualisation of space. However, Lefebvre is particularly interested in its controlling operation through the use of ‘walls, enclosures, and façades’ in order to ‘define both a scene (where something takes place) and an obscene area to which everything that cannot or may not happen on the scene is relegated’ (39). On the level of the city then, ‘duplicity’ becomes a fundamental characteristic of modern urban space that, by embracing some things and excluding oth16

Lefebvre actually uses the term ‘psychoanalysis of space’ (1991, 99). As presented in Lacan’s famous essay ‘Le Stade du Mirroir’ (translated into English as ‘The mirror stage’, included in Écrits: a Selection). Michel de Certeau describes the Lacanian mirror-stage as ‘the “joyful activity” of the child who, standing before a mirror, sees itself as one (…) but another, what counts is the process of this “spatial captation” that inscribes the passage toward the other as the law of being and the law of place’ (1984, 109-10). 18 Lefebvre writes: ‘So what escape can there be from a space thus shattered into images, into signs, into connected-yet-disconnected data directed at a “subject” itself doomed to abstraction? For space offers itself like a mirror to the thinking “subject”, but, after the manner of Lewis Carroll, the “subject” passes through the looking glass and becomes a lived abstraction’ (1991, 313-14). 19 Lefebvre argues that although abstract space presents desire ‘with a “transparency” which encourages it to surge forth’, in the homogenising space of abstraction ‘desire encounters no object, nothing desirable, and no work results from its action’ (1991, 97). The void is filled by the ‘phallus’ and its heavy load of myth, rendering abstract space apart from a ‘representation of space (geometric homogeneity)’, a ‘representational space (the phallic)’, as well, apart from ‘an arena of practical action’, also ‘an ensemble of images, signs and symbols’ (288). 17

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ers, creates an ‘underground life’ in the city, a kind of inseparable ‘unconscious’ that comes back to haunt it.20 In Kontoleon’s own words: Its bustling activity in the morning creates the conditions that will, come the night, create the need to live it up and revel till dawn. In other words – at night the road gives back all the dirt the day has thrown at it (Kontoleon 1999, 45).

An avenue that looks like me The city’s spatial ‘double’ is, however, controlled and placed under surveillance in modern urban planning through the practice of ‘zoning’, the drawing of absolute boundaries between apparently contrasting uses (e.g. work-related and residential activities, or cultural and commercial activities). In this way, ‘stratified’ places are produced: particular places are specially designated for pleasure and sexuality, like holiday resorts or villages devoted to leisure (Lefebvre 1991, 310). As Lefebvre writes, the ‘phallus’ is isolated, ‘projected into a realm outside the body then (…) fixed in (…) space and brought (…) under the surveillance of the eye’ (310). Kontoleon recognises this phenomenon when he writes: Squares signal freedom. Avenues aim at success. Commercial streets offer comfort. Some neighbourhoods cover the need for love. Others lead you to the heights of social success (Kontoleon 1999, 41).

Syngrou Avenue appears to have many ‘faces’, however: ‘Besides, Syngrou Avenue always knows how to change faces. It taught me to do the same’, Kontoleon writes (44), and later: But, before revealing to me the secret sins of love, it rewarded me with the sight of a church built of brown stone, and of three or four small houses snuggly perched amid those cliffs that had been – as if by mistake – planted in the middle of the valley, rather than on a beach, and left to keep company, not to sea-gulls and fishing boats, but to sparrows and green buses (44).

The avenue is therefore represented as if transcending all the rules of abstraction: in the story, we watch the apparently‘masculine’, abstract environment of high-rise office buildings and high-speed cars of the day coexist with the sensory-sensual space of the night in an almost organic 20 ‘Every society and particularly the city, has an underground and repressed life, and hence an “unconscious” of its own’ (Lefebvre 1991, 36).


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entity; moreover, it is a multi-layered environment that allows for the interpenetrating of different uses, in this way escaping ‘zoning’. From a readable environment as the ‘straight and very wide’ road that was designed to channel traffic from the city to its port and coastline (Biris 1999, 189), subject to the survey of the planner’s eye – and to the writer’s male gaze of his childhood – the avenue becomes a truly permeable environment that allows its ‘juxtapositions’, its ‘proximities’ and ‘emotional distances and limits’ (Lefebvre 1991, 288) to show through. Syngrou Avenue appears therefore to possess a certain ‘permeability’, which first embraces, and then transgresses, modern ‘duplicity’, transforming the place into a layered environment of dislocated objects. ‘Permeability’ as a condition of the modern city has been discussed extensively. Within the framework of psychoanalysis, Freud was the first to compare the layered structure of the psyche with the reality of a city. Using Rome as an example, he argued that just as the traces of ancient Rome lying under the ground of the contemporary city are also to be found on the surface of the city, so too childhood experiences are never eradicated, but instead regularly erupt in the present (see Pile 1996, 241). Postmodern urban theory has drawn on the analogy between the spaces of the urban and the spaces of the mind. Its description of the city as ‘permeable’ reflects a political awareness of the mechanisms of the ever-competing ‘conscious, preconscious, unconscious; with shifting, positioning and fighting between them in a struggle for control and expression’ (Pile 1996, 243), and a view of history as a ‘palimpsest’, in sociologist Michel de Certeau’s sense 21: This place, on its surface, seems to be a collage. In reality, in its depth it is ubiquitous. A piling up of heterogeneous places. Each one, like a deteriorating page of a book, refers to a different mode of territorial unity, of socioeconomic distribution, of political conflicts and of identifying symbolism (de Certeau 1984, 201-02).

The artist and cultural theorist Victor Burgin takes the discussion further by comparing the city’s spatial order to a biological organism. Comment21

De Certeau, historian and member of the Freudian school of Paris, writes about place: ‘The village, the neighbourhood, the block are moreover not the only things that make the fragments of heterogeneous strata function together (…). It would be more appropriate to appeal to the oneiric (but theoretical because it articulates practice) model evoked by Freud in discussing the city of Rome, whose epochs all survive in the same place, intact and mutually interacting’ (1984, 202).

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ing on Lefebvre, Burgin has argued that ‘“the panoptical-instrumental space of colonialist capitalist modernity” has always been fissured and called into question by transgressions’ (quoted in Gregory 1997, 228); that happens because space is endowed with a certain ‘porous’ quality, similar to that of the structure of a living organism ‘punctured by pores and orifices’.22 Therefore any attempt to draw ‘closures’, to delimit and isolate space, is destined to fail (see Burgin 1996, 147). The political implications are significant: ‘porosity’ allows for the existence of ‘interruptions’ and ‘dislocations’ that display the superimposition of past spatial formations on modern space, and thus reconstitute it as a discursive production. A further point of interest is that ‘porosity’ extends from the macrolevel of the built environment to the micro-level of the body. As described in Kontoleon’s short story, the body is reconstituted in space through the identification of the subject with the avenue: going through the ‘looking-glass’, the author does not merely find the sign of himself or of his favourite place, but an intertwinement between a palpable sexual space and his own body rhythms. In reality, Syngrou Avenue is famous for the transvestite prostitution that has gradually come to dominate one side of it and the area closest to the coast.23 That transgression of the ‘phallus’, which happens simultaneously on the intimate level of the body and on the wider socio-political level of the city, is revealing. Firstly, it demonstrates the fluidity between cities and bodies and the two-way interaction between them: it exemplifies, in Grosz’s terms, the notion that ‘neither the body nor its environment can be assumed to form an organically unified ecosystem’, but ‘rather produce each other as forms of the hyperreal’ (Grosz 1992, 242). Secondly, it identifies that condition with a subversive being-in-space: Syngrou Avenue interacts with the erotic body, as depicted in the story, not only to produce desire, but also to generate bodies, which, in architectural historian Iain Borden’s words, 22 A term borrowed from Walter Benjamin, who used it in order to describe precapitalist Naples (see Benjamin 1986). Burgin discusses Benjamin’s ‘porosity’, paying particular attention to the Lefebvrian discussion of space as an extension of the body; he writes, quoting Lefebvre, that ‘space is “first of all my body, and then it is my body counterpart or ‘other’, its mirror-image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, penetrates, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other”’ (Burgin 1996, 151). 23 For more on transvestitism and Syngrou Avenue, see Kostas Taktsis’ autobiographical book Fovero Vima.


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‘have a dynamic operation in the city’ in terms of the ‘production of meanings, subjects, relations, uses and desires’ (Borden 2001, 12). The body-space relation, then, is restored through transgressions of the nonsensual space of abstraction, only to become a site for more transgressions on the social and political terrain. Bachelard’s ‘topoanalysis’ also recognises a certain fluidity between ‘in’ and ‘out’, ‘an osmosis between intimate and undetermined space’ (Bachelard 1994, 230). That ‘osmosis’ is revealed when ‘inside and outside are not abandoned to their geometrical opposition’ (230), which is something only topoanalysts and poets would do. Bachelard’s ‘intimate’ space, in the sense of inhabited, dwelled-in space, is necessarily space ‘read’: ‘It therefore makes sense (…) to say that we “write a room”, “read a room”, or “read a house”’ (14). Echoing Bachelard, de Certeau condemns the ‘logic of techno-structures’ that attempt to deprive urban spaces of the stories and legends that haunt them; since the city is truly ‘habitable’ when appropriated through subjective narratives, when it is ‘marked by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone (...)’, the annihilation of narrativisation only turns the city into a ‘suspended symbolic order’ (de Certeau 1984, 106), a total abstraction. In the case of Syngrou Avenue, Kontoleon’s representation of urban space marked by a personal story annuls the planners’ dehumanised cityscapes. The writer fulfills Bachelard’s wish for poetry ‘to give us back the situations of our dreams’ and to provide us with ‘resting-place(s) for daydreaming’ (Bachelard 1994, 15); he re-presents the modern cityscape as a Bachelardian place for daydreaming, revealing in this way within the planned city another ‘metaphorical’ city, like the one Kandinsky had imagined: ‘a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation’ (de Certeau 1984, 110).24 Conclusion Lefebvre saw the spatial restoration of the body and its sexuality as the only way out of the violence of abstraction and towards the reestablishment of modern space as social space. He dreamt of a ‘diversification of space’ that would create ‘fixed, semi-fixed, movable or vacant’ appropri24 Quoted from Kandinsky’s book Du Spirituel dans l’Art (published in French in 1969), in which he traces all spatial experience back to a primordial childhood experience of space conceived mainly in psychoanalytic terms.

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ated places, which would not obey the functional distinctions of abstract space, and in which the body and its pleasures would be restored making room for a ‘mobilisation of “private” life’ (Lefebvre 1991, 363). In this article, I have attempted to show that psychoanalytic theories, which deal with the relation between the subject’s internal world and the external world of ‘objects’, may have a lot to contribute to the subject of how these ‘places’ could be produced;25 furthermore, that literary narratives can also play an active role in this production. From that perspective, I would like to suggest that Kontoleon’s representation of Syngrou Avenue comes close to the Lefebvrian dream as it reconstructs the place through the narration of an erotic event in which any distinctions between the body and the city dissolve. In the short story ‘I think that Syngrou Avenue looks like me’, the reader is presented with a space that uncannily ‘is like me. And it is like you too’ (Kontoleon 1999, 46), and so (re-)presented with a transgressive space where anything is possible: I did very well – I congratulate myself – to decide to identify with Syngrou Avenue. An avenue that digests everything and can be blamed for nothing. An avenue like that doesn’t need to prove its identity. It is what it is: selfsufficient and alone – a road with very few side-streets (…). Syngrou is a road that accepts things as they are. And it contains all sorts of things (46).

References Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1986. Naples. In Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz. 163-73. New York: Schocken Books. Biris, Kostas. 1999. . 19 20 (Hai Athenai. Apo tou 19ou eis ton 20on haiona). Athens: Melissa. Borden, Iain. 2001. Skateboarding, Space and the City. Architecture and the Body. Oxford and New York: Berg.

25 I mainly refer here to theories of incorporation and identification, as discussed first by Freud (in An Outline of Psychoanalysis, he writes: ‘A portion of the external world has, at least partially, been abandoned as an object and has instead by identification, been taken into the ego and thus become an integral part of the internal world’ (Freud 2001, 205)); and then later by Lacan. Burgin has observed that ‘insofar as they apply to considerations of space, they are as yet little developed within the field of psychoanalysis itself’ (1996, 151), but Pile has further suggested their application to urban politics, in order to describe ‘the power-laden “dialectics” which graduate the subject, the spatial and the social’ (1996, 243-44).


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Burgin, Victor. 1996. The City in Pieces. In Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture, 139-58. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Casey, Edward S. 1997. The Fate of Place. A Philosophical History. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Freud, Sigmund. 2001. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey. Vol. 13, 1937-1939. London: Vintage. Gregory, Derek. 1997. Lacan and Geography: The Production of Space Revisited. In Space and Social Theory. Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, eds. George Benko and Ulf Strohmayer, 203-31. Oxford: Blackwell. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1992. Bodies-Cities. In Sexuality & Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina, 241-53. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. –––. 1995. Space, Time, and Perversion. London: Routledge. –––. 2001. Architecture from the Outside. Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Kirby, Kathleen. 1996. Re: Mapping Subjectivity. Cartographic vision and the limits of politics. In Body Space. Destabilising geographies of gender and sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan, 45-55. New York and London: Routledge. Koliva, Vasiliki. 1985. . , . . " #$ %$ 1930-1940 (O astikos choros sta mythestorimata ton G. Theotoka, A. Terzake kai K. Polite tes dekaetias 1930-1940). In : O K E K: !"# $"# (Neohellenike Pole, Othomanikes Kleronomies kai Helliniko Kratos: Praktika tou Diethnous Symposiou Hestorias), 197-201. Athens: Association of Neohellenic Studies. Kontoleon, Manos. 1999. & $ ( #) *++ , (Nomizo pos he leoforos Syngrou mou moiazei). In , & & "" (Athena, diadromes kai staseis), ed. Michel Phaïs, 37-47. Athens: Patakis. Lacan, Jacques. 2001. Écrits: a Selection, transl. Alan Sheridan. London and New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Longhurst, Robyn. 1995. The Body and Geography. Gender, Place and Culture 2, no. 1: 97-105. Mallgrave, Francis, and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. 1994. Empathy, Form, and Space. Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893. Santa Monica: The Getty Centre for the History of Art and the Humanities. Papageorgiou, Kostas. 2000. Athens in Modern Greek Literature. From the establishment of the modern Hellenic state to the present. In Athens. The Famed City, ed. K. Papageorgiou. 470-527. Athens: Militos. Pile, Steve. 1996. The Body and the City. Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. London and New York: Routledge.

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Ross, Kristin. 1993. Rimbaud and Spatial History. In Space and Place. Theories of identity and location, eds. Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires. 35765. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Seferis, George. 1995. Complete Poems, transl. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. London: Anvil. Taktsis, Kostas. 1989. '( ) (To Fovero Vima). Athens: Exantas. Van De Ven, Cornelis. 1978. Space in Architecture. Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Vitti, Mario. 1978. $"# +, # (Hestoria tes Neohellenikes logotechneas). Athens: Odysseas.


URBAN MINDSCAPES REFLECTED IN SHOP WINDOWS

Giandomenico Amendola

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between shopping, urban life and form and mindscapes of the city. The history of this relationship is traced from the separation of market place and key sites of public life in the cities of Ancient Greece to the transformation of the entire city into a shopping centre in today’s post-industrial societies. In contemporary European and American cities, a circular effect can be observed: shopping centres are increasingly built according to models of real streets, enhanced by references to people’s imagination. At the same time, city centre designs increasingly adopt the look and feel of the fake but comfortable and appealing ‘streets’ inside shopping malls. A mall atmosphere pervades the contemporary European and American city. According to Dickens, in Victorian Coketown, schools, hospitals and prisons were all similar in that they looked like the factory. In the contemporary city, office buildings, railway stations, airports and museums are similar as they are all designed following the shopping mall model. In fact, this is what they are: shopping malls, designed to appeal, to charm and to make people buy. The mall has assumed the status of icon and epitomized scenario of contemporary urban experience. An entire life can be lived inside a shopping mall. In Paul Mazursky’s and Woody Allen’s 1991 film Scenes from a Mall, a marriage parabola (love, betrayals, romance, love again, etc.) is

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played out in the span of a day in a Los Angeles shopping mall.1 The 2004 movie The Terminal reflects a world even more affected by the shopping mall model and influence. If it were not for the check-in counters and the gates in the background, the New York City airport terminal where Tom Hanks – as the traveller without visa Viktor Navorski – lives on the gated threshold of the United States would be indistinguishable from a shopping mall. It is a world apart with its own labour market, its nomadic population, its habits, laws and social networks and – of course – its shops. The movie plot is a fiction, the airport terminal, its environment and its mood are not. Like all catch phrases, ‘the world is a mall’ is a mix of hype and fact. The core of the statement reflects both new urban commercial scenarios and a widely shared feeling. Today, it is almost impossible to draw a clear borderline between shopping and the city, between shopping experience and urban experience, between the modern flâneur and the shopper. Shopping is not only a basic routine activity of contemporary city life; it seems to make up the very essence of the contemporary urbanite. Shopping is a means to experience urban life. Such an overlap – or homology – between the city and shopping points to shopping as a corner stone of social organization, built form and experience of the contemporary city. Shopping creates the cultural basis of urban mindscapes. From Depato in Tokio to Prada in New York City or to KaDeWe in Berlin and CityWalk in Los Angeles, shopping monuments are city monuments. The brand is the added value to wealthy shopping districts and city centres. Former exiles of the 1970s and ‘80s ‘white flight’ to the suburbs are converted back to city life by shopping. They are attracted by the city lights, by the greater consumption opportunities, by shop windows and by people sharing the same urban experience. E-commerce can provide lower prices, suburban commercial centres have easier parking and larger shelves, but they cannot wrap goods with imagination and excitement as city centre shops and their streets do. In North American edge cities and in the anonymous suburbs of European metropoles, shopping malls represent precious fragments of a lost urbanity. In contemporary edge cities the focus – both practical and symbolic – of urban experience are the shopping areas that act as anchors of residential islands. Without shopping, suburbs could not sur1 The movie is set in Los Angeles, though the real mall used as the film set is borrowed from New Jersey.


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vive. In the 1950s, home shopping meetings – Tupperware parties – were the only chances of sociability for suburban housewives. During the 1960s and ’70s, the only shared public spaces in American suburbs where the shopping centres. The first generation shopping mall – the suburban one – was a blend of a variety of architectural, cultural and social elements. It had economic functions (marketing for the baby boomers generation), political functions (an agora-like community centre), cultural functions (diffusion of urban cultural models and life styles) and social functions (intergenerational socialization). In the suburbs decades, one of the few links between the nowhere of suburbs and city life was the shopping centre that provided not only consumption chances but also public space and social encounters. In George Romero’s cult movie Dawn of the Dead (1978), zombies coming from different cemeteries march to the shopping centre because, as one zombie explains, ‘it is the only place everybody knows’. This need of the suburban dwellers for some kind of public life was a powerful factor in producing the second generation of shopping malls and with these, new urban mindscapes. In the 1970s, a new generation of shopping malls was designed to give to ‘nowhere people’ a simulacrum of city. In order to match people’s desires, traditional garage- or shoe boxlike shopping centres were transformed into fragments of city environment, with shops, fountains, main streets and plazas (the term plaza was preferred to square because it sounded more European and recalled a vibrant continental street life). The second generation shopping malls responded to dreams of a lost city life and consisted of a blend of suggestions coming from European history (nineteenth-century Parisian passages and their dream-like architecture, open air art), American tradition (metropolitan urban villages like SoHo and Greenwich Village in New York City, filtered by Disneyworld and Hollywood) and the media world (themes drawn from movies and TV series). The result of such a blend was a shopping mall built around a ‘plaza’, designed like a movie set of an ideal city full of art pieces and fountains (if upper class clients were expected), of picturesque carts and open air Mediterranean cafés (for medium level customers) or Disneyland-like features (for families and young people). The shopping mall became a simulacrum of the city in that it reflected not a real city (with its drawbacks and problems) but a dream city, a city that people were longing for.

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The artificial but dream-like cityscape of the shopping mall has been the general rehearsal of the contemporary shiny and appealing city centres and their shopping cores. Nowadays, the relationship between city life and shopping is so strong and indisputable as to look embedded in the very nature of the city itself and shopping is often assumed to be the very core of the urban experience. The close link between shopping and urban experience and the peculiar relationship between shopping, city life and urban fabric are a contemporary phenomenon. The merging in the same place of the functions of agora and of marketplace occurred in most European countries only in the Middle Ages. In the cities of Ancient Greece, the agora was the very centre of the public and political space of the polis but trade activities where not accepted or welcome. In Rome, marketplaces became spacious and attractive under Emperor Trajan. They became city monuments: the multilevel Trajani markets in Rome are still a wonder of functionality and modernity. Nevertheless, public life did not take place in the marketplace: public affairs where discussed in the Roman baths, the thermae. Even in the early modern European City, there was still a clear – though fading – separation between the place of the market and the public place of the Piazza where public affairs where run and people met to exchange ideas rather than only goods. Even when merchant guilds governed the city (e.g. in Siena) this distinction was kept. Shopping and its space began to play a central role in the modern city only in the nineteenth century. The Paris Passages are urban spaces explicitly designed to host the shopping and social encounters of the rising bourgeoisie. An intense, if superficial social life took place here. The flâneur of the Paris passages, described by Baudelaire and Benjamin, and providing inspiration to urban sociologists Simmel and Wirth, became the epitomy of the modern urban man as both dreamer and utilitarian (that is to say: a contemporary shopper). Britain had provided the model that inspired the Parisian Passages. At the end of the seventeen hundreds, the Duke of Chartres changed the Palais Royal Galleries into a fashionable meeting place, taking Bath, the fashionable holiday resort of the English aristocracy, as a model. The French name points to the early basic function of the Passages as connectors in the urban fabric. They, according to Baudelaire, where streets that dreamed of becoming palaces (see Benjamin 1982). The Passages are the Ur- Form, primitive and original, of modern shopping streets.


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Passage des Panoramas or Passage Vivienne, with their glass, electric lights, and atrium constructions, with their goods and dreams piled high, have influenced the Parisians’ urban mindscapes more than the cityscape itself. The Passages are fragments of a dream city, carved at the beginning of the nineteenth century into an unfriendly and hostile urban fabric. Here, the rising bourgeoisie began to disclose their ideas for a new city. The luxurious decorations with gold, marbles and mirrors are drawn from the ‘ancien régime’ palaces but the difference is in their accessibility to everybody, aristocrat or not, who can afford them. Passages are the stage on which the new ruling class, proud of its buying power, displays its status symbols. Thanks to new glass technologies, the shops have larger and well lit windows where the phantasmagoria metamorphosis, described by Walter Benjamin (1982), takes place: displayed goods are transformed into dream objects whose value is not in their practical use but in their ability to fulfil consumers’ desires. These window displays were the first step towards the staging of goods that ever since has played a central role in the cityscape and the urban imaginary. Goods, the principal actors on the urban stage, will in two centuries’ time expand their presence from the niches of the Passages to the whole city. In adding magic to city life, Parisian Passages inverted the traditional and typical urban sequence of ‘I go to buy’, turning it into ‘I buy to go’. And ever since, this new logic has provided the basis for the design of both commercial architecture and city centre developments. The fundamental formula of the contemporary shopping mall – excitement or entertainment plus retail – thus came to existence in Passage Vivienne, Colbert or Jouffroy in nineteenth-century Paris. In his 1926 novel Le paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon refers to the ‘Passages de l’Opéra’ as the pulsing heart of the ‘modern mythology’ of Paris and as the sanctum of modernity. This sanctum was, of course, quite different from the solitary nature and inaccessibility of the holy places of previous ages. The sanctity of modernity lies in its ephemeral character, in speed, electric lights, and in the phantasmagoria of goods. In Marc Augé’s terms (1995), the Passages were ‘non-places’ – not because they belong to a lower class of places, but, because, like contemporary shopping malls and airports, they are very special places: they are temples of a new era.

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Parisian Passages are a milestone in the relationship between shopping and the city because they show that there is a demand for experience and people are willing to pay for it. The Passages provided the link between the baroque experience of the ‘ancient régime’ and the budding bourgeois society and its city. Using the successful engineering of emotions, a particular achievement of baroque architecture, to attract people and to convert visitors into buyers, they were at the same time state-ofthe-art architectural constructions, as they were the first buildings to adopt new lighting and heating techniques and iron and glass coverings. Shops attracted and enchanted people with the help of large and brightly lit windows. They were promising not only the goods, but an experience. Nowadays terms like ‘experience economy’, ‘experience architecture’ or ‘experience shopping’ are in common usage, but at the dawn of the nineteenth century they were not. The experience provided by the magic space of the Passages – streets crowded by fashionable people and made comfortable and luxurious like palaces – was the magnet that attracted people and soon turned the Passages into the main tourist attraction in Paris. Expanding commerce led to the building of another urban monument in the second half of the century: the department store. Where the passages had still occupied the threshold between two different centuries and societies, dreaming of a new world with the language of the old one, department stores were the expression of maturity both of the modern city and of the urban bourgeoisie. They were brand new both in their architectural form and in their raison d’être, a veritable expression of a new class that, though rich, was still looking for an adequate lifestyle. The department stores were monuments to dreams in a city that, thanks to Baron Haussmann, was becoming a monument itself. They became urban landmarks both in the cityscape and in Parisians’ mindscapes of their city. Department stores like the Samaritaine or Printemps were very special places during the Parisian Second Empire, as they were the first modern urban places in which middle and upper class women were free to stroll along the counters and the mirrors without an escort. In department stores they did not buy an item – a chair, a towel or a dozen plates – but they could choose a lifestyle, look at it staged in the show rooms, imagine themselves in the picture, and, finally, buy it. Step by step, piece by piece, and thanks to the department store, the urban bourgeoisie was


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able to build its own identity and lifestyle. Department stores were the school for modernity, the classrooms in which the new urban bourgeoisie learned to convert its buying power into life styles and social habits. In Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), based on the first Parisian department store ‘Au Bon Marché’, Zola describes the store owner’s strategy as that of making women the queens of his store, of ensnaring them in order to conquer and better control them. The main instrument of enchantment was the mirror, whose function was not only to boost artificial light and enlarge the space, but also to create the illusion of dreams coming true: every client could see herself dressed according to her wishes in an environment reflecting her wishes. Thus, for women, the new department stores became the essence of the city itself. Paris life and shops are the desires of Emma Bovary for instance, Flaubert’s female marginal and dreamy hero who longs for the escape from grey everyday life into a life of self-fulfilment and happiness. The new Parisian department stores expanded rapidly and created a typology that was adopted with some variations in Europe and across the ocean. By 1872, the store was one of the main tourist landmarks in Paris and concerts were staged in the building on a regular basis. In the nineteen hundreds, not only department stores, but the number of shops and cafés, too, continued to grow with an accelerated rhythm all over Europe. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, shopping increasingly became the distinctive social habit of the new bourgeoisie in cities like Paris, London, and Berlin. Nevertheless shopping was still marginal in urban life and form. It only began to forge mindscapes and cityscapes in the second half of the twentieth century, at the time of the crisis of the modern industrial city. Until then, architects and city planners did their best to keep shopping apart from city life. The main planning instrument was the zoning method that located the different urban functions – e.g. housing, business, shopping, leisure – in well separated city areas in order, this was the claim, to optimise the urban machine. Architects considered designing shops and commercial buildings a trivial kind of work to be carried out by the lower ranks of architects or the less clever designers. There are only a few examples of shops designed in the first half of the twentieth century by leading architects such as Sullivan, Mendelsohn or Wright. Great modernist architects disliked shops, and their work did not match clients’ needs and expectations. Most of these ‘signature’ shop

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designs did not leave the architects’ offices. Le Corbusier designed a scheme for a shoe shop (unbuilt); Kahn, three shoe stores, but only one was built; Mies van der Rohe, an unbuilt scheme for a department store in Berlin; Gropius, a scheme for a shopping mall in an unbuilt renewal project in Boston. One of the few stores of the time designed by a top architect is the Goldman shop in Vienna by Alfred Loos. There is a legend that Loos designed the shop, which was located just opposite the Hofburg, in a provocatively progressive and unusual way, in order to make the Emperor Franz Joseph unhappy. A more trustworthy witness – Loos himself – tells a more realistic story. According to his own account, Loos accepted to design the shop for a fashionable tailor only because he was in need of suits and shirts. A major change took place in the second half of the twentieth century with the crisis of the modernist movement in architecture and, even more importantly, in urban planning and design. At the beginning of the sixties, a journalist without any formal training in city planning – Jane Jacobs (1961) – deeply affected and changed American planning culture, claiming that zoning was killing modern cities and that only a balanced mix of different functions – e.g. business, shopping and housing – could save the city. Jacobs’s alternative urban model was based on her neighbourhood: Greenwich Village in New York City. Her emphasis of the street as the focus of urban experience and of everyday life, stressed the role of shopping not only as a practical and functional activity but as a social practice. Modernist zoning was decisively overcome in 1971 in New York, with the introduction of the Special Zoning District of Fifth Avenue, which admitted the coexistence of different functions. Until well into the 1960s, shopping and shop windows were only an aspect of the city: they were not yet the city tout court. In the seventies, shopping began its unstoppable conquest of the city and of urban life, of cityscapes and mindscapes. There are several factors underlying this change, and they span from culture to economy, from de-urbanisation to de-industrialisation. In the last decades of the twentieth century, star architects began to commit themselves to commercial architecture. Koolhaas, Nouvel, and Rossi added their signatures (or their own brands) to famous brands like Prada, Printemps, and Armani. Today, in the postmodern city – the socalled ‘fantasy city’ (Hannigan 1998) –, shops and shopping play a central role, both in practical and in symbolic terms. Because of the ongoing


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urban de-industrialisation and the rise of the service economy, the core of the city consists in shops and in their lights, their windows and in the people that flock to them. You can enjoy the city if you can shop in it and you can pay for your experience. The city itself is a merchandise that can be purchased and used. The contemporary city is a demand-centred city. A popular concept of progressive schools of architecture in the seventies was ‘to design with people in mind’. This old idea of sociologists and architects who advocated more attention to people’s needs is being resurrected in a different shape now, as a corollary to consumption pressures. It is not the citizens, but the consumers that architects must now keep in mind when designing. Shops, hotels, houses, offices, railway stations, public spaces, etc. must be designed so as to attract people. Built space must be sold and built space must help to sell. ‘To design with the consumers in mind’ is a must. Postmodern architecture is a major indicator of the new relationship between shopping, experience and urban form. In their seminal book Learning from Las Vegas (1972) Venturi, Brown and Izenour stress the importance for architects to pay attention to everyday life and its languages, symbols and signs. Las Vegas, according to these authors, is the city where the contamination between pop culture, American commercial vernacular and formal architecture is most intense. Contemporary architecture, in Europe as well as in America, has learnt from Las Vegas (and from Disneyland as well) that communication is a must but cannot be taken for granted any longer. Architects (and marketing experts) are now fully aware of the importance of finding proper means to communicate with people in order to attract and to motivate them. The city and the urban environment – this is one of post-modern architecture’s main principles – must intercept people’s desires and match them. This precept is shared by the worlds of architectural and urban design and of shopping. All three draw languages, signs and vocabulary from popular everyday experience and from pop culture in order to cope with a turbulent marketplace where supply exceeds demand. Demand centred strategies in urban design and in marketing are an effect of such a structural unbalance. The tough competition between cities is a major factor in the greater influence of shopping in moulding the contemporary city. As cities must compete to attract companies, capital and people, they have to appeal to

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employers, families, workers, consumers and tourists. An opportunity to intervene in an effective manner in the development of urban form and organisation is provided to city administrators by the fast and thorough de-industrialisation process that has forced cities to reinvent their economies, replacing industrial production with services, leisure facilities, tourist attractions, cultural industries and shopping opportunities. In such a scenario a new word has found its place onto the city administrators’ agenda: city marketing. It is a new approach in that it does not only refer to the promotion and the advertising of a city but also to efforts towards meeting the demands for a better urban design. The city itself is a product, ‘selling the city’ is a must, and shopping facilities are a major means for attracting people. New shopping areas are presented as cities’ cultural attractions, and many small British cities compete with each other using their city centres with their shopping attractions as magnets (the city logo is often printed on promotional shopping bags). Consumption is a vital means for urban renewal. Gentrification and neighbourhood revitalization, as in Tribeca in New York City, the Marais in Paris, Brera in Milan, or Santa Croce in Florence, operate chiefly through shops and boutiques, which act as groundbreakers and vanguards. Shops and boutiques attract people and create a trendy and branded atmosphere. Apartment and building prices skyrocket. Nowadays shopping malls are, to some extent, the victims of their own success. In the United States, they are facing a major crisis, with many important malls being dismantled or transformed into residential or office buildings, as in the case of Sherman Oaks Galleria in Los Angeles, which had been the icon of West Coast shopping malls and the location of many movies. The drop of visitor numbers and revenues is not only a consequence of e-commerce growth. The new competitors are the city centre shopping streets, which have been changing as a reaction to the shopping malls and have developed aggressive marketing strategies. The city centres and their commercial streets are now becoming more and more similar to open air shopping malls. There is a circular process that is changing our everyday environment: shopping malls and shopping centres are more and more similar to city streets, and city streets are becoming more and more similar to the shopping malls’ fake streets. Baudrillard coined the term ‘hyper-reality’ for this phenomenon: reality in order to be accepted must imitate the imagi-


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nary; the success of so-called everyday architecture is in its proximity to the world of the media and the imagination. There are several models using shopping to affect the cityscape and urban experience by making use of people’s imagination. The most common of these are the Gruen transfer and the Jerde transfer. These imitative processes at first operate in a causal linear way that in time takes on a circular logic, characteristic of hyper-reality. The Gruen transfer derives its name from Victor Gruen, the Austrian born architect who designed the first nostalgic city-like shopping malls and set up the guidelines for the current ‘new urbanism’ that has become fashionable thanks to advocates like the Prince of Wales and his guru architect Leon Krier. Gruen’s projects, from the groundbreaking Southdale Center near Minneapolis to Fort Worth in Texas, all reflect the same philosophy and share the same features: a nostalgia for a community you can trust, architectural forms that recall the past and people-centred European streets. The Gruen strategy builds on people’s longing for a world in which they feel safe. The underlying model is the traditional community and the everyday life of small provincial cities or of European historical towns, enriched by elements of Disneyland’s Main Street. Nostalgia, filtered by historical and mass media stereotypes, has proved to be a powerful and effective strategy. Quite different to this is the so called Jerde transfer, a design and marketing approach that takes its name from another American architect, Jon Jerde, based in Venice Beach, California, whose name is widely known for innovative mall design and ‘experience architecture’. In 1977, he designed the Horton Plaza Center in downtown San Diego; in 1982, the giant Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota; and in 1993, the pirate show and the façade of Treasure Island Casino in Las Vegas. The synthesis of Jon Jerde’s radical approach can be found in his City Walk at the Universal City theme park in Los Angeles. City Walk is a busy, noisy metropolitan street, quite different from the nostalgic dreams of Disney’s main street. The designer’s aim was to create a veritable urban atmosphere, and to provide the experience of a full immersion into metropolitan life without the drawbacks (crime, cars and pollution) of the real city. Disneyland Main Street, with shops and streets full of souvenirs, junk items and nostalgia, is only a few miles away from Universal City. Visitors flock into Walt Disney’s Main Street looking for the lost order and the coherence of a bygone world. In Disneyland and in Disneyland-like

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shopping centres people have the illusion to be the focus and the very centre of the city. The underlying design principle is to make people feel like Vitruvio’s Renaissance man (sketched by Leonardo) who is the centre of a universe he can master. Even the scale of Disneyland’s main street buildings is modified in order to make people feel more important than the built environment. Main Street and its shops reflect the Ur-Form of the modern urban mindscape. Main Street is the icon and the stage of an evergreen past where you can feel free, free to goof around, to browse and to shop. It is an experience you can buy. In Universal City’s City Walk – or in Fremont Street in Las Vegas (also designed by Jerde) – by contrast, the main motivating factor is not nostalgia but a condensed, accelerated, exciting, contemporary urban mood. The City Walk design principles are explicitly borrowed from any successful, exciting, contemporary city centre shopping street (from New York City’s Times Square, London’s Piccadilly Circus or Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm). Amplification, bombardment of the senses, entertainment, are the means by which City Walk or Fremont Street change the modern flâneur into an addicted consumer. City addict and shopping addict turn out to be one and the same. Design principles are chaos and incoherence, several steps ahead of Venturi’s post-modern claim for complexity and contradictions. It is the fake but perfect prototype of the noisy, exciting, crowded contemporary street where you can smell city air. The shopping street is the city tout court. The Gruen and the Jerde transfers produce artificial but reliable and believable city experiences after models drawn from real experience, the media world and stereotypes. However, they are more than simply linear effects. For, according to Baudrillard, in post-modern experience, reality is accepted only if it recalls the imaginary world. Indeed, both in Disneyland Main Street and in Jerde’s City Walk and Fremont Street, it is possible to discern a three step circular process that starts from a real street, goes through a fake street built after a real life model, and ends up with a real urban street designed after the fake street. Walt Disney claimed that he based the idea of Disneyland Main Street in Orange County, California – the first of his theme parks, built in the 1950s – on his childhood memories. The model was Marceline, the Missouri city where he was born. According to this account, a real city – though filtered by nostalgia and enriched with quotations and frills coming from the media world – was the model for the theme park stage. In


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the span of a few years, millions of visitors, mainly Americans, have become so familiar with Disney’s Main Street to make it the prototype of a small community’s public space. Nothing is more real than Disney’s Main Street as it is designed after widely shared memories, dreams and popular images. As a result, when in the nineties, city administrators of a real city – Medina, Ohio – decided to revitalise their city centre in order to attract more visitors and consumers, the best model they could find was Disneyland Main Street. They redesigned the city centre according to Disney’s model, and promptly saw an increase in visitor numbers and shop revenues. Imagination has become the model according to which reality is forged. This is an example of the circularity of the Gruen transfer. The Jerde transfer is becoming circular as well. In Fremont Street, originally designed after New York’s Times Square, speed, stimuli, excitement are everywhere. They are in the shops’ lights, in the high volume music, in the crowds of people; everything is accelerated and exaggerated. Even the colours of the fake sky change fast. The Times Square model is now being superseded; Fremont Street itself has become an example of intense metropolitan life and shopping. It is a model derived from real life, namely itself. The Manhattan 42nd Street is undergoing a major process of refurbishing; the models that designers and urban renewal promoters are following are those of Los Angeles’s and Las Vegas’s fake metropolitan streets. The trick that can turn an everyday urban landscape into a magic shopping area is in theming the street. Theming a street is not that difficult: a themed street is an iconographic street. Existing signs are stressed in order to become icons, noise is themed and converted into a modern soundtrack, the street soundscape. Themed, branded and exciting streets are the new shopping malls. The task of turning a flâneur or a passer-by into an eager consumer cannot be accomplished by a single shop, however shiny and appealing. This objective can be better achieved by the city environment as a whole, by the urban shopping scenario and the city mood. Stadtluft macht buyer. The motivating factor is in the city magic itself: in its people, its life, its lights, its architecture. The design of contemporary shops of Prada, Armani, or Nike – just to name a few – is not aimed to increase sales or to make the products more visible. The objective of contemporary commercial architecture is to produce the ‘aura’ of the product (may it be shoes, suits or a

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car) and to embed this aura in the consumer’s experience. The equivalent to experience shopping is Rem Koolhaas’ experience architecture. The contemporary city is designed and built according to people’s dreams and desires. They are taking the place of needs as corner stones and north stars of city design and government. Cityscape and shoppingscape are more and more similar as they are both inspired by dreams. The dreamlike architecture of the Parisian Passages was confined to city niches and enclaves. Now dream architecture is giving its imprint to the entire city. The urban stage – organised by shopping logic – is a major means to change the modern flâneur into a buyer. The traditional urban equilibrium between the street and its shops is changing. The street is not only a free space between shops, but street and shops merge. Street lights, events, pedlars, colours are all part of the selling strategy. The new technical term ‘stealth shopping malls’, referring to malls that are fully integrated in urban streets, points to this metamorphosis. Shopping allows you to buy experiences, ethnic shopping makes you travel across countries and cultures, distinctive and status shopping lets you climb (or give the illusion to climb) the social ladder. In shop windows it is possible to find everything from the life style you prefer to the body and the look you wish to have. Shop windows are a blend of Alice’s mirror (the door to get into Wonderland) and Dorian Gray’s picture (that never gets older). Shop windows reflect desires and buildings, mindscapes and cityscapes. There is nothing more real than the mindscape reflected by windows as it is the image of the city you are longing for, of the city that you are creating with your desires and dreams. These dreams are ‘real’ as you can step into them if you have enough buying power.

References Amendola, Giandomenico. 1997-2003. La città postmoderna. Bari: Laterza. SSS. 2006. La citta vetrina. Napoli: Liguori. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


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Crawford, Margaret. 1992. The World in a Shopping Mall. In Variations on a Theme Park, ed. Michael Sorkin, 3-30. New York: Hill and Wang. SSS. 2002. Suburban Life and Public Space. In Redressing the Mall. Sprawl and the Public Space, ed. David Smiley, 21-30. Washington D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts. Dicks, Bella. 2003. Culture on Display. The Production of Contemporary Visitability. London: Open University Press. Farrell, James. 2003. One Nation Under Goods. Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books. Ferguson, Priscilla. 1994. The Flâneur On and Off the Streets of Paris. In The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester, 22-42. London : Routledge. Ferreira Freitas, Ricardo. 1996. Centres Commerciaux: îles urbaines de la postmodernité. Paris: L’Harmattan. Geist, Johann. 1983. Arcades. The History of a Building Type. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hannigan, John. 1999. Fantasy City. Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis. London: Routledge. Herman, Daniel. 2001a. Jerde Transfer. Spatial Assault. In Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, eds. C. Chung, J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, and S. T. Leong, 402-7. Cologne: Taschen. SSS. 2001b. Separated at Birth. In Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, eds. C. Chung, J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, and S. T. Leong, 708-19. Cologne: Taschen. Hollein, Max. 2002. Shopping. In Shopping. A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, eds. Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, 13-16. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers. Jackson, P., M. Lowe, D. Miller, and F. Mort, eds. 2000. Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces. Oxford: Berg. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Lauter, Wolfgang. 1984. Passagen. Dortmund: Die Bibliophilen Taschenbücher. Leong, Sze Tung. 2001. Gruen Urbanism. Mall as Urbanism. In Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, eds. C. Chung, J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, and S. T. Leong, 380-9. Cologne: Taschen. Maitland, Barry. 1985. Shopping Malls: Planning and Design. New York: Nichols. Miles, Steve and Malcolm Miles. 2004. Consuming Cities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schwarzbach, F. S. 1979. Dickens and the City. London: Athlone Press. Sorkin, Michael, ed. 1992. Variations on a Theme Park. New York: Noonday Press. Stierle, Karlheinz. 2001. La Capitale des signes - Paris et son discours. Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme. Venturi, Robert. 1966. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

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SSS. Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ward, Stephen. 1998. Selling Places. London: Spon Press. Zukin, Sharon. 2004. Point of Purchase. How Shopping Changed American Culture. New York: Routledge.


ENCOUNTERING THE CITY: ON ‘NOT TAKING YOURSELF WITH YOU’

Nicolas Whybrow

Abstract The urban anthropologist Franco La Cecla refers to the Socratean warning against ‘taking yourself with you’ on your travels to strange lands and the danger, if we do, that we risk ‘colonising with our presence every step of the journey’ for ‘to know new places corresponds in this century with denying their difference’. This paper considers the event of encounter with the unknown city, emphasising the broader implications of the act of transition (with its etymological traces of ‘passing through’, ‘being infected’ as well as ‘going over to the enemy’). Drawing on Marc Augé’s theory of the ‘abstractly familiar non-places of supermodernity’ in antithetical conjunction with the ‘strangely familiar’ experience of the Freudian uncanny, the paper analyses what is involved for the identity of the subject in the suspended process of de-/re-orientation. I speak from the point of view of performance; that is my discipline. Or perhaps I should say interdiscipline since the very nature of performance is such that its practice and study is integrated, seeking connections between disciplines, forging new and maybe improbable alliances, unsettling boundaries, and always moving on – not unlike the visitor’s or walker’s experience of the city. And that is the other point of view I grant myself, that of a modern-day Benjaminan flâneur, indulging in the meandering, creative practice of wandering and wondering, walking and speculating. There is an important elusiveness in the action of the walker, which is redolent of the city’s own unforeseen movement as it seeks to negotiate identities for itself: I move because the city does. So there is a

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Nicolas Whybrow

dialectic that emerges between how cities move and how you move in them. In Neil Leach’s words: ‘the “wanderer” represents the freedom and flux of the city. As such the “wanderer” is the archetypal creature of our contemporary condition, a creature whose existence reflects the very transiency of the city’ (1999, 159). But before I even get to the city I need to get there, as it were. And it is actually the event of this transition with which I am chiefly concerned here: an after as well as a before, an in between frame of mind, which marks a shift from familiar to unfamiliar. Hence, ‘losing yourself’ as well as ‘losing sight of yourself’ emerge as prerequisite for encountering the unknown city In ways that are ‘remarkable’ or ‘unforgettable’. The short European flight upon which I am about to embark provides the basis, then, for the process of travel to be evoked as a necessary psychic rendering-strange. Dying to Go I’ll begin on the plane from London Heathrow to Berlin Tegel. Still on terra firma, just easing out of the blocks and taxiing towards take-off. ‘In the event of the aircraft landing on water ...’ Wait. Slip up or customer relations policy change? ‘Unlikely event’, surely. That is what they have always said in the past: unlikely. What is going on? The tables have turned and we have to bank on the event being likely or at least even odds? After all, there is a quite confounding argument to say that the outcome of all risk situations is ultimately two to one. It either happens or it does not, and it could do so at any time. So perhaps the airlines are finally coming clean. Or maybe we are talking evolution. The airlines have come to the conclusion that, as a species, we humans have become so conversant with the global discourse of air travel – so sky-wise – that we do not require that little linguistic prop anymore. It is now inscribed in our cultural genes, as it were. In fact, retaining it may in the meantime produce the reverse effect, namely to draw attention to rather than disguise the very real possibility of the plane crashing. Sophisticated beings that we are, we have developed an immunising capability against such rhetorical charms, which, let’s face it, did have the tricky task of deflecting our thoughts from death by raising the possibility of its imminence. From the airlines’ point of view, then, it is best to be matter of fact. Play it straight, deliver the instructions and hope the fearful thought keeps its distance.

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And, as the cabin crew continues the performance of its emergency ritual, it strikes me how odd it all is, that tugging of toggles and tapping of top-up pipes. Deeply familiar, but strangely abstract. And somehow archaic, the vestige of a primeval era of travel by air. Like activating propeller blades by spinning them manually. It seems to stand in no relation to the advanced degree of sophistication represented by presentday aircraft technology. Will they still be doing that fifty years from now? Or will there be an assumption by then that safety procedure is generally known; that we do not require to be taught or reminded anymore of how to behave in the unlikely event? Well, perhaps. But I suspect the survival of this survival ritual is safeguarded by a purpose exceeding – or even superseding – the communication of a code of safe practice. That purpose might be the perfunctory playing out of an exercise designed to insure the airlines against liability in the event of litigation following an accident. Rumour has it after all that when things actually go wrong, the notion of procedure in any case goes out of the window (so to speak). Hence, being seen to be taking precautionary measures is the most important factor from the point of view of the post-crash determination of responsibility. On a less cynical note, I would suggest the ritual is chiefly about managing terror. Not in the (unlikely) event of it arising at some future point in the flight, but in the extremely likely event of it being present here and now. As I have pointed out, the problem for airline companies is how to deal with the very tangible association of the service they provide with the idea of death: that which is unknown and unforeseeable, which you fear – literally and figuratively, the last thing you want to happen. There cannot be many modern, everyday phenomena that confront you with the possibility of death with quite the same immediacy as travelling by plane. There are, for instance, visits to hospital. But hospitals are designated ‘death sites’. They are prepared for it. They have real procedures that are implemented when it occurs. We accept that mortality, however it is handled by medical discourse, is one of the features of hospital culture. It deals in it. Air travel does not, supposedly. Moreover, whereas a visit to a hospital may invoke the ‘smell of death’, it is not necessarily yours, though ultimately it is probably that of which you are thinking. Airlines are faced not only with having to invoke death’s possibility – without mentioning it – but also with palliating the implication that if it takes place, it will be within the next few hours and it will affect you.

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They are caught, then, in the unenviable position, on the one hand, of causing you to contemplate the potential occurrence of death – a nasty one at that – whilst reassuring you, on the other, that the risk to which you have committed yourself was really worth taking. To enable the latter thought to gain ascendancy, the former needs to be displaced or buried. Like the plane itself our attention is elevated to a higher channel, away from the earth and thoughts of interment. So, if we are in fact talking survival tactics in the cabin crew’s performance, the element of survival is more accurately ascribed to the strategic redirection of terror than the passing on of ‘handy tips’ for certain unmentionable eventualities. The whole procedure might be called entertaining the unbearable idea of death, a performative action that marks the collapse of the terror of contemplation into the ritual of its diversion. Adrian Heathfield’s article ‘Facing the Other: the Performance Encounter and Death’ usefully sums up the notion of the social organisation of cultural production as originating in a defensive reaction to the threat of mortality: Modern societies are predicated on ‘survival strategies’ which frequently involve the temporary resolution of death’s threat through objecthood: the fixing of that which eludes understanding and explanation into identifiable and knowable objects. Objecthood draws phenomena into the field of the rationally explicable and is a condition which implies containment through place, name and identity (Heathfield 1997).

Terra Nullius We are airborne and rising. A member of the cabin crew places before me a flat, rectangular box. My squarish meal. – What would you like to drink, sir? – Oh, er, got any white wine? – Bordeaux or Australian Chardonnay? Be with you in a moment, madam ... But this is precisely not a square meal. This is a mini-banquet of delicacies: smoked salmon for starters, then roast chicken and Russian salad, followed by tiramisu. And these are delectable angels, unconditionally indulging my every desire: pleasing to behold, silky in their movements, charming and obliging of manner. Burp and they would probably pretend to find it alluring. I may not be God – we’ll be hearing from him


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later, I expect, delivering his report on the state of play 35,000 feet above Hanover or thereabouts – but I’ve certainly got some sort of minor fiefdom to my name. As the air gets thinner and the alcohol begins to cloud my brain, I’m not in heaven just yet, but it is giving me a pretty good foretaste. But where am I in fact? ‘In between’, no-man’s land (or air), no-where? Well, it could be the occasion of my last supper. But that is a retrogressive thought. Death, or the fear of it, has long since been lulled out of my system. I am in full trance now, a state which began to work its spell at Heathrow, actually. A kind of sickly-sweet shopping and eating delirium. I realised, as I waited for the sugar to disappear into the depths of my third cappuccino, that the hive of activity all around me in the departure area, that constant stream of people parading past my observation post outside Prêt a Manger, was entirely without aim. It dawned on me when the same characters would reappear at intervals, still apparently on their way somewhere. And I recognised what was going on because I had been there myself, circulating endlessly, prowling the precinct, a trapped soul, thinking: there must be something interesting, something I haven’t seen; there must be more. In some respects the activity suggests the aimless strolling of the flanêur. In fact, it is the antithesis because its possibilities are finite and predictable. You cannot get lost, only pointlessly ensnared. The anthropologist Marc Augé refers to airports, or the locations of air travel generally, as instances of the non-places of supermodernity. The latter is meant in the sense of a modernity that is over-determined, containing an excess of information which no longer allows human beings to recognise themselves: This overabundance of images has perverse consequences in so far as the more we get a chance to see everything, the less we can be sure we are still able to really look at them. The world becomes, one might say, abstractly familiar to us, so that, socially speaking, there are literally no more relations between the world and us, in so far as we are content with the images imparted to us, as is the case today for a lot of people (Augé 1995, 10-11).

Augé’s notion of the ‘abstractly familiar’ recalls Freud’s musings on das Unheimliche. Translated correctly, but nevertheless incompletely as (the) ‘uncanny’, the German unheimlich(keit) also has literal connotations of being ‘unhomely’ or even, as Paul Auster’s alter ego muses in The Invention of Solitude, the state of ‘not belonging to the home’ (Auster 1988,

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148). More commonly, it refers to that which arouses a sense of fear, insecurity or foreboding. Running these various senses together leads you to equate the experience of terror with the notion of not being home(ly), or of being in the realm of the unfamiliar: ‘what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known’ (Freud 1990, 341). There is a link here too with Heathfield’s summary of objecthood as that which ‘draws phenomena into the field of the rationally explicable’ (Heathfield 1997). A secure condition of Heimlichkeit or ‘home(li)ness’ is restored through a network of familiar or knowable objects. However, Freud’s actual thesis is based on the curious way in which heimlich (‘homely’, ‘familiar’, ‘native’) ‘is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ (Freud 1990, 347). This is premised on the fact that heimlich also means ‘secret’ – ergo: the home, or its objects, as the protector of secrets – which is in fact its dominant sense in common usage. A ‘warm and secure’ phenomenon harbours something ‘ugly and threatening’. (Leach gives an illuminating example of the dialectic in operation: ‘within the heimlich of the homeland there lurks the unheimlich of nationalism’ [Leach 1999, 159].) Hence, for Freud, ‘it may be true that the uncanny is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition’ (Freud 1990, 308). As such, the ‘uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it’ (Freud 1990, 363). Augé concludes that ‘in the world of supermodernity people are always, and never at home’ (Augé 1995, 109). Non-places not only produce a form of suspended identity (or temporary non-identity), they also – or therefore – preclude significant interaction with the subject’s environment. Like white noise, they effect a ‘blanding out’, a state of alienation in which you cannot properly sense. Hence, the non-places of travel can be said to promote an experience that is forgettable, in which no significant trace is left either in or by you although, paradoxically, it is a location to which you may return repeatedly. The ‘abstractly familiar’ emerges, then, as the effective antithesis to the ‘secretly familiar’ action of the uncanny inasmuch as the latter implies an acute sensing or ‘coming home’ of something previously witnessed, something that had absented itself. Augé’s non-places evoke a return which produces an absenting.


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Paradoxically, the traveller ‘accedes to his anonymity only when he has given proof of his identity’, according to Augé, a process which produces ‘solitude and similitude’: Alone, but one of many, the user of a non-place is in contractual relations with it (or with the powers that govern it). He is reminded, when necessary, that the contract exists. One element in this is the way the non-place is to be used (…) The contract always relates to the individual identity of the contracting party. To get into the departure lounge of an airport, a ticket – always inscribed with the passenger’s name – must first be presented at the airport desk; proof that the contract has been respected comes at the immigration desk, with simultaneous presentation of the boarding pass and an identity document (…) and checks are made at departure time to ensure that these will be properly fulfilled (Augé 1995, 101-3).

The English version of the French non-lieu (non-place) does not, as the translator of Augé’s book points out in a footnote, capture an important juridical application of the expression, namely ‘no case to answer’ or ‘no grounds for prosecution’. In other words, it is ‘a recognition that the accused is innocent (Tr.) ’. As Augé himself states: ‘In a way, the user of the non-place is always required to prove his innocence’ (Augé 1995, 102) or, one might add to underline the paradox: to attest to his or her anonymity, to confirm their disappearance or absence. As Shusterman points out, the latter’s ‘etymology (ab + esse: “away from being”) reveals its link to the ancient philosophical puzzle of non-being, the paradoxical nature of “things” that don’t exist or simply fail to be “here and now” (that is, present)’ (Shusterman 2000, 99). Terra Incognita My mind drifts back fifteen years to the mid-1980s when I lived and worked in West Berlin for a year, frequently undertaking trips by train or car on the designated transit routes to and from West Germany. Every time it was an adventure both terrifying and exhilarating because you never knew what the East German frontier guards had in store for you. Procedures were rigorous but absurdly so, for in truth they were superfluous. You weren’t permitted to turn off the motorways – not that many would have wanted to, save out of curiosity – and the trains did not stop till they got to the border at the other end. If the guards could find a way of pulling you up for some flaw in your behaviour or ID so as to fleece you of western currency, they would.

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The checks were conceived as an exercise in intimidation, providing the basis for the state to assert a sense of its ideological superiority. Ironically, then, if there was any real proving going on, it was in the reverse direction. But in the same way as you tended to mistrust East German Olympic success, which was supposed to be indicative of the way that this superiority produced better human beings, there was always something ‘incredible’ about the checks. In fact, they navigated a fine line, from the traveller’s point of view, between fear, irritation and amusement. On the trains, the guards – carrying guns, of course – would flip open little portable ‘bureaux’ in stiff black leather, which hung round their necks. In scrutinising your passport they would indulge in a cameo performance of studied efficiency. Ostentatiously they reassured themselves of your authenticity as they tested your photo not once but twice against your actual face, which could not help but break into a smile. The double-take as a popular comic convention of high farce. Your smile disappeared fast, though, as it met with a look of steel and the stamp thudded down on your passport with the conclusive action of a guillotine. But it was a look that seemed to speak – or so you fancied – as much of entrapment as the confident assertion of authority. Who was really in control? Whilst there was no question that a guard could make life difficult for you on a whim for the three or so hours that you were occupying GDR territory, there also seemed to be a hint of acknowledgement of something else, as if s/he were saying: I know how this must look, but what’s amusing to you, mate, is my life. In other words, it was a ritual, which somehow could not disguise the paradox produced by having to go to such lengths to prove its moral superiority. There is no doubting the sense of Unheimlichkeit created by these encounters, but one of a different order. There were all those associations relating typically to the arousal of unease and fear: the sense of threat and unfamiliarity, of ‘not being homely/at home’. The last of these did not, of course, take you into the ‘comforting’ abstracted realm of the non-place, though, but into the relative insecurity of the ‘incognisant place’, one which was at once terrifying and thrilling because it was secret(ive) (geheim/heimlich), repressive and unpredictable on the one hand, yet somehow ‘pleasurably safe’ on the other. The most common use of unheimlich in informal speech is as an adverbial intensifier meaning ‘incredibly’ (as in ‘incredibly interesting’). The unknown place is just that: incredible, but in a dual sense; that which you


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would not believe – which seems unlikely – because its ‘unknownness’ is both sinister and amazing. The type of encounter with the GDR guards was one which seemed to play with the serious possibility of something being or going wrong, of there being a question-mark over your authenticity in this place. There was a ‘case to answer’, but one, which in true Kafkaesque style, you yourself were not actually capacitated to effectuate. Ultimately, it was an experience that was unforgettable. Even now, Augé suggests, ‘the countries of Eastern Europe retain a measure of exoticism, for the simple reason that they do not yet have all the necessary means to accede to the worldwide consumption space’ (Augé 1995, 106-7). By comparison, the sickly alienation of the non-place of supermodernity implies submission to the pacifying overdetermination of objecthood, that saturated network (or cul-de-sac) of consumerist signification that serves to deny or forget the extraordinary or unlikely. As Edensor observes in his analysis of the culture of the Indian street, western streets tend to be marked by non-sensuality. Within the touristic order there is organised and disorganised space, the former corresponding to a ‘manufactured otherness’ as against the latter’s unregulated stimulation of both desire and fear (Edensor 1998, 215-16). Tegel Terror We’re going down. The plane banks and turns in a broad sweep over the eastern part of Berlin, which looks flat and grey. Row upon row of systems-built residential blocks: the Plattenbauten of Hellersdorf. A character in Norman Ohler’s novel Mitte maintains: ‘If you look down from a plane, the buildings form letters which spell NOT HERE’ (translated from Ohler 2001, 217). A dull pain has begun to occupy the right half of my skull. Migraine. Or perhaps a touch of vertigo, now that I can see the ground below. I wince as the television tower, that beacon of advanced GDR technology, comes into view. 365 meters high, its spindly, red and white needle-point is slowly piercing the inner corner of my right eye. All I can think of is the title of a collection of Bruce Chatwin’s writings – his last – which I haven’t even read: What Am I Doing Here. I remember reading in one of his biographies how some people believed there to have been a typographical error: a forgotten question-mark. In fact, it was a cosmetic matter. The publishers didn’t consider such punctuation to look good on the cover (see Clapp 1998, 175). I also recall reading now that one of Chatwin’s intentions before he died was to walk

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the boundary of East and West Berlin (ibid. 220). He never did. Ten months after his death in January 1989, twenty-eight years after partition began, that boundary was being crossed by thousands of people all at once. In retrospect the historian Alexandra Richie describes the experience of that transitional moment itself as ‘quite banal – one simply walked a few metres past a large, ugly structure and into another district’. At the same time, though, ‘it meant so much (...) everyone sensed that this was a moment they would savour for the rest of their lives’ (Richie 1999, 835). And another seven months after that, on 17th June of the following year, I myself recall walking down the avenue in the western part of the city named after that very date and passing through the reopened Brandenburg Gate. Reunification not yet in place, I received a token ‘DDR’ stamp in my passport, placed neatly, but to me with staggering nonchalance – the frontier guard grinned and winked, I swear – alongside some of the other ones I had chalked up in the mid-80s. Perhaps, when you find yourself caught in the middle of such momentous events all you can do is perform in them as if they were the most mundane. We have just crossed the former border, or what no longer remains of it. The Wall – that terrifying symbol of a divided identity and the most celebrated demarcation of no-man’s land in recent history – has disappeared, and with it, seemingly, the GDR. But that’s a view from above. As Walter Benjamin proposes in OneWay Street, a landscape is only experienced properly by walking through it: The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns (Benjamin 1997).

And, as if to confirm the physical immediacy of Benjamin’s spatial invocations, it is when the plane touches down at Tegel Airport that the real terror strikes. To be precise it is when the reverse-thrust of the brakes kicks in; that delayed counter-surge which finally propels me out of my air travel trance because I think, having already survived the bump and swerve of landing, that something has gone wrong. All I can see as I peer in alarm out of the window are the wing flaps turned up, hysterically


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exposing mechanical innards. It is not exactly reassuring to have the airplane bare itself like that just at a point when I need it to demonstrate its robustness. And not an angel in sight now. But for me it’s not really crash terror. This is terror incognita. I have descended on a strange – though once-known – city and my whole being feels as if it has been blasted out of me. The migraine – the migrant’s curse? – that has replaced it is forcing my right eyelid shut, as my body tries valiantly to find ways of alleviating the pain. My visual field is blurred as a result. I cannot see. I seem to have lost sight of myself. Really, what am I doing here? Later I realise that what is happening to me is a necessary prerequisite for the discovery of strange territory. Strange but familiar. I have been here before. The experience of terror is what spurs me on to seek curative terra firma. A little crisis has been opened and I must ‘look into it’. As Roland Barthes proposes, ‘one never speaks of fear: it is foreclosed from discourse, and even from writing (could there be a writing of fear?). Posited at the origin, it has a value as method; from it leads an initiatic path’ (Barthes 1989, 350). I have travelled through non-place to unknown-place, but I am still ‘passing through’ or ‘infected’, both of which are meanings attributed to the Latin transitio, according to the Berlin poet Durs Grünbein (1999, 89). (A third is ‘going over to the enemy’, which puts me in mind of the ‘unlikely events’ of 9 November 1989, of the fall of the Wall. Victor Burgin refers to this form of transition as representing ‘the economic and political equivalent of “osmosis” – the movement of a fluid through a semi-permeable membrane, from the weaker to the stronger solution’ [Burgin 1996, 156].) And, as Franco La Cecla points out, ‘the feeling of a possible and imminent danger’ – the source of my terror – ‘is the sense of adventure (...) Getting lost in these cases is a condition of beginning, the need and the ground on which to start or to resume getting orientated’ (La Cecla 2000, 34). Importantly La Cecla also refers to the Socratean warning against ‘taking yourself with you’ on your travels; the danger, if we do, that we risk ‘colonizing with our presence every step of the journey’ for ‘to know new places corresponds in this century with denying their difference’ (La Cecla 2000, 39). That is what tourists generally do, eliminate the ‘real experience of otherness’, as colonialists did before them. Thus, as Jane Rendell proposes, citing Kaja Silverman, two modes of identification can be sketched: on the one hand ‘“heteropathic”, where the subject aims to

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go outside the self, to identify with something/someone/somewhere different’. And, on the other, ‘“canabalistic” where the subject brings something other into the self to make it the same’ (Rendell 2002, 259). But there is also the suggestion that what is happening to me here, this necessary emptying of selfhood, is replicated somehow in the very topographic turmoil of the city. I haven’t even left the plane, but I sense that the ‘new Berlin’ with its ‘identity in transition’, will somehow suit my own displaced frame of mind. If my self has disappeared temporarily, the promise of its return lies in wait in the strange yet familiar terrain I’m about to negotiate. In his review of Franz Hessel’s 1920s book about flânerie in Berlin, Benjamin isolates its deepest insight as being the writer’s observation that ‘(w)e see only that which looks back at us’ (Benjamin1999, 265). Thus there is a reciprocal or performative relationship between viewer and viewed, one which echoes the transitive practice introduced by minimalist art of, as Nick Kaye formulates it, ‘forcing an incursion of the time and space of viewing into the experience of the work’ (Kaye 2000, 3). For ‘work’ read locale or city. Thus, as Liggett neatly concludes of Benjamin, he sees active engagement with the material of the world as generative. His relationship with the city is not subjective, of the lone witness to events, nor is it objective in the positivist sense, of the discoverer. The relationship is performative and mutually generative. A space that attracts meanings is made as he moves through the city (…) not reporting as a correspondent would or assuming correspondence with the truth (but) using (himself) as the instrument (…) The life of the city and the life of its artists are intertwined as the fragments of modernity are reconfigured into a montage based on encounters with the city (Liggett 2003, 103).

References Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, transl. J. Howe. London: Verso. Auster, Paul. 1988. The Invention of Solitude. London: Faber and Faber. Barthes, Roland. 1989. The Rustle of Language, transl. R. Howard. Berkeley and LA: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. One-Way Street. In Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926. Edited by M. Bullock en M.W. Jennings. Translated by R. Livingstone et al, 444-88. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.


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SSS. 1999. The Return of the Flâneur. In Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1927-1934. Edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith. Translated by R. Livingston et al. 262-67. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. Burgin, Victor. 1996. In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Clapp, Suzannah. 1998. With Chatwin. London: Vintage. Edensor, Tim. 1998. The Culture of the Indian Street. In Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space, ed. N. R. Fyfe, 203-221. London and New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1990. The ‘Uncanny’. In Art and Literature (14), ed. A. Richards, 335-376. London: Penguin. Grünbein, Durs. 1999. Transit Berlin. Grand Street 69 (Berlin issue)18, no.1: 8589. Heathfield, Adrian. 1997. Facing the Other: the Performance Encounter and Death. In Shattered Anatomies: Traces of the Body in Performance, eds. A. Heathfield, F. Templeton and A. Quick. Bristol: Arnolfini Live. Hessel, Franz. 1984. Ein Flaneur in Berlin. Berlin: Das Arsenal. Kaye, Nick. 2000. Site-specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London and New York: Routledge. La Cecla, Franco. 2000. Getting Lost and the Localised Mind. In Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday, ed. Alan Read, 31-48. London and New York: Routledge. Leach, Neil. 1999. The Dark Side of the Domus: The Redomestication of Central and Eastern Europe. In Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, ed. N. Leach, 150-62. London and New York: Routledge. Liggett, Helen. 2003. Urban Encounters. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ohler, Norman. 2001. Mitte. Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag. Rendell, Jane. 2002. David Blamey (Information). In Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility, ed. D. Blamey, 259-260. London: Open Editions. Richie, Alexandra. 1999. Faust’s Metropolis: a History of Berlin. London: HarperCollins. Shusterman, Richard. 2000. Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.


CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CITY



STRANGE CITY: BELFAST GOTHIC

Neal Alexander

Abstract This essay sets out to delineate a fragmentary tradition of Belfast gothic, arguing that this bundle of representational paradigms arises directly from the city’s perceived status as a ‘Black City’, the reviled, plainly industrial counterpart to its projected self-image as a ‘City of Success’. Drawing upon representative examples, I will briefly sketch the progression of these infernal and gothic figurations from early non-fictional examples through to their apotheosis in Troubles fiction. Crucially, I situate these depictions of Belfast not so much in relation to Irish gothic, with which they are only slightly connected, as within the broader European context of urban gothic as based on concepts by Freud and Tönnies, wherein the modern city becomes the favoured locus of the uncanny and the specific character of urban life provokes powerful social fears. Originally established as a religious and commercial centre predicated upon what Lewis Mumford describes as ‘a fusion of secular and sacred power’ (1961, 38), the city has nonetheless been subject to a longstanding religiously-grounded distrust which might be traced back to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel: Cain’s fratricide precipitates his banishment from the land he had tilled, and leads eventually to the founding of the first city, Enoch (Genesis 4. 17). As a parable of the transition from agricultural communities centred on the primitive village to the new institutions and forms of urban settlement, Cain’s story may be read in terms of the modern cleavage between country and city, which sustains itself through an artificial moral geography that exalts the rural to the denigration of the urban. Where the countryside is imagined as a land of purity and

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simplicity, in which an organic relationship between man and nature brings the former closer to God, the city is a place of complexity and the iniquities of experience. In his seminal study The Country and the City, Raymond Williams shows how this moral geography became compounded in a whole range of nineteenth-century literary representations, such that the city came to be regarded as ‘what man had made without God’ (1993, 240). Arguably, this pronounced anti-urban bias receives a particularly strong articulation within Irish cultural and political ideology. Indeed, Liam O’Dowd remarks upon the symbolic multi-valence of the country/city opposition in Ireland, arguing that ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are not ‘merely descriptive terms referring to physical settlement types, rather they carr(y) a heavy volume of associations: moral, cultural and political’ (1987, 46). If this suggests that the city is implicitly regarded as not only ungodly but un-Irish, it might seem natural to regard Belfast – which is both urban and industrial – as doubly damned. For many commentators throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Belfast’s cult of moneymaking and secular materialism was simply further evidence of the city’s parvenu Philistinism, although it was possible to go further and imply that the city had sold its soul for worldly riches – like Louis MacNeice’s Charon, its hands were thought to be ‘black with obols’ (MacNeice 1966, 530). This Faustian paradigm is alluded to with wry humour in St John Ervine’s novel, Mrs. Martin’s Man, although Ervine is also making a serious point about the way in which the interests of capital take precedence over morality in Belfast: Someone said to (Esther) once, that if Jesus Christ Himself were to live in Belfast, and were not the managing director of a linen-mill or some equally rich man, He would not gain any Belfast man’s respect. “They would make Ould Nick himself Lord Mayor if he had a lot of money, an’ was a Prodesan’!” (Ervine 1914, 220).

In consonance with conservative attitudes towards the city then, Belfast is at best a place in which morality is compromised, and at worst a type of hell, with ‘Ould Nick’ as its first citizen. This infernal aspect of Belfast’s literary image is further compounded in its depiction as a ‘Black City’ (Caulfield 1953), comparable in its industrial bleakness to Dickens’ Coketown, and constituting a counterpart to the city’s projected self-image as a ‘City of Success’ (Pim 1917). The imagery of sinful corruption with which the city is identified

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arguably shifts towards the mobilisation of gothic figures and conventions. For example, E.M. Forster sees Belfast as ‘unreal yet squalid’, a city of bleak utilitarianism which ‘stands no nonsense’ but is nonetheless ‘haunted by a ghost, by some exile from the realms of the ideal who has slipped into her commonsense, much as the sea and the dispossessed fields, avenging nature, have re-emerged as dampness and weeds in her streets’ (1961, 92). Imagining a series of Freudian returns of the repressed, Forster constructs a thoroughly ambivalent image of the city wherein its solid practicality and prosaic exterior are underlaid by the spectral traces of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘unreal’. In doing so, he pitches social realism into the representational domain of the gothic. The importance Forster places upon the symbolic resonances of the city’s manifest industrial reality moreover suggests the difficulty of reconciling what might be called Belfast gothic with a broader tradition of Irish gothic. For, in as far as a distinct tradition of Irish gothic may be identified – and W.J. McCormack contends that such a tradition ‘turns out, on examination, to be a slender one’ (1991, 833) – it is typically bound up with the declining fortunes of the Protestant Ascendancy class, overlapping in significant ways with the important subgenre of the ‘Big House’ novel. By contrast, many of the recurrent features of Belfast gothic cluster around the image of the ‘Black City’ – the manufacturing town or industrial metropolis – which is itself a conspicuous product of the social forces that tolled a death knell for the landed gentry in Britain and Ireland. I propose, therefore, to consider the fragmentary tradition of Belfast gothic which it will be the object of this essay to delineate within the wider European context of urban gothic, wherein the modern city becomes the favoured locus of the uncanny and the specific character of urban life provokes powerful social fears. The advantages of such an approach might be demonstrated through a close examination of a striking passage from Sean O’Faolain’s travel narrative An Irish Journey, which conveys O’Faolain’s first impressions of Belfast under the conditions of the wartime blackout: I made for Belfast, which had begun to seem less and less desirable the nearer I came to it. (…) Only at night, when every street was a gully of darkness, and a sense of eerie mystery lurked at every corner, did I feel the least stir of my imagination. Donegall Place suggested The Murders of the Rue Morgue. Grosvenor Road might have been a brothel quarter. I was reminded of what a Northern woman once said to me about Belfast, that it has a Burke and Hare atmosphere, like old, murky Edinburgh. She made me imagine it

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before it developed grand notions about itself – warning me not to forget that Belfast was not made a city until as late as 1888 – drowsing in a Sunday sleep, behind heavy curtains, with tasseled pelmets, and a Bible open on the table (O’Faolain 1941, 241-42).

O’Faolain’s reluctant, almost fearful, approach to the city – both literally and as a subject for literary representation – immediately ups the dramatic tension, and his arrival is significantly presaged by a thunderstorm that ‘went rolling and echoing down the glens all night long’ (241). It is slightly strange, therefore, that he should imply that he was initially uninspired by the city, for his depiction of its nocturnal horrors is almost feverishly effusive, combining characterisation, likenesses in literature and popular memory, and more than an inkling of sexual disquiet. His image of the city ‘drowsing in a Sunday sleep’ makes much of the austere zealotry that attends Calvinist religion, casting Belfast as the heartland of a Northern ‘Bible belt’, while the city’s ‘Burke and Hare atmosphere’ refers to the famous true-crime ‘ghost story’ of two Ulstermen who graduated from grave-robbing to murder as a means of making money, selling the bodies of their victims to Edinburgh anatomy schools. Belfast’s sombre respectability is thus deemed soporific, and all sorts of grisly secrets are imagined to lie hidden behind its ‘heavy curtains’ as the ‘homely’ Belfast interior is reconfigured as an exemplar of the gothic. In this inversion and unmasking, O’Faolain’s image of Belfast clearly invokes the Freudian concept of das Unheimliche – the complex, often terrifying, experience of the ‘uncanny’. For, at the crux of Freud’s tortuous examination of the uncanny and its linguistic underpinnings is the realisation that among the various meanings attributed to the German word heimlich (homely) is ‘one which is identical with its opposite, “unheimlich”. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich’ (Freud 1990, 345). Moreover, extrapolating from a point made by Schelling, Freud argues that ‘everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (345). What is most interesting about O’Faolain’s depiction of Belfast, however, is his implicit sense of it as a blueprint for future Belfast writers, and his conviction that the gothic is the only mode capable of representing the city accurately: These erebusite nights I walked around and around the Falls Road area – where most riots begin and end – and I knew that this city needs not merely a coldly realistic novelist, but a man with a love for the macabre. The only Belfast writer who has tried to bottle the ‘realism’ of the city is St John Ervine, but he is lacking in poetry, and has

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only succeeded in making it taste like reboiled mutton gone cold (O’Faolain 1941, 242). As we have seen, Ervine’s city is not entirely free of sinister associations, although O’Faolain’s point is that his brand of shop-keeping realism is paradoxically incapable of conveying the awful ‘reality’ of Belfast. Indeed, reality in Belfast is itself deemed excessive, overspilling the representational capabilities of realism per se – what the city needs, claims O’Faolain, is an Irish Poe. O’Faolain’s representation of Belfast can usefully be seen in the context of more widespread anxieties surrounding the rise of the modern city, in which the urban becomes identified as the site of the uncanny. It is worth noting, for example, that in the late nineteenth century the labyrinthine city replaced the gloomy forest and mouldering castle as the favoured location of gothic fiction. Remarking upon this shift in the topography of gothic writing, Fred Botting notes that the ‘apparent reality of the city’s horrors evokes emotions that ask questions of the social order, emotions relating to fears in the immediate present rather than displaced onto a distant past’ (1996, 125). This immediacy of social anxiety, coupled with predominantly urban settings, can be seen in, for example, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Charles Dickens’ later novels, and James Thomson’s poem, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’. Richard Lehan, however, argues for an even more fundamental link between the rise of the city and the rise of gothic fiction, observing that many of the classic texts of late eighteenth-century gothic fiction connect the passing of the landed estate with ‘an evil emanating from the city’ (1998, 37). As Lehan convincingly shows, the subgenre of gothic fiction arose in response to the social and technological upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, which radically reshaped the symbiotic relationship between the country and the city. Shifting the focus away from fiction and towards developments in architecture and the production of space, Anthony Vidler regards the experience of das Unheimliche as the constituent feature of modernist space, arguing that ‘the uncanny finally became public in the metropolis’ (1992, 6). As Vidler depicts it, the city actually becomes the space of fear itself, a ‘patholopolis’ in which it is impossible to feel comfortable. Moreover, this pervasive sense of dis- or unease is, in a typically Freudian manouevre, bound up with the quotidian activity of walking in the city – which is, of course, O’Faolain’s most important means of exploring the uncanny

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otherness of Belfast’s unlit streets. To this end, John Lechte argues that ‘(s)ince Baudelaire, we know that walking in the city opened up a modernist paradigm. Walking in the city signified being away from home – read: being away from the familiar and being exposed to difference and the unfamiliar, to what Freud would call unheimlichkeit (unhomeliness)’ (1995, 103). In contradistinction to the private space of the home, the city streets are ‘strange’, promising unforeseen – and potentially disturbing – encounters and opening up a threatening and unbounded new world. Lechte’s observations help to clarify a point that is made more obliquely by Freud himself in a characteristic piece of ‘autobiographical’ story-telling included as part of his 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’: As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without inquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery (Freud 1990, 359).

As usual, Freud tells us more about his own sexual anxieties here than anything else, yet his tale – like O’Faolain’s, which echoes it – also provides an exemplary instance of the disquieting encounters that are an integral part of walking in the city. What is strictly ‘uncanny’ about the experience, as Freud understands it, is the factor of ‘involuntary repetition’, which ‘forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable’ (359-60), a feeling that is clearly augmented by the experience of being ‘lost’. The town itself is ‘unknown’ to Freud, who ‘wandered about for a time without inquiring (his) way’, returning again and again to be confronted by the ‘painted women’ he desires and fears. This loss of spatio-temporal coordinates entails an unsettling lack of control, and Freud’s experience of the city as an inescapable labyrinth neatly dovetails with his initial formulation (following Jentsch) of the uncanny as ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’ (341). The city’s propensity for disorientation is uncanny then, as it transforms the purposeful walker into a helpless victim – a version of the gothic interloper – trapped in a

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threatening and obscure environment. Ultimately though, Freud is telling us of an unsettling encounter with ‘otherness’, with people and a whole milieu he is anxious to avoid. Yet, walking in the city inevitably propels us into confrontations of this sort, for, as Roland Barthes observes, ‘(t)he city, essentially and semantically, is the place of our meeting with the other’ (1986, 96). Importantly, however, such meetings rarely involve processes of familiarisation or assimilation, and as a result the other typically remains other, stubbornly resisting attempts to naturalise her sheer alterity. In the city, insists Zygmunt Bauman, ‘strangers are likely to meet in their capacity of strangers, and likely to emerge as strangers from the chance encounter which ends as abruptly as it started’ (2000, 95). Here, a deep rural/urban divide becomes apparent, for if the country village may be considered a paradigm of the ‘knowable community’, living in the city means living with strangers as strangers. This fundamental distinction between the forms of social life in the country and the city can be thought of in terms of the differentiation between what the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies calls Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: All intimate, private, and exclusive living together, so we discover, is understood as life in Gemeinschaft (community). Gesellschaft (society) is public life – it is the world itself. In Gemeinschaft (community) with one’s family, one lives from birth on bound to it in weal and woe. One goes into Gesellschaft (society) as one goes into a strange country (Tönnies 1955, 37-38).

For Tönnies, the ‘strange country’ of Gesellschaft is embodied by the city, and especially the metropolis, where urban life’s ‘numerous external contacts, contracts, and contractual relations only cover up as many inner hostilities and antagonistic interests’ (266). Fundamentally, urban life remains irrevocably ‘foreign’ to the social ideal of ‘intimate, private, and exclusive living together’, and Tönnies’ thinking aligns itself with the familiar conservative country/city dichotomy, imagining the movement from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in terms of loss, alienation and insecurity. This traumatic transition is a recurrent feature in literary depictions of the modern city, and has a particular historical relevance in Belfast fiction as the city’s industrial growth – like that of many others – was dependent upon the migration of rural workers in the nineteenth century, a circumstance that becomes a thematic structure, for instance, in Michael McLaverty’s Belfast novels Call My Brother Back (1938) and Lost Fields (1941). The powerful psychic undertow accompanying this experience of

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uprooting and relocation means that in Belfast fiction it is often the case that country folk and Southerners (like O’Faolain) approach Belfast with considerable trepidation. For example, in Sam Hanna Bell’s December Bride (1951) the aged countryman, Petie Sampson, visits Belfast for the first and only time, experiencing the city as a disturbing cacophony of sights and sounds. Having been ‘bewildered by the hurrying crowd’ (Bell 1982, 261) and made unusually drunk, Petie loses both his companions and his faithful dog, and returns to Ravara churchyard with no other objective than to lie down and die: ‘Here the old man fell on his knees, then stretched himself out, casting his arm over the grave. At first the rain struck him with a dry pattering noise, merging at last into the dull insistent murmur with which it fell on gravestones, grass, and trees’ (270). These morbid overtones have been reprised more recently in Dermot Healy’s A Goat’s Song (1994), where Jack Ferris’ journey from west Mayo to the ‘strange streets’ (1995, 281) of Belfast figures as a distinctly Dantean descent and the city itself is implicitly rendered as a deathly terminus: He wiped away the mist from the window that he might see the city. Plumes of wind-driven black smoke from some house being demolished went by. Then came a graveyard with its back to the road. Each headstone appeared like someone kneeling, head bowed. These were vexed images. He put them out of his mind (Healy 1995, 279).

Vexed images also arise from an initial encounter with the city in David Park’s The Healing, which follows young Samuel Anderson’s transplantation to Belfast from his South Down home. On arrival, Samuel’s experience of the city’s chaotic unfamiliarity, its sinister ‘nowhere world’ (Park 1992, 26), only exacerbates the nightmares that have tormented him since his RUC father’s murder: ‘As the car headed across the city he grew nervous again. So many faces – more than he could register or scan. (…) Like the hidden faces in his room they stared down at him and there were too many to hide from’ (27). Samuel’s terrified response to the strange country of Gesellschaft is bound up with his personal traumas, yet it also exemplifies the conservative recoil from the variegated multiplicity with which the city confronts the migrant or visitor. And in all three of these novels, Belfast manifests itself as some form of externalised psychological threat, one that is attended by morbid fantasies and gothic portentousness.

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Park’s novel is also important because it exemplifies what might be called the ‘theological’ reading of the Troubles current in a number of novels from the 1980s and 1990s, which augment their use of gothic imagery by drawing upon the apocalyptic vision of fundamentalist religion, thus imbuing Belfast with a distinctly Old Testament atmosphere. In The Healing this strategy centres on the figure of Mr Ellison, a religious crank who has been driven to the edge of sanity by his wife’s death and the knowledge of his son’s paramilitary connections. In response to the violence of the Troubles, he develops a stark religious vision into which he incorporates the adolescent Samuel, prophesying a Biblical purge of the unholy city: There is a great sickness down there and every day it consumes more and more – men, women, children – it infects everyone, sweeps them into the pit. It’s just like the Bible all over again, when the children of Israel were wandering in the desert, trapped in their sin and backbiting against God, and the people were bitten by fiery serpents (Park 1992, 91-92).

More luridly, M.S. Power’s Children of the North Trilogy sustains its depiction of Belfast as a ‘godforsaken city’ (1987, 120) with grim, and somewhat wearying, determination. Power’s most memorable (and persistent) image is that of the preposterously grandiose ‘city of Moloch, the hieratic legend, the land that split when Christ was crucified’ (1986, 111). As a place of terrible sacrifice, Power’s Belfast is home to an ancient and unchangeable evil that transmits its atavistic violence from one generation to the next, creating a fatalistic and ‘unending cycle of violence’ (1985, 113) that is impervious to the forces of history. In such representations, Belfast itself is overlaid by a superimposed terrain of moral and symbolic significance – Laura Pelaschiar describes Power’s technique as ‘moral Gothicism’ (1998, 122) – the city figuring less as a physical environment to be navigated and explored than as an abstract psychic locale shaped and structured by individual desires and fears. The question of the ‘merciless theologies’ (McNamee 1994, 9) underpinning Belfast’s violent history is much more adroitly handled in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (1994), a novel that is now widely acknowledged as the representative instance of what is referred to as Belfast gothic in this essay. Its visceral portrayal of sectarian violence has also been the cause of much controversy and comment from critics and reviewers alike, and while this is not the place for a protracted argument about the novel’s relative merits or failings it should perhaps be made

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clear that I do not concur with the popular view that sees the novel as a voyeuristic exercise in the ‘aesthetics’ of violence. It is important to remember that this is at least partly an historical novel, recreating one of the most hellish periods of the Troubles through its fictionalisation of the Shankill Butchers, a rogue UVF cell which operated out of West Belfast, systematically torturing and murdering its Catholic victims during its notorious period of activity in the early to mid-1970s. The novel focuses on the figure of Victor Kelly and his attempt to refashion the city as ‘a diagram of violence centred about him’ (11), and McNamee enhances the gothic atmosphere of social and civic decay in post-industrial Belfast to a funereal stillness. Victor’s ritualistic murders are an attempt to assert control over the two things which repeatedly confound him – his loyalist identity and the city itself. For, if Victor’s knife-work is an attempt to inscribe a secure Protestant identity for himself on the bodies of his victims, thus overcoming the stigma attached to his ‘Catholic’ surname – ‘(y)our ma must of rid a Taig’ (6) – his series of murders also serve the larger purpose of reinforcing the stark sectarian geography of Belfast, transforming the city and its inherent Gesellschaft into a simulation of Gemeinschaft, a collection of distinct, demarcated urban ‘villages’: ‘(H)e had created a city-wide fear and put it in place and felt it necessary to patrol its borders’ (202). This artificial imposition is augmented by the sacrificial nature of the knife murders, for, as René Girard argues, the rite of sacrifice constitutes a cathartic deflection of a community’s self-directed violence onto a substitute victim, the purpose of which is ‘to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric’ (1977, 8). Victor, therefore, can be seen as the instrument of an extreme form of communitarian galvanisation, although this function is consistently figured in terms of mortification as he sets about composing the ‘ritual dark of the city’ which will reconfigure Belfast as a necropolis: ‘The city in all its history as a study in death. The shipyard that built Dreadnoughts. Engineering the means for people to face death. The ghettoes barely separated. The aspects of death common to any city’ (McNamee 1994, 158). Victor relies upon an intimate knowledge of Belfast’s urban geography, reciting its street names from memory as ‘an inventory of the city, a naming of parts’ (27), but his mistake is to assume that the life of the city can be reduced to ‘a set of mechanical principles, requirements to be fulfilled’ (76). For the city ultimately reasserts its essential Gesellschaft in a series of disorientations that produce the conditions necessary for Vic-

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tor’s demise. Increasingly intoxicated with his own sense of power and a growing dependence upon amphetamines, Victor eventually comes to an uncomfortable awareness of the city as a shifting, ‘dubious topography which required constant surveillance’ (84): But sometimes on one of these runs he would say, where are we? He sounded surprised as if he had suddenly discovered that the streets were not the simple things he had taken them for, a network to be easily memorized and navigated. They had become untrustworthy, concerned with unfamiliar destinations, no longer adaptable to your own purposes (McNamee 1994, 163).

Here, Victor’s attempts to master the urban environment are frustrated by the city’s ineluctable capacity for providing what Richard Sennett calls ‘experiences of otherness’ (1991, 123); its investment in the ‘possibilities of transformation’ (30) through which an area that is intimately known can suddenly become ‘(a) different territory’ that is ‘seemingly unreliable’ (203). Similarly, this constant capacity for defamiliarisation and change also overcomes Victor’s attempt to replace the city’s urban cacophony with the silence of death. McNamee is acutely aware of the intricate relationships between language, representation and violence, providing a near constant self-reflexive gloss on his own procedures through the attitudes, commentary and reactions of the reporters Ryan and Coppinger as well as by including a welter of references to film and popular culture: ‘Gothic, manufactured. There was a cinema feel to it’ (McNamee 1994, 153). Moreover, Victor’s method of killing explicitly targets orality and the medium of speech – ‘The root of the tongue had been severed. New languages would have to be invented’ (16) – replacing them with his ‘written’ incisions, although these are significantly indecipherable, ultimately signifying nothing but mute rage: ‘(Ryan0 found Darkie Larche naked in an empty bath. His torso was incised with small cuts meticulously executed and his head was bent to his chest as though there was something written there that he could read, words in a severe tongue’ (213). Even the phrase that Victor’s killings disseminate throughout the novel and which haunts Ryan’s consciousness, is a plea for oblivion: ‘Please. Kill me’ (24). Indeed, Victor lives at the centre of an unheimlich silence which he inevitably imparts to others. So Hacksaw McGrath takes refuge in the silence of madness and the isolation of his prison cell, saying ‘I like this place here. It’s quiet. No call for words at all’ (103); Victor’s girlfriend, Heather, feels trapped in ‘the distorted, uneasy silence of a horror film’ (175); and his father, James, having suf-

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fered a stroke, can only articulate a wordless horror at his son’s presence: ‘When she heard the front door open and close she knew that it was Victor and it seemed that James also knew because he twisted his head and made a noise in his throat like a sound taken from the extremity of human expression’ (225). To conclude then, it may be possible to read Resurrection Man as one of those tortured gothic texts that David Punter regards as consumed with the effort to find the tenor of the howl of anguish which would, perhaps, be the silencing of all text, the voice of abjection which would mark the limit of language and act as the harbinger of the ‘silencing-forever’ which has always been the inner signification of Gothic’s preoccupation with the tomb, the crypt and premature burial (Punter 1996, 190).

Victor’s unglamorous death – ‘(n)o last rueful gangster smile, goodbye world’ (McNamee 1994, 230) – therefore, is also a defeat for the effective silences of repetitious stylisation and empty simulation, thus allowing the possibility for ‘(n)ew languages (…) to be invented’, languages which might be able to articulate ‘(t)he speech of the city. A dreamtime of voices’ (61).

References Barthes, Roland. 1986. Semiology and the Urban. In The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, eds. M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagapoulos, 87-98. New York: Columbia University Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, Sam Hanna. 1982 (1951). December Bride. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge. Caulfield, Malachy Francis. 1953. Black City. Dublin: The Talbot Press. Ervine, St John G. 1914. Mrs. Martin’s Man. London: George Allen & Unwin. Forster, E.M. 1961 (1936). Abinger Harvest. London: Edwin Arnold. Freud, Sigmund. 1990. Art and Literature, transl. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickson. London: Penguin. Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred, transl. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Healy, Dermot. 1995 (1994). A Goat’s Song. London: Flamingo. Lechte, John. 1995. (Not) Belonging in Postmodern Space. In Postmodern Cities & Spaces, eds. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson, 99-111. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Lehan, Richard. 1998. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. MacNeice, Louis. 1966. Collected Poems, ed. E.R. Dodds. London and Boston: Faber. McCormack, W.J. 1991. Irish Gothic and After (1820-1945). In The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, eds. Seamus Deane et al. Vol. 2, 831-54. Derry and London: Field Day Publications and Faber. McNamee, Eoin. 1994. Resurrection Man. London: Picador. Mumford, Lewis. 1961. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. London: Secker & Warburg. O’Dowd, Liam. 1987. Town and Country in Irish Ideology. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. Special Interdisciplinary Number, ed. John Wilson Foster: 43-53. O’Faolain, Sean. 1941. An Irish Journey. London: Readers’ Union with Longmans Green. Park, David. 1992. The Healing. London: Jonathan Cape. Pelaschiar, Laura. 1998. Writing the North: The Contemporary Novel in Northern Ireland. Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso. Pim, Herbert Moore. 1917. Unknown Immortals in the Northern City of Success. Dublin: The Talbot Press Power, M.S. 1991 (1985; 1986; 1987). Children of the North Trilogy: The Killing of Yesterday’s Children; Lonely the Man Without Heroes; A Darkness in the Eye. London: Abacus. Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Vol. 2, The Modern Gothic. London and New York: Longman. Sennett, Richard. 1991. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. London and Boston: Faber. Tönnies, Ferdinand. 1955. Community and Association [Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft], transl. Charles P. Loomis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Vidler, Anthony. 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Williams, Raymond. 1993 (1973). The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press.



‘SEEING THE FUTURE’: URBAN DYSTOPIA IN WELLS AND LANG

Keith Williams

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between H.G. Wells’s early futuristic fictions and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) – and condsiders their influences on the mindscapes of European cities. Despite Wells’s disowning of his own influence on Lang’s method and themes in his review of the film, Metropolis has reworked Wells’s early ideas in a complex way. Sleeper and other early texts project the possibilities of sound and image recording into totally urbanised, managerial societies. In them, the city’s public and private spaces are saturated with technologically advanced systems of marketing and/or panoptic surveillance and control. Wells’s early insights into the construction of the urban future and of future consumers are astonishingly prescient. Lang crucially took up the self-conscious visuality of Wells’s early critique of the media-controlled city in the meta-cinematic tropes of his own film. He also extended Wellsian notions of economic caste and urban alienation (though arguably missing the crucial importance of mass consumption). Two cultural texts creating an influential template for imagining the urban mindscape of the European future were H.G. Wells’s ‘scientific romance’ When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and Fritz Lang’s silent epic Metropolis (1926). Strangely, key transactions between them remain unexplored.1 Wells’s speculations, only four years after the Lumières invented the 1 For Metropolis’s eclectic sources, including When the Sleeper Wakes (hereafter WTSW), see Elsaesser 2000, 12-15. Also summaries of contemporary reviews in Kaplan 1981, 152-55. The novel was translated into German in 1906.

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cinematograph, project the implications of sound and image recording into a technological future where megalopolitan space is saturated with advanced technologies of marketing, surveillance and control. His insights into the construction of consumers and charismatic ‘electronic presence’ by ‘hyperreal’2 means are crucial to this. This essay discusses the principal legacy of Wells’s prescience about urban things to come, through its effect on Metropolis.3 Cinema and urban modernity developed in creative symbiosis. Movies became ‘the mirror of modern life – which meant city life’ (Christie 1994, 39). In 1936, ‘Modernist Marxist’ Walter Benjamin recognised that affinity. Technological change did not just impact culture in the abstract, but perception of concrete experience ‘on an individual scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic’ (Benjamin 1973, 250). Hence the metropolis’s prominence in early film, suffusing it as much as Modernist art and literature. Filmmakers and writers quickly visualised the modern city itself as a kind of dynamic cinematic ‘space’, with an accelerated, staccato tempo. This revolution in perception began in the 1890s in giant conurbations, producing diverse forms for representing the city and ambivalent positions about it. London overtook Paris as the world’s largest metropolis, with a population of 5.5 million and rising. In Anticipations, Wells stressed the need for modern society to come to terms with its own mass character and environment (1902, 34-35). He recognised a major shift not just in demography, but also in consciousness. If metropolises represented a social mutation, how could traditional cultural forms such as the novel adapt to their new mindscape (see Keating 1984, 129)? One prominent 2 For explanation of media simulations as ‘the real’s hallucinatory resemblance to itself’ (i.e. the contention that their discourses create a ‘hyperreality’, at once apparently indistinguishable from actuality but artificially constructed), see Baudrillard 1988, 145-47. 3 Jules Verne had written a dystopia about the Paris of 1961 (a century in the future). This anticipates WTSW in foreseeing titanic architecture, electrification, motorised traffic, ‘mass culture’ and communications developments such as fax machines, ‘la télégraphie photographique’ (see Verne 1994, 70). Its industry is also run by state monopolies and multinationals, with oppressed workers. Only recently rediscovered and published, it is notable not as intertext so much as symptomatic response to the emergent technologised city. Wells undoubtedly influenced Sant’Elia’s designs for the Citta Nuova (1914), key Futurist vision of metropolises to come, in vast geometric architecture, traffic and high technology (see Gold 1985, 123-24 and Meyer 1995, 167-68). For Wells’s wider influence on the international branches of Futurism, see Hulten 1986, especially 454, 498, 501, 506, 566, 568 and 601-02, and Chialant 2005.

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way writers tried to map their complex new reality was by critiquing the possibilities of the cinema, as the technological form of urban life par excellence. The characteristic ‘optical speculations’ of Wells’s futuristic fiction were one particular method. Hence his self-conscious visualisations of future London, saturated by media and mass forms of life. As it developed, cinema screened the city’s ambiguous appeal, simultaneously glamourising it and sponsoring its ‘new mythology’ as modern Babylon. The cumulative image offered urbanites a visual space for adjusting ‘to the hectic, alluring and dangerous world they inhabited’ (Christie 1994, 62). The cinematic city also became a key site of the ideological struggle to represent the conditions of modernity, to make visible and reform its extreme inequalities, venality and alienation. Wells’s own role in devising a form for representing its social totality would result in the controversial impact of Metropolis and his own riposte, Things to Come, a decade later. Anne Friedberg (drawing on Benjamin’s flâneur with his roving city viewpoint) argues that a defamiliarising ‘mobilised virtual gaze’ is characteristic of modern cultures, as it had developed by the twentieth century, and that this is epitomised by cinema (see Friedberg 1993, 2-3). The imaginary visual mobility of Wells’s writing is one of the strongest literary parallels. However, that virtual gaze was double-edged, its voyeuristic gratification indivisible from potential for surveillance in the urban environment. WTSW’s ‘systematised sensuality’ reflects one side of such artificial extension of sight, just as the character Ostrog, manager of the Edisonian consumer modernity of electric power and light and controlling his megalopolis panoptically, through a network of visual technologies, reflects the other. Hence this anti-capitalist urban dystopia is crucial to understanding Wells’s method of foreseeing urban modernity and his influence. It warned that in the corporate tomorrow of 2100 media technology might not be driven by political progress and enlightenment, but by managerial capitalism and commodity culture.4 4

Wells alludes to the tradition of socialist Utopias his vision undercuts. E.g. Graham recalls Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), whose hero Julian West wakes in a future Boston where poverty and social injustice have been eliminated. Similarly, Wells deliberately challenges the anti-industrial ‘arts and crafts’ communism of William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891) (see Wells 1994, 51-52 and 120). Another likely (though unmentioned) intertext is Jules Verne’s ‘In the TwentyNinth Century – The Day of an American Journalist in 2889’ (1889), not least for advances such as a global informational economy (see Verne 1978, 97-116).

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In machine-dominated London, capital of the globalised state to which the late-Victorian utopian socialist Graham miraculously awakes, technology is an overwhelming force: ‘After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage’ (Wells 1994, 117). Wells showed particular prescience about how media spectacle constructs and ‘interpellates’ modern urban subjects as consumers. Graham is immediately kitted out, using a miniaturised screen with virtual manikin (Wells 1994, 30-31). Similarly, Wells’s ‘Story of the Days to Come’ (also 1899) elaborates this marketing role. Its built environment is overlaid by colossal moving colour advertisements and sound recordings (Wells 2000a, 364). A domed transparent roof makes London into a space halfway between vast twenty-second century mall and futuristic Crystal Palace. That ‘monument to consumption’, built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 was fundamental in shaping a ‘dominant system of representation’ for Victorian commodity culture, developed through press advertising, posters, photography, techniques that featured in the journal Graphic, where WTSW was serialised (see Richards 1990, 3 and 17-72), and in new technologies like cinema. In effect, Wells created a proto-Debordian ‘society of the spectacle’, forewarning about the triumph of commodification and media ‘hyperreality’ (see Debord 1983, thesis 36). The spectacle becomes the means by which ‘the consumer sees “the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived”’ (Richards 1990, 13), a reifying formula closely resembling Wells’s dystopia. Not only have screens replaced windows on the world outside, videos have superseded books in the city’s mass culture. Graham gleans its history through a video feature, complete with sound and colour. An angry young man from the white silk-clad élite, embryonic of Freder in Metropolis, protests against the city’s socio-economic injustice, perpetrated in Graham’s name (Wells 1994, 49-50). Freder is a kind of Sleeper too, awakening to the plight of the dispossessed to which privilege made him oblivious. He is also heir to the urban future, because his father is its Master, and faced with the same moral choice: accept the system, or change it. Graham meets Helen Wotton, Ostrog’s radical niece, who, like Lang’s Maria, triggers his social conscience. Like Maria too, Helen inspires Graham to visit the underworld of Labour Department serfs, disguised in their blue canvas uniform (155-59). Exploitation of communications technology has also created a ‘universality of power’ (50). Information is transmitted instantly by two-way


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‘videophone’ to manage the crisis of Graham’s unexpected awakening (29-30). Just as workers’ levels resonate with mind-numbing ‘babble machines’ (giant phonographs, blaring propaganda), ‘The Boss’, Ostrog, operates a panoptic network of surveillance and intelligence-gathering half a century before Orwell’s all-seeing ‘Big Brother’ and his ‘telescreen’. Clusters of mobile camera-like ‘specula’ (114) enable Ostrog to monitor the metropolis from his ‘crow’s nest’ (102). The OED online defines ostrog (Russian) as both prison and fortress.5 This is appropriate for a proto-fascist strongman ruling a ‘rationalised’ future extending Jeremy Bentham’s principle of the ‘panopticon’ prison (a key development for Michel Foucault’s theory of surveillance culture) to a citywide scale. Ostrog’s means also recall European fiction’s first ‘megalomediac’: Francis Bennett, owner of the Earth Herald, from Verne’s ‘In the TwentyNinth Century’ (1889). Verne imagines how media empires might develop with the rise of American press magnates. Located in megalopolitan ‘Centropolis’, Bennett is effectively uncrowned king of the world, more powerful than nation states by monopolising a form of news television, the ‘phonotelephote’ (Verne 1978, 98-99 and 102). Ostrog orchestrates a rebellion, but it is a media-created fake, a boardroom takeover by violence, exploiting discontent (Wells 1994, 162-63). He wants the Sleeper as his ‘telegenic’ persona, a benign public screen for dictatorship. If killed, Ostrog intended replicating Graham, endowing a double with his identity by hypnotically implanted false memories. Hence what matters is not Graham’s authentic existence, but the effect of his transmittable likeness as the ultimate branded signifier in the future’s commodity culture: ‘The whole of this revolt depends on the idea that you are awake, alive, and with us’ (100). Ostrog wants Graham simultaneously duplicated and broadcast round every city in the world as a virtual ‘electronic presence’, a simulacrum testifying to the millennial ‘miracle’ of his awakening.6 Thus Wells predicts media technology’s role in propaganda and news-management, mass-spectacle and the synthetic mystique of celebrity (106). Wells’s influence made the issue of seeing the urban future and how the future might see integral to the critically self-conscious ‘videology’ of 5 Wells may also be alluding ironically to Moisei Ostrogorsky, who produced an influential critique of transatlantic democracy (see Quagliariello 1996). 6 It seems unlikely to be mere coincidence, that ‘In the Twenty-Ninth Century’ features a cryogenic experimenter, whose ‘resurrection so impatiently waited for’ was to be transmitted live by ‘phonotelephote’ (see Verne 1878, 112 and 115).

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SF, raising the question: who controls mediation and how will it shape political consciousness?7 This is exemplified in Metropolis, scripted by Lang in collaboration with Thea von Harbou, from her 1926 novel.8 The powerful monopolise access to communications, integral to the city’s ‘mechanically transmitted chain’ of command (Stewart 1985, 167). Like his counterpart Ostrog, Joh Fredersen surveys his city panoptically, by telescreen in his central control tower HQ, epitomising voyeurism as a central theme. This converts to two-way videophone for communicating with machine-room foreman Grot. Foregrounding the camera’s gaze and screens-within-screens typifies the tendency towards ‘allegories of vision and modernity’ in Lang’s films.9 Fredersen’s videophone is thus private counterpart to inventor Rotwang’s robot: a mass spectacle perverting visual entertainment ‘into hypnotic delusion’ (Stewart 1985, 167). The SF Zukunftsroman had been fertilised in Wilhelmine Germany by both native and foreign writers, especially Wells. By the 1920s, it was a highly developed vehicle for popular propaganda by both Left and Right for imagining techno-scientific utopias revolutionising society and its built environment (see Fisher 1991, especially 3-20, Schenkel 2005, 94-95, and Nate 2005, 105-09). But Lang turned back to Wells’s method of seeing the urban future to give his text renewed topicality within a Weimar Republic context both class-riven and polarising around political extremes threatening its fragile social democracy. Set around 2000 in New York (Lang had recently visited America),10 Metropolis is also an anticapitalist dystopia, with Fredersen its Ostrog-like magnate-dictator, while Freder assumes Graham’s naïve playboy role. Lang switches nominal location from Europe to a generically Americanised, technological city of the future to reflect anxieties about Germany’s post-Great War dependence on transatlantic capital under the 7

See Stewart 1985, 159-207, especially 162. First serialised in Das illustrierte Blatt, from August 1926, six months before the film premiered (see Elsaesser 2000, 12). 9 ‘Lang’s films (…) deal primarily with modernity’s systematic nature, its interlocking technologies which I describe as the “terrain” of modernity: a new landscape of space and time riddled with technological links and devices which seem to extend (and often defy) the human will’ (Gunning 2000, especially x-xi). 10 New York’s night skyline was inspirational according to Lang’s article ‘Was ich in Amerika sah’, Film-Kurier 11 (Dec. 1924). ‘(…) it was the crossroads of multiple and confused human forces (irresistibly driven) to exploit each other and thus living in perpetual anxiety’. Hanging, ‘almost weightless (…) to dazzle, distract and hypnotise’, New York seemed alive ‘as illusions live’ (quoted in Gold 1985, 128). 8


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1924 Dawes Plan.11 There was, in effect, a Kulturkampf taking place over the German metropolis as the crucial site of technological modernity, its effects and problems. As capital of the unified nation state from 1871, Berlin already focused fears about Prussian centralisation, but this took on particular intensity in the age of film, which meshed with WTSW’s way of seeing mechanised future urban space. In 1903, when Berlin’s population topped four million, Georg Simmel (1997, 175) contrasted the accelerated visual bombardment and fragmented spatio-temporal pattern of the Großstadt with the emotional flow and social ties of provincial small-town life, presenting it as an over-stimulating, stressfully ‘cinematic’ rhythm. Thus a polarisation developed between supposedly ‘organic’ rural traditions and the increasingly ‘denatured’ city. Simultaneously, a new aesthetic celebrating big city modernity was epitomised by August Endell’s Die Schönheit der großen Stadt (1908) and found practical expression in the techno-industrial designs and socialised architectural planning of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus.12 But, as in WTSW, domination by the cashnexus meant urban consumerism went hand in hand with class division and alienation of labour. Simmel’s metaphor for the objectification of city workers achieved its most famous visualisation in Metropolis, under Wellsian auspices: ‘The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organisation of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of purely objective life’ (Simmel 1997, 184). Großstadt films, like other Weimar art, clearly visualised such anxieties about ‘forces out of human control’ (Lees 1984, 85-87). Responses to the city as symptomatic index of progress or degeneration were most sharply expressed by radical critics, epitomised by Oswald Spengler’s reactionary catastrophism which outdid anything in Wells’s apocalyptic vision. His ‘Soul of the City’ chapter in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1922) denounced the Weltstadt as ‘monstrous symbol’ of disembodied intellect, ‘demanding and devouring fresh streams of men’ (Spengler 1928, 98-99 and 102). The term itself (coined around the turn of the century) denoted 11

In the inter-War period, Lewis Mumford was the chief American visionary of a world dominated by giant cities, moving from Metropolis to devouring Megalopolis, and on to the social disaster of the wasted Necropolis. Arguably, Lang telescoped all three stages together in Metropolis, under the influence of Wells’s all-consuming urban dystopia (for Mumford’s cycle see introduction to Sutcliffe 1984, 2). 12 For an overview of Weimar ‘culture of cities’, see Willett 1984, 110-44.

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liberal-capitalist metropolises with global connections and cosmopolitan populations independent of, or antagonistic to, statehood. Hence nationalist attacks followed Spengler’s cue. Nazis, worshipping Blut und Boden, fulminated against Berlin’s growing reputation as centre of International Modernism and crucible of Weimar decadence (see Lees 1984, 83-84). However, the Weltstadt was also attacked by Leftists. Ernst H. Gruening’s 1922 article focused on its dehumanising rationalisation, describing New York as a voracious ‘Moloch’ (1984, 84-85).13 Above all, Berlin focused fears of colonisation by globalising capital, represented by Ford’s controversial assembly-line system on the one hand, imported ‘mass’ culture on the other and climaxing in Adolf Halfeld’s Amerika und der Amerikanismus, published in 1927, the year of Metropolis’s release.14 WTSW was also a principal model for the social symbolism of Lang’s sets. In the most extreme form of ‘architectural determinism’, hierarchy is literally spatialised in the multi-levelled built environment of Wells’ London.15 Similarly, class is stratified in Metropolis: élite penthouses and orgiastic nightclubs above; below, ‘monstrous’ machine rooms; subterranean, the brutally stylised ‘workers’ city. H. Lanos’s illustrations to the Graphic serialisation of Wells’s text blend late-Victorian classicism with Art Nouveau curvilinear motifs, Europe’s proto-modern design style (Wells 1899, 41-561). Lang, a trained architect, updated this, topically incorporating jazz-age Art Deco Américain. But Lang was also attracted to the filmic dynamism with which Wells alternates human scale and overwhelming cityscape: (Graham’s) first impression was of overwhelming architecture. The place into which he looked was an aisle of Titanic buildings, curving spaciously in either direction. Overhead mighty cantilevers sprang together across the huge width of the place, and a tracery of translucent material shut out the sky (…) A cliff of edifice hung above him, he perceived as he glanced upward, and the opposite façade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular 13

The Canaanite idol was also a multivalent symbol in Weimar SF. Alfred Reifenberg’s world domination fantasy was titled Des Götzen Moloch Ende (1925), to symbolise the ‘monstrous’ international conspiracy keeping the Reich down. In Hans Richter’s TurmStadt (1926) the skyscrapered city itself is a man-eating ‘Moloch machine’ (see Fisher 1991, 46-47 and 128). 14 For the debate about Americanisation and the Nazi reaction, see Rentschler 1996, especially 90-91. 15 Radical transformation of city space has other social implications. Overground London has become a multi-levelled hotel, so the privacy of family dwellings has disappeared (see Wells 1994, 174).


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perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast windows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief (Wells 1994, 34).

This ‘gigantic glass hive’ with its ‘kaleidoscope’ pattern of masses (colourcoded by caste) is traversed by ‘moving ways’, giant conveyor belts crammed with human traffic (63 and 36, respectively); the space above by aircraft and advertising blimps (e.g. 116). Abrupt contrast between above and below was a leading Expressionist strategy for dynamising physical and social space.16 Metropolis, like WTSW, is riddled with staircases, shafts and most famously the ‘Pater-noster Maschine’, transporting shifts of workers. Wells also transforms static scenography into ‘cinematic’ space, with a constantly refocused and obstructed viewpoint conditioned by the built environment. The reader ‘sees’ vicariously through Graham’s moving ‘intra-diegetic’ gaze, through transparent panes or partial structures, alternating claustrophobic with vertiginous effects. These fragment the imaginary visual field into fluctuating stereoscopy: There came a passage in twilight, and into this passage a footway hung so that he could see the feet and ankles of people going to and fro thereon, but no more of them (...). Presently he was in a lift that had a window upon the great street space (...) he saw people going to and fro along cables and along strange, frail-looking bridges. Thence they passed across the street and at a vast height above it. They crossed by means of a narrow bridge closed in with glass, so clear that it made him giddy even to remember it. The floor of it also was of glass (...). He stopped, looked down between his legs upon the swarming blue and red multitudes, minute and fore-shortened (...)’ (Wells 1994, 40-41).

Such descriptions anticipate moving high and low angle camerawork in Metropolis, but also ‘montage’ city documentaries, such as Berlin – Symphony of a City (Walther Ruttmann, 1927), with its shots through windows, vehicles, lift cages, girders, etc., and collective synecdoches such as commuters’ hurrying legs. Above all, WTSW presents what Ostrog calls ‘this great machine of the city’ (Wells 1994, 165) as a vast interlocking mechanism, meshing with theorists such as Simmel and Gruening. Metropolis’s opening superimposes machine parts over skyscrapers, suggesting the same interchangeability. Fear of technologies’ implications for social organisation grew from their power and fascination, which film visualised in

16

For such ‘raumbildend’ motifs in Lang and others, see Eisner 1969, 119-27.

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operation.17 Dystopian extensions of the city-as-machine metaphor satirised ‘rationalising’ policies such as the American Frederick Taylor’s ‘time and motion studies’. Taylorism is attacked when Freder takes a worker’s shift, literally fighting the clock on a gigantic dial. His intertitle – ‘Father, I never realised ten hours could last so long’ – visualises a Wellsian paradox: simultaneous acceleration and dilation of temporality under modernity at its most alienating.18 Lang famously choreographs workers into the spatio-temporal rhythm of machinery, as ‘soft’ components, symbolising industrial dehumanisation. His coup de cinéma, doubling Maria’s features on the robot, is thus symbolic terminus of the city’s mechanising effects on bodies and minds. However, Wells was notoriously unflattered by Lang’s intended homage, believing he had outgrown such alarmism. His 1927 review of the New York premiere declared that Metropolis compounded ‘almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress’, though reluctantly acknowledging ‘decaying fragments of my own juvenile work’ in the mix (Wells 1928, 178-89, especially 178-9). Wells had quickly revised WTSW’s demographic predictions in his Anticipations, swapping megalopolis for suburban decentralisation, through electrification, telephonics, etc. (see Wells 1902, especially 39-40 and 589). Lang was wounded, probably reading the review in the Frankfurter Zeitung from 3 May 1927 (see McGilligan 1997, 129-30). It is tempting to infer that one reason for Wells’s reaction was his own misgivings returning to haunt him. Less surprising was Hitler’s enthusiasm for Metropolis’s paradoxical blend of mysticism and urban futurity.19 Arthur Koestler described fascism as an ‘ultra-modern form of reaction’, because it opportunistically hijacked technological means for irrational ends (1937, 80-82). Like other dictators, Hitler had an ‘edifice complex’, developing a personal project for defeating transatlantic modernity with his architect, Albert Speer. They would rebuild Berlin as ‘Germania’, world super-capital in monstrously swollen neo-classical proportions, after his plans for global conquest (resembling bad science fiction) were 17

For an overview of technologised cities in Weimar films see Sutcliffe 1984, 152-58. In Wells’s ‘The New Accelerator’ (1901), for example, metabolic time is artificially speeded up, resulting in the slowing down of perceptual time (see Wells 2000b, 487-97). 19 This may have led to Goebbels’ alleged offer to Lang to head the Nazi state film authority (Reichsfilmkammer) in 1933 (see, among others, McGilligan 1997, 174-76 and Werner 1990, 24-27). 18


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accomplished (see Richie 1998, 470-74). Ironically, the shape of actual things to come was slipping from Wells’s control. Though noting that English intertitles called Fredersen ‘John Masterman’ (Wells 1928, 181), Wells neither detected topical parallelism with Nazi doctrines, such as Herrschaft, nor anticipated their imminent realisation. Ominously, Metropolis’s intellectual overreaching and narrative incoherence (aggravated by the butchered release) made it a box office flop, causing American investors to pull out.20 UFA was consequently snapped up by media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg, one of Nazism’s principal backers. Nonetheless, Wells conceded that Metropolis wasted ‘fine possibilities’, because the Weimar Republic, cradle of urban design, seemed so committed to modernisation (Wells 1928, 188). Yet he did not consider that Metropolis might be symptomatic of the struggle in Germany itself between reactionary and progressive forces.21 Ironically, it proved less about the future as such, than where the immediate present was heading, though Wells’s review also marks the germination of his answering urban ‘technotopia’.22 Most tellingly, Wells ignored Lang’s extrapolation of his own foreseeing of totalitarian urban surveillance and control.23 Ostrog rejects democ20 Metropolis was the most monumental product of ‘Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft’ (UFA), at Neubabelsberg studios, taking sixteen months to shoot, with over 37,000 extras, and costing over 7 million marks. 21 Kaes argues that the mystical Gemeinschaft between labour and capital is only possible after the suspiciously semitic Rotwang’s control over technology has been removed (2001, 162). For ambiguities in Lang’s relationship with Nazism, see Werner 1990. 22 Wells wrote, ‘it would have been (…) far more interesting to have taken some pains to gather the opinions of a few bright young research students and ambitious, modernising architects and engineers about the trend of modern invention, and develop these artistically’. Hence it would be possible to film ‘how these things could be brought into touch with the life of to-day and made interesting to the man in the street’ (Wells 1928, 188). The resulting 1936 film was based on Wells’s 1933 ‘history of the future’, The Shape of Things to Come. A memorandum circulated to Alexander Korda’s production team still held Lang’s vision of the monstrous, mechanised city as ‘the exact opposite of what we want done here’ (repr. in Wells 1935, 13-16, especially 13). However, Wells’s own scripting came nearly as close to producing a Babelian crash for London Films. 23 Nonetheless, Wells took self-critical pains to dissociate himself from WTSW’s proto-totalitarian possibilities in relations with Germany after Hitler’s takeover. Banned by the Nazis himself, he defended German writers from censorship and persecution as President of PEN (see Schenkel 2005, 99-104), although it is still arguable that the World State of Things to Come is essentially totalitarian, however benign its technocrats’ intentions.

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racy – ‘the Crowd as Ruler’ – as liberal anachronism versus evolutionary necessity: ‘the common man now is a helpless unit. In these days we have this great machine of the city, and an organisation complex beyond his understanding’ (Wells 1994, 165). Ostrog believes in Nietzsche’s mastering ‘Over-man’, and that modern conditions inevitably demand and justify dictatorship (166-67). He broadcasts the cult of the Sleeper as miraculous panacea, even though his revolution is purely placebic in terms of reforming social conditions. Similarly, Hitler exploited mass destitution from economic collapse, to project a ‘benign’ public persona as saviour of the Volk. Further extrapolations merit exploration. In ‘A Story of the Days to Come’, a photographic press anticipates the sacrificial machine idolatry of Metropolis: ‘it seemed to Denton in certain moods almost as if this must needs be the obscure idol to which humanity in some strange aberration had offered up his life’ (Wells 2000a, 370). Similarly, Lang visually puns together Biblical barbarity and urban modernity. Babel and Babylon became metaphors ‘for the vast and indeterminate’ city in the early twentieth century (Minden 1985, 194),24 and particularly for Berlin. Metropolis’s most famous allusions are Freder’s vision of the ‘heart machine’ as Moloch’s jaws, devouring fresh human Futter, and Maria’s sermon against Babel. Both are filtered through Wells.25 The Canaanite idol’s name and his 1895 Time Machine’s troglodytic cannibals – the Morlocks – resonate with proximity. The ‘mouth’ of their mechanised underworld is surmounted by a sphinx.26 The Sleeper cult is monumentalised in Atlas statues, nobly shouldering the sky, although the ruling deity is actually the Syriac idol of riches: ‘Every city now is a prison. Mammon grips the key in his hand’ (Wells 1994, 158). Babelian imagery (‘titanic architecture’, ‘babble machines’,27 etc.), coupled with machine-worship, saturates not

24 In the novel, Fredersen’s Central Control Tower is known as ‘Der Neue Babel Turm’ (von Harbou 1984, 15). 25 Von Harbou’s novel features multiple pagan deities based on Wellsian imagery. The factory hooter, ‘voice of the city’, is described as ‘Behemot-Laut’. Freder visualises a whole pantheon in the central machine-room (see von Harbou 1984, 15, 25 and 31). 26 See Wells 1987, 43-44. A possible source for ‘Morlock’ is a famous 1864 address by Marx, which Metropolis may also allude to, describing industrialists’ willingness to sacrifice poor children to profit as Moloch worship (Marx 1969, 1: 16). 27 Wells considered Lang’s mooted title ‘Neubabelsburg’, punning on the studios’ name, to be more apt (Wells 1928, 180).


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just WTSW and ‘A Story of the Days to Come’, but Wells’s ‘Lord of the Dynamos’ (1894), ‘The Cone’ (1895), etc. The most important transposition of Wells’s self-consciously visual treatment of the technological city lies in ‘metafilmic allegory’ (Stewart 1985, 167). Wells (1928, 179-80) noted that Metropolis was the acme of Expressionism’s preoccupation with artificial life. However, he did not consider Lang’s robot as an analogue for simulation of life in moving images, developing his own insights about projection of charismatic ‘electronic presence’ through urban media.28 Significantly, Lang displaced WTSW’s motif of the hypnotic double (to preserve Graham’s likeness for televisation) onto the female android. Rotwang mesmerises the ‘real’ Maria, before grafting her captive likeness by (literal) superimposition. He thus disguises his metallic invention as ‘a “celluloid”, an illusory dea ex machina’ (Stewart 1985, 166). This is vital for Fredersen’s strategy of manipulating urban alienation into violent revolt, in order to subjugate the workers once and for all. Like the paradox of cinema itself, the robot is a mechanical ‘replication’ (see Telotte 1995, 3-5 and 16-17),29 both cinema and robot are inventions, both create spectacles moving urban massaudiences in emotionally charged and/or propagandistic ways. Thus Lang’s specific response to Wells’s critique of mediation and loss of authenticity in the modern city had a key impact on SF’s self-referentiality. Postmodern mutations of this joint legacy into the existentially undecidable ‘replicants’ inhabiting the ‘tech noir’ urban sprawl of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and CGI ‘cyborgs’ of more recent ‘retrofitted’ dystopian environments testify to that. Metropolis’s urban media politics also have a gender dimension. The Weimar constitution was arguably Europe’s most modern in terms of sexual equality. But behind the polarisation of Maria’s image, Lang may echo Wells’s ambivalence about the emerging ‘New Woman’ of the 1890s (see Kaes 2001, 155-57). Significantly, bluestocking Helen Wotton politicises Graham about the future, catalysing the ‘real’ revolution. Cinema would be a symptomatic medium for re-negotiating femininity as social product and cultural icon, especially its implications of patriarchal panic (Spengler regarded ‘the Ibsen woman’, substituting ‘soul conflicts’ for 28 In the novel, Maria seems uncannily to be ‘an zwei Orten zu gleicher Zeit’, because of her mechanically cloned image (von Harbou 1984, 122). 29 Telotte (1995, 54-57) traces Futura’s screen ancestry in forms of mechanical life deconstructing ontological boundaries between human and artificial identity from Méliès to Expressionism. See Kaes 2001, 155-57.

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children, as quintessence of the modern city. In both novella and film, the false Maria is associated with nightmares about the ‘Whore of Babylon’ (see Spengler 1928, 105, and von Harbou 1984, 113)). Similarly, WTSW replaces maternal functions by faceless automata in corporate crèches (see Wells 1994, 178-79). Thus ‘liberated’ city women become sexual consumers (see 182-83). In contrast, Lang’s Maria is pastorally feminine. Demurely dressed, she leads poor children to interrupt Freder’s frolics with scantily-clad courtesans. His partner’s flirtation prefigures the frenzied ‘shamelessness’ of Maria’s double’s nightclub dance. Both echo the virtual eroticism late-Victorian Graham finds so shocking: ‘These were no pictures (…) but photographed realities’. Consequently, the future city’s mediated culture is dominated by ‘systematised sensuality’ (51-52). Similarly, the robot’s electronically-generated aura symbolises the synthetic glamour of ‘star charisma’, a mass commodity by the 1920s. Between these poles – neo-Victorian domestic saint and mechanically ‘modernised’ urban vamp – the new image of femininity was arguably played out on the early twentieth-century screen.30 Wells derided Lang’s ‘mediator’ plot as mystical hokum, though it also derived from the Sleeper’s iconography. Freder fulfils Maria’s prophecy about the chosen one who will heal divisions between capital and labour in the city’s social body. Her intertitle reads: ‘Between the brain that plans and the hands that build, there must be a mediator ... it is the heart that must bring about an understanding between them.’ As Lang admitted later, this ‘Märchen’ (fairytale) was incompatible with ‘socially aware’ filmmaking.31 But he downplayed Metropolis’s own foregrounding of the camera’s potential for demystifying treatment of urban modernity. Through Freder’s explorations, like Graham’s, Metropolis makes visible underlying relations between socio-architectonic strata, the spectator/reader ‘discovering’ these vicariously with respective protagonists. In German, Mittler, ‘mediator’, also connotes ‘medium’, alluding to Lang’s visual technique. His camera suggestively links zones of urban experience alienated by ideological distance, a principle extended to representing actual metropolises on location, through cross-cutting montage by documentarists such 30

Brigitte Helm played both mechanical femme fatale and heroine ‘with Gish-Pickford look’, deliberately evoking this dyadic image (see Jensen 1969, 67). For the politics of ‘technosexual’ urban femininity in the Weimar period, see Lungstrum 1997, 128-44. 31 Lang quoted in Herbert W. Franke ‘Nachwort’ to von Harbou 1984, 198-205, especially 201.


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as Alberto Cavalcanti, Ruttmann, Dziga Vertov and others, in France, Weimar Germany and the USSR.32 Berlin – Symphony of a City marked the swing away from studio-bound Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) in treatment of urban themes. Although Metropolis lurches between banal romance and universalising socio-economic critique, avant-garde ‘big city’ films of the later twenties would show populations amid contemporary social and built environments, more mimetically and concretely, in their complex interactions. Wells himself praised the style of Berlin – Symphony of a City as an alternative mapping of modernity’s urban mindscape.33 However, though Wells disowned Lang’s topical reworking of WTSW, their joint influence on seeing the future quickly became part of the basic ‘DNA’ of anxieties and aspirations urban SF articulates. For example, High Treason (dir. Maurice Elvey, 1929) was a futuristic thriller with visible roots not just in the key role hi-tech media play in imaging social totality, but also in tensions with the transatlantic model of progress. London is the (relatively) high-rise capital of the ‘Federated States of Europe’, a pan-European model also entertained by Wells in the twenties and thirties (see Partington 2005, 321-38). The plot concerns frictions secretly fomented by an arms cartel with the ‘Atlantic States’, a rival superpower centred on New York. World war is prevented by timely subversion of a TV broadcast and mass urban feminist revolt. Conversely, Just Imagine (dir. David Butler, 1930) countered European scepticism about an Americanised future, dreaming a technotopian USA of 1980. A Depression citizen miraculously revives to wonder at the cloudpiercing proportions of built environment, urban motorways, aerial traffic and, especially, hi-tech consumer durables – videophones and TVs. As a musical comedy, it set the tone for romantic modernist sets throughout 1930s Hollywood (see Albrecht 1986, 156-60). However, the film’s optimism was reworked ironically in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World 32

Lang begins to uncover what Storm Jameson called ‘relations between things (men, acts) widely separated in space or in the social complex’, which capitalism mystifies. It was the objective of documentary to artfully reveal their full reality (see Jameson 1937, 17-18). For montage city documentaries and texts, see Williams 2003, 31-50. 33 Wells was aware of the ‘absolute film’ tendency, with which Ruttmann was associated as experimental animator. It was a significant influence on Berlin’s characteristic alternation between mimesis and the abstract, its ‘symphonic’ patterning. Wells also held up Ruttmann’s ‘magnificent production’ for setting new standards in the treatment of modern themes by ‘plotless’ means (see Wells 1929, 16 and 27).

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(1932).34 Huxley updated WTSW to satirise the potential triumph of transatlantic corporatism and the virtualism of ‘the Feelies’ over Europe and the world. Similarly, visionary German texts battled over the urban future, with greater urgency as the Republic reached its crisis. Wilhelm Götz’s Vor neuen Weltkatastrophen (1931) typified Nazi rejection of Americanisation and Soviet social levelling, both threatening to brainwash the Volk into urban automata. Conversely, Werner Illing’s 1930 Utopolis (in cheap edition from the Social Democratic book club) defended ‘Futura’s’ workers’ paradise (complete with enlightenment by 3D cinema) against capitalist counter-revolution. Ludwig Dexheimer’s Das Automatenzeitalter (1931) fought a rearguard action for scientific progress and pacifism, reinventing robots as benign educators.35 However, SF film became increasingly subservient to nationalist and anti-semitic propaganda after Hitler’s takeover36 – and so did the cinematic representation of Berlin. Putzi Hanfstängl’s Hans Westmar (1933) caricatured it as degenerate, cosmopolitan Babel, parasitic on the host nation. Most ominously, Der Herrscher (1937) took up where Lang’s ‘resolution’ to modernity’s problems ended ambiguously. Its Berlin was now the integrated, techno-industrial powerhouse of a coming society, managed by upstanding Aryans under their ‘superhuman’ leader, not unlike that of the pseudonymous ‘Schmid’s’ Im Jahre 2000 im Dritten Reich (1933) (see Richie 1998, 453-54 and Fisher 1991, 94-99). Luckily, that delusion perished. Post-War reconstruction has replaced it with a guiding vision of Europe as transnational economic and political community, seemingly set to expand into the twenty-first century, as counter-balance to a super-powerful transatlanticism. However, the moment of specific creative dialectic between Wells’s and Lang’s ways of seeing the future merits critical historicisation. We might then appreciate the ongoing relevance of both its anxieties and aspirations for developing truly modern urban mindscapes and modes of living, simultaneously distinct and localised, yet globally affiliated in consciousness.

34 For further discussion of such films in relation to the legacy of Lang and Wells, see Gold 1985, 129-31 and Neumann 1996, 33-38. 35 For these, see Fisher 1991, 145-49, 182-201. 36 For films such as FP1 antwortet Nicht (1932), Der Tunnel (1933) and Gold (1934), designed by Lang’s key personnel, see Hake 2001, 54-57.


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References Albrecht, Donald. 1986. Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies. Santa Monica, California: Hennessey and Ingalls. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. Selected Writings, ed. M. Poster. Cambridge: Polity. Benjamin, Walter. 1973 (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In W. Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217-52. London: Fontana Chialant, Maria Teresa. 2005. H.G. Wells, Italian Futurism and Marinetti’s Gli Indomabili (The Untamables). In The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, eds. Patrick Parrinder and John S. Partington, 205-21. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum. Christie, Ian. 1994. The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World. London: BFI/BBC. Debord, Guy. 1983. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red. Eisner, Lotte H. 1969. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, transl. Richard Greaves. London: Thames and Hudson. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2000. Metropolis. London: BFI. Fisher, Peter S. 1991. Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gold, John R. 1997. The Experience of Modernism: Modern Architects and the Future City. London: E. & F.N. Spon. SSS. 1985. From ‘Metropolis’ to ‘The City’: Film Visions of the Future City, 1919-1939. In Geography, the Media and Popular Culture, eds. Jacquelin Burgess and J. R. Gold, 123-43. London: Croom Helm. Gunning, Tom. 2000. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: BFI. Haining, Peter. 1978. The Jules Verne Companion. London: Souvenir Press. Hake, Sabine. 2001. Popular Cinema of the Third Reich. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hulten, Pontus. 1986. Futurismo and Futurismi. Milan: Bompiani. Jameson, Storm. 1937. Documents. Fact 4 (July): 17-18. Jensen, Paul M. 1969. The Cinema of Fritz Lang. New York: Barnes. Kaes, Anton. 2001. Metropolis: City, Cinema, Modernity. In Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, ed. Timothy O. Benson, 146-65. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. Kaplan, Ann E. 1981. Fritz Lang: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall. Keating, Peter. 1984. The Metropolis in Literature. In Metropolis 1890-1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe, 129-45. London: Mansell. Koestler, Arthur. 1937. Spanish Testament. London: Gollancz.

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Lees, Joseph. 1984. The Metropolis and the Intellectual. In Metropolis 1890-1940, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe, 67-94. London: Mansell. Lungstrum, Janet. 1997. Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity. In Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum, 128-144. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. McGilligan, Patrick. 1997. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. London: Faber. Marx, Karl. 1969 (1864). Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association. In K. Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works. Vol.1, 11-18. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Meyer, Esther da Costa. 1995. The Work of Antonio Sant’Elia: Retreat Into the Future. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Minden, Michael. 1985. The City in Early Cinema: Metropolis, Berlin and October. In Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, eds. Edward Timms and David Kelly, 193-213. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nate, Richard. 2005. Ignorance, Opportunism, Propaganda and Dissent: The Reception of H.G. Wells in Nazi Germany. In The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, eds. Patrick Parrinder and John S. Partington, 105-25. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum. Neumann, Dietrich. 1996. Before and After Metropolis: Film and Architecture in Search of the Modern City. In Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner, ed. Dietrich Neumann, 33-38. Munich: Prestel. Partington, John S. 2005. H.G. Wells and the International Pan-European Union. In The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, eds. Patrick Parrinder and J. S. Partington, 321-38. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum. Quagliariello, Gaetano. 1996. Politics Without Parties: Moisei Ostrogorsky and the Debate on Political Parties on the Eve of the Twentieth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rentschler, Eric. 1996. The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Richards, Thomas. 1990. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Richie, Alexandra. 1998. Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. London: Harper Collins. Schenkel, Elmar. 2005. White Elephants and Black Machines: H.G. Wells and German Culture, 1920-45. In The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe, eds. Patrick Parrinder and John S. Partington, 91-104. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum. Simmel, Georg. 1997 (1903). The Metropolis and Mental Life [‘Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben’]. In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, eds. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, 174-85. London: Sage. Spengler, Oswald. 1928 (1922). The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World History II, authorised trans. by Charles Francis Atkinson. Vol. 2. London: Allen and Unwin.


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Stewart, Garrett. 1985. The ‘Videology’ of Science Fiction. In Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film, eds. George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 159-207. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sutcliffe, Anthony. 1984. The Metropolis in Cinema. In Metropolis 1890-1940, ed. A. Sutcliffe, 147-71. London: Mansell. Telotte, J.P. 1995. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Verne, Jules. 1978 (1889). In the Twenty-Ninth Century – The Day of an American Journalist in 2889. In The Jules Verne Companion, ed. Peter Haining, 97116. London: Souvenir Press. –––. 1994. Paris au XXe Siècle. Paris: Hachette. von Harbou, Thea. 1984 (1926). Metropolis. Berlin: Ullstein Verlag. Wells, H.G. 1902. Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. London: Chapman and Hall. SSS. 1905. Ausblicke auf die Folgen des technischen und wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts für Leben und Denken des Menschen, transl. Felix P. Greve. Minden: Bruns. SSS. 1987. The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H.G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, with introduction and notes by Harry M. Geduld. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. SSS. 1934. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain. London: Cressett. SSS. 1929. The King Who Was a King: The Book of a Film. London: Ernest Benn. SSS. 1928. Mr Wells Reviews A Current Film: He Takes Issue With This German Conception of What the City of One Hundred Years Hence Will Be Like (New York Times, April 17, 1927). Incorporated as The Silliest Film: Will Machinery Make Robots of Men? In The Way the World Is Going: Guesses and Forecasts for the Years Ahead, 179-89. London: Ernest Benn. SSS. 2000a (1899). A Story of the Days to Come. In The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells, ed. John Hammond, 333-98. London: Phoenix Press. SSS. 2000b (1901). The New Accelerator. In The Complete Short Stories of H.G. Wells, ed. John Hammond, 487-97. London: Phoenix Press. SSS. 1935. Things to Come – A Film Story Based on the Material Contained in His History of the Future ‘The Shape of Things to Come’. London: Cresset. SSS. 1906. Wenn der Schläfer erwacht, transl. Felix P. Greve. Minden: Bruns. SSS. 1994 (1899). When the Sleeper Wakes. London: Dent. SSS. 1899. When the Sleeper Wakes (serialisation). The Graphic (14 Jan.-6 May), 41561. Werner, Gösta. 1990. Fritz Lang and Goebbels: Myths and Facts. Film Quarterly 43 (Spring): 24-27. Willett, John. 1984. The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short. London: Thames and Hudson. Williams, Keith. 2003. Symphonies of the Big City: Modernism, Cinema and Urban Modernity. In The Great London Vortex: Modernist Literature and Art 1910-30, ed. Paul Edwards, 31-50. Bath: Sulis Press.



STRANGERS (TO) THEMSELVES: CITYSCAPES AND MINDSCAPES IN 1980s EUROPEAN CINEMA

Barry Langford

Abstract Critical discourse on cinematic representations of the postmodern city has focused on dystopian Hollywood epics like Blade Runner, obscuring the very different responses to urban experience in 1980s European cinema. European city films avoided lurid large-scale depictions of entropic, commodified urban environments in favour of smaller-scale psychological and/or symbolic portrayals of individuals grappling with the pressures of history and personal identity. This essay explores the differing refractions of the urban in Roeg’s Bad Timing (GB 1980), Tanner’s In the White City (Portugal/Switzerland 1984) and Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Germany 1987). The legacies of traumatic historical events like World War II and the Cold War lend a specific European dimension to generalised postmodern crises of narrative and individual identity. Individual pathologies are bound up with these larger contexts, and these complex relationships are framed in terms of the subject’s engagement with (or disengagement from) the city. The essay also considers the phobic and romantic visions of female sexuality that structure these films’ urban mindscapes. During the 1980s, onscreen representations of the contemporary city took a decisive postmodern and futuristic turn. In the United States, the definitive film accounts of the city in the wake of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) were such other tech noir efforts as Batman (Tim Burton, 1988) and the independent productions Liquid Sky (Slava Tsukerman, 1982), Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1983), and The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984). All shared a dystopian emphasis on the city as a nightmare of

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technologised commodification in which the prospects for either personal connection or collective social action were dispersed and atomised virtually to the point of extinction. Towards the end of the decade, this postmodern urban vision acquired a powerful new visual lexicon in the novel manga aesthetic emerging from Japan in such animated SF films as Akira (1988). In Britain, alongside a despairing dystopic strain expressed in such anti-Thatcherite fantasies as The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1988), the dominant social realist trend persisted – often crossed with a new awareness of the complexities of the gendered and racially and sexually diverse metropolises of post-imperial culture – in such London films as Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1986) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988) and Mike Leigh’s High Hopes (1988). Such cinematic cities, whether rendered in the lexicon of fantasy or social realism, clearly helped articulate anxieties about the changing dimensions of civil society and thus located themselves firmly in the public realm. Continental European cinema in this decade, by contrast, persisted in exploring the city as mindscape – a screen onto which are projected the compulsions, obsessions, phobias, desires and fantasies of both individual protagonists and the cultures they inhabit: a notion powerfully pioneered in such 1960s art cinema classics as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (The Eclipse, 1960) and Deserto Rosso (Red Desert, 1964). In this regard cinema perhaps reflected European resistance to the new political and economic realities of unfettered capital markets, deregulation and labour ‘flexibility’ – and the associated phenomena of inner-city collapse and ‘white flight’ – to which as many commentators have observed Blade Runner and its ilk in various ways bore witness.1 This is not to suggest of course that European films are simply immune or indifferent to the same factors that elsewhere motivate the postmodern turn in other national cinemas. However, whereas those, mostly American, films principally identified with the postmodern turn tended to render the new (or, depending on which authority one consults, intensified) cultural condition as simply a given, European films often express a distinct anxiety at the supersession of modernist experiential modes. We can see this difference of sensibility manifested in particular in the divergent treatment of narrative in 1980s city films. Although Blade Runner clearly thematises – in the replicants’ programmed obsession with memory, real and manufactured – a concern with and for 1

See amongst many others Bruno 1987; also Harvey 1989, 308-23.

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narrative restitution even in the face of its ineluctable attenuation, other US films proffered rapturous enactments of narrative’s mutation into pure representation, whether in the flattened affect of indie cinema (Repo Man) or the renovated cinema of spectacular attractions of the Hollywood action blockbuster.2 European films by contrast depict the city in ways that suggest at once the extension and intensification of modernist preoccupations with the fragmented urban sensorium and a recognition of the increasing difficulty of rendering coherent narratives of contemporary experience; with however the important addition of a critical project that aims either to forestall the wholesale dissipation of narrative structure into random pulses of at best individuated energies, or at least to make clear the psychic and social costs of such a reduction of narrative’s shaping force. This essay aims to illustrate this complex cultural movement by analysing three films of the 1980s in which crises of narration and narratability are rendered through the portrayal of three different European cities – Vienna, Lisbon, and Berlin – as the mindscapes of their protagonists. All three films centre on visitors who are emphatically characterised as outsiders by their foreignness (including in one case, their non-human nature): through their different attempts to narrate the city, involving in varying degrees integrative, fragmenting and dominative styles of narration – styles motivated in turn by strongly contrasting subject positions – a crucial moment in the reshaping of the contemporary European city is dramatically rendered. Bad Timing (GB, 1980) Critical accounts of Bad Timing tend almost as a matter of course to place Nicolas Roeg’s densely woven story of obsessive desire in a familiar finde-siècle Vienna of Freud, Klimt and Schiele – taking up an invitation offered by the film itself, which directly references all of these.3 In so 2

The version of postmodernism informing this summary will be generally recognised as Fredric Jameson’s (1991); see also Harvey 1989, and – with particular reference to the urban – Soja 1988. On the cinema of attractions, see Gunning 1990 and 1995; on the action blockbuster as postmodern spectacle, see King 2000, Langford 2005, 233-56. 3 Art Garfunkel’s character is a research psychoanalyst at the Freud Institute; in the opening scene, Alex and Milena browse a Klimt exhibition; leafing through a sheaf of Milena’s scattered papers, Inspector Netusil turns up a postcard of a Schiele selfportrait (whose scrawny naked body and shock of curly hair strongly resembles Garfunkel as shot by Roeg in several key scenes).

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doing, such critics presumably aim to overlay the allure of fin-de-siècle sexual perversity onto the comparatively bland streets of the modern Austrian capital, a city which – reflecting perhaps the modest size and low international profile of post-war Austria – lacks any very strong received image or associations, perhaps typically regarded as a dowager capital, quietly cohabiting with the ghosts of its long-vanished Imperial past. In this regard Vienna could hardly be more different from Venice, whose exotic and uncanny qualities Roeg had famously exploited in Don’t Look Now (1973). Cinematically, of course – if one excludes studio-era Habsburg fabrications such as Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948) – Vienna’s most celebrated screen appearance came in a perhaps uncharacteristic guise, as the rubble-strewn, divided occupied city of the immediate post-war years in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). The film established a generic lexicon of noir atmospherics, international intrigue, and disenchanted skulduggery that was to prove profoundly influential on the post-war espionage thriller – but it would not be placidly prosperous, neutral Vienna, reunified by the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, but divided, spy-infested Berlin that inherited The Third Man’s caustic combination of power politics and personal betrayal. In fact, Bad Timing not only alludes in passing to Reed’s classic film4 – in the zither we hear on the soundtrack in a characteristically tortuous café scene – but also recalls to the viewer the ineluctable implication of all of central Europe’s great cities in the Cold War, the historical legacy of Europe’s dark twentieth century.5 Jeffrey Lanza combines these points of reference in invoking Vienna, the word’s spy capital as well as Sigmund Freud’s birthplace [sic: Freud was actually born in Freiberg] (…) there are constant references to espionage, searching, intrusion, betrayal and identity turmoil. In this respect, Bad Timing is really a sequel to Carol Reed’s The Third Man (…) Bad Timing tells us how the duplicity and suspicion surrounding the city have not really altered since World War II (Lanza 1989, 57).

In narrative terms, the basis of such an account lies in the psychological profiling Alex Linden (Art Garfunkel) has undertaken for US military intelligence, presumably (the motive is never spelled out) to identify candidates who can be suborned or blackmailed into spying for the West. 4 It may be worth noting that in Roeg’s previous film, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), the alien visitant Newton watches The Third Man, intercut scenes from which point up his own betrayal at the hands of his former partner. 5 The term is Mark Mazower’s (1999).


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In the zither-scored café scene, Alex is trying to obtain some insights into his lover Milena Flaherty’s (Theresa Russell) marriage to Czech intellectual Stefan Vognic (Denholm Elliott) – of which Alex has himself only become aware through reading the dossier – from an unnamed Czech defector. Yet in many ways, Bad Timing is much less a ‘city film’ – that is, a film in which the character of the urban milieu plays a visible and active role in the narrative – than either of the other films discussed in this essay. The film’s Vienna, in fact, is truly remarkable in nothing so much as in its sheer banality. Roeg carefully abjures any glimpse of tourist Vienna (the Ring, the Prater, the Stephansdom) to the point where the address of Milena’s unremarkable apartment block, mentioned several times – 2, Schönbrunnstraße – seems something of an ironic joke. Most of the exteriors and streetscapes traversed by Alex, Milena and Inspector Netusil (Harvey Keitel) are as anonymous, functional and unmemorable as the streets of any other post-war central European city, a bland, slightly tatty bricolage of traffic signals, advertising hoardings, neon signage, office buildings and department stores. If anything, the city subordinates any distinctive onscreen identity to a modulated version of the noir metropolis – all shadows, cigarette smoke, sex clubs and perverse, vengeful desire – that has become a kind of International Style of postmodern urban representation (see Dimendberg 2004). The affectless manner in which Alex undertakes the profiling work – presumably simply for pay, since he gives little indication anywhere in the film of any interest in politics6 – and persists with it even once it becomes a gross infringement of his intimate relationship with Milena, is wholly characteristic of his persistent refusal to acknowledge any personal implication in actions that may dramatically impinge on others. Alex’s position as a research psychoanalyst frees him from the complicated investments of clinical practice; his teaching, from what we see of it, is showy and self-aggrandising; his two most graphically-depicted and intense sex acts with Milena, a near-onanistic rut on the staircase of her apartment building and the climactic rape as she lies comatose after overdosing on barbiturates, are wholly selfish and devoid of reciprocity. Tellingly, too, although Alex clearly understands German (students and 6 Although an apparently glib aside during his lecture on secrecy and spying to the effect that ‘the guilt-ridden voyeur is usually a political conservative’ may reveal more about the guilt-ridden voyeur Alex than he certainly intends.

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colleagues speak it to him) and is presumably fluent in the language, he speaks barely a word of German in the entire film.7 Although Alex is superficially similar to other Roeg protagonists who are cast as intruders in unfamiliar and threatening surroundings – the East End gangster Chas in Turner’s druggy rock-star ménage in Performance (1970), the English schoolchildren in the Australian Outback Walkabout (1971), the English tourists John and Laura Baxter in Venice in Don’t Look Now, the extraterrestrial Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)8 – Alex is different in that his outsider status seems as much willed as enforced by circumstances. The film’s bland Vienna may in fact be seen as a projection of Alex’s own inability or refusal to commit himself even to full participation in the society in which he lives and works:9 bar a handful of cutaways to Netusil at home and one shot of Milena stuporously dialling Alex’s number towards the end of the film, every scene is experienced by the spectator from Alex’s perspective (at various points, moreover, it is unclear whether the images onscreen depict actual incidents or Alex’s fantasies of them). The lack of a sense of place or of history in this historically-freighted milieu thus becomes an index of Alex’s own isolation and egoism. Alex’s Czech dissident ‘source’ leaves Alex little the wiser but adds a jocular rider that points up the issues of subjectivity, shifting perspectives, and concealed personal agendas that thematically underpin the film: ‘Everything I say has to be taken in the context of who I am’. Yet a repeated keynote of both urban theory and of fictional urban representation, a counterpoint to the equally familiar motifs of isolation and alienation, is that living in cities entails an ineluctable and necessary encounter with others/the Other: in film, the most powerful accounts of the schizophrenia and deracination of the modern metropolis, from Playtime (1967) to Taxi Driver (1976), as well as romantic satires like City Lights (1931) and Manhattan (1979), at the same time insistently evoke the

7 He eventually identifies Milena’s street number to the emergency operator as ‘zwei’. 8 As has frequently been noted, Roeg’s fondness during the 1970s for casting pop stars in challenging dramatic roles (Mick Jagger as Turner in Performance, David Bowie as Newton, and Art Garfunkel here) tended to emphasise this fish-out-of-water dimension. 9 During their Moroccan holiday, Alex dismissively remarks that he probably won’t renew his contract at the University in Vienna and speaks vaguely of returning to Boston (where he did his graduate work).


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desire and need for community. Thus it is unsurprising that a willed refusal of the social such as Alex’s proves fragile as well as self-destructive. Netusil accomplishes his deconstruction of Alex’s self-contained, self-sufficient image, revealing the violence and destructive rage that fuels his superficial cool, by retracing Alex’s 20-minute journey through the city earlier in the night. Netusil can ‘read’ the semes of the city well enough to recognise Alex’s distorted rendition of them: he knows, for example, exactly how long it would have taken Alex to drive to Milena’s apartment after receiving her telephone call (he dismisses as ‘nonsense!’ his assistant’s suggestion that the roads might have been congested at 1 am); he knows too that the radio channel to which Alex’s car radio was tuned when he pulled up at Milena’s stopped broadcasting at midnight – thus leaving an unaccounted-for gap of almost two hours between Alex’s arrival and his call for an ambulance. Such apparently trivial pieces of common urban knowledge constitute the mesh of the social, outside of which Alex has, impossibly, attempted to set himself. On their deceptively sunny first date (as Salwolke notes [1993, 78], it takes place atypically in daylight and in the conventionally social locale of a café), Milena guilelessly asks Alex to take her to one of his favourite places in Vienna – but he does not respond (their attention is distracted by a traffic warden ticketing his car, a premonition of Alex’s perception of the city’s complex autonomous social life as simply a constraint and a hindrance) and this ‘sharing’ of the city, if it ever takes place, happens off-screen. Two other cities besides Vienna figure briefly in Bad Timing and function even more clearly as mindscapes structured around fantasy and desire. The first of these is the Moroccan city of Fez, where Alex and Milena take a holiday,10 depicted in Orientalist fashion as an exotic maze – as pungent, compelling and vibrant as the film’s/Alex’s Vienna is mundane and leeched of colour. The second, New York, first appears within the Moroccan sequence itself, in a story Alex tells Milena: I remember in New York, across from us on the other side of the park was this beautiful old mansion. It was very elegant, aristocratic. It made me feel good knowing something so beautiful was so close. Around it were lots of other lovely buildings, mostly built I think around the turn of the century. 10 Pointing out the virtually identical design of the couple’s hotel room in Morocco and Milena’s apartment – both strikingly centred on an eyeless Greek mask that functions as an eerie silent observer throughout the film – Susan Barber suggests (1981, 48) that this entire sequence may be Inspector Netusil’s fantasy, although it has been foreshadowed by Milena’s copy of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.

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One by one they went down, and one by one up went, mostly, monstrosities. But that one building remained. It was there. Someone said an eccentric millionaire owned it. At night as a kid, when I’d walk across the park I’d use it to guide me. And later, when I graduated, started to teach, it was still there. One day I had to go to Boston, that was Friday, when I got back on Tuesday it was gone. Gone. Like that.

We see New York City itself in the film’s coda, a scene that may be imagined by Netusil: climbing into a Manhattan cab, Alex spots Milena in a group of women entering a midtown hotel. Alex just has time to call out her name and see her turn to stare him down coolly, without a flicker of either affection or vengefulness, the tracheotomy scar borne candidly down the centre of her unadorned neck, before turning indifferently away. From what would have been Milena’s point of view – had she not turned her back on him – we see Alex borne off into the stream of Park Avenue traffic, his strained face pressed awkwardly to the rear window: an image that, as John Izod points out (1992, 122), recalls Holofornes’ severed head held by Klimt’s Judith at the start of the film, except that Alex’s mutilation is self-inflicted. It seems as if New York functions for Alex as a kind of reality principle, figuring loss and specifically exposing the illusory nature of his own control of his environment and of his narrative. The city’s strong urban signifiers (the immediately recognisable Pan Am Building11 features prominently in the Manhattan sequence) prevents Alex from either ignoring, disassembling or dominating it as he has Vienna; while the character and iconographic (Klimt) continuities from the Vienna story suggest that Alex’s control of his environment there is equally illusory. More specifically, and appropriately given the narrative centrality of psychoanalysis, Alex’s relationship to the city is exposed as taking place on a destructive axis where the Symbolic (Alex’s desire to schematise and control his social and personal relations) has fused with the Imaginary (his belief that he has in fact done so). Bad Timing reveals this to be a perverse, selfish and finally unsustainable retreat from narrative’s inescapable implication in the social, which ultimately imperils not only the other it aims to deny but the very self it is intended to empower.

11

Now the headquarters of Metropolitan Life.


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In the White City (Switzerland/Portugal, 1983) I had a dream. I dreamed that I left the ship and rented a room in a hotel. Without really knowing why I stayed there motionless, waiting. I dreamed that the city was white. That the room was white and that solitude was white too. And that silence was white. I’m tired. I would like to learn again how to say things. (Paul) If Bad Timing centres on a densely compressed, aggressive and very specific contest to appropriate the city’s meaning(s), Alain Tanner’s Dans la Ville Blanche/In the White City depicts a much more attenuated and reflective relationship of the individual to the urban. Once again, however, it is a transaction in which the individual is ultimately defeated and diminished by the engulfing expanses of the city. A quintessential example of European art cinema – in its apparently digressive narrative structure and its saturated anomie – In the White City’s minimalist story concerns Paul (Bruno Ganz), a Swiss merchant seaman who jumps ship in Lisbon. Paul, it seems, paradoxically seeks to reconnect with the rhythms and vistas of the sea (experiences his labour, immured in tanker engine rooms, has denied him) by anchoring himself in the anonymous tranquillity of a hotel room amidst the ocean of the city. Over the course of the film, Paul gets up late, plays pool, wanders the winding, climbing streets of the city and gazes at the moonlit rooftops from his hotel room window. He has an affair with a hotel chambermaid that ends as a result of a misunderstanding. His wallet is stolen and later, confronting one of his assailants, Paul is seriously wounded. More than anything, Paul observes himself quietly subsiding into solitude, a transient in a city whose language he does not understand. Paul’s attempts to structure his experience into discursive shape take the form of Super-8 films he posts back to his mystified, concerned wife in landlocked Basle. These grainy, jerky, awkwardly framed handheld images, shot while walking or from the sides of trams and buses, punctuate the film’s generally undemonstrative, meditative mise en scène. Initially the Super-8 sequences are clearly narratively situated: we see Paul filming himself and the dockside as he leaves his ship, then we see the footage he has shot. As the film proceeds, however, Paul vanishes from his own films, which become ghostly visions of pure specularity, disembodied encounters with the city. The Lisbon they reveal to the spectator reflects the growing (spiritual and mental) absence of their maker, a disjointed, vertiginous and oddly depopulated bone-white labyrinth. Sheets flap on laundry lines hanging from dark windows like empty eye sockets. The

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home movies float alongside the narrative, in which the spectator cannot securely locate them, while at the same time providing the audience with what little sense of Paul’s inner life we can achieve. Super-8 – as Stephen Barber notes (2002, 90), already an almost anachronistic medium in 1983, but also at this time undergoing rediscovery by arthouse filmmakers for its suggestively poetic qualities12 – invokes the dream of a medium of spontaneous self-expression more ‘real’ and less mediated even than writing (with which Paul confesses his difficulty). Tanner elides the actual laboriousness of processing Super-8, allowing Paul’s wife, impossibly, to project raw stock onto her apartment wall immediately on receipt. In this connection, it seems suggestive that many of Paul’s films recall cinema’s own earliest moments, when the new medium was greeted with a delirious celebration of its capacity to render the world as it actually was. The numerous images shot from moving vehicles echo the popularity with early audiences of films shot from trains (most famously the ride-like ‘Hale’s Tours’: see Kirby 1997); even the moment when Paul’s camera seems to penetrate his lover Rosa’s open mouth recalls a well-known comic short of 1902.13 But this realm of sheer expressivity, as hinted at by the spectral nature of the images Paul captures, proves phantasmic. As suggested above, the decorporealised images of Lisbon actually derealise both their subject (the city) and the subject of the gaze (Paul), expressing and communicating nothing beyond their own inexhaustible look. Although the restlessness of the images he makes is the opposite of Paul’s own increasing immobility, the one is the objective correlative of the other: if the Super-8 films capture (as we may imagine) Paul’s inner turmoil, they conversely reflect the diffusion of the isolated and self-preoccupied subject. Aside from his relationship with the chambermaid Rosa (Teresa Madruga) – which they both conduct in a foreign language, French, their only common tongue – Paul interacts meaningfully with almost no-one. Most exterior shots find Paul walking alone, often in anonymous light-industrial areas or alongside freeways. His utter exclusion from the social is encapsulated in the rare shot that finds him in a bustling commercial streetscape – but immobile and indifferent to the urban life around him as he reads to himself a letter (in German) from his wife. Another instance of Paul’s dismally unsuc12 Compare for example the use of Super-8 to convey scenes of childhood memory in Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers (1983). 13 Oh! Mother Will Be Pleased!


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cessful flânerie sees him failing in the role of an urban archetype, the petty thief (destitute and hungry, Paul tries to steal some fruit from a street stall). The ubiquitous political graffiti on the walls of the old city, too (reminding us that Portugal had experienced a revolution within the previous decade), bespeak a realm of social and cultural activity with which Paul neither can nor wishes to engage. Towards the end of the film, events – his injury, Rosa’s departure, running out of money – compel Paul into forms of action that seem to constitute some sort of re-engagement with the social world of the city. At first these are stumbling and half-hearted – forcing himself on a group of uninterested and uncomprehending Portuguese workers with banal comments about World Cup football matches – but they gather momentum. Paul regales a gang of street kids with his awful blues harmonica playing, hitherto a solitary pleasure. Finally he has to sell his Super-8 camera to buy his train ticket back to Basle. Symbolically devoid of any baggage (he has to borrow a pen and paper to send a telegram to his wife from the station), on the train Paul lets his gaze meet that of a young woman in the seat opposite: though he no longer has a camera, we see her image filmed in Super-8, as if he has wrested back his expressive capacity from the machine into which it had hitherto been alienated. This closing image lends the end of the film an ambivalent tone, leaving it open whether Paul’s internalisation of the machinery of imagemaking is to be read as a reintegration of the active/sensuous and imagining/desiring self, or as an indication that the imaginary constructions in which Paul has mired himself in Lisbon will persist even after the city – and his camera – have been left behind. Whether the young woman’s candid gaze is to be read (whether Paul will read it) as invitation or simply as the gaze of the Other in which Paul can re-encounter himself, and what either of these might mean for the prospect of Paul actually reaching Basle and his wife, remains equally unresolved. Given that the urban environment of Basle, as we briefly glimpse it in the scenes where Paul’s wife receives his letters and films, appears to share some of the qualities of absence that are so pronounced a feature of Paul’s wandering through Lisbon, it also remains an open question whether this urban anomie is after all Paul’s projection or an objective attribute of the contemporary European city.

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Wings of Desire (West Germany, 1987) In Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire, Bruno Ganz plays a very different kind of urban spectator from Paul in In the White City.14 Of the three films discussed in this essay, Wings of Desire is obviously by far the most ‘publicly’ oriented, concerned as it partly is with the legacy of World War II in its most densely impacted urban cynosure, Berlin. Moreover, its depiction of a fragmented, atomised and heterogeneous urban landscape in which earlier mythic narratives are explicitly disempowered has allowed the film to be frequently allied with other landmarks of cinematic postmodernism such as Blade Runner. Yet the elliptical and poetic strategies Wenders and his co-scenarist, Peter Handke, adopt to engage with these concerns once again indicate the very different tenor with which European cinematic cityscapes are rendered in the 1980s, compared to their transatlantic counterparts. Narration and/as/or action are the dialectical poles on which Wings of Desire turns. Berlin is represented as definitively beyond (omniscient) narration: frenetic montage sequences at accelerated speeds suggest an inexhaustible urban flux (one that will exhaust the spectator long before s/he has penetrated more than a fraction into its infinite diversity). The endless streams of random incident noted by the recording angels never crystallise into narrative form, but remain fragments snatched from the flow of time and suspended in the angels’ quizzical, timeless gaze. The spectator intensely experiences the lack of a centred narrative in the first fifteen minutes, as each Berliner upon which the camera’s disembodied gaze alights briefly promises to become a character through whom the city’s vast mosaic can be focalised, but quickly disappoints and vanishes from the frame, never to return. Equally, however, Berlin may be seen as suffering from a surfeit of narrative, crushed beneath the weight of a hi/story it cannot escape. The arrival of the descended angel Peter Falk to star in a mystery movie set in 1945 Berlin sees him surrounded by costumed SS men, Hitler Youth, and Jews emblazoned with the yellow star awaiting deportation. The only story Berlin can tell, or that can be told about Berlin – so it appears in 1987 at least – is the story that begins with Hitler and ends, as so many of the journeys undertaken in Wings of Desire end, at the Wall (‘it’s impossible to get lost in Berlin’, as a line of dialogue has it, ‘because you can always 14 By an odd coincidence, Ganz was also Roeg’s first choice to play Alex Linden in Bad Timing.


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find the Wall’). This is a near-paradox, a narrative of absolute stasis whose inability to progress threatens the annihilation of narrative altogether: so at least fears the itinerant bard Homer, dragging his tired old body up the steps of the central library and through the weed-strewn wasteland that has swallowed up the pre-war Potsdamer Platz. In this context, the camera’s indifferent, universal gaze in the opening of the film acquires a more ambivalent dimension. For Graf the identification of the angel’s eye with the camera’s point of view, and their activity of observing, recording and retelling, make the angels in Wings of Desire personifications of a cinematic ideal: a cinema based on the undiscriminating observation of all kinds of phenomena, in the world of physical appearance, the capturing of the secret of existence in photographic images, and the preservation of these images for the future (2002, 116).

But what appeared at the start of the film to be a celebration of the Hericlitean flux of the cityscape is revealed as the atomised reality of a culture disempowered from rendering itself in the shaping, enslaving forms of shared narratives by the catastrophic failure of an ideological master narrative (Nazism): a failure that has petrified the future in the abject shards of its own disaster. Narrative of the kind represented by Falk’s film is not narrative at all but the eternal traumatic return of dead time. The crisis of movement at the level of narrative finds its objective correlative in the Wall, which stymies and frustrates the natural flow and passage of urban transit. Moreover, if the angelic perspective is indeed to be identified with that of an idealised camera-eye, it appears that its infinitely serial pre-/procession of images is itself implicated in these recursive patterns by its incapacity or refusal of meaningful discrimination. In this sense, as David Harvey notes (1989, 314), realigning the photographic image with the telling of stories in real time becomes the film’s central preoccupation. The narrative device through which this abstract idea is explored is of course the angel Damiel’s increasingly urgent desire to step out of the angelic sphere of pure phenomena for participation in mortal experience. Thus Damiel’s abandonment of the immortal but futile angelic domain for the fast-flowing River of Time (a recurrent metaphor in the film, both spoken and visual), symbolically undertaken from the no-man’s-land behind the Wall, and his love of the trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), represents the reintegration of the insistent present-tense of contemporary human consciousness with a historical sensibility that expands but does not overpower it – a ‘reunification’ conceivable in 1987

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only in the terms of fantasy, or perhaps of art. Alongside the library and the studio where Falk’s wartime epic is shooting, two other prominent venues revisited by the film’s characters at different times are the circus and the nightclub where Australian poet-rocker-seer Nick Cave performs with his band The Bad Seeds. Whereas, as we have seen, the first two are compromised as possible vehicles of narrative regeneration by the dead weight of history, the other two, sites of a more informal, ephemeral and interactional performative mode, seem to offer glimpses of a transcendence of the petrified forms of history fixed in books or through the distributive mechanisms of commercial narrative cinema. They offer a renewal of sorts of the oral tradition embodied by Homer – but which he fears has been extinguished – and express an idea of urban experience quite different from, even at odds with, either the monumental architectural presences that so often bespeak the city (the film famously opens with Damiel standing atop Berlin’s most famous and tragically conflicted landmark, the Brandenburg Gate) or the institutionalised processes of historical inscription, commemoration, and distortion represented by the cumbersome apparatuses of the movie set. In their different ways, the rock show and the circus act open up narrative prospects without defining or confining them; they are numinous, suggestive and epiphanic rather than programmatic or didactic; and they occupy distinctively urban – interstitial, transient – spaces. It is as if through such performances the multiplicitous micro-narratives dispersed across the fabric of the city, briefly glimpsed through the angels’ agency at the start of the film, achieve a provisional, unstable – and, as the circus’ dispersal reminds us, concomitantly vulnerable – coherence that renders them at least partly perceptible and communicable to others, if only for their own duration. Even such delimited forms of collective narration are in Wings of Desire hardly achievable on any larger scale than the first person (or, in the film’s ultra-romantic conclusion, in that sublimated oneness constituted by the couple): a striking feature of the crowds at the two Nick Cave shows featured in the film is their rapt isolation from one another, as if the echoes of Berlin’s unmasterable past prohibit the usual delirious, surging, fist-pumping collectivity of the rock audience. In this sense, Wings of Desire offers a distinctively European rejoinder to the versions of the postmodern metropolis popularised by Blade Runner and its ilk: with Europe’s urban apocalypse a fact of living memory rather than a projection of paranoid fantasy, in place of large-scale realisations of the dystopic metropolis the city is rendered as unavoidably fragmentary and


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individuated. Such intensified individuation is not primarily depicted in terms of commodification and urban entropy, but at least in part as valid, even necessary, rejoinder to the disasters of previous master narratives. The danger of this condition is the kind of neurotic enervation that in different ways grips Alex Linden in Bad Timing and Paul in In the White City: a solipsistic retreat from the social, or even the interpersonal, that renders the city merely a mindscape and incapacitates any possibility of trans-individual engagement with the historical and (in all senses) political realities that continue to inhere in the city. Wings of Desire tentatively suggests that it may be possible to construct informal, and inevitably fragile, versions of the urban that go beyond the purely individualistic to elicit some sense of place for the subject through the forms of narrative – while consciously forgoing any attempt to produce authoritative or definitive visions of the city. To some extent, Wenders’ vision in Wings of Desire – predicated on the assumption of Berlin’s paralysing historical petrifaction – has been ironically countered by the unforeseeable thaw, just two years after the film’s release, that restored both historical narration on the largest possible scheme and jubilant collective appropriations of the city’s traumatised spaces. A further irony is that in the eyes of many progressive cultural figures in post-reunification Germany, the terms on which Berlin has been sutured back into history have been precisely those of commodification, market orientation and Americanisation (the latter of course a key theme in Wenders’ earlier films in particular) that Berlin had been enabled to resist precisely through the temporal and narrative afflictions depicted in Wings of Desire. Thus the film now stands as a historical document in its own right, of a moment when European urban identities sought a distinctive path for rendering the city both humanly apprehensible and historically meaningful at a trans-individual level – a moment which the restoration of history’s dynamic momentum has consigned to the past.

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References Barber, Stephen. 2002. Projected Cities: Cinema and Urban Space. London: Reaktion. Bruno, Giuliana. 1987. Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner. October 41: 61-74. Dimendberg, Edward. 2004. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Graf, Alexander. 2002. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway. London: Wallflower. Gunning, Tom. 1990. The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. T. Elsaesser, 5662. London: BFI. SSS. 1995. An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator. In Viewing Positions, ed. L. Williams, 114-133. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Izod, John. 1992. The Films of Nicolas Roeg: Myth and Mind. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. King, Geoff. 2000. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. London: I. B. Tauris. Kirby, Lynne. 1997. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Langford, Barry. 2005. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lanza, Joseph. 1989. Fragile Geometry: The Films, Philosophy and Misadventures of Nicolas Roeg. New York: PAJ. Soja, Edward. 1988. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Wenders, Wim. 1997. The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations. London: Faber&Faber.


ONCE IN TV’S ROYAL CITY: TELEVISION COVERAGE OF ROYAL MEDIA EVENTS

Hugh O’Donnell

Abstract This article is based on an analysis of television coverage of seven very high-profile recent royal events across Western Europe: six weddings (in Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark) as well as the funeral of Princess Diana. Using the concepts of megaevent, media event and liminal event, it examines how official narratives attempt to transform the city into a magical space characterised by a fusion of past and present, a process accompanied by the often highly filmic presentation of ‘ancient’ buildings (cathedrals, town halls, palaces etc.) and the careful avoidance of inappropriate localities and symbols. It also examines the increasing trend towards marketing such cities televisually as desirable tourist locations. The article finishes by arguing that, alongside this official narrative of the city as a site of material and symbolic authority, the crowd present at such events often transforms them in turn into a site of carnival, thereby raising questions as to the ideological efficacy of that narrative. Introduction In their current configuration, large-scale royal events – at least as far as Western Europe is concerned – are simultaneously mega-events, media events and liminal events. In all three modalities television coverage of such events constructs complex and conflicted cityscapes. These cityscapes have both an external and an internal material dimension, but

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also, as I will demonstrate below, an additional symbolic dimension where internal and external, past and present fuse. This study is based on a detailed analysis of television coverage of the funeral of Princess Diana in London on 6 September 1997, and also of seven royal weddings which took place in the following European cities on the dates indicated: Seville, 18 March 1995; Barcelona, 4 October 1997; Brussels, 4 December 1999; Oslo, 25 August 2001; Amsterdam, 2 February 2002; Copenhagen, 14 May 2004; Madrid, 22 May 2004. Despite monarchy’s origins in feudalism, all the monarchies mentioned here (with the exception of the British monarchy) are incessantly constructed within their respective societies as signifiers of political modernity (for a detailed analysis see Blain and O’Donnell 2003). But that modernity is one rooted in a certain vision of the continuing authority of the past. How such a past is reconstituted varies, of course, as explained in more detail below. Whatever the differences, however, these events are all subsumed within a largely uniform narrative of ancestral sovereignty flowing from the past to the present and simultaneously suffusing reconfigured and symbolically transformed cityscapes. A typology of events We have been really cynical in this respect (…). We have given a great deal of thought to the television viewers, so that they can have a great experience. Einar Sandbæk, Head of Design: Festival Elements, on the Norwegian channel TV2, 25 August 2001.

While the events under consideration here do not share all the characteristics proposed by Roche (2000) as defining ‘mega-events’ – basing his analysis primarily on Expos and Olympics, he has predominantly in mind very large-scale international events occurring at predictable intervals, having a strong commercial dimension and moving from city to city often on the basis of a bidding process – the points of contact are none the less many and obvious. Their ‘mega-ness’ is inescapable, at least on a national scale: they are invariably a leading topic in the national media for some time in advance, on the day of the event itself they dominate these media entirely, and they can, if to varying degrees, develop an international audience. Like Roche’s mega-events, their material location is always a city, they attract an international (if limited) ‘cast’ and they are clearly seen by the organisers

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as an opportunity to present a particular view of what might loosely be called the ‘host country’ both to its own inhabitants and to an international audience, the cityscape being a key, perhaps the key element of that view. The notion of the media event as developed by Dayan and Katz (1992) is crucial to any understanding of television coverage of royal events. For these authors media events interrupt the flow of normal television programming to the extent of displacing it altogether, they are by definition live and attract and enthral very large audiences, and though they are not initiated by television itself television is closely and centrally involved in how they will be mediated to their very sizeable publics: they are thus not merely televised events, but ‘television events’ (54). Within this general framework, the experience offered to the television viewer is often a paramount design consideration. The constantly increasing protagonism of television in such events has been one of the most notable developments of the last decade and plays a defining role in the (re)constitution of the city. During the 2001 Oslo wedding a camera mounted in the bridal car allowed the viewers to see the royal couple’s every gesture as they travelled from the cathedral to the Royal Palace, while another placed above and behind them gave their view of the crowd as they waved from the palace balcony. Computer graphics have also been pressed into service. In May 2004 viewers of the Danish channel TV2 were treated to an extremely realistic computer simulation of what it would be like to drive up the cobbled avenue to Fredensborg Castle to join the official guests for the evening reception. This participants’ point-of-view reached what was surely its peak during the Madrid wedding of May 2004 when, as the bride moved slowly up the aisle of the Catedral de la Almudena, a mobile camera advancing ahead of her relayed to the viewers the visual experience of walking towards the altar as seen from the point of view of the bride herself. The concept of the ‘liminal event’ is one borrowed from anthropology. It was first elaborated by Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his seminal work The Rites of Passage (1960), and was subsequently taken up by Victor Turner (1995), who developed the idea beyond the study of African or Indian societies to events such as the great hippy ‘happenings’ of nineteen-sixties America. For both these writers liminality occurs when a particular threshold (limen in Latin) is crossed during rites of passage – a phase which for both is always crucially linked with the concept of transformation – a threshold beyond

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which those present move ‘from one cosmic or social world to another’ (van Gennep 1960, 10). In this altered state the normal rules relating to social positions no longer apply, indeed differentiated social positions melt away into forms of spontaneous solidarity which they call ‘communitas’: as Turner puts it, liminality is the dominant characteristic of ‘units of space and time in which behaviour and symbolism are momentarily enfranchised from the norms and values that govern the public lives of incumbents of structural positions’ (1995, 166). As we shall see, all of these elements – transformation, the momentary suspension of roles and rules, communitas – are key features of the large-scale royal media event. However, what places these events to some extent outside canonical notions of liminality – and which makes them, therefore, using Turner’s vocabulary, perhaps more ‘liminoid’ than ‘liminal’ (xi) – is that in its classical operation liminality affects all those concerned in the rite, whereas in royal events structure (hierarchy) remains visibly, indeed ostentatiously present in the reconfigured royal cityscape. Under the cobbles ... the past! Your marriage introduces a dynastic line into the thousand-year history of the Spanish monarchy, which is intimately linked to the best and most glorious past of the peoples of Spain. Cardinal Archbishop Antonio M. Rouco Varela to Crown Prince Felipe of Spain and Letizia Ortiz, 22 May 2004.

The area in which large-scale royal events differ most obviously from Roche’s mega-events is in their relationship with modernity. For Roche mega-events: typically involve non-religious/secular values, ideologies and principles of organisation connected with ‘Western civilisation’ including ‘techno-rationalism’ (positive roles for science and technology), capitalism, universalistic humanism, urbanism and transnational levels of organisation of communications and transport (2000, 9).

While it would be incorrect to say that such elements were entirely missing – I return to some recent developments below – they are not in any sense foregrounded. In fact the dominant ‘time orientation’ of royal events is invariably the past (see Dayan and Katz 1992, 35), a narrative which has powerful effects on both the real and mediated cityscape.


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All the events listed in the introduction have taken place in large, modern metropolises. However, while classical mega-events produce a material transformation of the city, the symbolic transformation achieved through the liminality of royal occasion returns the city to an (entirely fictitious) earlier version of itself signifying the permanence and continuity of national state power: in an internationalising world nothing remains as national in its purview as monarchy. This ‘magic’ itself is, of course, entirely modern in origin, and relies heavily on the power of state or city authorities to close off streets normally packed with traffic so that they can be momentarily occupied by a cast from bygone days: men on horseback wearing imperial livery accompanying in many cases carriages likewise drawn by horses. The relentless focus on pastness can lead to organisational decisions which at times border on the comic. Thus when, during the Danish wedding, the bridal party left Copenhagen Cathedral to make its way through the old part of town – a series of narrow (and normally pedestrian-only) streets known collectively as Strøget – to the royal residence of Amalienborg, it travelled briefly along H. C. Andersen Boulevard, a large and generally unexceptional thoroughfare with no obvious visual links with the past. On reaching this street the entire procession sped up considerably, slowing down again only on entering Strøget. The kind of pastness re-enacted varies, of course, as a function of the discourses of monarchy and history circulating in the country in question as well as, though to a much lesser extent, of the political colour of the government in power. Television coverage of Diana’s funeral in the UK bore at least to some extent the imprint of New Labour’s recent election victory (see Blain and O’Donnell 2003, 184-86), though in general terms such events are seen as ritual occasions on which politicians of all hues (with very few exceptions) come together to celebrate the royal nation and the sovereignty (of which they are, of course, collective beneficiaries) which flows from it. Thus the Scandinavian weddings, working within a broad social-democratic discourse which, despite significant societal change (see, for example, Olsen 2005), continues to be a privileged ideological reference point, offered a low-key and even understated narrative of whence they have come, a small-scale pastness of intimate architecture and (in the Danish case) narrow cobbled streets. The Spanish weddings, on the other hand, have attempted to re-invigorate an imperial vision of Spain’s former greatness alongside their claim to modernity, with Madrid in particular

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playing a resolutely monumental card: ‘Monumentality’, writes Lefebvre, ‘transcends death (…) As both appearance and reality, this transcendence embeds itself in the monument as its irreducible foundation’ (1998, 221). Thus the Madrid wedding not only chose the imposing Catedral de la Almudena for the ceremony itself, but also took the wedding procession past the city’s most famous museums and other important public buildings. The large ‘M’ decorating the pennants visible everywhere was, we were told, based on a design from the Enlightenment, and several of the buildings of the Gran Vía were ‘wrapped’ in reproductions of paintings by Velázquez and Goya. Whatever the inflection, however, the most emblematic visual index of pastness is everywhere the cobblestone. No televised royal wedding is complete without it. While for the contestatory students of Paris in 1968 cobblestones were the gateway to emancipatory imagination – sous les pavés… la mer! (beneath the cobbles… the sea!) – in the magical liminality of royal events they are the portal through which the authority of the past infuses the present. The visual production of such a discourse of pastness frequently involves television imagery of almost filmic quality. Dizzying views of the bride and groom walking down the aisle taken from towering coigns of vantage on the ceiling of lofty cathedrals (the views in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk were particularly spectacular) and helicopter flyovers of medieval town centres or monumental districts are now absolutely routine, but more recent developments include often moving shots taken from behind statues on pillars or buildings hundreds of feet above street level, or close-ups of bells pealing taken from within the bell towers. Even a relatively crusty viewer such as myself cannot fail to find such views breathtaking in their conception and execution. The internal dimension of this magical cityscape involves the close and lingering attention given to the artistic and architectural riches to be found inside cathedrals, stately banqueting halls and so on. The most striking example of this took place during the Seville wedding of 1995 – directed for television by Spanish film-maker Pilar Miró – when in a single, uninterrupted shot lasting almost three minutes the camera slowly moved its way up one side of the reredos, along the top and back down the other side. Throughout this entire shot the whole of the screen was filled with the most lavish and intricate gold-plated baroque designs. This intense focus on exuberant religious iconography has been a standard element of the Spanish weddings ever since. It has not, of course, been a feature of Protestant ceremonies elsewhere, which have been much more


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reserved in their references to statuary, but these have also included cameras attached to ceilings or moving up and down stone columns, shots of stained-glass windows and so on. The pastness is everywhere, infusing the regalia of the groom and other male protagonists (who occasionally carry swords), and even the figure of the bride, whose dress is more often than not ‘inspired’ by that worn by an earlier monarch. Indeed, in proclaiming the fusion of past and present the importance of fashion as a mobile element of the reconfigured cityscape cannot be overstated. If we categorise the main actors involved as (1) the buildings and general cityscape (2) the wedding party in all its variety, and (3) the ‘crowd’ present on the streets, a strict (and gendered) division of labour emerges. There is a perfectly clear, indeed if anything overstated, visual and discursive link between the self-consciously anachronistic uniforms of the leading men and the buildings and areas of the city chosen for the staging of the event, translated, in all senses of the word, into a fictive past. In this way the men represent not only the continuation of the past in the present, but also the permanence of hierarchy as expressed by the authority discursively inscribed in the buildings and in their uniforms. The transformation of the streets into traffic-free medieval lanes or Enlightenment boulevards simultaneously allows them to provide an unexpected stage for female attire normally limited to grandiose interiors. These highly elegant fashions are the subject of intense comment and even analysis by the television commentators (and by the media in general), to the extent that it is now increasingly common for there to be a fashion expert on the studio team precisely for this purpose. Interviews with female members of the crowd revolve relentlessly around this topic. In this way the female guests, following a pattern identified long ago by anthropologists in relation to ritual processes in general, mediate communitas while the men embody structure (see Turner 1995, 117). The intrusion/extrusion of the ‘unwanted’ present As Crown Prince and Princess you will take forward the Danish monarchy and with it the Danish model of society which we believe it is crucially important to maintain and renew in a time marked by internationalisation and globalisation. Bishop Erik Norman Svendsen to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Mary Donaldson, 14 May 2004.

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For all its undoubted power and the impressive range of resources at its disposal, the magical reconstitution of the past in the present is of course vulnerable to many intrusions arising simply from the sheer stubbornness of the physical elements of the modern cityscape. The metropolises which host these royal events are not just large modern cities, they are located within and deeply penetrated by the international capitalist system with its panoply of global brands and logos (see Klein 2001). Thus, as the Danish royal couple made their way through the cobbled streets which make up Strøget their procession passed in front of branches of (among many others) Orange, United Colors of Benetton, Louis Vuitton and Burger King. While the commentators had willingly provided details regarding the various ‘historical’ sites featuring along the route (sixteenthcentury churches, Copenhagen’s first cinema and so on) these bridgeheads of transnational capital were passed over in silence. This tension provides on occasion some of the most unintentionally entertaining moments of these events. During the Copenhagen wedding, for instance, the cameras panned excitedly over crowds waving Danish and Australian flags (the bride was Australian), at one point zooming in on a little boy sitting on his father’s shoulders enthusiastically waving a flag, only to reveal that it was a McDonald’s flag. In Oslo a large balloon in the shape of a Tellytubby with the words ‘I love you’ written on it in English floated up slowly in front of the camera. But if the official narrative remains vulnerable in relation to signs of globalising capital, it is much more successful at silencing other domestic failures. All large metropolises have their areas of deprivation characterised by substandard housing, poor amenities and a generalised semiosis of want. These areas are nowhere to be seen, resolutely avoided by the organisers, designers and commentators. As the Danish procession passed through Amagertorv, a young man pulled open his jacket revealing a tee-shirt bearing the words ‘Save Christiania’1, eliciting no acknowledgement whatsoever from the commentators. Past and present can fuse only on the fairy-tale terrain of picturesque or monumental once-ness.

1 Christiania is an illegal squatter settlement dating from the nineteen-seventies. See http://christiania.org/tale1/main/


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Selling the royal city Some people have complained about the amount of money it has cost to decorate Madrid for this wedding, but the Town Hall has always argued that this wedding would contribute to the promotion of the city so they wanted to offer the best image possible (…) How many adverts would have been needed to make Madrid as well known around the world as is happening at this wedding? Xavier Coral, on the Catalan channel TV3, 22 May 2004.

A quite striking change which has taken place over the last ten years or so – and one which reveals important structural similarities between royal events and mega-events as more generally defined – has been the increasing penetration of the mediated version of the event by tourist discourse. As Roche argues: One of the main impacts (…) mega-events are assumed to have on their host cities is in terms of the short- and long-term economic impact of the event on the flow of tourists into the city, and also the long-term cultural impact of the event on the image of the city nationally and internationally by potential tourists and private sector decision-makers and investors (2000, 140).

What brought the presence of such a discourse most forcefully to my awareness was my analysis of Diana’s funeral in 1997, followed quickly by the second Spanish wedding less than a month later. In total I watched eight different televised versions of Diana’s funeral, from the UK, the USA, Norway and Sweden. As might be expected, the visual narrative was substantially the same on all eight channels, with only very minor variations on what we might call the ‘periphery’ of the event. Beyond that, however, the description of the route taken by the funeral procession was remarkably consistent wherever I looked: more or less everyone informed me how many panes of glass Crystal Palace contained, for example, which was the first street in London to have public lighting, when Henry VIII appropriated Hyde Park for hunting, when Westminster Cathedral had been built and so on. What eventually became clear was that, in exactly the same way as happens in other mega-events (see Puijk 1997, 31), the organisers had provided television broadcasters throughout the world with detailed information on the route. The script built around this information was to all intents and purposes a tourist script, a point specifically reflected in CBS commentary with veteran reporter Dan Rather pointing out buildings which, he suggested, American viewers who had already visited London would recog-

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nise, and others that anyone intending to go there should include in their itinerary. The tourist discourse in the Spanish wedding in Barcelona in October 1997 made little attempt to disguise itself in any way. Domestic coverage started early in the morning, with the move to international feed taking place perhaps an hour before the ceremony began. Spanish viewers were no doubt surprised to see the shots of minor notables arriving at Barcelona Cathedral interrupted without warning by a long title sequence proclaiming the architectural wonders of the city, focusing heavily on the works of Antoni Gaudí. Later a relatively ‘dead’ period in the ceremonial (the long list of witnesses were signing the official documents) was filled with a lengthy flyover of well-known tourist areas of the city, its unifying motifs being ‘the Gothic, the Modernist and the Sea’. Since then tourist discourse has become a more or less standard component of television coverage of all the royal events covered in this study. During the Belgian royal wedding in 1999 a member of the Brussels Tourist Board joined the studio team to openly promote the city as a ‘royal city’. Coverage of the Danish wedding in 2004 contained many references to the ‘sights’ in the ‘picturesque’ old part of town. In Madrid, as the bridal procession passed in front of the Prado – Madrid and Spain’s most important museum – the angle of the shot changed so that viewers could see the imposing main entrance to the building (a special camera had, of course, been located precisely there in order to make such a shot possible). Not only the routes chosen for the procession but the by now obligatory helicopter shots of the ‘tourist’ part of town must also be seen as parts of the discourse. In the state-sponsored transformation of the city, the fusion of past and present offers a powerful opportunity for increased capital accumulation. The persistence of carnival It’s a postmodern festival (…) there’s a popular festival atmosphere, it’s almost carnivalesque. Art Historian Tommy Sørbø on the Norwegian channel NRK1, 25 August 2001.

The official narrative of royal events is beyond any doubt one of national unity, indeed, national ‘communitas’ (for a detailed argument based on the analysis of many such events see Blain and O’Donnell, 2003). The mode of address and narrative assumptions of both official and television sources take for granted that the public will participate in this sense of


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renewed national cohesion. But is this actually the case? In an attempt to theorise audience behaviour during large-scale royal events, I intend to concentrate initially on Diana’s funeral, precisely because it is a funeral rather than a wedding, and then move on to the weddings. In their taxonomy of media events Dayan and Katz (1992, 26) conflate weddings and funerals into the single category of Coronations. My own research over the last ten years has, however, led me to the conclusion that such a conflation is misleading, primarily because this conflation has the unfortunate side effect of eliding important tensions between the organisers’ agenda and the behaviour of the public in situ. In the case of a wedding, cheering and celebration are the order of the day, and it is easy to assume that the behaviour of the public chimes ideologically with the aims of the organisers to the same extent as it does gesturally. In the case of a funeral, however, behaviour which does not correspond to an official discourse and practice of mourning will instantly point to a mismatch between the audience’s agenda and that of the organisers. Were those in attendance at Diana’s funeral procession wholehearted participants in a discourse and practice of grief? The Channel 4 programme The Princess’s People, screened on the first anniversary of the funeral, tells a somewhat different story, one backed up by careful analysis of the televised version of the funeral itself. While the focus of the BBC and ITV cameras was overwhelmingly on the coffin, which was kept in the centre of the screen at all times, with the crowd relegated to the periphery, The Princess’s People focused just as resolutely on those lining the streets, both the evening before the funeral and on the day of the funeral itself. Their footage of the evening before shows a mixture of a party atmosphere in London with people singing loudly and drinking liberally and jostling – at times leading to blows – for the best positions to get the least restricted view of the cortege when it passed. The dominant topic among the crowd the next day had nothing to do with grief, but revolved obsessively around who would get the best view, why some had a better view than others, and so on. The mood was also openly festive, with people laughing and joking, and with enormous hilarity being occasioned by a police horse urinating copiously on the road. In short, on both the eve and the day of the funeral, The Princess’s People showed that at least for significant sections of the crowd the streets of London were not a symbolic site of mourning but a material site of festivity.

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As regards live television coverage of the funeral itself, anyone who makes a minimal effort to resist the television companies’ visual and linguistic narrative can easily ascertain the agenda of the crowd as they run alongside the carriage, jump up and down or climb on each other’s backs or even up lampposts to get a better view. The dominant activity among the crowd was the taking of photographs – at times it is difficult to see the gun carriage through the sea of raised arms holding cameras aloft – not an activity normally associated with a funeral where one genuinely mourns for the deceased. The city as site of carnival is also much in evidence among the crowds at the weddings analysed here. While the official narrative attempts to absorb this atmosphere into the celebration of the wedding, the focus of the crowd is often more on the cameras than on the wedding procession itself. As the Danish procession made its way along Strøget, the crowds in the large open space made up of Nytorv and Gammeltorv surged towards the cameras and waved and cheered, some of them speaking excitedly on their mobile phones, perhaps to people watching out for them at home. Similar scenes were also in evidence in Oslo and Madrid. While scenes such as the above seep into the official narrative of the live event in ways which the organisers cannot control, other retrospective reporting formats (newscasts, current affairs programmes and so on) openly reveal another side to the behaviour of the crowd. Thus in Copenhagen amateur dramatists were shown wandering around dressed in oldfashioned clothes. During the Amsterdam wedding a woman asked if she was enjoying the event enthusiastically replied, ‘Yes, you don’t see a golden carriage every day’, while unofficial bands struck up on the pavements and passers-by danced. I have, of course, no wish to argue that no members of the crowd are co-opted into, or indeed voluntarily opt into the official narrative – these crowds are relatively large and heterogeneous – but even the most desultory examination of the crowd’s behaviour shows that its relationship with the city is not necessarily uniformly that of the organisers. Indeed, we are almost certainly witnessing the dramatised conflict, however fragmentary and polymorphic, between, in the words of Lefebvre, ‘political projects and the obstacles they run into – that is to say those forces that run counter to a given strategy and occasionally succeed in establishing a “counter-space” within a particular space’ (1998, 367). The carnivalesque street space generated spontaneously by the crowd in parallel to the ‘magic’ space aimed for by the organisers is also the only


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arena where contestation or reinscription is tolerated (serious opposition is dealt with summarily by the police), perhaps since the carnivalesque cannot be repressed without simultaneously compromising the magical. Mock weddings among the crowd are commonplace, carried out by fictitious bishops wearing fake robes. Women wear tiaras and even wedding dresses, at times combined with trainers and jesters’ hats. ‘Alternative’ wedding banquets are organised. While this is clearly not full-blown carnival in the medieval sense as described in great detail by Mikhail Bakhtin – in the weakened liminality of modern societies it is simply not possible to assert that the activities of the crowd are, in such moments, ‘outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity’ (Bakhtin 1984, 255) – the city as site of the carnivalesque is none the less there for all to see. This postmodern mixture was in fact summed up by Tommy Sørbø (quoted above) in his analysis of the Oslo wedding: ‘there’s a crossover of high and low, like and unlike and new things with the old (…) today it’s more about fun’. I offer no euphoric conclusions regarding the general (as opposed to local) transformative power of such operations. As de Certeau argues, such ‘tactics’ take place not in their own space, but in the space of a more powerful ‘other’: ‘Lacking its own place, lacking a view of the whole (…) limited by the possibilities of the moment, a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power’ (1984, 38, emphasis in the original). Even so, despite the enormous cost of such events in terms of the huge range of resources involved – much of this cost being borne by the public purse – there are no grounds for any naïve assumption that that crowd invests the cityscape with the meanings proposed by the organisers. On the contrary, there is much evidence to suggest that such events are for them a continuation, however diluted, of the long European tradition of carnival, where the focus is on their own enjoyment and fun. Conclusion ‘At bottom’, writes Michel Foucault, ‘despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king’ (1998, 88-89). Proposing that, in Western Europe,

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we live in societies where power increasingly operates through circuits which lie beyond the formal contours of the law, he argues that the concept of sovereignty remains the linchpin of official discourses of authority. In the television events which royal weddings and funerals have to a very large extent become, the liminality programmed in to the overall design allows the city itself, or, more correctly, carefully chosen parts of it, to become the material site of a ritual re-enactment of that institutionalised power. All the major stakeholders in that power – not only the monarchy itself and the media, but also the political system, the Churches, the military, high culture and, increasingly, powerful players from the world of commerce: all now ex-officio members of the dramatis personae – participate willingly in a call to communitas which is simultaneously a restatement of established authority. Indeed, in the weakened liminality of modernity communitas no longer (momentarily) dissolves structure: on the contrary such rituals, Turner argues, ‘reinforce structure’ (1995, 201). However it would perhaps be more accurate to say that they provide a particular kind of stage – the magically and politically reconfigured cityscape – where structure, and those with a significant stake in it, reinforce their claims to ancestrally legitimated authority. Are such claims taken seriously by those ‘others’ invited to participate in the ritual convocation of communitas? My analysis suggests that more than one cityscape is called into being during such events. Outside the television event (though occasionally infiltrating it) another more carnivalesque cityscape is put in motion where a different kind of communitas altogether is celebrated: one in which established authority is mocked, made little of, challenged and even symbolically subverted.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984 (1965). Rabelais and his World, transl. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Blain, Neil, and Hugh O’Donnell. 2003. Media, Monarchy and Power. Bristol: Intellect. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel. 1998 (1976). The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, transl. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin.


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Klein, Naomi. 2001. No Logo. London: Flamingo. Lefebvre, Henri. 1998 (1974). The Production of Space, transl. Donald NicholsonSmith. Oxford: Blackwell. Olsen, Lars. 2005. Det delte Danmark [Divided Denmark]. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Puijk, Roel. 1997. From Parish Pump to Global Village. In Global Spotlights on Lillehammer, ed. Roel Puijk, 27-58. Luton: University of Luton Press. Roche, Maurice. 2000. Mega-events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1995 (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. van Gennep, Arnold. 1960 (1908). The Rites of Passage, transl. Monica B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.



CARTOONS AND THE COMIC EXPOSURE OF THE EUROPEAN CITY OF CULTURE

Matthew Reason

Abstract Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture in 1990 is widely perceived as an event both marking and precipitating a renaissance in perceptions of the city. As part of a project looking at the long-term legacies of 1990, including the image legacy, this paper uses cartoon depictions of Glasgow’s City of Culture experience as a tool by which to analyse what is now seen across Europe as a landmark cultural regeneration initiative. It argues that the caustic, politically incorrect genre of the cartoon articulates underlying social stereotypes that survive such initiatives and run counter to more mainstream narratives. It describes how the cartoons both enact a comic exposure of Culture City folly and articulate aspects of a city’s self-mythology and urban mindscape. The European City of Culture project was conceived in 1984 with the intention of providing a cultural dimension to the work of the European Community. The first cities to hold the title were an unsurprising roll call of great European cultural centres – Athens, Florence, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris – who all celebrated the year as a marker of their already-apparent cultural importance. The 1990 host city was scheduled to be in the United Kingdom, with the British government holding a competition to decide where should be awarded the title. Nine cities competed – including Bath, Bristol, Cambridge and Edinburgh – with Glasgow receiving the nomination in October 1986. With a very different status and image than previous title-holders, a degree of astonishment accompanied this decision to award Glasgow the

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title. In a way this surprise was appropriate, as those behind Glasgow’s Year of Culture had always perceived it as being about more than the celebration of culture. Instead, Glasgow 1990 was intended to play a role in transforming the image of the city and addressing exactly those perceptions that saw the idea of Glasgow as a cultural city as incongruous. Indeed, not least in terms of its effectiveness in realigning perceptions of the city, Glasgow 1990 is frequently presented as a landmark example of successful culture-led regeneration, much imitated by other post-industrial cities across Europe and radically changing perceptions of the European City of Culture concept. Forming part of a wider examination of media reporting on Glasgow’s City of Culture – carried out by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Cultural Policy Research – this article will briefly explore the context behind the Glasgow bid, particularly regarding what was termed at the time as ‘the image issue’. The focus of the article, however, will be an exploration of cartoons as an indicator or zeitgeist of responses to Glasgow 1990, using their caustic commentary to guide an investigation into unspoken and unreconstructed responses to the city’s image changing initiative. The article will argue that examination of these cartoons reveals underlying prejudices barely articulated in mainstream reporting, prejudices that in displaying fixed and determined representations have a significance beyond the expected and routine presentation of comic caricature and cynicism. This use of cartoons as evidence is not, of course, unproblematic and no straightforward relationships to popular reactions are being claimed. Nonetheless, as a method it has been usefully employed in cultural and historical studies. Douglas, Harte and O’Hara, for example, use cartoons to trace Anglo-Irish relations, stating in their introduction that ‘(p)olitical cartoonists at once reveal and reinscribe prevailing ideologies by reflecting back at us ideas and attitudes which we already hold, but with such piquancy that our beliefs and prejudices may become graphically reinforced or challenged’ (1998, 1). It is in a similar manner that this paper uses cartoons to explore Glasgow’s Year of Culture and reveal perceptions of the city’s urban identity and mindscape. The Image Issue In 1988 Harry Diamond, Glasgow’s Head of Public Relations, stated that ‘less than two decades ago Glasgow was thought of by most outsid-

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ers as Siberia in a kilt’ (1988). This, in short, was the ‘image issue’: Glasgow’s reputation as a dirty, grim, violent city with high unemployment, high poverty and high crime. This reputation was seen as putting off tourists, deterring external investment and driving people and jobs away from the city. Rectifying this was something Glasgow Action, an enterprise organisation of business and council leaders, highlighted as central in any strategy for city development, stressing ‘(t)he need for a significant improvement in Glasgow’s image, without which the full potential of the city as a business centre and visitor destination would not be realised (Glasgow Action 1987, 22). Motivated by such observations, a series of branding and public relation initiatives had been set in place in the 1980s with the purpose of changing external (and internal) perceptions of the city. These initiatives included the founding of a geographically specific Greater Glasgow Tourist Board; the opening of the Burrell Collection; moves to establish the city as a conference destination (including the opening of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre); the hosting of the 1988 UK Garden Festival; and the launch of the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign to realign perceptions of the city. These initiatives did trickle through to affect Glasgow’s external image, with for example the Burrell Collection becoming Scotland’s number one tourist attraction in terms of visitor numbers and bringing many people to Glasgow for the first time. The image of Glasgow had, therefore, already been changing for the better before 1990. Indeed, it is unlikely that the City of Culture title would have been won without the groundwork of previous initiatives. However, despite such movement in perceptions it is clear that negative impressions of Glasgow continued to exist throughout the 1980s and it was this image issue that it was hoped the City of Culture title might directly address. As the documents supporting Glasgow’s bid put it: ‘(The) European City of Culture will have an enormously beneficial effect on the city in continuing the momentum of the regeneration process and by providing the opportunity, perhaps once and for all, of confirming the new image of Glasgow’ (GDC 1986, 6). The intention of the organisers was, therefore, to use the title as a catalyst to continue the reshaping of Glasgow’s image. Today, looking back on Glasgow’s reign as City of Culture, one of the successes of the event does indeed seem to be the ushering in and confirming of a new image of the city. Within recent media commentaries, for example, the

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Year of Culture is frequently recalled as a central event in relation to the city’s general regeneration and specifically in terms of its image transformation. Ian Burrell, for example, describes how the City of Culture transformed Glasgow, with its ‘image of grim tenement housing and razor gangs replaced by a reputation for stylish bars, striking architecture and cutting edge design’ (‘How Glasgow seized its chance to put unsavory image behind it’, The Independent, 5 June 2003). Deyan Sudjic similarly writes that ‘ten years ago (Glasgow) was still stuck with the razor gangs in the badland stereotype’ but in part because of the Year of Culture it is now ‘more confident about itself than it has been for half a century’ (‘Sounding Off’, The Observer, 15 April 2001). Much of this recent consideration of the importance of the Year of Culture in transforming Glasgow’s image has been prompted by coverage of British cities bidding for the 2008 European Capital of Culture title – with Liverpool to be the first UK city to host the award since Glasgow. Such positive perceptions of Glasgow 1990 are not entirely the product of nostalgic reflections, ten-plus years having passed since the event. During 1990 itself, the perceived success of the Year of Culture project as an image altering initiative is clear in the media reporting, most strongly demonstrated in the international coverage the city received. The New York Times, for example, profiled the city under the headline ‘Good Grief its Glasgow’ (20 May 1990); while the Vancouver Sun declared Glasgow had changed ‘From tough industrial town to Cultural Mecca’ (10 March 1990). What such headlines demonstrate is the international media using the Year of Culture as an opportunity to (re)discover Glasgow, and find out, to their partial surprise, that it was not an entirely bad place after all. Amongst such positive reporting, however, there is one forum of media representation where more sceptical perceptions of the City of Culture initiative are in evidence, articulating particular cynicism about the title’s effectiveness in transforming the image of the host city. This scepticism is found in the form of newspaper cartoons, particularly those published in Glasgow during the city’s 1990 experience. Often the newspaper cartoon is the forum in which the most visceral, politically incorrect and least self-censored responses to the news emerge. The attitude articulated in cartoons usually (although not always) reflects the editorial line and prejudices of the paper in which it appears, although often doing so in a manner that peels away layers of politeness


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and equivocation and instead goes for the jugular. As cartoonist Martin Rowson (2001) writes, cartoons present their ‘case in a visceral and immediate way (…) While satire is often described as a kind of corrective surgery, cartooning is corrective surgery carried out with a cudgel.’ In this way, newspaper cartoons seem to express the unspoken, even unthought, gut responses of their authors, and less directly also their papers and readers. By recognising this role of the cartoon in articulating underlying prejudices, it is possible to see how an analysis of the way in which newspaper cartoons report the news of their time can be used as a tool to access a discourse that articulates the most unequivocated attitudes of the media and society at large. Of course, such newspaper cartoons are traditionally caustic, their scepticism consequently coming as little surprise. Nonetheless, this article believes that a closer look at these cartoons allows access to the clichés and prejudices that surrounded Glasgow’s year as City of Culture, expressing beliefs that underwrote and directed aspects of more mainstream coverage. City of Culture Cartoons It was announced in October 1986 that Glasgow had won the United Kingdom’s nomination to be 1990 European City of Culture. Amongst other media coverage, The Times reported this news under the headline ‘Glasgow Proclaimed European Capital of Culture’ declaring that ‘(this) cultural accolade should help sink the city’s misleading but persistent image to the uninitiated as a dark and violent place where the incautious run the risk of being accosted by diminutive toughs in a spit-and-sawdust pub’ (Philip Jacobson, 21 October 1986). Realising the ambitions of those organising the event, this article clearly and straightforwardly positions the City of Culture initiative as an important and valid step in transforming perceptions of Glasgow. The tone of the reporting is respectful and open; its attitude to the news of Glasgow’s success is overwhelmingly positive and welcoming. However, a cartoon accompanying the report communicates a much more visceral response, depicting one Glaswegian man threatening another with the words ‘And I’ll thump anyone who says I’m not cultured’ (Mel Calman, Times, 21 October 1986).

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Figure 1. Mel Calman, 1986. Reproduced courtesy of M. & C. Calman.

The brutal articulation of surprise and incredulity at Glasgow’s nomination as City of Culture that is clearly present in this cartoon throws the entire mainstream report askew. Suddenly it is the image of the ‘uninitiated’ that appears to prevail, rather than that of a new Glasgow. Indeed, the cartoon clearly features exactly one of the ‘diminutive toughs’ that the reporter describes. The cartoon also begins to reveal some of the unspoken attitudes of the report proper, particularly prejudices of nationality and class, which once explicitly demonstrated in the cartoon, also begin to appear in the report itself. The possible image change suggested by the City of Culture title is no longer merely newsworthy, but instead becomes something rooted in underlying and persisting stereotypes. As a result it does not seem too exaggerated to suggest that the cartoon


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speaks for the The Times and for its readers in expressing the gut reaction of incredulity to the news that Glasgow could be considered a City of Culture. An example exhibiting similar references and intentions appeared in the London Mail on Sunday in January 1990, welcoming the start of the Year of Culture with a cartoon depicting a rubbish-strewn Glasgow street, in the background a fight taking place in front of a pub. In the foreground a tramp, bottle in one hand and standing beside a billposter proclaiming ‘Glasgow European City of Culture’, calls out to a welldressed couple: ‘Hey Jimmy! Can ye spare a fiver for a wee drop of Chateau Latour ‘59?’ (JAK, Mail on Sunday, 7 January 1990).

Figure 2. Raymond Jackson, 1990. ‘Hey Jimmy! Can ye spare a fiver for a bottle of Chateau Latour '59?’ Reproduced courtesy of the Mail on Sunday. Image supplied by the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature, University of Kent.

The contrast this cartoon constructs between rough, dangerous and uncultured Glasgow and the tramp’s supposed taste for expensive wine is clear. The juxtaposition suggests that the well-dressed couple, the Chateau Latour and the entire concept of high culture are all equally

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alien to Glasgow. The cartoon appeals directly to its readers’ unspoken prejudices that Glasgow cannot really be a City of Culture and that any change indicated by the title is cosmetic – the posters in the background suggest a high cultural gloss over the city’s popular culture of boxing and football – and as silly as the idea of a tramp drinking a wine well beyond his class. The social implications of this word are intentional, for it is clearly perceptions of class, as much as taste or wealth, which are significant here. The cartoons in the Mail on Sunday and Times articulate external impressions of Glasgow. However, the vast majority of the cartoon responses to the Year of Culture were produced within Scotland and most printed by Glasgow-based newspapers. Indeed, of a total of thirtytwo newspaper cartoons about Glasgow’s Year of Culture published between 1986 and 1991, twenty-four were in papers printed in Glasgow of which eighteen were in the local Glasgow Evening Times. At the same time, however, there is also a striking similarity between the cartoons originating in Glasgow and those appearing in the London papers – the majority communicating a harsh and mocking response to the idea of Glasgow as a City of Culture. Of the total of thirty-two cartoons, twenty are clearly negative in their response, while none are wholeheartedly positive. Indeed, many of the images found in the cartoons printed in the Mail on Sunday and Times – drunkenness, violence, poverty and the juxtaposition of high culture with Glasgow’s indigenous culture – are also found in the cartoons originating within the city. Amongst these images, the repeated and prominent theme is that Glasgow, Glaswegians and high culture simply do not mix. For example, one cartoon features a man falling off his barstool and cursing: ‘Damn! I’ve missed the Burrell Collection again’ (Bob Starrett, The Herald, 23 March 1990). Suggesting that they are invariably too drunk to physically manage to see any culture, this cartoon repeats the stereotype of the alcoholic Glaswegian. The jibe is doubly powerful in this context, as the city’s licensing hours had been extended specifically for the Year of Culture in the attempt to create a European atmosphere of late opening. The cartoon implies that Glaswegians inherently lack the self-control to cope with such opportunities. Again it is asserted that culture (here in terms of the entire idea of European cultural and social sophistication) and Glasgow are simply not compatible.


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Other examples similarly play on the comic consequences of mixing Glaswegians with the idea of culture. For example, one cartoon shows two women at a Year of Culture exhibition, with one saying to the other: ‘Ma Jason got nicked fur daein’ graffiti better than that’ (Gall, Evening Times, 19 April 1990).

Figure 3. Willie Gall, 1990. ‘Ma Jason got nicked fur daein’ graffiti better than that.’ Reproduced courtesy of Willie Gall and the Glasgow Evening Times.

It was, however, the arrival in Glasgow of opera singer Luciano Pavarotti for a City of Culture concert that provoked the greatest flurry of cartoon responses. A gift to cartoonists, the instinctive association of opera with high culture and the high ticket prices of the event starkly contrasted with the dominant perceptions of Glasgow. Just a selection of those published, the following captions come from cartoons responding

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to the Pavarotti concert, each depicting an exchange between two women: ‘Senga McCallum’s jist had a wee boy an’ she’s ca’in’ it Luciano’ (Gall, Evening Times, 14 May 1990); ‘When I telt her me and ma man got tickets fur Pavarotti fur £120, she asked if that was fur a fortnight’ (Macfarlin, Sunday Post, 27 May 1990).

Figure 4. Rod McLeod, 1990.‘I prefer Placido Domingo maself – he’s mair like Sydney Devine.’ Reproduced courtesy of the Daily Record.

Again the comic incongruity of the juxtaposition between Glaswegians and high culture is clear. Again there is an element of mockery of both the ignorance of the characters depicted and a sense of the inherent ridiculousness of the event. Each also appeared in Scottish papers, the majority in papers printed within Glasgow and most in papers where the editorial line was largely supportive of the Year of Culture initiative. This was particularly the case with the Evening Times, hugely supportive of the


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Year of Culture and described in an internal City Council document as ‘the 1990 press flagship’ (Warnock 1991). While the laughter of outsiders, mocking the idea that Glasgow could possibly be a cultural city, is relatively easy to explain as being based on brute prejudices, the mocking humour of cartoons originating in Glasgow is clearly more complicated. Here it is again worth stressing that cartoons are intrinsically satirical and debunking; as Rowson (2001) writes, ‘(o)ppositionism is intrinsic to the cartoonist’s art: a positive cartoon often looks like – often actually is – just propaganda’. Nonetheless, in reading these cartoons some more complicated explanation than mere nihilism must be sought. At a fairly straightforward level this might be that the cartoons simply enact a hyperbolic exposure of stereotypes, one in which the reader is invited to laugh at the use of the stereotype rather than at the stereotype itself. Perhaps more revealing readings, however, can be found in one of two possibilities: the explicitly political rejection; or the more nuanced result of self-mythologising. The Political Rejection of Culture City Glasgow 1990 saw a continued discourse of opposition and disquiet about the Year of Culture initiative, most prominently manifested in the Workers City group. Objections included the argument that money was being wasted on culture that could be better spent elsewhere; that the Year of Culture had nothing to do with typical Glaswegians; and that any changes resulting from the event were cosmetic, masking or undermining the city’s real identity. Farquhar McLay, for example, argued that inner city development and visitor attractions would only serve to further disadvantage people in the poverty ghettoes on the outskirts: In the light of the hard fact as is lived by people at the bottom of the heap in Glasgow, it is difficult to see the ‘culture’ tag as being anything other than a sham accolade to help grease the wheels of the capitalist enterprise and smooth the path for the politicians (McLay 1988, 1).

Located at the height of the divergence between Labour-voting Scotland and a Thatcher government elected by Conservative-voting England (at the 1987 election the number of Scottish Tory MPs had been reduced to ten), much of the Workers City invective was directed toward the central government at Westminster. Perhaps surprisingly, given the Conservative government’s actual ambivalence towards the project and the political origins of the event itself, there existed little or no accompanying

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anti-European political antagonism. This is certainly indicative of the low profile that Europe as a concept actually occupied in Glasgow’s European City of Culture. Reflecting the conceptual origins of the initiative, Glasgow’s initial Year of Culture proposals had included references to the European dimension of the event and its intention to encourage ‘cultural exchange and joint projects with organizations and other countries, particularly Europe’ (Festivals Unit, 1987). Additionally, some moves were made to ensure Glasgow’s presence in other European City of Cultures, particularly in Berlin in 1998. However, during the year itself such ‘celebration of Europe’ was not a prominent theme, and as a result any debate about the European Community project was at a very secondary level. Instead, the political emotions stirred up by Glasgow 1990 were primarily domestic, and it is this perspective that is reflected in cartoons commentating on the event. Although a direct link with the Workers City group is unlikely, a very similar political rejection of the City of Culture project is implicit within many cartoons mocking the event. Most evident is the depiction of high culture as irrelevant to the people of the city: instead of seeing the cartoons as scorning Glaswegians for their cultural ignorance, could they not be asserting the city’s rich popular culture (not least embedded in humour and represented by the cartoons themselves) and mocking the pomposity and inconsequence of high culture? This kind of rejection of the Year of Culture event is clearly demonstrated in the cartoons contained in Kultchir Boak – a special issue of Electric Soup, a Glasgow-based comic similar to the more widely known Viz. Featuring strips such as ‘Artfurartsake – Geezabrekfurfuxake’ and ‘A Night at ra Oppra’, the Kultchir Boak echoes many of the themes found in the newspaper cartoons. Glaswegians are featured throughout as drunken, lazy and violent, their relationship to ‘culture’ being one where art is not only over their heads but entirely outside of their frame of reference and relevancy. However, in the Kultchir Boak it is clear that it is these scatological Glaswegian who are the heroes (or at least antiheroes) and the idea of the Culture City and pretentious art that is scorned and ridiculed. Usually implicit, this perspective is made entirely apparent in a strip titled ‘Escape to Culture City’, with this exchange between the Green family:


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– Paw, whit is Culture? – It’s anythin’ connected wi’ Glesga that ye kin photograph, interview or write aboot. – Aye, an’ if ye kin make souvenirs ooty it – yet a cultural ongtrapanoor. (Quitely 1990)

However, at the same time that the cartoons in Kultchir Boak, and to a certain extent also in the newspapers, demonstrate a radical rejection of the City of Culture concept, it is also possible to see them as perpetuating and promoting a distinctly socially conservative agenda. To an extent, therefore, it might be possible to see the fierce class rejection of the City of Culture project as a form of self-socialisation, affirming change as impossible and asserting the insurmountability of class boundaries. Nonetheless, it is clear that these voices did articulate the responses of a section of Glasgow’s population alienated geographically, economically and culturally from the City of Culture project. It is this cultural alienation that is most relevant here, particularly in terms of the assertion of an alternative, and more ‘real’, Glaswegian popular culture and self-mythology. Glaswegian Self-Mythologising Almost all of the cartoons on Glasgow’s Year of Culture stereotype the Glaswegian man as alcoholic, violent and lazy. One, for example, shows two women and an unshaven, slovenly-dressed and slouching man, with one women saying to the other: ‘In his case ah don’t think a year o’ culture’s goin tae be long enough’ (Gall, Evening Times, 23 October 1990). Clearly the implication here is that one year of culture will not be enough to change Glasgow either. Indeed, it is clear that many of these male comic creations are standing for Glasgow, representing the spirit, physicality and soul of the city. This identification of Glasgow with its citizens (although, significantly, primarily with its male citizens) is a recurring motif in literary and popular representations of the city. It becomes a kind of ‘Mr Glasgow’ tradition found in the legendary Glasgow Hard Man and the traditional respect granted to the working man; in prominent personalities such Pat Lally, Lord Provost and city leader for much of the 1980s and 90s, or the comedian Billy Connolly; and most crucially here in the tramps and drunks featured in the newspaper cartoons.

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With the city identified with its men folk, it is worth looking back at these newspaper cartoons and at the urban identity being communicated. In this context the depictions of the drunkenness and indolence of men in post-industrial Glasgow needs to be seen in the light of the city’s nostalgia for the lost heavy industries, and the representations of male violence re-read in relation to the tradition of the Hard Man. So, while violent and drunk, the men in these cartoons are characteristically witty (the tramp calling for Chateau Latour) and usually make their presence felt on the world either through violence or humour or both. In this way the failings of the men are mitigated by either a degree of self-awareness or at least with the ability to impact (if only violently) on the world. This is particularly the case in Kultchir Boak, where it is the drunken and violent men who disdain culture, not the other way round. These mythologies of masculinity are central to Glasgow’s self-narrative, highlighting the importance within the city of self-mythologising. Like many other industrial cities, Glasgow has always sought to tell and sell its own story, often employing humour to do so. This has included the positive narrative of industrial working class ethics, demonstrated in the pride taken in the epithet ‘second city of the empire’ and the image of the city as the place that built the ships and engines that powered the British Empire. At the same time, however, as Glasgow’s story turned darker in the twentieth century, there has also developed a willingness to adopt the negative epithets and negative narratives as symbols of pride for the city. ‘No Mean City’, taken from the title of the 1935 book by McArthur and Kingsley Long depicting the city as dominated by razor gangs, misogyny and poverty, has been adopted in part as source of wayward pride, emphasising the city’s down to earth nature, its honesty and crucially (in its self-adoption) its sense of humour. In this vein, in the run-up to 1990, Patrick Prior (1989) published a cartoon strip history of Glasgow that embodies this sometimes sentimental but always self-aware willingness to tell the city’s story. Indeed, retelling Glasgow’s story was a feature of many prominent Year of Culture events, including The Ship, a popular narration of Glasgow’s working class, industrial identity, set in an engine shed in Govan. In a very different manner, Alan Grant and Jim Wagner’s 1998 comic book retelling of Humphrey Bogart movies in Glasgow, partly set against the backdrop of the City of Culture, also shows the city’s instinct for a comic self-narration that is both self-mocking and self-aggrandising.


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This conscious awareness of humour as central to Glaswegian identity, alongside the frequent acceptance of and even revelling in negative stereotypes, presents another possible explanation of the content of the cartoons mocking Glasgow’s pretensions to be a European City of Culture. The cartoons are at once mocking and glorifying the stereotypes, demonstrating a macabre humour that is witness to a tenacious pride in being Glaswegian. Psychologists have argued that prejudice plays a role in affirming self-identity (for example Fein and Spencer 2000, 172-90), and indeed, it is possible to see the acts of self-prejudice in these cartoons as performing a self-affirming function. In relation to the City of Culture, the traditional Glasgow mythology of the working man’s city (with the implicit sexism, by exclusion at least, that this image contains) leads to the rejection of 1990 witnessed in the cartoons. The year’s events are perceived as unconnected with the lives of typical citizens, and the cartoons depict Glaswegians as too grounded to be moved by what is portrayed as marketing hype and middle-class pretensions. In his critique of official attempts to redefine Glasgow, Ian Spring describes the attempt to market a new and cultured Glasgow as a mythology, consisting of ‘a system of images, ideas, signifiers that has its own integral, coherent structure, bound together by an ideological glue’ (1990, 46). The difficulty, as Spring identifies, was that Glasgow was already engaged in a much more embedded process of mythologising: one that asserted not high culture, but proclaimed its own popular culture, a ‘real’ culture found not in the City of Culture programme but in the pubs and streets, in humour and music and, of course, in cartoons. A similar tension is identified by Boyle and Hughes, who suggest that attempts to change Glasgow’s image from above – ‘(t)he new image has been constructed from the drawing board and exposed to Glaswegians in a marketing campaign for the year’ – were contested at grass-roots level. This imposed mythology is contrasted with Glasgow’s embedded identity, described as one ‘sedimented down the years in Glasgow’s consciousness’ (Boyle and Hughes 1990, 221). The simple realness of this identity, however, is hugely problematic, as it too depends upon a series of ideas and images bound together by implied and ideologically weighted assumptions. Indeed, Boyle and Hughes themselves reaffirm one of these ideological assumptions when they unreflectively equate the grass-roots with the left-wing political

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movement. This way, Glasgow’s reputation as socialist city becomes more than a political allegiance but also a part of its mythology – as Seán Damer writes, ‘Glasgow was a robustly socialist city. Its people actually believed in all the stuff about the Red Clyde’ (1990, 5). Although not constructed top-down, this embedded identity is at least partially consciously constructed through popular representations in humour, literature, storytelling and cartoons, which together construct the psychological mindscape of Glasgow and the conceptualisation of the city within the imagination. Additionally, if a ‘mindscape’ details the imaginative envisioning of place, then the continual assertion and retelling of Glasgow’s autobiography becomes a mindscape in its own right – the psychology of the city and its people becoming that of self-biography and self-narrative. Indeed, while the City of Culture project was being rejected in political terms by left-wing groups and commentators, it is possible to suggest that a parallel narrative was being adopted within the city, where the Year of Culture becomes another element in the myth of Glasgow’s tenacity and ability to reinvent itself in the face of adversity. This possibility is presented, for example, in The Evil Doers, a play by Chris Hannan (1991) set in Glasgow against the backdrop of the Year of Culture. Here the hero renames himself ‘Danny Glasgow’, setting himself up as a tourist guide, ‘cultural ongtrapanoor’ and proselytiser for the new city. Inevitably not unproblematic, this new Mr Glasgow sets up a series of contrasts between the real and unreal, between surface presentation and underlying truth, that presents a complex and layered discourse about the changing self-identity and mindscape of Glasgow. Similarly, perhaps rather than an outright rejection of the new Glasgow, it is a pugnacious willingness to write its own narrative that the Times cartoon is hinting at – ‘and I’ll thump anyone who says I’m not cultured’. Post-script It might be easy to dismiss these cartoons as mere cartoons, by definition driven to caricature, cynicism and satire. It would be surprising if they did not set out to mock and debunk Glasgow’s Year of Culture. However, by demonstrating how the cartoons are rooted in a whole series of deeply seated narratives of image and identity it becomes clear that their message cannot be so easily dismissed. Clearly the cartoons do present representations of the city that have an enduring, if not determined,


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significance – becoming fixed points around which the more rapidly changing slogans and self-conscious re-branding exercises are forced to circulate.

Figure 5. Robert Thompson, 2003. Reproduced courtesy of The Observer.

Whether there is any direct relationship between these cartoons and popular perceptions of the city is of course open to debate. However, demonstrating the tenacity of such negative images is a cartoon that appeared in the The Observer in June 2003, alongside a report of Liverpool winning the nomination to be European Capital of Culture 2008. It shows two men, marked as stereotypical Scousers by their trainers, shell-suits and permed hair. One is holding a placard reading ‘Liverpool City of Culture’, the other is wearing a tie and saying: ‘Oi Terry, I’ve decided to start wearing a tie with my shell suit’ (Robert Thompson, The Observer, 8 June 2003). This cartoon parallels almost identically the hu-

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mour and message of that which appeared in the The Times seventeen years before; an echo of Glasgow’s experience that casts doubt on the effectiveness of such large-scale and centralised initiatives in transforming underlying social mindscapes.

References Boyle, Mark and George Hughes. 1991. The Politics of the Representation of the ‘Real’: Discourses from the Left on Glasgow’s Role as European City of Culture. Area 23, no. 3: 217-80. Damer, Seán. 1990. Glasgow: Going for a Song. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Diamond, Harry. 1988. Less than two decades ago… City of Glasgow Public Relations Department. Unpublished manuscript. Douglas, Roy, Liam Harte, and Jim O’Hara. 1998. Drawing Conclusions: A Cartoon History of Anglo-Irish Relations 1798-1998. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Fein, Steven and Steven J. Spencer. 2000. Prejudice as Self-Image Maintenance: Affirming the Self Through Derogating Others. In Stereotypes and Prejudice: Essential Readings, ed. Charles Stangor, 172-90. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Festivals Unit (Glasgow District Council). 1987. Glasgow: European City of Culture 1990. Press information sheet. Glasgow Action. 1987. Glasgow Action: The First Steps. June 1987. Glasgow District Council (GDC). 1986. European City of Culture 1990: Supplementary Submission. Unpublished document. Glasgow Print Studio. 1979. The Scottish Cartoonists: This Should Be a Laugh. Glasgow: Elm Tree Books. Grant, Alan, John Wagner, and Robin Smith. 1998. The Bogey Man. London: John Brown. Hannan, Chris. 1991. The Evil Doers & The Baby. London: Nick Hern Books. McLay, Farquhar, ed. 1988. Workers City: The Real Glasgow Stands Up. Glasgow: Clydeside Press. Prior, Patrick. 1989. Could This be Thistle’s Year? Artwork by Robert McWilliam. Glasgow: Scotrun. Quitely, Frank. 1990. The Greens: Escape to Culture City. Electric Soup Issue 3. Kultchir Boak. Rowson, Martin. 2001. We Are the True Outsiders of Journalism. British Journalism Review 12, no. 1: 29-37. www.bjr.org.uk/data/2001/no1_rowson.htm. Spring, Ian. 1990. Phantom Village: The Myth of the New Glasgow. Edinburgh: Polygon. Warnock, Sam. 1991. A Statistical Analysis of UK Press Cuttings on Glasgow 1990 Cultural Capital of Europe. Glasgow City Council, Festivals Unit. Unpublished Document.


DRIFTING BRIDGES: SEMANTIC CHANGES OF THE BRIDGE METAPHOR IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BUDAPEST

Levente Polyák

Abstract Symbolic buildings are defining elements of European cityscapes. Cities are often grasped and imagined through these buildings, and continue to be represented by them, even when their meanings are completely transformed. This transformation of meaning is obvious in the case of buildings with a strong political connotation. In the case of buildings that are not explicitly politically charged, it is, however, a more complex process, mobilised by different, though interwoven discourses of the city, opinions, wishes and representations, of which only a part can be explained in the strictly defined political dimension. In this article I will demonstrate how the meaning of such distinguished symbols of Budapest as the Chain Bridge and the Elisabeth Bridge have changed over the recent decades, and how the role of the ‘symbol of the city’ has drifted from one bridge to the other, according to the actual political and social context. In Search of an Identity From the late 1990s, when Hungary’s entrance into the European Union was placed on the agenda, Budapest’s status in Europe and particularly in Central Europe has been debated intensely. At the beginning of that decade, city leaders had had ambitious ideas about what roles Budapest could play: it could be a financial, conference or intellectual centre of Central Europe, a gate city or a bridge connecting Northeast Europe and the Balkans with Western countries. Ten years later, it became evident that the majority of these hopes had been in vain. Other big cities of the

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region, Warsaw and Prague, seemed to have done better in the competition of cities; Budapest has had to redefine its plans. Critics of recent urban policies in Budapest above all blame local communication strategies, judging them one-sided, excluding the possibility of dialogue and creating an iconology which is shaped by fairly recognisable political interests, but which loses its meaning and makes an often anachronistic impression in an international context. According to this view, the city has fitfully clung to its hundred-year-old image, and there is a lack of new, emblematic buildings that could make new ways of identification possible for the residents of the capital and offer new perspectives to visitors. Nevertheless, while the iconology of the city is unable to renew itself and the city is stuck with its icons from previous eras, these icons themselves are in constant transformation. If the visual environment and images of contemporary cities have a decisive role in their attractiveness for tourism, they are also key elements of the production of urban identities. Similarly to the tourists, who are ‘collecting quickly recognisable pre-marked sights which can be incorporated into existing constructs of understanding’ (Ashworth 1998, 282), the residents also construct their mindscapes with reference to ‘preemphasised’ symbolic points, often buildings, if not in their everyday practice, then in moments of festive identification. Speaking about Budapest, public debates and opinions are most often concentrated on the city’s physical dimensions. It is common to consider the city as an ensemble of its buildings and their condition - streets and squares, brick and stones - and any acknowledgement of ‘softer elements’ of the urban space in these debates seems to be secondary compared to the ‘hard’ ones. The notion of the city is thus most often reduced to its ‘first’, material layer, and it is through this material fabric of the city, buildings and architectural plans, that different visions of Budapest are articulated. Consequently, for a better understanding of the recent transformation of the city, it is revealing to examine what certain buildings may mean in this specific urban context, and how these meanings have changed across time. In his analysis of the re-appropriation of former communist buildings in Eastern Europe, Neil Leach writes: ‘Meaning is articulated by the way in which the building is perceived in terms of the complex play of its current use and memories of previous uses. In this respect, a change in use and the fading memories of previous uses will redefine its meaning within the public imagination’ (Leach 2002, 85).

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The way old buildings of Budapest are used as icons, positioned into different, changing narratives of power is particularly interesting in the case of bridges. Intersecting the Danube at regular intervals, their rhythmical position in the city allows us to consider them as almost geometrical elements of the cityscape, whose symbolic modifications can be traced even on a city map. Citizens of Budapest have liked to define their city as a cultural meeting point between East and West, successfully exploiting the universal idea of the bridge which carries, according to Roland Barthes, ‘a crucial significance for the mankind’, namely that of ‘connection and humanity’ (1964, 63)1. Due to its special geographic position, the city is often referred to as the ‘Queen of the Danube’2 or the ‘City of Bridges’3. Due to their different shapes, colours and materials, Budapest’s bridges have become determining elements of the urban landscape and nodes of the mental coordinate-system of orientation: distances can be measured by the number of bridges passed. Moreover, bridges have become particularly important places of the cultural text of the city, they have become points of reference, symbols that can be set in diverse ‘great’ narratives of the city and the country, and can be used as verifications of these narratives. What happens along the Danube, often called the artery or jewel of the city, concerns everyone. The bridges, despite their connective traffic function, have become independent as buildings, acting as separate architectural signs absorbing meaning allocated to them and gaining their importance more through these meanings than from their primary functions. ‘Buildings potentially become the visible embodiment of the invisible, the vehicle through which the fantasy structure of the homeland is represented’ - writes Neil Leach (2002, 88). Representational buildings are offered as both points of physical orientation and identification. Identity must be embodied, and in the case of Budapest, the most spectacular objects of this embodiment

1 The English translation of Barthes’ ‘La tour Eiffel’ (The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. University of California Press, 1997) is missing pages 62 to 72 of the original text. Where cited, I have translated these passages. 2 The slogan ‘Queen of the Danube’ was invented by the Budapest Tourist Office in the early 1920s, in order to attract mass tourism to the Hungarian capital. 3 ‘City of Bridges’ is the core concept of the Budapest bid for the title of 2010 European Capital of Culture.

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are the bridges. They become carriers of identity of both the scale of the city and that of the nation. With such a prominent position in the symbolic geography of Budapest, to outline the history of the bridges and their role in the iconology of the Hungarian capital, in fact means to trace the formation of the city’s own self-image. The Bridge as a Symbol A technical structure bearing a road, a pathway, a power, gas or postline between two different concepts, views, principles, beliefs of perhaps between two types of situations distant in time or in levels in order to secure safe passage and transport between them (SCCA 1993, 177). This is the definition of a bridge that Antal Lakner used when describing the location of his art piece ‘Direction Signs’ created for the 1993 exhibition ‘Poliphony’4. Lakner placed short inscriptions on the two overhead beams of Elisabeth Bridge. When crossing the bridge from the West to the East, the inscription ‘OVER THERE’ came into sight, while traversing it in the other direction, ‘OVER HERE’ could be read. With this installation Lakner marked the bridge as not only a connection between two sides, but also as a symbolic site, following the collapse of communism, of the transition from one set of values to another, from one kind of identification to another. To consider the bridge as a symbol of Budapest is hardly a novel idea. The union of the formerly independent towns Pest, Buda and Óbuda in 1873 presupposed the construction of the first permanent bridge – the Chain Bridge, and it was actually the idea of the bridge that united the city. When it was first built, the Chain Bridge was considered by the citizens of Budapest to be the most significant public building. It was seen as a symbol of progress and economic development on the one hand, and as an image of the harmonious balance of political oppositions and the notion of social reforms on the other. ‘Under the rising arch of the Chain Bridge the old Hungary graduated into the new Hungary. There was a hole on the bridge through which our grandfather dropped 4 ‘Poliphony’, organised by the Soros Centre of Contemporary Art, was the first event after the fall of communism whose curators, in order to comment on social changes, invited artists to use public space as a medium.

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from his memory the obsolete slogans and ideals’, the novelist Gyula Krúdy wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century (1963, 151). Going even further, Ernö Szép claimed in a poem of the same period that ‘the Chain Bridge is like life’ (2003, 208). Thus, the Chain Bridge, but the other seven Budapest bridges, too, have gained a mythical status. Each bridge was predestined to become an iconological monument at the moment of its inception; and so their representations, even if they differ from one another significantly, are to a certain extent representations of the city itself. Some bridges cherish more immediate, more intimate narratives, while others contribute more to the main political narratives of the city. Although it would be worthwhile to consider all the bridges of Budapest in detail, this text will focus on the two bridges situated in the centre of the city: the Chain Bridge and the rebuilt Elisabeth Bridge. Both of them have had a crucial role in the representation of Budapest since the middle of the twentieth century. Representations In her analysis of the myths that constitute Berlin’s modernity, Margaret Manale explains the importance of the postcard in the collective experience of the city: To give an immediate view of the aura that surrounds a city, nothing is more eloquent than the tourist postcard. This kind of photo carries a myth immediately identifiable by the addressed. These images detain the rare elements that last for a long time, and that, like common places, allow collective memory to relate and to locate to a fix point in this moving universe (Manale 2003, 205).

We should expand this description to all the classic photographs that have been taken in the city and the films that have been shot there. Frequently used, widely known representations create frames through which the city is collectively perceived, experienced and re-represented. In Andrea Kahn’s definition: ‘(Representations) structure an understanding of urban lifeworlds by organising perceptions and everyday experiences of the city. By inscribing an idea of “the city” (which is only ever an idea), they impact materially and ideologically on notions of what the urban “is” and aspirations of what it could become’ (2002, 237). Neighbourhood management projects and master plans, albums of photography, cult films and tourist guidebooks all offer guidelines to

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interpreting the city, and thus inevitably have a political dimension. As Rob Shields puts it: These images and stereotypes, an imaginary geography of places and spaces, are shown to have social impacts which are empirically specifiable and located not only at the level of individual proxemics, but also at the level of social discourses on space which underpin the rhetorics of ideologues and politicians, and pervade and subvert even the rationalistic discourse of planning and regional development policy’ (Shields 1991, 6).

If we want to grasp the ‘mood swings’ of a city, as much as its political shifts, it is important to examine not only its manifest political, but also its artistic, commercial and other representations. To demonstrate the significance of bridges in the urban imaginary of Budapest and their ubiquity in the representations of the city, it is worth recalling some images from the time of World War II. Portrayals of wartime Budapest most often consist of the shocking images of exploded bridges, their ruins sunk into the Danube. These images clearly represent the total collapse of the capital and the paralysis of its functions. Many films used these images as symbols of revival either in collective or in individual life. Tourist brochures for Budapest appeared in 1945 with the slogan ‘Budapest lives again!’, and they characterised the city’s renewal by pictures of the heroic enterprise of bridge-building. The rubble fished out of the river was used in the rebuilding of the bridges, but the reconstruction still took years. The public undoubtedly followed the progress with great attention: the provisional pontoon bridges built to re-open traffic across the Danube were even given nicknames by the people. The communist take-over at the end of the 1940s rearranged the symbolic geography of the city, and thus the image of Budapest came to be represented by its new symbols. The party propaganda successfully overwrote the monuments of the pre-war right-wing political system which had fostered a strong national identity. By designating new places of cult right beside them, the communists rendered these symbolic sites of the old regime insignificant.5 Reconstruction and restoration work projects, too, had to comply with the new image. The restoration of the lions and national coats of arms decorating the Chain Bridge, for exam-

5 A spectacular example for this is the chosen location for the Procession Square, a scene for all large-scale communist ceremonies, just next to the often covered Heroes’ Square, a central site of former national representation.

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ple, raised a fierce ideological debate. Finally, the lions remained, but the coats of arms were transformed. The booklet called The New Hungary, published by the new communist government in English and French (Budapest Idegenforgalmi Hivatala 1950), intended to present the new social system to the international community. They show the image of a dynamic country in transformation, a country that is being rebuilt by young workers with the help of a rapidly developing industry. While the Chain Bridge all but disappeared from the line-up of buildings used to represent the city, another monument became the main symbol of Budapest: the Statue of Liberty, visible from almost all parts of the city, which propagated the liberation of the city by the Soviet army and the triumph of socialism. This statue was supplemented by the image of the parliament, with a huge red star on the top, easily exploited for emphasising the democratic character of the system and the continuity of social evolution. During the 1950s Budapest’s self-image as a tourist destination diverged from its ideological message in a specific way: while images of the city mediated values of the socialist society – factories and young workers, new schools and housing estates – towards its inhabitants and other countries of the Eastern Block, Budapest’s tourist image was built on its architectural past, its heritage. This contradiction is resolved by the author of the aforementioned tourist brochure The New Hungary: ‘The new Budapest is proud of its heritage, of the Chain Bridge for instance, because it was an incomparable technical achievement of its age’ (Budapest Idegenforgalmi Hivatala 1950, 5). This is a peculiar way of reinterpreting the urban tradition, depriving it from a good part of its meaning, and narrowing it down to its technological values. The reconstruction of the blown-up Elisabeth Bridge in 1964 brought a significant new element into the landscape of Budapest. It is the only bridge that was not rebuilt in its previous form. It is a very modern structure, without any ornaments, gaining its shape from its traffic function. With its glaring whiteness it looks sharply out of place, and with its junctions it detaches and cuts itself off from its surroundings. Plans and photos of the bridge reveal an abstract, utopian object that feeds narratives of progress, velocity and technology. Its distance was maintained by its special protection in the communist era: being a military object, noone could even dream of using it in a non-functional way.

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Figure 1. Coin from the 1970s, with the image of the Elisabeth bridge.

This sterility is somewhat opposed by the folkloric comments made by the general public after its construction. Hundreds of jokes and anecdotes were born at this time. These reactions and the pictures of the construction carry a very specific social meaning: the bridge was built for people so that they could go to work by crossing it. In this way, the bridge suggests a completely new vision of society, and the 1970s did effectively bring along the cult of the Elisabeth Bridge, the brand new pride of Budapest: it quickly became the new ‘number one symbol’ of the city, used on the covers of city brochures and as contemporary film setting, for example for car chases, of which we can see a stylized reprise in Ferenc Andras’ film Dögkeselyu [Vulture] (1982). Its modern appearance perfectly suited the idea of socialist urban planning, which otherwise rarely had a chance to intervene at the core of the city. From the beginning of the 1980s, possibly as a result of growing tourism among other factors, marketable images of the urban heritage came to the fore, favouring for its purposes landmarks such as the Chain Bridge, the Castle and the Fishermen’s Bastion. The paradigm of the Elisabeth Bridge and the world associated with it seemed to vanish. Despite the supposed inertia of all architectural forms, age matters: the bridge simply did not fit into the reconstructed nineteenth-century atmo-

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sphere of the city. This process can be illustrated spectacularly by the choice of scenery in a cult movie of the late 1980s, Péter Gothár’s Just like America (1987): the hero, before going on a trip resulting in his death, jumps from the Elisabeth Bridge right onto Brooklyn Bridge in New York. This scene can be read as a metaphor of a failed utopia and of doomed plans. This image foreshadows the Elisabeth Bridge’s later use as the focus of a number of social and environmental problems, as well as the site of demonstrations concerning these. After the fall of communism in 1989, monuments of the former socialist system became victims of civilian and institutional attacks, the chief political statues were removed and placed in a memorial park. Red stars on key public buildings gave way to the national coat of arms. Street names were changed again, and thus the political geography of the city gained new emphases. The Hungarian capital spent the 1990s searching for a new identity, and found its precursor in the flourishing Budapest of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Skipping the extremes of the twentieth century, this new identity stresses continuity with a cosmopolitan, selfconfident past. Although the 1990s saw several projects with the declared aim of creating new icons, new emblems of the city, none of them have actually stepped over the boundaries of particular political representation.6 This is why an old icon, the Chain Bridge, has again become the most important, floodlit sign of the city.

Figure 2. Logo of Budapest used in 1990s tourism campaigns. 6 The best example of the political exploitation of architecture is the scandalous construction of the new National Theatre on the most expensive riverside land of Budapest.

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‘Possessing’ the Bridge In the overpoliticised public life after the collapse of communism, the question which party can consider itself an heir of which political group has gained great importance, and the struggle for position has essentially revolved around the symbol of the bridge. As the Chain Bridge symbolises tradition and a European flair at the same time, it is crucial for political parties to ‘possess’ this symbol; the exclusive identification with it is the proof of historical continuity and political legitimacy. This vying for position has numerous manifestations: since 1997, the liberal City Hall has organised a so-called ‘Bridge Festival’ every year; during this event the Chain Bridge is transformed into a pedestrian bridge for a day, and into a place of celebration featuring actors and spectacles. Another example is Géza Bereményi’s film The Bridge Man (2002), which centred on the life of count István Széchenyi, who had initiated the building of the Chain Bridge. This film was subsidised by the former rightwing government, and its leading actors are known as right-wing activists. Such attempts to re-appropriate the Chain Bridge, to tie its image to this or that political party, to the city or the country, can be understood as symbolic arguments in the omnipresent debate of political competence. The intention to possess the Chain Bridge is not limited, however, to a strictly political sphere. The annual Budapest Spring Festival, the most important cultural event of the city, for instance, uses the lion decorating the Chain Bridge as its logo; ‘Noblesse oblige’ – this is how a poster, using the image of the Chain Bridge, advertises a new apartment building; dozens of companies and associations use its printed image as their logo; advertisements of cars, banks, insurance companies and hotels like to turn towards the Chain Bridge to borrow its imaginary elegance, permanence, safety, and European character. largest cultural event. It is appropriate to borrow the words Roland Barthes used when describing the Eiffel Tower: the Chain Bridge ‘belongs to everyone, every imagination finds its affairs in it’, its picture is ‘beyond any relations of property’ (Barthes 1964, 70). In 1996, however, the Coca Cola Company caused general indignation and outraged politicians who intended to monopolise the Chain Bridge as a visual symbol, by proposing to drape the Chain Bridge in red. The City Hall refused the proposal, but could not do anything against Coca Cola using a similar idea in a digitally animated video: a convoy of long, red trucks led by Santa Claus, crossing the same bridge.

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Compared to the representation boom of the Chain Bridge since the fall of communism, images of the white, monumental Elisabeth Bridge have emerged less and less often. It has, however, become a subject in the socio-political and environmental discourse of the city. ‘The Elisabeth Bridge should be destroyed’ – claim all those who identify the source of all problems in what the bridge represents. In effect, the bridge has become a terrain of different conflicts. The Elisabeth Bridge has been the location of several large demonstrations in the last twenty years. For example, protests against a planned dam on the Danube – originally designed as a joint project by Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and continued by the Slovak government – took place on it. Similarly, in 2002, members of right-wing political organisations chose this bridge for their sit-down strike against government policies, paralysing the traffic of the entire city. It is clear that this kind of use of public space, this occupation, is very different from the other kind of use, outlined in relation to the Chain Bridge. While the Chain Bridge is untouchable, the Elisabeth Bridge serves more and more as a battlefield. The Elisabeth Bridge, perhaps due to its visibility, its structural purity, but much more to the values attached to it, has practically become a ‘political message board’ in the last decade. It was the location, too, of the 2002 action by the public art group Supergroup, which transformed the bridge into a ship, as part of a campaign encouraging participation in the national elections. The bridge has been host to flags of diverse kinds of political resistance, appearing and remaining only for a few hours or days, before being taken off by the police. The same bridge has also been the location of ‘critical mass’ actions, organised by the local bicycle messenger subculture, with a crowd of cyclists big enough to fully occupy the bridge. The image of the bridge blocked by traffic jams is often shown as a warning of the forthcoming ecological disaster in the capital.7 This explains why the Elisabeth bridge has gone out of fashion in recent years as a tool for advertising and place marketing campaigns. Only a few construction companies, in their persistent fascination with technology, continue to use its image as a logo. The central role of bridges in the definition of the city has been striking also in the latest debates about the city’s future. Before the 2002 referendum on Hungary’s membership of the EU, the Government initiated a huge campaign for a Yes vote. In this campaign the notion of 7

See for example Lélegzet 2002, no. 126: 8-10.

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the bridge offered itself as an obvious and exploitable tool to indicate the convergence between Europe and Hungary, and to celebrate their union.

Figure 3. Cover of a special edition of the free magazine Pesti Est (2004, no. 11), preparing for Hungary's entrance to the European Union. ‘Europe is here’, announces the text above the image of the Chain Bridge.

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A temporary pontoon bridge was put up for two days, successfully reminding people of the post-war bridges, and creating a sense of the dawn of a new epoch. The ‘Europe Bridge’ was an immense success, with tens of thousands of people having crossed it, and it raised one of the most sensitive questions about the image of the city: why is there no new pedestrian bridge built across the Danube, which could become its new symbol? Immediate proposals for new bridges inspired intensive discussions. Again, it became clear that the question of the usage and construction of bridges is in fact the very frontline where different concepts of Budapest’s ‘personality’ and image confront one another. During the 2004 municipal elections campaign, two of the four main local candidates referred to a bridge with their background images in their advertisements. Bridges were actually the only buildings that appeared in their campaigns. The day when Hungary became a member of the European Union was celebrated in Budapest with the decoration of the city’s bridges. ‘Europe is here’, could be read on posters adorned with the picture of the Chain Bridge. The Chain Bridge is there for every occasion, just as the word ‘Europe’ offers itself for every argument. People are supposed to believe that Ernö Szép’s cited line is reversible: life is like the Chain Bridge. Conclusions In this chapter I intended to show how Budapest’s bridges have been exploited by political and economic agents seeking to profit from their ‘aura’ and the associations they evoke, while artists and civic initiatives have used them in different, more contradictory narratives. These bridges have a distinguished position in the urban imagination: acting as synecdoche they represent the whole city, while being only a part of it. The chosen examples demonstrate that urban mindscapes are not only shaped by individual and collective experiences of the city and by aesthetic representation, but are also subject to conscious mediation and are under the influence of diverse agents in the politics of urban symbolism. The experience of contemporary European cities shows that the projection of urban visions, the creation of an image of the city, the anchoring of the urban imagination with a theme or architectural object are central to today’s planning toolkit. However, the main problems of urban democracy are not solved, only transposed to a symbolic level: what are the ways for citizens to partici-

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pate in the process of attaching meaning to urban space? What are the institutional models for promoting independent, informed and reflected forms of urban consciousness? And beyond these, there are other questions raised by the specific condition of post-communist cities: how to encourage personal relationships being forged to places which are not claimed by competing grand narratives? How to encourage citizens to use a more detailed, responsible and differentiated set of meanings in their identification with the city?

References Ashworth, Gregory J. 1998. The Conserved European City as Cultural Symbol: the Meaning of the Text. In Modern Europe. Place, Culture, Identity, ed. Brian Graham, 261-86. London: Arnold. Barthes, Roland. 1964. La Tour Eiffel. Paris: Delpire. Budapest Idegenforgalmi Hivatala (Tourism Office of Budapest). 1950. The New Hungary. Budapest: Budapest Idegenforgalmi Hivatala. Kahn, Andrea. 2002. Imaging New York. Representations and Perceptions of the City. In The Urban Lifeworld, eds. Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz, 23751. London and New York: Routledge. Krúdy, Gyula. 1963. Hídavatás. In G. Krúdy, Pesti levelek, 148-53. Budapest: Magvetö. Leach, Neil. 2002. Erasing the Traces. The ‘Denazification’ of Post-Revolutionary Berlin and Bucharest. In The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis, ed. N. Leach, 80-91. London: Routledge. Manale, Margaret. 2003. La Modernité Fait Mythe. Les Temps Modernes 59, no. 625: 196-215. Soros Center for Contemporary Arts (SCCA). 1993. Poliphony. Budapest: Soros Center for Contemporary Arts. Shields, Rob. 1991. Places On The Margin. An Alternative Geography of Modernity. London: Routledge. Szép, Ernö. 2003. A Lánchíd és az Alagut. Budapest: Szukits. Szerb, Antal. 1969. A százéves Lánchíd. In A. Szerb, A varázsló eltöri pálcáját, 48288. Budapest: Magvetö.


RECONSTRUCTING THE ANCIENT CITY: IMAGINING THE ATHENIAN POLIS1

Stuart Price

Abstract This chapter identifies the ways in which the Athenian polis is conceptualised as both a cultural site and as the origin of democratic practices. The Acropolis and its environs is often presented as the embodiment of an ‘ideal’ city-state, a tradition which persists in museum guides, photographic studies, archaeological reports and European ‘mediascapes’ in general. The dominant notion of a cultured demokratia, inseparable from the physical site of the Parthenon and other monuments, has its origins in ancient literary sources. Adherence to this tradition tends, therefore, to obscure other aspects of Athenian history, including the imperial character of its fifth century dominance, the political and military symbolism of its building programme, and the fact that a polis did not necessarily have to be linked to a particular physical domain. The major part of the enquiry is focussed, however, on those modern interpretations which draw attention to the cultural significance of the Acropolis as both a physical site and an urban ‘imaginary’. Introduction: The Acropolis and Modernity Tourism, according to one influential perspective, is the act of visiting places which represent ‘cultures in a mapped space’ (Lury 1997, 75). In this scenario, travellers seek out attractions which offer ‘a unity of place and culture’ (ibid). In the case of historical sites, well-known monuments

1 I should like to thank the editors for their positive responses and Lucy Byrne for her thoughtful comments on references to Ancient Greek culture and scholarship.

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come to represent the material archetype2 of an ancient civilisation. The purpose of one form of cultural tourism is, therefore, to encounter an ideal past through those structures which guarantee its authenticity. Judging by the extensive commentary devoted to its monuments (found in academic studies, museum guides, and tourist brochures), the Acropolis at Athens is a prime example of a geographical location which has been used to encourage the development of contemporary myths about the past. The growth from the late sixth century BCE of a vibrant but limited democracy, with Athens as the political centre, has become one of the parables of European modernity, providing a point of identification for communities which trace their own social order to a civilisation often promoted as an ideal. This chapter identifies the ways in which the Athenian Acropolis, together with its associated buildings, is presented as the embodiment of an ideal city-state, its temples and monuments considered to be ‘the highest achievements in western architecture and art’ (Economakis 1994a, 9). As Villing observes, Athens was ‘rediscovered’ in the eighteenth century as ‘the cradle of (…) democracy and the free human spirit’ (2005, 7). The Enlightenment tradition, which made the Acropolis both the ‘universal architectural palette of the Western world’ (Rhodes 1995, 1) and ‘the centre of civilisation’ (Rodenwaldt and Hege 1930, 13), persists in a number of contemporary sources. Modern interpretations draw attention to the cultural significance of the Acropolis as both a physical site and an urban ‘imaginary’, capable of providing an example for the conduct of a rational, yet principled, civic existence. Economakis regards the Periclean buildings as expressions of a period when ‘creation was inseparable from the communal spirit’ (1994b, 223); in other words, he sees the monuments as the product of a collaborative effort and a cooperative outlook. Modern conceptions of fifth century Athens3 suggest, therefore, an enduring paragon of artistic attainment, as well as the moral template for European and indeed wider democratic practices. Martin, promoting this theme, argues that Greece ‘achieved a balanced harmony’ between the nomadic societies of northern Europe and the ‘centralised bloc’ of the 2 In the sense of an original model, a shared conception of which is circulated in a variety of representational forms, such as photographs, written guides, and films; these call to mind a series of associated themes and meanings. 3 The period during which Pericles reconstructed the Acropolis as a monument to the power of Athens and its gods.

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Eastern kingdoms (1967, 9). In Martin’s opinion, such ‘political individuality’ favoured the ‘development of mankind’ in general (ibid). The reference here to mankind may be insensitive but is unfortunately perfectly accurate, if the exclusion of women from the public life of the ancient city is recalled.4 In other texts, the Periclean monuments which overlook the modern city become inseparable from the ancient Athenian polis, which is in turn represented as the prototypical city-state. This point of view, envisaging an urban community founded on the pursuit of culture and equality, justified in the sense that the structures were functional and not merely ornamental, continues to circulate within what Appadurai calls Western and European ‘mediascapes’, the repertoire of images and information circulated by media forms (quoted in King 2004, 32). The production of data and symbols is not, however, sufficient; they must be animated by the existence of themes and their translation into narratives. These are sometimes known as the ‘master tropes’ through which public conception of history is organised (White, quoted in Shohat and Stam 2002, 118). The popularity of the ‘democratic’ narrative, as applied to Athens, does not reveal the traumatic conflicts which produced the Athenian state nor the hierarchy of values which agitated its citizens. Noble families in the sixth century had to accept the move towards political reform in order to stave off revolt from the poor; the archon5 Solon intervened to create a more equitable society in which debt was relieved, exiles were allowed to return, political rights were extended, and crafts encouraged (see Bradley 1988, 86). Solon, although regarded as an iconic figure (in, for example, fifth-century tragedy), was not a democrat. During the period of his influence, Athens was still a timocracy, in which the political rights of citizens were determined by four distinct degrees of wealth. It was not until the fifth century that a full political democracy for male citizens came to fruition; even then, Athens continued to be a highly stratified class society, dependant upon slavery. Powell draws attention to the type of conflict which could arise between social groups, demonstrated in the response of some wealthy Athenians to the construction of the defensive structures known as ‘the long walls’, which 4 Athenian women were citizens only with regard to their function as members of citizen-families and as devotees of religious cults, rather than as political entities in their own right. 5 A political as opposed to a military ruler.

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provided a secure corridor to the port of Piraeus in time of war. In Thucydides’ words, these rich citizens hoped ‘both to abolish the democracy and to stop the building of the Long Walls’ (Powell 1988, 65). Furthermore, democratic reforms took place in a period when imperial ambition required the settlement of rebellious regions by Athenian colonists, and the imposition of other forms of government on cities which had previously been ruled by oligarchs or tyrants (see Bradley 1988, 181). It would be reasonable to argue that an oversimplified depiction of the Athens of this period cannot explain the complexity of the polis itself, the central issue in appreciating the contours of ancient political practice. According to Parker (1996, 21), an early use of the modern concept of the polis as ‘an ideal synthesis’ of place, culture, economy and political life, appeared in Burckhardt’s work on Greek culture. Yet Burckhardt’s nineteenth century study, published as The Greeks and Greek Civilisation, was only translated into English in 1958. It seems more likely that the idealisation of the Greek polis was first suggested in Aristotle’s description of the Athenian constitution. Although Manville describes the polis as ‘a politically autonomous community of people living in a defined territory’ (1990, 53), this ancient form of collective organisation was not the exclusively urban culture it is sometimes imagined to be. It was composed, as Manville goes on to remark, of ‘a civic centre with surrounding arable countryside’ (ibid). In other words, the everyday existence of Athens depended on agriculture. There was no separate urban structure in the modern sense of an ‘autonomous’ city, a place where individuals can exist without any substantial knowledge of the economic circumstances which provide the guarantee of their daily sustenance. Equally, the notion that a tribal society eventually made way for a civic order based on law and rationality, is questioned by those who argue that tribes were not vestiges of a past age but only reached mature development during a period when the polis had already been formed (see de Polignac 1995, 2). Ruins: Links to the Past The actual structures which provide a material link with an imagined antiquity, and by association its practices and traditions, pass through many periods of physical reconstruction. Sites are excavated, cleared, and re-built, yet often seem to remain in a state of ruin. Of course, complete reconstruction may defeat the object of preserving the past, obliterating the historical record which is often quite literally ‘multi-layered’. The -


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apparent state of ruination which greets many travellers may, however, fulfil a basic expectation of venerated places giving rise, at certain points in the history of aesthetic taste, to a liking for picturesque decay (see Etienne and Etienne 1992, 59). Ruins seem particularly appropriate to locations associated with myth and, according to Rhodes, ‘give us the tangible reality of history’ (1995, 4). It might, however, be more accurate to argue that ruined cities, temples and palaces are used to represent the distinctive values advanced by each successive phase of European modernity6. Holtorf, for example, states that ‘ancient remains (…) become sites at which certain themes and stories of the present manifest themselves’ (2005, 158). Public awareness of these modern narratives depends on the circulation of images, fables, artefacts (in the present era, usually copies) and motifs, which in turn contribute to what Holtorf, in less than admiring terms, calls the ‘rendering’ of monuments like ‘Stonehenge (…) Pompeii (…) the Acropolis of Athens’ into ‘global archaeological clichés’ (2005, 157-58). Part of the reason that narrow conceptions and trite descriptions continue to circulate, is simply because they remain useful in the commercial promotion of specific locations. In some cases, a simple reference to culture is deemed sufficient to excite the interest of the prospective visitor. Lury offers an example of an advertising text which promotes travel through the slogan ‘Sicily. Tourism is culture’ (Lury 1997, 75). The tendency to reproduce platitudes is matched by vague sallies into the realm of mythology, particularly apparent in popular guides and brochures. One advertisement for the Greek islands jokes about the limitations of memory and knowledge: ‘Remember Helen of Troy, Jason and his Argonauts and the fearsome Minotaur? OK, so you don’t actually remember them, but you remember those myths you learnt at school (…)’ (Airtours brochure: ‘Greece 2005’). In this case, a number of ingredients are mixed together; legend, myth and the historical past are all deployed to reinforce the attractions of tourist activity. Reference to legend may be favoured in promotional material, but is not confined to this genre; it also occurs within more

6 The term refers to a very recent past, and by implication a state of affairs at least old enough to be identified as separate from (though still intimately related to) the immediate sensations of everyday experience. Yet it also suggests a kind of on-going recency, which reveals the difficulty of making references to the transitory moment, the elusive yet constantly ‘renewed’ present.

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scholarly discourses, which also play their part in drawing attention to the physical and cultural qualities of interesting sites. Although serious guides to Greek antiquity usually discriminate between fable and the archaeological record, there is nonetheless a tendency to evoke a general atmosphere of transcendent aestheticism. Writing about the Acropolis, Economakis characterises the sanctuary as ‘echoing a distant, heroic age that seems almost to have merged into the realm of myth’ (1994a, 9). Rhodes argues that the existence of ancient cultures is ‘inextricably intertwined with myth and legend and metaphor’, and that contemplating this amalgam of sources ‘removes us from the everyday into the more universal, mythical realm of Minos and Homer, Oedipus and Pericles’ and even ‘Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar’ (1995, 4). The existence of the archaeological record, however, sets certain conditions for the exercise of the imagination, depending on the site chosen. In the case of Pompeii (one of Holtorf’s ‘clichés’), buildings, objects and even the form of individual people were preserved by volcanic ash, providing an unambiguous marker from which to establish the outlines of its public culture, as well as a readily understood popular fable. Many other sites, however, present a more difficult proposition. If a particular epoch is regarded as the pinnacle of artistic or cultural achievement, the physical evidence of the preferred era is sometimes hard to disentangle from the wreckage of periods thought less important. Where certain features are given predominance, on the basis of their value or quality, the consequence can be an uncompromising approach to structures which, so to speak, obstruct the view. In order, for example, to re-model Athens as the epitome of architectural purity, the Bavarian nineteenth-century architect Leo von Klenze not only painted idealised vistas of the city, but also cleared the Acropolis of all its mediaeval dwellings, some of which were constructed within and between the columns of the Parthenon (see Etienne and Etienne 1990, 83). The existence of such buildings confirms the Athenian site’s varied history, and provides support for the observation made by Pausanias translator Peter Levi that the Acropolis is the most complicated site in Greece, having been ‘a Mycenaean fortress, an archaic complex of sanctuaries (…), an elaborate forest of Hellenistic and Roman art, a walled town, a Turkish castle, a battlefield, and an archaeological carcass stripped to the bone’ (Pausanias 1971, 63).


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Attempts to reproduce a ‘pure’ Periclean environment, as an archaeological aim or even within representational art (the paintings of Alma-Tadema are an example7), indicate the degree to which earlier, later or even lesser contemporary developments may sometimes be regarded as irrelevant clutter. Rodenwaldt, in his description of the Acropolis, mentions the disappearance of ‘many small sanctuaries’ which in his opinion ‘had no artistic merit’ and presumably therefore made no contribution to what he called the ‘final classical perfection’ of Greek art (Rodenwaldt and Hege 1930, 19). Conversely, Murray argues that the Parthenon was built on the ruins of what he advances as ‘arguably more beautiful’ archaic temples (1994, 212). Scranton, writing about ‘classic’ architectural style, opposes mainstream opinion in championing the Hephaisteion rather than the Parthenon, citing it as the embodiment of the ‘characteristic Greek ethos’ (1962, 9). It is clear that different authors proceed from quite divergent perspectives, with Rhodes maintaining that any general understanding of the Periclean Acropolis requires ‘some consideration of the religious traditions and instincts from which classical form ultimately sprang’ (1995, 1). Travlos on the other hand, whose pictorial dictionary is obliged to start with the first letter of the alphabet, uses this circumstance to stress the importance not of religion and ritual, but of the place where ‘the whole life of the polis was concentrated’, the Agora, the ancient marketplace which lies below the Acropolis (1971, 1). This, in his view, was ‘the focus of political, commercial, social and administrative activity’ (ibid.) and therefore vital to an understanding of how Greek culture evolved. Villing notes that, with social life focussed on the Agora, the Acropolis itself could become the preserve of the gods (see Villing 2005, 9). This assertion should not obscure the enduring obligation which the inhabitants of Athens recognised, through sacrifice and attendance at religious ceremonies, to the deities they believed had founded their city. Religion was part of a system of democratic rights and obligations, in which notions of the public and the private are difficult to keep apart (see Parker 1996, 5). The common denominator within all these sometimes competing perspectives is the evocation of a place, a specific situation from which the conduct of ancient life is imagined. 7 Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a nineteenth century painter who specialised in studies of Greece and Rome, basing much of the architectural detail on early photography of the sites.

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The Athens of the Imagination The practice of archaeology is one element within a larger project to establish an imaginary reconfiguration of ancient societies. A familiar and popular component of the discipline is the public display and reproduction of plans, artistic reconstructions, and models, as well as the creation of television programmes which follow the process of excavation. Another aspect of the depiction of the past is, as demonstrated above, the use of evocative prose. Villing’s account of the Athenian city, for example, notes that most of the ancient buildings ‘have long been lost to the ravages of time’ so that fifth century Athens is ‘no longer a visible, living city’ (2005, 6). She contends, despite this, that ‘Classical Athens is still much alive in our minds’ (ibid). Here, the notion of a shared ‘mindscape’, an imagined situation symbolised through characteristic physical or architectural attributes (which are then associated with civic values), is used as a point of reference for comparison to the modern age. Economakis is a particular adherent of this approach, criticising exactly the ‘change of mind’ (my italics) that allowed ‘the indiscriminate march of concrete and steel’ which characterises modernity; he too uses the power of the imagination to ‘try to imagine the sounds of the ancient city over the feverish din of automobiles’ (1994b, 222). There is no doubt that Economakis is correct to lament the physical erosion of monuments in the Greek capital. Yet it is precisely the fact that fifth century Athens is often regarded as the culmination of what Rhodes calls ‘a genetic Greek drive’, the outcome of which is a monumental art ‘permanent in its appeal to the human condition’ (1995, 6), which helps to reinforce an atmosphere of reverence. This, in turn, informs the scholarly interventions which decide the appearance of restored artefacts and structures. The rebuilding of monuments is made therefore not only on the basis of available technology, but also in the light of the prevailing values of the period in which restoration is conducted; this, of course, is no bad thing if it helps to preserve a site which has suffered so many unnecessary depredations, yet the fact that previous interventions have had to be revised and even undone, demonstrates the dangers of following the path of technology and dominant cultural fashion. One of the most important and influential aspects of the Acropolis restoration (pursued since 1975 by the Committee for the Conservation


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of the Acropolis Monuments) has been the prevailing consciousness amongst the Greek authorities of the loss, destruction and vandalism suffered by artefacts during the period when the country was under foreign occupation. In other words, the ruins which make up the urban imaginary of a romanticised Athens are partially the consequence of the theft and despoliation inflicted on the site by those ‘advanced’ European elites which claimed to find a new cultural direction in their form and meaning. It seems as though the removal of artefacts from one culture to the museums and galleries of another marks the point at which they may be celebrated; the exception was Lord Byron’s condemnation of Elgin. The esteem in which the Greek monuments were held was not, however, always in evidence. Many artefacts on the Acropolis were systematically defaced, during the period when the Parthenon was used as a Christian church. A number of sculpted metopes suffered considerable damage in an attempt to eradicate heathen traditions (see Cook 1997, 23). Appearances and Origins In the view of some historians, the dominant notion outlined above, of a cultured, peaceful demokratia, fixed in one location but gradually evolving from tyranny towards the attainment of justice and equality, owes its origin to ancient literary sources. These materials employ concepts which are closely linked to the political aims of Athenian ascendancy, and are elaborated from the ‘final result of the phenomenon they set out to analyse’ (de Polignac 1995, 3). Adherence to this tradition tends, therefore, to obscure other aspects of Athenian history, including the imperial character of its fifth century dominance (see Tsakos 2003), the political and military symbolism of its building programme, noted by the historian Thucydides (see below), and the fact that a polis did not necessarily have to be linked to a particular physical domain; under threat, an entire community could abandon its homeland and relocate elsewhere (see Manville 1990, 39). Indeed, the Athenians themselves, during the preparations for the battle of Salamis, had forced their Spartan allies to adhere to the defence of the Greek coast by threatening to withdraw their own ships, embark their families and goods, and sail to Siris in Italy. In plotting the origin of Athenian cultural and military strength, there have certainly always been departures from orthodox interpretation, even within the ranks of those who champion the value of ancient democracy. The difficulty of idealising the polis becomes particularly apparent when

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the political and economic origins of the Periclean project are considered. Murray, for example, is quite forthright on this point. He notes that ‘the fifth century complex of the age of Pericles was an ideological construct’, a set of buildings designed to demonstrate Athenian hegemony over the whole of Attica and every lesser Greek state (1994, 212). Pericles used funds which members of the Athenian alliance had provided in defence of the whole Delian league. The original description of the League had, by the 440’s, changed from ‘the Athenians and their allies’ to ‘the cities which the Athenians rule’ (Morkot 1996, 87). Although it is unwise to rely entirely on the few ancient sources which describe conflict between the Greek allies, it is at least plausible that, in Plutarch’s words, the minor Greek states regarded Pericles’ action as the use of their financial contributions ‘under necessity for the war’ to gild Athens and decorate it with ‘expensive stones and statues and thousandtalent temples’ (quoted in Powell 1988, 60). This connection between military preparedness and the assertion of power through an overwhelming concentration of cultural display, was also evident in the Persian capital at Persepolis (see Morkot 1996, 65) and is a fairly common feature of state policy in any age. In the opinion of the ancient writer Thucydides, if Athens had become deserted, with only its religious buildings and the base of other structures visible, then later peoples would assume that the military strength of the polis had been double its actual capability (see Powell 1988, 62). The scale of the buildings was, however, only one aspect of the power generated by Athenian visual culture. The traditions of representation inherited by the Periclean state may be seen in the sculptures on the Parthenon, which reveal much about cultural values and symbolic reference. The Parthenon contained a series of sculptures, produced as friezes, as three-dimensional figures on the east and west pediments, and as metopes, the latter being square spaces between the triglyphs within a Doric frame. In all, ninety-two fully sculpted metopes adorned the temple (see Korres 1994, 29). The building programme, overseen by Pericles and his chief architect Pheidias, was completed in rapid order, using sculptors from across Attica, over a period of fifteen years (447 – 432 BCE). Not all sculptors could reproduce what Villing calls ‘the body’s own forces and energy’ in the new Athenian manner (2005, 17). In drawing attention to the perfection of the best of fifth century sculpture, contrasts are often made with the more inflexible and limited Archaic style which preceded it. Cook


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identifies the difference between the ‘forward-looking’ artists who produced the most dynamic sculptures, and those whose technical skill and imaginative conception fell short and could therefore be described as ‘old-fashioned’ (1997, 31). The fourteen metopes removed by Lord Elgin were sculpted in high relief and depicted the mythical struggle between centaurs and lapiths, in which the centaurs attempted to carry away lapith women during a wedding feast. Throughout the Parthenon, reflecting in all probability the years of war against Persian invaders, conflict is represented in a variety of forms. All, however, appear to be variations on the theme of order against chaos, or civilisation versus barbarity (see Cook 1997, 24). This idea is taken up by those authors who attempt to analyse the ways in which moral distinctions are made between Greeks and other categories of individual. In two and three-dimensional art, there is a clear adherence to a standard of masculine physical appearance, which demands that the civilised peoples appear as well-proportioned specimens, while their opponents are depicted in quite different ways. Many fifth century Greek figure-vases, for instance, depict the strangeness and relative weakness of military opponents, who are often shown being overcome by naked and heroic Greek hoplites (see de Souza et al. 2004). In the case of the centaurs, they fulfil the role of the monstrous beings which populate the imaginary or mythical space that lies beyond the known bounds of civilisation (see Price 2001, 132). The fight between the lapiths and their enemies is used to illustrate the idea of moral quality and its close alignment with the corporeal presence of the Athenian warrior. In an analysis of Greek concepts of identity, Lissarrague notes that these are established primarily between the Greek male in his civic role (as soldier, citizen and politician) and the variety of other types, including barbarians, women, pygmies, satyrs and foreign enemies, who act by contrast to confirm the bond of identity which adult male citizens would demonstrate through their role in the life of the polis (2002, 101). The different peoples and groups which appear in Greek art are therefore used for a distinct purpose; to be ‘compared with the (male) Greek paradigm’ (ibid). As one commentator notes, the importance of social reproduction ensures that gender relations are often seen as the essence of cultures, ‘passed from generation to generation’ (YuvalDavis 2000, 175). The notion of a privileged masculine culture which took pains to distinguish itself from subordinate or rival groups, in order to consolidate its own imperial attainments, has indeed been passed down

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through the generations, through artefacts, monuments and sculptures. This conception of Greek life presents a strong contrast to the narrative of progress and public integrity which is suggested in the work of those who seek to preserve the physical evidence of Athenian culture. When promoted by the Greek state, however, the use of the Acropolis as a prime signifier of Western cultural heritage, may partly be attributed to a fairly straightforward political intention. This is the creation of a physical and cultural environment conducive to the return of artefacts removed by other European powers most famously exemplified by Lord Elgin’s seizure of the Parthenon friezes under Ottoman authority. Such actions, carried out to satisfy the demands of new museums established during the Enlightenment (see Etienne and Etienne 1992), occurred before the resurgence of Greek political autonomy; Elgin sold the sculptures to the British Museum, which took them into its possession in 1816. Descriptions of the circumstances which allowed Elgin to remove the sculptures clearly vary depending upon where they are thought to belong. Elgin himself maintained that he had collected the works ‘for the benefit of my country’ and had rescued them from ‘the imminent and unavoidable destruction with which they were threatened’8 (quoted in Cook 1997, 84). With the establishment in 1837 of Greece as an independent power, excavations began in Athens with the aim of uncovering monuments obscured by later buildings (see Travlos 1971, ix). The gradual reconstruction of the Parthenon, the Nike temple, the Erectheion, the Agora and associated sites, is thus a practical demonstration of Greek ‘maturity’ and also a visual and discursive intervention designed to draw attention to the moral case for the repatriation of Greek cultural artefacts. The response to this development by institutions such as the British Museum, provides an opportunity to identify the point at which the cultural celebration of the Acropolis as an urban ‘mindscape’ breaks down. Unable to enter the debate over reconstruction, due to be completed at some time between 2030 and 2050, the Museum is confined to describing individual artefacts and the religious myths and civil institutions to which they refer. A ruling in the High Court, confirming the refusal to return four drawings to the Czech republic (items looted by the 8 Elgin’s attitude to the Turkish authorities underwent a change after the Turks became enemies of the British state; it was their conduct, he later asserted, which had degraded the site of the Acropolis.


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Nazis in the Second War), provides an uncomfortable object-lesson in the struggle over the ‘moral obligation’ of nations; Britain’s Attorney General feared that the return of the Feldmann drawings would set a precedent for the recovery by Greece of the Elgin marbles.9 It is not only the symbolic power of ancient artefacts which causes debate and controversy but, it seems, their physical location and status as the property of nation states.

References Bradley, Paula. 1988. Ancient Greece. Using Evidence. Victoria: Edward Arnold Australia. Cook, B.F. 1997. The Elgin Marbles. London: British Museum. de Polignac, Francois. 1995. Cults, Territory and the Origins of the Greek City-State. Chicago: Chicago University Press. de Souza, Philip, Waldemar Heckel, and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. 2004. The Greeks at War. Oxford: Osprey. Economakis, Richard. 1994a. Acropolis Restoration. In Acropolis Restoration: The CCAM Interventions, ed. R. Economakis, 8-11. London: Academy Editions. SSS. 1994b. The Voice of Teiresias. In Acropolis Restoration: The CCAM Interventions, ed. R. Economakis, 220-223. London: Academy Editions. Etienne, Roland, and Francoise Etienne. 1992. The Search for Ancient Greece. London: Thames and Hudson. Holtorf, Cornelius. 2005. From Stonehenge to Las Vegas: Archaeology as Popular Culture. Walnut Creek: Rowan and Littlefield. Hosagrahar, Jyoti. 2005. Indigenous Modernities. London: Routledge. King, Anthony. 2004. Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture Urbanism Identity. London: Routledge. Korres, Manolis. 1994. The Construction of Ancient Greek Temples. In Acropolis Restoration: The CCAM Interventions, ed. Richard Economakis, 28-33. London: Academy Editions. Lissarague, Francois. 2002. The Athenian Image of the Foreigner. In Greeks and Barbarians, ed. Thomas Harrison, 101-24. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lury, Celia. 1997. The Objects of Travel. In Touring Cultures, eds. Chris Rojek and John Urry, 75-95. London: Routledge.

9 The British Government, as of 27.07.05, began a review of this decision, on the basis that ‘Nazi looted art cases are unique moral claims’ (BBC news online: www.bbc. co.uk, 27. 7. 05).

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Manville, Philip. 1990. The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Martin, Roland. 1967. Living Architecture: Greek. London: Oldbourne. Morkot, Robert. 1996. The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Murray, Oswyn. 1994. Anastylosis and Historical Integrity. In Acropolis Restoration: The CCAM Interventions, ed. Richard Economakis, 212-13. London: Academy Editions. Parker, Robert. 1996. Athenian Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pausanias. 1971. Guide to Greece. Vol.1, Central Greece, transl. Peter Levi. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Powell, Anton. 1988. Athens and Sparta. London: Routledge. Price, Stuart. 2001. Involvement of the Citizen in Local Life? In As Grandes Questos da Comunicacao Municipal, 132-38. Lisbon: Forum de Municipios Europeus. Rodenwaldt, Gerhardt and Walter Hege. 1930. The Acropolis. Oxford: Blackwell. Rhodes, Robin Francis. 1995. Architecture and Meaning on the Athenian Acropolis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scranton, Robert Lorentz 1962. Greek Architecture. London and New York: Prentice-Hall. Tomlinson, Richard. 1991. The Athens of Alma Tadema. Wolfeboro Falls: Alan Sutton. Travlos, John. 1971. Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens. London: Thames and Hudson. Tsakos, Konstantinos. 2003. The Acropolis. Athens: Hesperos. Villing, Alexandra. 2005. Classical Athens. London: British Museum. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 2002. The Imperial Imaginary. In The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, eds. Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk, 117-47. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2000. Citizenship, Territoriality and the Gendered Construction of Difference. In Democracy, Citizenship and the Global City, ed. Engin F. Islin, 171-88. London: Routledge.

APPLICATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF URBAN MINDSCAPES



THE MYTH OF BERLIN: THE IMAGINED AND THE STAGED CITY

Klaus Siebenhaar

Abstract In the wider interest of demonstrating the impact of city myths on urban mindscapes, this paper considers the example of the comparatively young European metropolis Berlin and shows how the city’s myth as ‘eternal colonial and pioneer city’ has impacted on literature, journalism, city marketing and city development. The four main image, development and city marketing strategies (‘New Berlin’, ‘Berlin – Open City’, ‘Schaustelle Berlin’, ‘Young Berlin’) of the first decade after the city’s reunification, e. g. the 1990s, are the focus of critical reflection and will be considered in their practical implementation. Myths are immortal and they make immortal. This is a fact from which great cities profit, since they are usually possessed of a whole reservoir of myths. Cities create myths and become myths themselves. The formation of a myth serves in numerous ways to help a city find its own identity and develop a distinct image. Both the founding myths and the myths of everyday life provide patterns of orientation and interpretation as regards the historical process as well as the contemporary urban process of communicating the city’s self. ‘The myths of a city express and specify its particular profile, its aura, its historically evolved and politically willed identity with all its caesuras and crises. These myths create correspondences with history and with the collective narratives that circulate and change with the talk of the town’

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(Fuchs and Moltmann 1995, 14).1 Cities may be read and understood like a book; they produce texts, pictures and images which collect and store physiognomy, spirit, character, atmosphere and cultural impressions. You remember each city just like you remember a person, because ‘each city is an individual being’ (Scheffler 1989, 9). Different layers of perception and tradition are concentrated in the formation of a city’s myth. It blends concrete views, dream images, knowledge born out of experience, wishes, traditional tales and archetypes of attitude, thus forming a unique kind of truth: a truth that provides possible means of interpretation. The myth’s system of information creates a distinctive web of stories, serving as the (self-) interpretation of a city’s history and thus helping to create meaning. Seen in this way, the question of whether myths are true or false is redundant. The only relevant question is whether their content is coherent and inherently harmonious. No other comparable European metropolis has been so preoccupied with itself, in text and images, as has Berlin. For at least a hundred years, the city has been concentrating on itself in a way that is – in extremis – pathologically obsessive but also representive of a cultural effort of historical dimension. Catalogues of Berlin-related literature and of artistic self-reflexion reveal a need for the assurance and protection of the city’s own identity which transcends the respective historic epochs and can only be explained by the city’s history. The metropolis of Berlin developed in just a few decades between 1870 and 1920; it can boast neither a central position held over centuries nor a continuous growth of cultural and economic leadership. The definition and communication of the self, necessary for the formation of an identity, has been achieved mainly by way of cultural patterns. Throughout the post-war period, ideological and political confrontation and competition between the systems were played out indirectly, mainly in and through the arts. Both halves of the divided Berlin served as overly decorated cultural shop windows of the West and the East. Both halves of the city claimed the status of European cultural metropolis and supported their claims with political posturing and infrastructural endowment. Highly subsidised mainstream culture and fringe scenes were characteristic of both parts of the city. From the late seventies onwards, West Berlin began integrating its underground scene into tourist1

Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.

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orientated city marketing campaigns (with slogans such as ‘metropolitan cocktail’ and ‘Kreuzberg nights’), whereas the East Berlin Prenzlauer Berg scene was only unofficially able to achieve a bohemian aura. In the divided Berlin culture had an explicitly political function on several levels: as a tool in the competition between East and West, especially in the period of the Cold War and after the building of the Wall; as a prestige factor and a means of compensating for the dwindling political and economic importance of West Berlin, and as a resplendent expression of East Berlin’s claim to capital city status; as dissident art in the sixties and seventies; as a demonstration of vitality and creativity amidst social abnormality (due to the city’s isolation); and as a particularly attractive soft locational factor. This brief historical account reveals the indissoluble unity of cultural and political city policies in Berlin since 1945. Beyond all ideological differences and demarcations, these policies had only one central aim, namely to glamourise the twin Berlins, thereby distracting attention from their political and economic problems. Literature, journalism, film and other art forms have both produced and deciphered the cultural and historical topography of Berlin throughout the decades: ‘They produce images of Berlin which provide, in both a negative and positive way, valuations, archetypes of attitude, characteristic traits, stereotypes, intellectual and moral statements and judgements, thus preserving them over the ages’ (Siebenhaar and Damm 1995, 25). Berlin has produced myths and, in the process, has become a myth itself. The most important Berlin myth evolved at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when the city developed into a European metropolis, engaging in a process and rate of change of hitherto unknown dimensions. London and Paris, the metropoles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, could only look on in awe as the population of the upstart Berlin doubled and then tripled in just a few years, and as Berlin changed its physiognomy in such a radical way as to eclipse even Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris. Berlin became Europe’s ‘boom town’, with a disregard for its own tradition parallelled only by American cities. Even before the ‘roaring twenties’, the metropolis Berlin’s greatest decade, countless essays and feuilleton articles had given birth to the myth of Berlin as the most American among European cities. After visiting Berlin, even the American author Mark Twain replaced the metaphor of ‘Athens-upon-Spree’, which

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referred to the Schinkelian classicism of Berlin, with that of Berlin as the ‘Spree Chicago’ of the late Wilhelmine empire. The art critic Karl Scheffler drew on this idea of the city’s American character to develop the basic myth of the eternal colonial and pioneer city of Berlin in his book Berlin – ein Stadt-schicksal (Berlin – Destiny of a City) published in 1910. This myth, which has since been used countless times in literature, art, advertising and marketing strategies and which is still valid today, has become an indelible part of the collective mindscape of the city of Berlin. There is not a single historical turning point or epoch that has not used the myth of the pioneer city, either as legitimation or stimulation; be it the twenties, the time after 1945 or the periods when the Berlin Wall was built and subsequently torn down. This shows what strength can be drawn from the creation of such a myth, the strength to weather a history as changing as that of the city of Berlin. As Scheffler points out, Berlin does not possess a firmly rooted city culture grown over centuries and thus cannot be perceived as a grown entity. This characteristic connects European and American elements and gives rise to a ‘sense of reality’, a colourful multitude, a spirit of ‘anything goes’: melting pot, business city, working class city, entertainment city, sin city with a taste of the metropolis. Berlin was, is and always will be more than a German city: multicultural for more than two hundred years, this eternal colonial and pioneer city is doomed to be a place that ‘always will be and never is’ (Scheffler 1989, 219). This is the claim, this is the quintessential thought in Karl Scheffler’s brilliant book on Berlin. The myth of Berlin as the eternal colonial and pioneer city has been preserved and developed in a variety of forms in literature, in the graphic arts and in cultural criticism. Brecht’s lyric poetry and plays, for example, teem with allusions to this American Berlin full of cold melancholy and tough fights, this Berlin full of upstarts and gold-diggers, portrayed in his image of the ‘webbed city’ Mahagonny. The essays of Brentano, Kracauer, Benjamin and Bloch further evoke and communicate the spirit of Berlin, infused with elements of transition, with fleeting moments, missing traditions, greedy curiosity and speed. Berlin seems to be built on sand and water, constantly exposed to the winds of the sea: this is why nothing in this city can be constant and eternal. Pioneer and colonial cities live on initiative, energy, a sense of adventure and a longing to make one’s fortune. The inhabitants of such cities are down-to-earth dreamers and tough guys, fighting for survival every day but also knowing how to party with abandon. Cities like these

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have constantly to be able to adapt and reinvent themselves. Creative destruction and the constant wish to rebuild are locked together in a delicate balance. The multi-fractured history of twentieth-century Berlin bears impressive witness to the vitality of this myth. Public perception has always focused on this extraordinary energy, the strength to survive and rebuild anew, the inexhaustible will to start out again from the beginning, whether in the ‘roaring twenties’, when Berlin was a mixture of a laboratory of modernism, a dance on the volcano and a place of industrial capitalism unchained, or in the frontier city ideology during the Cold War. Last but not least, the Berlin myth has been at the core of touristorientated advertising for the past thirty years, and of urban marketing since the eighties, especially after the reunification of East and West Berlin. Glittering asphalt, enticing pleasures, the pulsating life of a metropolis and unlimited possibilities for ideas and projects – these are the ingredients of which powerful Berlin advertising and marketing are made. Innovation, openness, courage, energy and unconventional thinking have been the key words of the numerous Berlin campaigns of the last decades. Campaigners have been right to trust the communicative powers of myths and images, especially when dealing with such a complex product as the city of Berlin: myths and images are long-living, stable and insightful, and can be varied and passed on indefinitely. This is especially important in the context of modern marketing, which relies on the recognition that the post-industrial ‘society of experience’ values staging, performance, theming, magic and myths. In the competition for tourists, entrepreneurs, scientists, budgets and infrastructure, the city’s distinctive brand needs three things: firstly, a distinctive profile; secondly, unique selling propositions, imagined as well as concrete; and thirdly, an emotional punch. The branding process of cities adheres to the same laws that apply to the field of consumer goods and to general social trends. Seen in this way, each city represents not only an individual being but also a brand personality, one with specific, distinct and attractive attributes, stimulating identification. Myths, perceived images, attitudes and traditional narratives are part of the brand character. Brands of this kind are signatures of an added value – which is what up-to-date city marketing is all about. Just before the Wall came down, the still divided city tried to conjure up a part of its old metropolis identity. After the reunification, which surprised everybody, it was possible to follow up this strategy, even under

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completely different conditions. Berlin was forced to reinvent itself once more in a very definite way. This was done whilst keeping in mind the city’s own strengths, talents and characteristics, by rediscovering and proclaiming its pioneer myth. Suddenly, there was a gold rush feeling in the city, it was the hour of visionaries, soldiers of fortune, project initiators, of keen planners and adventurous entrepreneurs. In the years 1990 and 1991, Berlin recreated the spirit of the ‘Stunde Null’ (Hour Zero) post-war myth, of a great new start, of cheerful anarchy. Investors, bargain hunters, conquistadores and ‘brave new men’ flocked to the eternal colonial city. Berlin invited these newcomers to expeditions into the ‘Wild East’, into unknown parts, wastelands and formerly forbidden districts. It was again a time for new beginnings, just like in 1871, when Berlin had begun its unstoppable rise to international city status. In the 1990s, the status of incompleteness became Berlin’s trademark. Urban nomadism, location scouts, temporal networks, gigantic plans for construction and reconstruction are the indicators of a new time, and these were the signal for the rebirth of the metropolis of Berlin, the rebirth of the spirit of the twentieth century’s first two decades. The unequalled socio-political constellation of the post-Wall period produced a momentum reminiscent of Berlin’s fruitful decades as a metropolis. The city began to outstrip its inhabitants’ capacity for change while politicians struggled to keep up with the dynamics of the moment. This is why between 1992 and 1997 four new slogans were rapidly created, to be used in various contexts in advertising and communication. These were: ‘New Berlin’; ‘Berlin – Open City’; ‘Schaustelle Berlin’ (‘Come and see Berlin’s construction sites’); ‘Young Berlin’. The slogan ‘New Berlin’, originally coined in the 1920s, has come to define the superordinate brand. It has served to represent the big projects of urban development, the reconstruction and construction of important districts such as Potsdamer Platz, Friedrichstraße, the government district, Alexanderplatz and Lehrter Bahnhof. Berlin was heralded as Europe’s biggest construction site, as the only metropolis having the opportunity to design and define its centre anew. ‘New Berlin’ has acted as both slogan and logo; it has decorated all brochures, letter heads, official administrative documents, making the new beginnings and radical changes apparent everywhere in the city, thus creating a permanent theme, building an image out of the old myths and integrating them into existing political, social and cultural spheres. To create a new attitude to urban culture, to a Berlin that presents itself spectacularly as a fast growing, dynamic, multifaceted, international

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laboratory of ideas and diverse lifestyles, the city developed the additional slogan of ‘Open City’. Together with the first slogan, ‘New Berlin’, this aims to transmit the idea of a ‘future made in Berlin’, open to everyone and to all ideas and projects. In the mid-nineties the city became a great stage of life, on which not even the most hidden of locations was safe from the staging of cultural events. The most important partners for this official arts policy became the two private or privatised marketing organisations in the city, Partner für Berlin-Gesellschaft für Hauptstadtmarketing mbH – a public-private partnership set up in 1994 by private companies, professional associations and the Senate of Berlin, with more than one hundred partners, and the Berlin Tourismus Marketing GmbH (BTM), a service agency for tourism partners founded in 1993 with the aim of positioning the German capital better in the international market. In particular, Partner für Berlin, under its managing director, the former Senator for Culture and Urban Development, Volker Hassemer, has successfully used major cultural events to develop a marketing magic in the city, as a means of creating a lasting image of Berlin in the media and in the minds of residents and visitors. With the creative marketing of construction sites in the annual event ‘Schaustelle Berlin’, the myth of the ‘New Berlin’ has been effectively staged as a permanent international show programme amid the numerous major building sites. Together with Nele Hertling (Hebbel Theater) and Ulrich Eckhardt (Berliner Festspiele GmbH), the Department of Culture, the Urban Development Department and the BTM have over the years organised performances by artists from throughout the world before tens of thousands of people on the construction sites; Daniel Barenboim conducted a ‘Ballet of the Building Cranes’; huge new construction projects on Potsdamer Platz, in Friedrichstraße, near the Reichstag and Lehrter Bahnhof became permanent spectacles, forging a hitherto unknown sense of identification with the city among Berliners and visitors to the capital. Political mise-en-scène, the aestheticisation of the urban environment and the cultural penetration of the urban space formed a perfect symbiosis, with the welcome side effect that today, for example, Potsdamer Platz – contrary to the expectations of sceptical architectural critics – has become one of the liveliest urban entertainment centres in Europe. This is why in the year 2000 the former governing mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, proudly announced in his preface to the new brochure for ‘Schaustelle Berlin’:

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This year again, the Schaustelle offers a whole summer of opportunities to see Berlin in its new shapes and colours with one’s own eyes. What was planned and built over many years has taken shape impressively. Even Berliners now look at their city with pride, a city which reinvented itself after the fall of the Wall and which is now coming close to the grand idea which it had approached time and again as its ideal concept since it was founded. The vision of perpetual birth which Karl Scheffler identified as the capital’s characteristic feature almost a hundred years ago is bound to remain with us in the coming century. Even though a lot has been achieved within a relatively short time, Berlin will remain a pioneer city and construction site in many places (Diepgen 2000, 3).

Scheffler’s myth of the eternal pioneer and colonial city lives forever. Never before has a major city been able to promote its construction sites as both a tourist attraction and a cultural place of self-identification as successfully as has Berlin since the mid-nineties. Linked to this is yet another dramatic cultural change. In Berlin, a socio-cultural phenomenon has taken place: the formerly oppositional alternative milieus appear to be completely marginalised, with the driving creative forces being represented instead by strategic alliances between politics, the real estate business and the new, creative cultural and media scenes. The slogan ‘Young Berlin’ is a further cornerstone in the city’s cultural marketing strategy. The Love Parade, the club scene, the art galleries in Berlin Mitte, young theatre directors as well as the young entrepreneurs from the advertising, multi-media, fashion and music scenes form the ‘Generation Berlin’ that had already been effectively communicated by the Department of Culture and ‘Partner für Berlin’ when the media were only just beginning to discover them. Nowadays, trends are monopolised by the political city marketers before they express themselves individually. The young entertainment and highbrow cultures unite in an interdisciplinary network that consolidates and gives international credence to Berlin’s reputation as a creative laboratory of ideas and projects. The ortunities offered by the arts, the media, and the entertainment sector are, however, not only proclaimed by the Department of Culture and Partner für Berlin. The Department of Economics with its ‘Capital of Talents’ campaigns is also involved in this efficient system. Following a resolute event orientation in mainstream culture (with the ‘Long Night of the Museums’ or the summer festival of the Berlin theatres at Potsdamer Platz, and ‘Autumn of the Arts’), a farreaching cross-over in culture-based city marketing is now being propa-

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gated by politics and industry: techno-culture, multi-media business, young lifestyles, music and film producers and arts consultants represent the ‘big party’ culture, which has created the image of ‘raving Berlin’ and the myth of the ‘roaring nineties’. Even though the myth of the ‘Children of Berlin’2 seems to have faded a little as a result of the crash of the New Economy, the subculture of Berlin is still a vital part of the myth repertoire of the city’s marketing campaigns. Although faced with serious economic problems, the socalled ‘Generation Berlin’ still preserves the feeling of living in the era of a new beginning. The city remains the projection site for new biographies and ideas. ‘Those who work here’, Matthias Arndt rightly comments in Thomas Krüger’s book Die bewegte Stadt, ‘have to shed their desire for clarity and security, they have to draw their energy from the continuity of constant change’ (1998, 160). Berlin has now once again reached the starting point of its rise to international city status. With the path illuminated by the myth of the eternal colonial city, this city cannot escape its destiny. The pioneers of a new departure are ready: they are young, nervous, with no illusions, but creative and able to combine their skills. They are entrepreneurs in the best sense of the word, because ‘the horror of boredom gives birth to entrepreneurs’ (Mark Siemons)3.

References Arndt, Matthias. 1998. Es geht auch ohne Geld. Neue Tendenzen der Kunstvermittlung in Berlin. In Die bewegte Stadt. Berlin am Ende der Neunziger, ed. Thomas Krüger, 159-164. Berlin: FAB. Diepgen, Eberhard. 2000. Introduction to Partner für Berlin Gesellschaft fur Hauptstadt-Marketing mbH., Schaustelle Berlin (brochure), 3. Berlin: Partner für Berlin. Fuchs, Gotthard, and Bernhard Moltmann. 1995. Mythen der Stadt. In Mythos Metropole, eds. G. Fuchs, B. Moltmann and Walter Prigge, 9-18. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Scheffler, Karl. 1989. Berlin – ein Stadtschicksal. Berlin: Fannei & Walz. Siebenhaar, Klaus, and Steffen Damm. 1995. Berlin Kultur. Identität, Ansichten, Leitbild. Berlin: FAB. 2 The title of a Berlin arts exhibition in the New York Moma branch P.S. 1 in November 1999. 3 Siemons, Mark. 1998. Die bewegte Metropole. Dagobert oder Die ganze Wahrheit über die Generation Berlin. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25/9/1998: 41.



BERLIN LITERATURE AND ITS USE IN 1 THE MARKETING OF THE ‘NEW BERLIN’

Godela Weiss-Sussex

Abstract Building on the current European-wide debate on strategies for city marketing, and using Berlin as a case study, this article proposes two ways in which literature could successfully be used to project a city’s complex identity. The article argues that the marketing of Berlin as a tourist destination could be enhanced firstly by promoting the contemporary literary scene as part of Berlin’s cultural diversity; and secondly by using Berlin literature to convey the historically determined identity of the city. Opportunities for, and conditions attached to, the inclusion of literature in an integrated tourism concept are highlighted. There has been much movement in recent years in thinking on city marketing away from generalising and formulaic approaches, such as those presented in textbooks like Philip Kotler’s Marketing Places (1993). Criticism has concentrated on the applicability of principles of product marketing to cities and has been directed towards three key aspects. The first concerns the validity and efficacy of city marketing strategies that lack integration with the wider social, political and cultural situation of the city in question. Critics stress the need for a holistic understanding of the city and the importance of the 2 public policy context. The second objection raised is that the com 1

I would like to thank the British Academy for enabling me to carry out the research for this chapter through the award of a Small Research Grant, and Jude Bloomfield for her very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 See Ward 1998; Erickson and Roberts 1997; Murray 2001; Grabow and Hollbach-Grömig 1998. With reference to the tradition of urban theory of the

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plexity of cities does not allow for them to be marketed under a 3 single brand definition. Recognising this problem, recent place marketing campaigns have worked on the basis of segmenting the market and developing different ‘products’ and different marketing strategies for different target groups (see, for example, Kotler et al. 1999, 161ff). However, this approach harbours another danger, as described by Erickson and Roberts: The danger of describing places as urban products lies not only in their commodification but also in the disaggregation of the city into a series of attractive attributes (…). This process tends to avoid and even exclude the many other readings which diverse populations may have of the same environment. It promotes a schizophrenic attitude to place as a collection of discrete and identifiable pieces, each with a formulated image, rather than a layered identity with plural meanings (Erickson and Roberts 1997, 57-58).

A useful approach, suggested by Chris Murray (2001, 8ff), is that a city’s identity be understood as a web of its inhabitants’ views and experiences – or mindscapes – of the city. The development of a city marketing strategy based on this concept, on individual experience, is multifaceted and heterogeneous, and is thus more apt to portray a truthful image of a modern city with all its contrasts than is an approach based on the city as a product. Furthermore, taking into consideration inhabitants’ views prepares the way for a sensitive and inclusive approach to marketing, one that allows for the recognition and promotion of the unique mix that constitutes a particular city’s 4 identity. The problem of the ‘image-reality gap’, a term used by Ronan Paddison inter alia to describe the mismatch between the marketing concept and the identity of a city, is also related to the marketing of the historical identity of a city (Paddison 1993, 348). Cities are not 1970s and 80s, Ward reminds us that ‘market forces have, at best, only limited compatibility with public interest criteria’ (6). 3 This is discussed, for example, in Boyle and Hughes 1990 and in Paddison 1993. 4 Only this will avoid the ‘remarkable similarity’ between cities in the way they are marketed that has been lamented by a number of researchers in the field: Erickson and Roberts reported in their 1997 Britain-based study that despite the need to compete for investment and market their locality, the ‘promotional material produced by various cities is remarkably similar’ (35). In 2001, Chris Murray came to much the same conclusion.

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newly manufactured products; their identity cannot be designed from scratch. Recent theories of city marketing thus advocate a more careful look at the myths, the history and the traditions of place (see, for instance, Boyle and Hughes 1991). In this article, the marketing strategy that has been used since German reunification in 1990 to promote the city of Berlin for tourism will be discussed particularly in the light of the latter two aspects of the criticism outlined above, the calls for a greater regard for a city’s complexity and for its culturally and historically constituted identity. Suggestions will be made for highlighting the uniqueness of the image of Berlin both in terms of the city’s cultural variety and complexity and of its historically determined identity. Both of these dimensions are emphasised in the city’s tourism concept for the period 2004 to 2010 (Tourismuskonzept für die Hauptstadtregion Berlin), published in March 2004 by the city government in conjunction with Berlin Tourism Marketing plc (BTM), the company that since 1993 has had the remit to position Berlin as an attractive tourist destination worldwide. Compared with the previous concept paper, published by BTM in 1998, the 2004 publication shows an interesting shift in the positioning of Berlin as a tourist destination. Whereas the earlier document stressed the slogan ‘Metropole im Aufbruch und Umbruch’ and defined the factor of change and the city’s sense of a new beginning as its unique selling proposition (BTM 1998, 13), six years later, while still holding on to the concept of change as defining element of Berlin’s identity, the positioning of the city as a tourist destination has been differentiated and two further – and crucial – elements have been added: For historic reasons, Berlin is defined to a far greater extent than any other city in the world by dynamism and change. These factors can be experienced in historical testimonies, in politics, architecture, the artistic and cultural scene, entertainment, fashion, gastronomy, etc. Berlin stands for vibrancy, excitement, but also for contrasts. (Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, Arbeit und Frauen and BTM 2004, 20, my emphases).

There is an indication here that a greater emphasis is placed on the factor of the city’s uniqueness, both in terms of its contemporary diversity and of its history. This article will explore to what extent the inclusion of literature in the overall tourism marketing strategy of the city could support this new emphasis.

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It is striking how few results a search for literary references in tourism marketing campaigns for Berlin since 1990 yields. There is only one large-scale, high visibility case in which BTM specifically used references to the city’s literature in the tourism marketing of Berlin. In 1998, the year of the centenaries of Theodor Fontane’s death and of Bertolt Brecht’s birth, the company produced flyers and offered guided tours and ‘package deals’ with the focus on the Berlin of these two writers. When asked why the recourse to literature in the marketing of Berlin had not been repeated since, a BTM representative explained that firstly, ‘literature is an unwieldy area. You cannot 5 market it’; and secondly, ‘it was not worth it’. Taking into account the costs for the printing of brochures, the preparatory research, the organisation of guided tours etc., he estimated that every Berlin visitor gained by the literature-based campaigns cost BTM 400 Euros. I would like to argue, however, that if bound into the tourism marketing strategy as an integral part rather than an only marginally related ‘extra’, literature could successfully be used to enhance the marketing of Berlin as a tourist destination and to enrich the visitors’ experience of the city. Berlin’s cultural diversity could be highlighted by showcasing the city’s contemporary literary scene, while Berlin’s literary history could be used to convey the historically determined identity of the city. I will explore these two concepts in turn. The promotion of Berlin as a city of culture has been one of the mainstays of the city’s marketing concepts. The marketing of culture, which used to be the ‘icing on the cake’, has now, in the case of Berlin and many other post-industrial cities in the 1990s, become ‘the cake itself’ (Ward 1998, 3). In an environment in which the service sector dominates employment, the cultural aspects usually promoted are major events, public art such as that displayed in museums, entertainment and nightlife. These are aspects that relate to a metropolitan experience that is largely not specific to the individual city. Thus, BTM concentrated on the promotion of musicals in 2003 and of museums in 2004. The campaigns for 2005 and 2006 highlight architecture and sport respectively. International events taking place in Berlin, such as the MOMA exhibition in 2004 and the football 5

Both quotations are taken from an interview conducted by the author of this article with Mr. Buri of BTM on 21 August 2003. All translations from German into English in this essay are my own.


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World Championship in 2006 are used to provide a focus around which local events and institutions can be showcased as well. However, Berlin has a particularly rich and varied cultural life, in terms of ‘high’, popular, and avant-garde culture and in terms of 6 multicultural diversity. Whether you turn to government reports, to 7 surveys of the city’s cultural identity, or to statements from the 8 many artists who have moved to Berlin since 1990, they all bear testimony to this perception of Berlin as centre of creativity, artistic expression and cultural plurality. It is evident that the promotional emphases described above cannot do justice to this creative vitality and diversity. Berlin’s literary scene lends itself to be highlighted in future marketing campaigns as it presents in an exemplary way the impressive mix of international ambition and local variety of high and popular culture. Indeed, with its range going from low budget or no budget artistic experiment, to the ‘beacons’ of high culture, supported by the federal government, the literary scene in Berlin is a true reflection of the fragmented postmodern reality of the new metropolis and of the representative function of the capital city at the same time. The city annually hosts high profile festivals of international scope and stature, among them the Berlin Poetry Festival in 9 June/July and the International Literature Festival in September. The latter in particular is a very large-scale, multi-strand event with enormous popular appeal, providing a panorama of the literary scene worldwide. On a slightly smaller scale there is a range of further events, annual or biannual, many of which are also of international orientation. A selective list includes the International Festival of

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Thomas Flierl, Berlin’s senator for culture, recently stated: ‘Berlin defines itself to a large extent by its culture and by the extraordinary diversity of cultural processes in the city’ (2004, 29). 7 The aspects of diversity, contrasts, spontaneity and freedom to experiment are identified again and again as Berlin’s greatest strengths by the various contributors to the volume BerlinKultur(haupt)stadt, ed. Eckhardt 2003. 8 See for example the interviews reported in Jörg Burger’s article ‘Kaputt, dreckig und voller Ideen’, Die Zeit, 22 January 2004. 9 Poesiefestival Berlin, Organiser: Thomas Wohlfahrt, LiteraturWERKstatt. The focus is on a different national culture each year – 2003: Australia; 2004: Ireland and the Celtic languages; 2005: the Spanish speaking world.

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Verbal Art [‘Maulhelden’] in January, the ‘Lesershow’ in 11 12 April/May, the Berlin Book Festival in June, the International 13 14 Berlin Comic Festival in August, and the Berlin Fairy Tale Festival in November. Apart from these festivals, an astonishing number of public readings take place across the city every day: in institutions subsidised by the federal or city government, among them no fewer than four ‘litera15 ture houses’, all with slightly different remits; in commercial venues, such as bookshops and reading cafés; in literary salons – some commercial, such as the monthly event organised by Britta Gansebohm in the Podewil cultural centre, and some not, for instance the literary 16 agent Karin Graf’s more sporadic evening readings; and in centres and activities set up by individual boroughs and local community groups as ‘culture in the community’ [‘Kultur im Kiez’]. The immensely popular ‘Lesebühnen’ (reading stages) and open mike events 17 should also be mentioned here. The emphasis of these events is on 10

This event took place for the third time in January 2004, supported by national and international cultural foundations and private sponsors. Due to a lack of sponsors, there is no 2005 event. 11 Organisers: Neue Gesellschaft für Literatur and Roter Salon (Volksbühne). In 2004, this event was staged for the fourth time. It has been growing year by year and, having outgrown its venue in 2003, it took over the whole of the Volksbühne building in 2004. 12 Organisers: the Berlin-Brandenburg section of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels. 13 Organiser: Neue Gesellschaft für Literatur. 14 Organisers: Neue Gesellschaft für Literatur and Märchenland e.V. 15 They are the Literarische Colloquium (LCB), with perhaps the most academic approach; the Literaturhaus off Kurfürstendamm, with a café and bookshop; the LiteraturWERKstatt in Prenzlauer Berg, with its emphasis on poetry; and the Literaturforum im Brechthaus. For an in-depth survey of these four institutions, see Dönges 2001. 16 The salonières aim to revive a Berlin literary institution from the early years of the nineteenth century, when charismatic hostesses like Rahel Varnhagen and Henriette Herz invited the intellectual and literary elite into their homes. However, most of their events are hardly distinguishable from readings in commercial venues. The whole concept of re-establishing salons in contemporary Berlin has met with scepticism because of the absence of grown structures, of an intellectually and culturally interested ‘society’ [‘Gesellschaft’] which could support them. See for example Hartung 1999; Haarmann and Siebenhaar 1999/2000. 17 First and foremost of these is Kaffee Burger, where Vladimir Kaminer reads and hosts his ‘Russian Disco’. A similar format is offered by the ‘Chaussee der Enthusiasten’ and ‘Surfpoeten’ groups, who each boast their own venue and calendar of events. Each Saturday, they jointly offer an event entitled ‘Kantinenlesen’.


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fun. The texts presented are largely self-referential, usually steeped in irony, sometimes creatively experimental, and even if their literary quality may at times be debatable, the ‘Lesebühnen’ have turned literature from a slightly elitist minority interest into a lively manifestation of popular culture, in which the texts presented are as important as the readings themselves. Berlin is not only a thriving literary venue, but also an outstandingly prolific place of inspiration for new writing: ‘the unchallenged capital of authors’, as the managing director of the association of publishing houses and booksellers Berlin-Brandenburg, Detlef Bluhm 18 (2000), claims. It would warrant a separate article (or book) to pro19 vide an overview of contemporary Berlin writing. Suffice it to say here that the mixture of different temperaments, generations and backgrounds has produced an exciting variety of literary production, in which subjective views of the city’s character feature prominently. Not surprisingly, then, literary agencies and publishing houses have also been concentrating in Berlin. During the 1990s, taking advantage of the spirit of new beginnings, a number of new publish20 ing houses were founded, and Berlin has been able to attract publishers established elsewhere either to move to the city or at least to 21 open a subsidiary there. The result is that since 1999 Berlin has moved up to second place nationally in the annual production of books, behind Munich. The publishing and book sector has developed to be, in 2004, one of the strongest areas in Berlin’s cultural 22 economy both in terms of profit and employment (Flierl 2004, 31). Conversely, however, some publishers have left the city (the high 18 See also the Berlin Chamber of Commerce’s description of Berlin as ‘city of literature’ (Industrie- und Handelskammer Berlin, ‘Medienstandort im Aufbruch’, press release 18 April 2001, www.berlin.ihk.de (accessed 27/9/03), in which Berlin is described as ‘home to more authors than any other city in Germany’. 19 For further information, see Schütz and Döring 1999 and Langer 2002. 20 Among these were be.bra (1994), Christoph Links (1990), Alexander Fest (1997), Bostelmann und Siebenhaar (1999), Berlin Verlag (1994). 21 Two examples are rowohlt BERLIN, a daughter of the rowohlt publishing house in Reinbek near Hamburg, established in 1990, and Eichborn.Berlin, a subsidiary of the Frankfurt publisher, set up in 1998. 22 See Siebenhaar 2001, 510-23, here 510. In spite of the general problems faced by the book industry worldwide, the website of the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels Berlin-Brandenburg on 25 November 2004 listed 156 publishing houses in the area (see www.berlinerbuchhandel.de).

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profile Siedler Verlag, for example, was moved to Munich by its owner, Random House, to combine all Random House activities under one roof) and many of the newly founded small-scale publishers have not been able to survive for long. City government policy would need to continue supporting this sector in order to further strengthen Berlin’s attractiveness as a city of literature. City government support is also needed to promote another aspect of literature that is characteristic of Berlin – and yet has been rather neglected so far. Literature is not only a product or an event, it is a ‘fundamental medium for identification and reflection of religious and cultural communities’ (LCB 1997, 2), it shapes and transports identity. To make use of the full potential of this function of literature, the multicultural richness of the city’s literature should be marketed as an asset. About 450,000 citizens of non-German ethnicity are officially registered as living in Berlin (see Statistisches Landesamt Berlin 2004). A series of national and ethnic festivals – among them Jewish, Kurdish and Russian – take place in the city, some annually, some on a more irregular basis, organised by members of these communities living in Berlin. All of these events contain a literary element even if their main focus is elsewhere; and they all form an essential part of the variety and the contrasts seen as part of the city’s unique selling proposition. Given this, these events should be supported and included in Berlin’s cultural policy agenda and the tourism marketing strategy of the city. Indeed, policy advisers at the highest level have 23 recognised that ‘the future of cultural policy is intercultural’. Two ways in which this recognition could be put into practice are, firstly, by the organisation of guided tours with a focus on immigrant literature, and secondly, by the addition of a dedicated literary strand to the highly successful and high-profile ‘Karneval der 24 Kulturen’, an event that is organised on an annual basis by the Werkstatt der Kulturen and supported by the Commissioner of the 23 See press statement of the Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft and the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung on the occasion of the second federal conference on cultural policy, Berlin, 26-27 June 2003 (www.kupoge.de/presse/erklaerung.pdf). 24 This event, which provides a platform for both professionals and amateurs, for youth and minority cultures, ran for the tenth time in May 2005. For further information, see www.karneval.berlin.de.


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Berlin Senate for Integration and Migration. Its purpose is to reflect Berlin’s cultural diversity, and while so far the main emphasis has been on music and dance, the addition of a literary element would fit both the event’s concept and the city’s profile. Overall, Berlin’s literary scene, even though representative of the city’s heterogeneous and vibrant culture, is still largely untapped by tourist marketing. Many of the events are virtually ignored by the 25 official tourism websites. Provision of access to literary events at present is haphazard and half-hearted and would certainly profit from better co-ordination with events organisers. Let us return to the 2004 Tourismuskonzept für die Hauptstadtregion Berlin. If the literary scene could serve to emphasise the ‘vibrancy, excitement, but also (…) contrasts’ of the city, Berlin literature could also be used to communicate the second new emphasis in this document, namely the city’s historical identity. Since the opening of the Wall, the suppression of Berlin’s historical identity in the official image promoted of the city has been deplored repeatedly. Uwe Rada (1997) and Régine Robin (2002), authors of Haupstadt der Verdrängung (Capital of Denial) and Berlin Memory of a City respectively, are just two of the more prominent voices in this chorus of criticism. While Rada and Robin are primarily concerned with Berlin’s public policies, the same criticism could be raised in relation to the city’s marketing campaigns. The point made at the beginning of this article, that cities’ identities cannot be designed from scratch, is particularly pertinent in the case of Berlin. Looking at the discourse that has dominated the city’s marketing material during the past fifteen years, the casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that Berlin was an entirely new product. Under the umbrella slogan of ‘New Berlin’, it has been the building sites, the not-yet, the new developments, the young and the hip that have been repeatedly emphasised and intoned. Understandably, the focus on the new is especially striking in the promotion of the 25

On 16 July 2003, I accessed two websites, searching for literary events in Berlin in the two-week period 16 July to 30 August: 1. The Zitty Stadtmagazin website (a major listings source for Berlin) had 218 literary events listed. 2. www.berlin.de (the official Berlin website) listed 38 literary events listed. Their selection was not organised by rank of importance of venue, canonicity or topicality of text or any other recognisable pattern.

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city as location for economic investment. Indeed, Partner für Berlin, the company whose remit is to attract investors to Berlin, states that it has been an explicit part of its strategy to exclude everything that 26 points to the city’s past. But this exclusion of references to the past 27 has also been echoed in the image of Berlin promoted to tourists. In marketing terms, this emphasis on change, the new, the hip and the cool may well be a unique selling proposition, but it does not amount to a long-term strategy. It is, in effect, rather precarious, and runs the danger of producing insecurity and hectic activity without clear direction. Indeed, as recent campaigns have illustrated, a marketing strategy hampered by fear of an admittedly very difficult past can easily lead to escapism: either into the superlative – usually centred on the modern architecture around Potsdamer Platz but also displayed, without any hint of irony, in BTM’s recent description of Berlin as ‘the source of today’s zeitgeist and the centre of the 28 world’; or into the future, referring to a somehow never quite fulfilled potential; or into the downright bland and featureless, such as the slogan used in spring 2003 to top the BTM website: ‘Crocuses in the parks, the first sunbeams in the street cafés, spring fever in and for Berlin’ – a text that might just as well be used for Braunschweig or Basingstoke. The twist in this strategy of stressing the newness of Berlin and its capacity for constant change and reinvention is that precisely this quality is the main ingredient in the somewhat elusive concept of the 29 ‘myth of Berlin’, the roots of which reach back into the nineteenth century. This quality was captured by Karl Scheffler in 1910 when, in 26 Interview conducted by the author with Bettina Thormeyer of Partner für Berlin on 22 August 2003. 27 See for example the introduction to the city featured by the German National Tourist Board: ‘The new capital is booming. The place, where modern architecture is redefining the skyline, has a magical appeal. Berlin is the current highlight for tourists not only as a place for hip events like the Love Parade, but also as a firstgrade cultural metropolis’ (www.germany-tourism.de/). Even though the picture shown with this text (the Brandenburg Gate photographed with the red trail of a speeding car’s back light) points to a combination of old and new – a marketing angle that many other European cities, among them London, Vienna, Hamburg and Cologne take – the text shows an exclusive interest in the new and the modern. 28 Berlin-Kalender 5 (Sept-Oct 2003), 3. 29 See Klaus Siebenhaar’s article in this volume for a discussion of the ‘Berlin myth’ in the context of Berlin city marketing.


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his book Berlin. The Destiny of a City he described the city as ‘condemned for ever to become, but never to be’ (1989, 219). What looks like an invention of identity, the insistence on the new, is rather paradoxically the recurrence of an old myth specific to 30 Berlin. But even so, the vagueness and reductive nature of the myth’s content is problematic. For a myth is a construct that ‘transforms the complexity of the world into images and narratives, (…) a body of experiences that can be passed on (…)’ (Hassemer and Eckhardt 1987, 11). Were a myth constructed by an inclusive process, incorporating all available contradictory experience, this would indeed be a powerful tool for city marketing. However, in Roland Barthes’ terms, ‘myth is depoliticised speech (…) it organises a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident (…)’ (1972, 143, original emphasis). Thus, Barthes states: ‘The relation which unites the concept of the myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of deformation’ (122, original emphasis). Elsewhere, he is even blunter, asserting that myth is a ‘surreptitious faking’ (125). In the context of marketing a city image, the crucial point is that myth denies historicity. Myths ‘do not debate conflicts, but gloss them over or promote their glorification’, as Rudi Thiessen formulates in an essay on the Berlin myth (1983, 21). This is convenient for the marketing expert who is to promote a city that served as the Nazi capital. But the question is whether this fear of negative images connected with the past has not actually been counterproductive, and whether it does not reflect a problem the city itself has, rather than a problem that the rest of the world has with the city. A recent article written by Lothar Heinke in the daily Der Tagesspiegel presents the ‘hit 30

Klaus Siebenhaar, one of Berlin’s most prominent cultural management and marketing experts, has always propagated the use of the Berlin myth in the marketing of the city. In 1994, he suggested that one of the main tasks for Berlin marketing was ‘to mediate the distinctive heritage of the city, the myth of Berlin’. He elaborated that rather than simply trotting out the myth of the Golden Twenties and thus referring to the past, the myths associated with the city should be ‘used productively’ (1994, 19). What he meant by that became clearer in a joint publication with Erhard Schütz one year later, where he located the ‘future of the Berlin image’ in the ‘trends of tomorrow’ which he saw originating in Berlin. The technoscene and Love Parade are cited as examples (Schütz and Siebenhaar 1995, 46).

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list of sights’ visited in Berlin as topped by the Wall, followed by the dome of the Reichstag building, the redeveloped inner-city back yards of the Hackesche Höfe, the former Hitler bunker, the Oberbaum bridge across which the border between East and West Berlin ran, the new architecture of Potsdamer Platz and the Museum Island (‘Wo bitte, ist der Osten?’, Der Tagesspiegel, 15 November 2004). Berlin visitors thus seem to resist the city marketing strategists’ rhetoric. Certainly, they come for the metropolitan lifestyle and for the new architecture, but their main motive for visiting Berlin remains the 31 city’s eventful twentieth-century history. Similarly, a 2001 study of the image of Berlin conducted within the international business community showed that above all other associations, the image of Berlin was perceived internationally as that of ‘capital city’ and of ‘famous old city with culture’ (see Partner für Berlin 2002, 64). It is encouraging to see, therefore, that the marketing strategists seem to be relaxing their determined and exclusive foregrounding of 32 the future as tourism potential. The emphasis in the 2004 ‘Tourismuskonzept’ on the historical dimension of change in the positioning of Berlin corresponds to the city’s visitors’ perceptions and expectations, and it also corresponds to the Berliners’ mindscapes of their city. It offers the opportunity to ground the projected image in the local population’s experience and in their perception of the city’s identity. In this respect, it is in accordance with the recommendation of two recent reports on the city’s economic development. Both the OECD’s Urban Renaissance Berlin (2003) and the Konrad Adenauer-Stiftung’s Ideen für Berlin (2004) highlight the economic dimension of identity (understood as characteristics of the city as well as the identification of the city’s inhabitants with their city), 31 Also witness the debate around the illegally set up memorial for the victims of the Wall. This memorial was in general well received by Berliners and tourists, but condemned by mayor Wowereit who claimed: ‘We don’t need any new memorials or newly erected walls to remind us of the division of the city (…)’ (gn/za, ‘Wowereit will keine Mauer am Checkpoint Charlie’, Der Tagesspiegel, 8 November 2004). After all, Wowereit argued, Berliners had fought for the fall of the Wall for decades. Interestingly, however, a change of policy has occured witnessed since, as senator Flierl has agreed to establish a memorial site at Bernauer Straße which will convey the authentic experience of the death strip that divided the city. 32 This position was still maintained in an interview conducted in October 2003 by the senator for urban development, Peter Strieder (see Matthias Oloew, ‘Geschichte für Touristen’, Der Tagesspiegel, 6 October 2003).


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conclude that it is a currently ‘undervalued asset’ (OECD 2003), and stress the need to make greater use of this resource (Brake and Iversen 2004). The historically defined identity of Berlin is a very specific one. Berlin is the archetypal ‘palimpsest city’, a city, in other words, in which layers of the past, superseded but still visible, contribute to a complex whole. It is difficult to think of any other city in which major historical changes have been compressed into so short a period. The transformation from Prussian capital to a centre of the avant-garde and a democracy with a prominent proletarian and socialist contingent, then to Nazi capital, to divided city and metaphor of the Cold War, and finally to capital again, of the reunited Ger33 many – all occurred in the space of 135 years. To acknowledge the palimpsest character of Berlin means to acknowledge the necessity to save the legacies of the past and to make them available to be experienced by today’s visitors, rather than allow history to be forgotten, or even worse, reconstructed, cleansed, scrubbed, and distorted: in Barthes’ words ‘deformed’ or ‘surreptitiously faked’. The past could be used and Berlin presented as ‘unique breakline, displaying the well preserved layers of German ideology’ (Hartung 1998, 24). The question is how to present and make available such a complex and difficult past as that of Berlin. It is as important to stay clear of dry didacticism as it is to avoid the construction of a ‘Wall Disneyland’. On the other hand, emotional access, subjective experience, experience of authenticity, must be provided as they make the difference between knowledge of the facts and understanding their meanings and effects. It is to this end that Berlin literature could be used with great effect. For a palimpsest city with few visible reminders of the past, the use of literature is particularly apt. As the Canadian writer Robert Dion put it: It is impossible to imagine Berlin without words (…) there is no Wort aus Stein – no ‘word of stone’ – that would have survived the struggles for 33 For references to Berlin’s palimpsest character, see for instance Robin 2002, 114, and Midgley 2003. Peter Schneider also uses this metaphor in his novel Eduards Heimkehr (1999). Describing his protagonist looking out across the cityscape around the Potsdamer Platz, Schneider writes: ‘The plan to inscribe into this slate, from which so many inscriptions of history have been erased, a new centre within five years, suddenly seemed to him thoroughly presumptuous’ (165).

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which the city was the theatre: the monuments are rare, and their voice is frail amongst the poems, films, songs, novels. The imagination of Berlin carries more weight than the city itself (…) (Dion 2000, 229).

Literary texts can help to discover the true genius loci of the city. Many places, looked at through the temperament of an author, brought to life with the help of imagined characters and descriptions or scenes from a literary text, allow an access that would otherwise be denied. Few of the everyday literary events staged in Berlin concentrate on Berlin literary history. There have been exhibitions devoted to the literature of the ‘New Berlin West’ of the 1920s and 1930s (in 1990); to censorship in the GDR (in 1991); to the writer and journalist Franz Hessel (in 1996). There have been readings of Berlin literature and colloquia on individual Berlin writers of the past, staged by the 34 city’s literary institutions. But whereas contemporary Berlin literature is – as I have mentioned earlier in this article – very visible, readings of works by authors from the Berlin past are comparatively rare and do not, in general, receive a high level of publicity. 35 Literary guided tours are being offered by several organisers, of which ‘Stattreisen’ has the most varied programme. Apart from tours through the Berlin of Schiller (in the 2005 Schiller memorial year), ETA Hoffmann, Fontane, Brecht, Prenzlauer Berg authors, Kafka and Grass, ‘Stattreisen’ also provide insights into East and West Berlin authors’ experiences of the Wall, and facilitate rallies for young people, encouraging the participants’ own literary reactions to their

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The Literaturhaus, for instance, hosted a colloquium on Georg Hermann in 1996, and Karin Kiwus of the Akademie der Künste organised a series of lectures on Berlin authors in the same year. Most recently, in June 2005, the Literaturhaus hosted the staging of a ‘text panorama of Berlin’ arranged by students of the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst ‘Ernst Busch’. 35 Among them are the Berliner Autoren Führungen, Berlin Starting Point, and even the pleasure boat company Spree-Cöllnische Schiffahrtsgesellschaft. On one day, 8 August 2003, 37 guided tours were offered by 26 companies, in all thinkable modes on all thinkable topics (on foot, by bicycle, by torchlight at night; through government buildings, lesbian Berlin, media city and even nature experience (sunset on the Havel river)). Out of these 37 tours, two were offered on literary themes: one on ‘great writers’ [‘große Dichter’], and one on ‘Fontane, Brecht und Co. – die Friedrich-Wilhelm-Stadt’.


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encounters with the city. The level of interest in these literary tours warrants the running of one tour per month in the case of a few of 37 the authors/themes on offer, but most are just run on demand. However, if integrated in the city’s marketing strategy and promoted through BTM as an approach to discovering the identity of the city, a greater impact might be achieved. The fact that there is a boom in books guiding visitors through Berlin, or Berlin society, with recourse 38 to the city’s literature lends support to this assumption. A consideration of Berlin’s literary heritage shows the wealth of material that could be used to add a subjective, engaging dimension to the experience of the palimpsest city of Berlin. It is only possible here to point to a few examples. If we go back to the years either side of 1800, there is the culture of the literary salons to be discovered. Hostesses like Rahel Varnhagen and Henriette Herz, both members of the city’s Jewish bourgeoisie, not only enabled the foremost writers and thinkers of their time to meet, but also encouraged a culture of discussion and social openness. The nineteenth-century pre-revolutionary ‘Vormärz’ literature of critical spirits such as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne encapsulates that critical engagement with the authorities which has remained characteristic of Berliners’ character. This critical self-confidence was carried on in the outspoken wit of Adolf Glassbrenner – whose character Nante, the loiterer at street corners, has become almost emblematic of the Berlin character – and in the early twentieth century in Heinrich Zille’s stark but humane drawings and texts. Theodor Fontane’s critical and perceptive novels of Berlin society (for example his 1892 Frau Jenny Treibel) started a tradition carried on by Heinrich Mann and Georg Hermann, among others. The city chroniclers and flâneurs Karl Scheffler and Franz Hessel should also be mentioned here. They characterised Berlin as the epitome of the 36 See http://berlin.stattreisenberlin.de/06stattrundg/index.html for further information. 37 Wolfgang Feyerabend, founder and director of Berliner Autoren Führungen, reports the greatest interest in Fontane, while second-rank writers are hardly asked for at all (telephone interview carried out by the author of this article on 8 August 2003). 38 Here is just a selection of recent publications: Bienert 1999 (1996); Bienert 2004 (1999); Feyerabend 2002; Bellmann 2000.

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ever-unfinished, ever-changing city, just like the journalists Alfred Kerr, Kurt Tucholsky and Egon Erwin Kisch, who provided a running cultural commentary on the developing metropolis. Bertolt Brecht’s writings and Alfred Döblin’s famous Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) deserve special attention, not only because of their outstanding literary merits, but also because, connecting with Glassbrenner and Zille, they continue to give voice to the proletarian identity of the city. Women authors of the 1920s, like Vicki Baum, Irmgard Keun and Gabriele Tergit, have a place here as do Russian avant-garde writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, showing the variety and cosmopolitan character of Berlin’s culture. This list could be continued through the 1930s, the post-War period and the post-1989 literature. But from this very brief inventory alone, at least four constant aspects of Berlin identity are discernible throughout Berlin literary history, aspects that could be used in the promotion of the image of Berlin. The first is Berlin’s capacity for change and re-invention, the second trait repeatedly highlighted as a defining characteristic of Berlin and its population is the concept of self-confident citizenship. The multi-cultural mix emerges as the third defining element of Berlin identity, which has let ideas germinate and grow, and contributed, in the early years of the twentieth century, to Berlin becoming a centre of the international avantgarde. Finally, the strong proletarian tradition in the city’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history, an aspect that tends to be played down in official representations of the city because it is deemed unattractive, can be identified as the fourth aspect. There are signs that Berlin literary history may be taken up and promoted more vigorously in the future. A start has been made by the city boroughs, who have initiated the installation of new memorials and plaques, among them one commemorating the burning of the books in 1933. Also, the naming of streets in the newly reconstructed centre around the Potsdamer Platz may reflect a renewed interest in Berlin literary history: the Brothers Grimm, Schelling and Eichendorff are represented here, and so are Fontane and the twentiethcentury women writers Else Lasker-Schüler and Gabriele Tergit. In order to increase the visibility and efficacy of the promotion of the city through its literary history, however, more creative thinking is asked for. Three examples of current European projects might serve


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as models which could be adapted to form part of Berlin’s tourist provision. The first is a project being developed in London, based on the idea that people walking around the city can use mobile phones to listen to literary scenes relating to particular spots (see Matt Wells, ‘Cultural Capital. BBC’s new angles on London’, The Guardian, 18 March 2004). Dialling particular numbers allocated to different spots, you would be able to access actors’ readings of extracts from works by Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf. The second example, also contributing to a culturally enriched sense of place, but far more ambitious, is the concept of literary parks in 39 Italy. Supported by UNESCO, several of these parks have been set up since 1992 in locations which inspired particular authors’ writing. Their aim is to combine a consciousness of heritage with a stimulus to creativity and imagination. From listener and recipient, the visitor is encouraged to turn into a writer or actor him/herself. And thirdly, it might be worth exploring whether such purely literary projects could be expanded to multidisciplinary art ventures along the lines of those developed and realised by the London based organisation Artangel. Artangel’s projects include the use of film, music, sculpture, soundscapes, etc. and focus on facilitating and enhancing the experi40 ence of the city and the sense of place. We might conclude, then, that in order to make successful use of literature both as an example of the cultural diversity of Berlin and as a guide through the city’s historical identity, several hurdles have to be overcome. Firstly, better recognition is required of literature’s potential to enhance the visitor’s experience of Berlin. During an interview with a 41 representative of the Berlin government press office, I asked about their priorities for city marketing and was told that certain concepts needed to be strengthened, first and foremost that of culture. But when asked about the relevance of literature in this context, the representative claimed: ‘Berlin has not got much to offer in this area’ and continued: ‘Fontane was too long ago – and Döblin would be thinkable, but proletarian Berlin is not exactly attractive, is it?’ 39

See www.parchiletterari.com. For further information, see www.artangel.org.uk. 41 Herr Günther, Senatskanzlei (Presse- und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin, 12 August 2003). 40

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It is worth noting in this context that since the late 1990s, awareness of Berlin literary heritage seems to have dwindled. The journal Lesezeichen, with a focus on Berlin literature, closed down after the ninth issue in 2001. By contrast, a new publication, the high-gloss berliner, carrying articles in German and English, and according to its own editorial ‘reflecting the zeitgeist and the new Berlin identity’ was founded in 2002. With the choice of title for its first issue ‘constant change – stetiger Wandel’ and with the slogan ‘Berliner. It’s an attitude’, this publication clearly rides on the wave of the ‘Berlin myth’. The only past that is referenced is that of the 1920s; apart from that, the exclusive focus is on the ‘generation Berlin Mitte’, presumably the target readership (berliner 1, October 2002). Publishing houses, too, deplore the general lack of awareness of Berlin literature. According to the publisher Volker Spiess, the ‘litera42 ture of the twenties and before is being ignored’. Interestingly, Spiess claims that Berlin authors of the early twentieth century were being ‘read avidly’ before the fall of the Wall, but that with reunification, this interest has fallen away. Large-scale projects such as a 23volume edition of Georg Hermann by Das Neue Berlin have had to be abandoned halfway, and some publishing houses, such as arani, have entirely discontinued their production in the area of Berlin Literature. This seems to be an indication of a general attitude. Consciousness of the city’s past and identity, the awareness of the city’s literary history, seems to be confused with parochialism and is consequently shunned. A rediscovery of Berlin identity through literature is thus clearly needed. Secondly, literature needs to be integrated into and deployed within the context of a tourism strategy. As tourist experience is to a certain extent structured by expectations created by materials seen before the actual visit, visitors’ awareness must be raised before they arrive. Literary themes on their own (as the example of BTM’s fruitless attempt to attract visitors with Brecht and Fontane showed) are, indeed, difficult to market. But they could be used to strengthen a more holistic image of the city of Berlin as a centre of cultural variety and a palimpsest city.

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Telephone interview conducted by the author on 19 August 2003.


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Thirdly, there needs to be improvement in communication, co-operation and co-ordination between city marketing and cultural policy. Awareness of the need to change the city’s economic strategies, and related to that, its tourism marketing, is there; innovative ideas exist; but better co-ordination between the agents involved in instigating and implementing change is needed. Think tanks such as the OECD, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the working group ‘Berlin – zivile Wege in das 21. Jahrhundert’ have been developing visions and strategies for Berlin’s economic future, of which tourism is an important 43 part. These have to be accessed, shared and ultimately put into action. Strategic thinking in city marketing has to be linked to cultural policy. The city government has pledged its commitment to culture, with Thomas Flierl, the city senator for culture, recognising that Berlin needs a ‘political concept for the city that is, among other things, based on culture’ (2004, 4). Furthermore, he has stressed his support for pluralism and cultural diversity. But with the current financial crisis of the city authorities, many reading venues have felt the pinch, and financial support from the federal government has for the greatest part been spent on ‘beacons’ of high culture and festivals of international appeal. The need to better integrate multi- and intercultural aspects into the city’s cultural policies has recently been 44 emphasised by several policy makers. Except for the large scale festival of ‘Karneval der Kulturen’, the multi- and intercultural element of the city’s culture has to date found no place in Berlin’s tourism concept. Finally, what is needed is the courage to break away from a mould of city marketing that produces blandness. The result might be a campaign that builds on the uniqueness and the enduring characteristics of the city to a greater extent than has so far been the case. Certainly, no one will expect an equivalent to the Dublin campaign which opens its website with a reference to the importance of litera-

43

See OECD 2003 and Brake and Iversen 2004; for the findings of the group ‘Berlin – zivile Wege in das 21. Jahrhundert’, see Der Regierende Bürgermeister von Berlin/Senatskanzlei 2003. 44 See www.kupoge.de/presse/erklaerung.pdf and Der Regierende Bürgermeister von Berlin/Senatskanzlei 2003, esp. 53-72.

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ture to the city’s identity, but it should be possible to avoid the embarrassment of dull and faceless campaigns such as the one run under the slogan ‘I feel Berlin’ [‘Mir geht’s Berlin’] in summer 2003, showing a woman holding replicas of the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Bear while reclining on a bed in a depressingly anonymous hotel room.

References Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape. Bellmann, Günter. 2000. Dichters Tatort. Literarische Schauplätze in Berlin. Berlin: Jaron. Berlin Tourismus Marketing (BTM). 1998. Berlin zum Erfolg. Berlin Tourismus Marketing 1998-2001. Berlin: Berlin Tourismus Marketing. SSS. 2003. Berlin-Kalender, 5 (Sept-Oct). Berlin: Berlin Tourismus Marketing. Berliner 1, October 2002. Bienert, Michael, ed. 1999 (1996). Joseph Roth in Berlin. Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. SSS. 2004 (1999). Berlin. Wege durch den Text der Stadt. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Boyle, Mark, and George Hughes. 1990. The Politics of the Representation of the ‘Real’: Discourses from the Left on Glasgow’s Role as European City of Culture. Area 23: 217-28. Brake, Klaus, and Sven Iversen. 2004. Ideen für Berlin; oder: was Berlin aus sich machen kann. Eine Synopse strategischer Entwicklungsvorschläge. www.kas.de/publikationen/2004/4453_dokument.html. Dion, Robert. 2000. The Spirit of Place: Berlin 2000. Queen’s Quarterly 107, no. 2: 223-32. Dönges, Thorsten. 2001. Literatur und Öffentlichkeit. Konzeption und Programme literarischer Einrichtungen in Berlin. Unpublished MA dissertation. Bamberg. Eckhardt, Ulrich, ed. 2003. Berlin Kultur(haupt)stadt. Berlin: Henschel. Erickson, Bill, and Marion Roberts. 1997. Marketing Local Identity. Journal of Urban Design 2, no.1: 35-59. Feyerabend, Wolfgang. 2002. Spaziergänge durch Fontanes Berlin. Zürich and Hamburg: Arche. Flierl, Thomas. 2004. Berlin: Perspektiven durch Kultur. Kulturpolitische Positionen und Handlungsorientierungen zu einer Berliner Agenda 21 für Kultur. Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur.

45 ‘Literary and popular, nostalgic and dynamic, Dublin is always warm in its welcome. Open your heart and welcome its soul’ (www.visitdublin.com).


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Grabow, Busso and Beate Hollbach-Grömig. 1998. Stadtmarketing – eine kritische Zwischenbilanz. Berlin: Difu-Beitrage zur Stadtforschung, vol. 25. Haarmann, Hermann, and Klaus Siebenhaar, eds. 1999/2000. Die Berliner Gesellschaft. Ein Sittenbild – gestern, heute, morgen. Berlin: Bostelmann & Siebenhaar. Hartung, Klaus. 1998. Berliner Übergangszeit: Entwickelt sich in der Hauptstadt eine Stadtgesellschaft und eine intellektuelle Kultur? Berlin: preprint. SSS. 1999. Doppelgesicht. Über die Paradoxien Berlins. Kursbuch 137: Berlin. Metropole: 7-36. Hassemer, Volker, and Ulrich Eckhardt. 1987. Vorwort. In Mythos Berlin. Zur Wahrnehmungsgeschichte einer industriellen Metropole, exhibition catalogue, ed. Eberhard Knödler-Bunte, 11. Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation. Kotler, Philip. 1993. Marketing Places. Attracting Investment, Industry and Tourism to Cities, States and Nations. New York: The Free Press. SSS. et al. 1999. Marketing Places Europe. How to Attract Investments, Industries, Residents and Visitors to Cities, Communities, Regions and Nations in Europe. London: Pearson Education Ltd. Langer, Phil. 2002. Kein Ort. Überall. Die Einschreibung von ‘Berlin’ in die deutsche Literatur der neunziger Jahre. Berlin: Weidler. Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB). 1997. Aufgaben, Zielgrupppen, Perspektiven. Berlin: unpublished paper. Midgley, David. 2003. Memory: The City as Palimpsest. Paper presented at a conference on ‘The City and the Imagination’ at St. John’s College, Cambridge on 30 June 2003. Murray, Chris. 2001. Making Sense of Place. New Approaches to Place Marketing. Bournes Green: Comedia. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2003. Urban Renaissance Berlin – Towards an Integrated Strategy for Social Cohesion and Economic Development. Paris: OECD. Paddison, Ronan. 1993. City Marketing, Image Reconstruction and Urban Regeneration. Urban Studies 30: 339-50. Partner für Berlin Gesellschaft für Hauptstadt-Marketing mbH. 2001. Tätigkeitsbericht 2001. Berlin: Partner für Berlin. Rada, Uwe. 1997. Hauptstadt der Verdrängung. Berliner Zukunft zwischen Kiez und Metropole. Berlin: Schwarze Risse. (Der) Regierende Bürgermeister von Berlin/Senatskanzlei, ed. 2003. Die BerlinStudie. Strategien für die Stadt. Berlin: Regioverlag. Robin, Régine. 2002. Berlin. Gedächtnis einer Stadt. Berlin: Transit. Scheffler, Karl. 1989. Berlin. Ein Stadtschicksal. Berlin: Fannei & Walz. Schneider, Peter. 1999. Eduards Heimkehr. Berlin: Rowohlt-Berlin.

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Schütz, Erhard, and Klaus Siebenhaar, eds. 1995. Berlin wirbt! Metropolenwerbung zwischen Verkehrsreklame und Stadtmarketing 1920-1995. Berlin: FAB. SSS. and Jörg Döring, eds. 1999. Text der Stadt – Reden von Berlin. Literatur und Metropole seit 1989. Berlin: Weidler. Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, Arbeit und Frauen, and Berlin Tourismus Marketing (BTM). March 2004. Tourismuskonzept für die Hauptstadtregion Berlin. www.berlin.de/senwirarbfrau/doku/wirtschaft/ tourismuskonzept.pdf. Siebenhaar, Klaus. 1994. Koma statt Konzept. Zukunft Berlin 1: 18-19. SSS. ed. 2001. Kulturhandbuch Berlin. Berlin: Bostelmann & Siebenhaar. Statistisches Landesamt Berlin. 2004. www.statistik-berlin.de/framesets/berl.htm. Thiessen, Rudi. 1983. Berliner Mythen. Ästhetik und Kommunikation 52: Mythos Berlin: 19-23. Ward, Stephen. 1998. Selling Places. The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850-2000. New York: Routledge.


SITES AND SIGHTS: THE URBAN MUSEUM IN A CHANGING URBAN STRUCTURE

Doris Teske

Abstract The history of the modern European public museum is closely related to the history of the urban built environment and its symbolic meaning. Thus, it is not surprising that contemporary town planning has used the establishment of new museums as flagships for urban regeneration. While architectural and tourism interest as well as museological and geographical research has focused on the spectacular modern art museums such as the new Tate Galleries or the Guggenheim Museums (most recent, Giebelshausen 2003), a closer look at the developments in Liverpool and Berlin shows that the local museums with their immediate interest in the welfare of the local community can have a stronger and lasting impact on the real and mental cityscape. In these two very different European cities, the post-industrial condition and the impact of global developments make the museums important features in the building and negotiating of local identity. Introduction When in 1974 the French geographer and philosopher Henri Lefebvre defined a trialectics of urban space as perceived, conceived and lived (1998, 33), he created a framework of interpretation in which an objective reality defining urban lives interacts with the individual perception of space and with shared concepts or patterns of interpretation. This paper focuses on such shared concepts, and in particular on the narrative of cityscape shared and shaped by contemporary urban museums. In analogy to the traditional term ‘landscape’, the term ‘cityscape’ unites various aspects of meaning (see Williams 1976 and Cosgrove and

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Daniels 1988). Both ‘-scapes’ describe both a physical unit, an arrangement of features united in the moment of perception or presentation, and the process and result of representing this unit in writing or painting. The cityscape thus refers to the built environment of a city as the surface and embodiment of its social and political structure, but it is also the imaginative structuring of a city in urban myths or narratives. The importance of this significatory process is especially evident in focal spaces and buildings, as signification has brought new impetus to questions of ownership, participation and power (see Zukin 1995). Striking examples are the recent spectacular museums of art designed by famous architects such as the Guggenheim Museum (Frank Gehry), the Jewish Museum (Daniel Libeskind) or the various new Tate Galleries (James Stirling and Michael Wilford, and Jacques Herzog and Paul de Meuron) in Bilbao, Berlin, London, St. Ives or Liverpool (see Giebelhausen 2003 and Taylor 1999). These museums have been celebrated as symbolic interventions in the existing cityscapes, improving their ranking in the international contest of cultural and commercial sites (see Harvey 1989). Museums such as the Tate Galleries or the Guggenheim Museums are part of a global structure of universal museums and international architectural highlights, which often, however, have little interaction with the cities in which they are located. Favouring cultural tourists as visitors and consumers, they create distance from the local community, regulating and disciplining it according to outsiders’ values. In contrast, local museums planned and built in the 1970s and 1980s have a much stronger interest in halting local decline and developing new meaningful urban structures in derelict areas, shaping a new urban identity. Their role is to manifest the city and its population in the museum building itself, in its location and in the exhibitions mounted. Both types of museums emphasise the symbolic aspect of town planning. Their basic functions, their clientele and their way of promoting an urban identity, however, are very different. This difference can be observed in Liverpool’s Albert Dock development, which harbours both the internationally acclaimed ‘Tate of the North’ and several museums with a strong community appeal, and in the museum developments along the Berlin Landwehrkanal, namely the ‘Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin’ (DTMB) and the Nationalgalerie-Kulturforum site.

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Urban elites, the museum and the symbolic geography of cities Although urban museums can be traced back to the civic collections of the Middle Ages, the typical form of the urban museum is a result of the nineteenth-century civic movement of the new middle-class elites. The early museum buildings in the Victorian industrial cities represented the new ideal of bourgeois civic identity, attributing meaning to the expanding cities (see Bennett 1995, 25-28). The City of Liverpool, for example, redefined itself by building a new cultural quarter on the margin of the old city centre (see Wilson 1998). In the isolated and elevated area behind St. George’s Hall (inaugurated in 1854), a cluster of museums and public buildings were built, starting with the Liverpool Museum and Library of 1852 (see ill. 1). From St. George’s Hall to the Walker Gallery (completed in 1874), the buildings present variations on neo-classicist architecture, referring to classical antiquity and Italian Renaissance culture and emphasising their indebtedness to the civic values of ancient Greece and Rome.1 Along with the waterfront developments along the river Mersey (most impressively the Royal Albert Dock by Jesse Hartley, 1845) and the wealthy suburbs of the Georgian town,2 this Victorian cultural quarter shaped a new symbolic cityscape in which a common interest in the arts, natural history and technological development was celebrated. In contrast, inner-city Liverpool with its slum quarters revealed a less fortunate city based on poorly-paid casual and menial work and divided by religious and political conflict between a huge Irish immigrant minority and the local anti-Irish population.

1

For an extended evaluation of architectural styles in museum buildings, see Hochreiter 1994, 58. In the British context the neoclassical style was soon rivalled by the neo-Gothic style, at least as far as buildings of public administration are concerned. 2 This area along Bold Street and Duke Street is currently marketed under the name ‘The Ropewalks’.

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Figure 1. Liverpool Museum and Libraries in 2004.

The Victorian Liverpool museums catered mainly for the local elite, but defined themselves in the context of other provincial and London museums and art galleries. On a local level they remained exclusive, due, for example, to high entrance fees. Although descriptions of local museums again and again refer to the inclusion of working-class visitors (see Liverpool Royal Institution 1835-1843), the architectural style and the format of most museums were intended to discourage and discipline the uneducated lower classes (see Bennett 1995, passim). Thus, it is no wonder that in their seminal writings on museum history critics such as Bennett, Duncan (1995) or Hooper-Greenhill (1992) have compared Victorian museums to Foucault’s disciplinary spaces. Museums as flagships of urban regeneration in Liverpool In the last two decades of the twentieth century, as the Victorian cityscape had become disconnected from the social and economic reality of the city, measures were instigated first by the City Council and later by the government-supported Merseyside Development Corporation (MDC, 1981-1997) that sought to re-establish Liverpool’s significance by putting


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the waterfront to new use. In cooperation with the MDC, national development agencies such as English Partnerships, and London-based private property developers such as Arrowcroft, the buildings of the Albert Dock were refurbished and the area turned into a mixture of up-market residential housing, luxury hotels, and shops and restaurants catering for tourists and the urban elite.

Figure 2. Albert Dock, Liverpool. View to the north (the Merseyside Maritime Museum and Pier Head’s Three Graces).

While the MDC succeeded in attracting the Tate Gallery’s northern branch to the Albert Dock as the cultural magnet for the new leisure quarter, the city government realised plans for several local history museums. Thus, universal and local museums were developed side by side in the area : the western warehouse wing was converted for the Tate Gallery by the architects James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates, drawing additional architectural tourists to the area, while the local museums – the privately owned Beatles Museum, HM Customs and Excise Museum, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and the Museum of Liverpool Life – were located in the other wings of the Dock warehouses and in several harbour buildings between Albert Dock and Pier Head. The idea of the MDC was to use the high-profile cultural institution of the museum to attract luxury clients. Its promotional strategy was to put a new focus on signification, seeing the Albert Dock redevelopment

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as a way to imbue a vision of change and prosperity into a city up to then defined by post-industrial recession. At the same time, a certain aloofness from the city was aimed at, whereby the Dock could symbolise the city without becoming part of the urban fabric. This attitude was compatible with the high-profile museum which catered for international and national tourists who had little interest in the city beyond. The idea of spectacular novelty, however, had to be reinforced continuously in order to keep the luxury quarter alive. Since 1988, this has demanded the unabated spin of non-profit agencies such as the MDC and Liverpool Vision focusing on redefinitions and improvements in the area and its close vicinity. In contrast, Liverpool’s local government expected the docks to have a sustained positive impact on the wider area, with the new cultural magnets effecting a general urban renaissance. It was hoped that the development of the Albert Dock would attract long-term investments, especially from the culture industries. Representative offices and headquarters were meant to create new jobs in the whole city and with them a new sense of prosperity (see Liverpool City Council 1987). Likewise, the shops and restaurants, initially tourist attractions, were intended eventually to target wealthy local patrons in a booming local industry. Albert Dock – successful urban regeneration? The dock regeneration was an immediate success with regard to its impact on the national and international image of the city as well as to visitor numbers and sales of or leases on property. The Albert Dock developed into a tourist magnet defining a new and attractive Liverpool. The city government used this image to promote itself, disregarding the high rates of unemployment, social malfunction and urban decline still defining the city. A medium-term evaluation of the commercial success of the Albert Dock executed by the MDC in 1997, however, was less positive, casting doubt on the success of the dock development and museum as flagships of urban regeneration: while visitor numbers had shown a dramatic increase between 1985 and 1990, the development had become less predictable in the 1990s. In spite of its successful beginnings, the phase of self-sustained development has not been reached even after twenty years, as can be seen by looking at the current vacancies and the imbalance in the existing shops in Albert Dock’s Britannia Pavilion and Colonnades.


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The Albert Dock has needed a second and third wave of regeneration initiatives financed by various national and EU agencies. For the support of the existing structures and the further development of the area, it has been necessary to attract high-profile cultural events.3 In spite of extensive criticism exposing the Albert Docks as a problematic symbol of success,4 however, the policy of investing large sums in ‘flagship’ developments continues: the envisaged King’s Dock redevelopment is repeating, updating and upgrading the mixed-use structure of Albert Dock and thus trying to attract a new wave of interest (see Liverpool Vision 2004a and 2005). Likewise, another major project in the Paradise Road area5 is supposed to solve the basic structural problem of the Albert Docks, namely the physical division between the dock area and the city centre, made most obvious in the eight-lane carriageway along the Strand and Wapping Road, which until now has prevented any ‘spill-over’ effect from the Albert Dock revival. The museums on Albert Dock – two success stories While the success of the urban redevelopment connected specifically with the Albert Dock remains uncertain, both the art gallery and the local museums have been highly successful. However, they differ considerably in their immediate and their long-term effects on the neighbourhood and the city in general. The Tate Gallery, with its whitened warehouse walls, has been celebrated as an ideal exhibition space because of its functionality, its flexibility and timelessness, but it does not relate the original function of the building to its current use. In its contents, the museum likewise shows little interaction with its urban context – its exhibitions only accidentally connect with Liverpool when envisioning and discussing urban moder3

Leading up to the year 2008, in which Liverpool will be the European Capital of Culture under the theme ‘the World in One City’, several cultural initiatives have been mounted, such as ‘Faith in One City’ in 2004, ‘Sea Liverpool’ in 2005 (the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar), and the celebration of Liverpool’s 800th anniversary in 2007. 4 This criticism can be found in the local press as well as in critical evaluations of the development as something destroying opportunities for local artists (Lorente 1996 passim). 5 The project for the Paradise Street Development Area (PSDA) with its estimated development cost of around £750 million shows the close interaction between the private and public sectors, namely the City Council and Liverpool Vision, Grosvenor Estates, and several private consultancy companies (The Paradise Project 2005).

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nity, and links to the artistic subculture in the city are seldom explored and tackled.6 In contrast, the Museum of Liverpool Life and the Merseyside Maritime Museum demonstrate a principle concern to connect with the everyday life of the people of Liverpool. Both touch upon everyday life situations and the way these have changed through the decades, and present recreations and holidays, work, family and housing in ways that include the visitors and their experience. The brick and iron warehouse building of the Maritime Museum relates to the city’s trading history, its rough and raw brick structure underlining the contents of the museum and giving a better idea of working-class living conditions and the city’s industrial and maritime heritage.7 By looking at shipping, at emigration and immigration, and at the impact of slavery, various groups of Liverpool’s population are included. Within the exhibitions, history is not only rendered, but made accessible through objects and individual narratives, making it possible for visitors to relate personally to the contents presented and to further explore particular fields of interest. This approach worked especially well in the 2003-2004 exhibition on the Blitz experience at Merseyside, which became a major attraction, uniting different groups of Liverpudlians, and in the 2005 exhibition on post-war high-rise housing.8 Another bond between the museum and the city, where the museum extends beyond its boundaries, is the series of community projects initiated or supported by the museum, which create a new awareness of the links defining the urban network. The presentation of working-class Liverpool, however, also harbours some problems, as the focus on the traditions of Liverpool is juxtaposed with the new reality of the people living and working on the waterfront. Liverpool’s traditional identity is celebrated, its former subordinate cul6

Two exceptions to this disconnectedness are the Liverpool Biennial partly staged by the Tate, and Tate’s ‘Project Space’, in which recent exhibitor Kara Walker had the lower floor of the Tate Gallery interact with Liverpool’s history of slavery and with the slavery gallery in the Maritime Museum (see Tate Gallery 2004). 7 This is seen in the reconstructed Liverpool dockside street and the interior of the slaveship in the vaulted basement galleries of the Maritime Museum (see Merseyside Maritime Museum 2005), or in the shed-like roof construction of the Museum of Liverpool Life befitting the presentation of industrial production. 8 ‘Spirit of the Blitz – Liverpool in the Second World War’ (Merseyside Maritime Museum 2004); ‘Living It Up: The Tower Block Story’ (Museum of Liverpool Life 2005). Informally gathered visitor reactions to both exhibitions were very lively and very positive.


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tures have found their symbolic home, and a greater Liverpool community connects very strongly with the museums. At the same time, the regenerated docks have little in common with the traditions they are celebrated for. The new inhabitants who make use of the visual accessories of Liverpool’s maritime past have no connection to the working-class heritage of the harbour area. It still remains uncertain whether the museum will find a way of accommodating these disparate groups by defining new narratives. Museums and the rebuilding of central Berlin The need for cultural institutions as ‘flagship’ developments seemed even more obvious in the West Berlin context of the 1970s and 1980s, in particular in the crescent stretching around the inner Berlin borderline. The building of the Berlin Wall (1961) had severed most inner-city links, the ‘Südliche Friedrichstadt’ quarter south of the old centre – the new East Berlin – losing its function of servicing the area around Leipziger Straße and Friedrichstraße. The area remained an inner-city wasteland, while the symbolic centre of West Berlin developed between Zoo and Kurfürstendamm, Ernst-Reuter-Platz and Lietzenburger Straße. West Berlin town planning left the area south and west of the Wall untouched, so that planning after a future reunification would not be hindered. An exception to this official policy was the Kulturforum, a segregated zone of cultural institutions on one of the urban wastelands on the outskirts of the destroyed Potsdamer Platz. Its main buildings, together with Neue Nationalgalerie (Mies van der Rohe, 1962-68), were intended as a new focal point in the city, emphasising the idea of Berlin as capital of German culture and of the Kulturforum as a (politically motivated) counterpoint to the East Berlin Museumsinsel. It followed the Berlin tradition of clustering academic, museum and art institutions. In the urban fabric, however, Kulturforum and Neue Nationalgalerie remained aloof, failing to connect symbolically with the buildings at the northern end of Potsdamer Straße or the Landwehrkanal area. The Berlin Museum of Technology – intervention in urban space In contrast to the concept of the Kulturforum, the Berlin Museum of Transport (later renamed Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, DTMB) promised a direct intervention in the urban area around it. When the West Berlin government decided to support the creation of a successor to

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the old Museum of Transport and Building of 1847 on a central site of Berlin transport history, its function was to be three-fold. Firstly, it was meant to propose an interpretation of the meaning of this city in general, emphasising the importance of technology for the history and future of Berlin. Secondly, its location in a derelict area on the northern border of Kreuzberg was to give an economic and symbolic impetus to local regeneration – filling the holes left in the post-war years had become an important objective of city planning. The theme of the museum and its definition as a museum for the city and the neighbourhood was a reaction to the breaking apart of the traditional working-class inner-city district of Kreuzberg, which by then had become a social hotspot defined by poverty, unemployment and a high percentage of migrants. Günther Gottman (1981), the director of the future museum, fittingly spoke of ‘Sanierung’ (redevelopment), meaning both the urban renewal of the area and the rediscovery of the technological and industrial identity of the city and its population. Thirdly, the technological museum was meant to promote the participation of the working-class population in the urban museum landscape (see Senat von Berlin 1979). Thus, the regeneration of the urban district, the inclusion of a new clientele and the symbolic reference to the industrial heritage of the city were to complement each other. In the phase of defining the future museum, little was said about the prospective importance of the possible sites in their urban context. While Theodor Stillger from the Munich Museum of Technology praised the vicinity to the Berlin Wall as challenging the division of the Berlin city centre, Sigfrid von Weiher criticised the site as a handicap for the new museum and described the area as derelict and dreary (both in Senat von Berlin 1979). The planning architects viewed the mixed use and dereliction of the area as a challenge (see Architekturwerkstatt Pitz-BrenneTomisch 1980). They wanted the museum to integrate its diverse urban surroundings, namely the administrative buildings north of the museum, the residential housing to the west and east, and the wasteland of disused transport lines to the west and south. To achieve this, the architects favoured an open museum structure which would face south and connect the museum to neighbouring Kreuzberg. Eventually, however, only the existing architecture on the northern end was developed, while the openair site was barely used and left without any direct street access. The development also focused on the establishment of a science centre in the neighbouring railway station building (‘Spectrum’). This focus on the northern end of the site, however, did not find an adequate response in


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the urban planning for the area north of the museum, where self-contained pockets of urban community were created. The museum and urban change In spite of its small beginnings, the DTMB has been an immediate as well as a long-term success. It developed according to the initial agenda, extending its exhibition step by step, and thus was able to attract more and more visitors from all parts of Berlin. At the same time, the continuous growth of the museum with its changing focus enabled it to react to developments in the urban context and creatively influence the perception of the area. During a first phase of extension parallel to the redevelopment of the urban area north of the Landwehrkanal, a stronger emphasis was placed on the interaction with other local museums in Südliche Friedrichstadt. In answer to other museum definitions of central Berlin, focusing on the Jewish heritage of the city, its Prussian history, or its elitist modernism, more stress was put on the industrial heritage of Berlin, emphasising the inventive spirit of industrial companies such as Siemens-Halske, Borsig or AEG. This imaginative interaction with other definitions of Berlin’s heritage, however, meant that local links to the Kreuzberg district and the immediate neighbourhood, i.e. the transportation heritage, were neglected. With the fall of the Wall and the relocation of the national government and important national agencies in the area around a rebuilt Potsdamer Platz, DTMB had to meet new challenges, once more re-evaluating its former position in the urban structure. As the Südliche Friedrichstadt area has partly re-established its old function as thoroughfare between the old centre of Berlin and Kreuzberg, and Potsdamer Platz and its southern extensions have been rebuilt, the museum site has become closely linked to the centre with its new lines of communication and its new national headquarters. The museum is aware of this new challenge, as is shown by the ambitious policy statement of 2001, in which the DTMB describes itself as equal to Kulturforum and to Museumsinsel (see DTMB 2001, 13). The DTMB has been successful in utilising the positive repercussion between the cultural sights along Landwehrkanal and in Südliche Friedrichstadt. However, for all the achievements of DTMB, the museum has not succeeded in defining its connection with neighbouring Kreuzberg, and this is symbolised by the missing access links towards the south and east.

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Figure 3. Deutsches Technisches Museum Berlin.

The exhibition, too, shows this neglect: links to the present-day multicultural Kreuzberg are missing. The innovations and changes brought about by the adaptation of traditional Kreuzberg small-scale industries to the new ethnic and alternatively ecological reality of the area – comparable to the changes in London’s Spitalfields – have so far been ignored by the museum. The changes in urban infrastructure, in communication and transportation links which define the company headquarters in the area, have not been incorporated in the exhibition. Finally, the innovative technology used in the nearby Potsdamer Platz area with the building of a new central railway station, special tunnelling and pumping technology, and the revolutions in materials, building procedures and communication technology are not reflected in the exhibition either. It is here, especially, that the museum still needs to work on its role of offering points of collective reference and identity. Berlin and Liverpool – failures and opportunities Both the cases of Liverpool and Berlin demonstrate how museums influence the perception of the city. With their location, with the language of


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their architecture, and with their exhibition style and content, they make a statement about their surroundings and the city in general. Local history or international art are presented in order to foster an idea of urban regeneration and reinvention. In all the cases mentioned, this strategy initially seemed to work, as civic consciousness was boosted in the short or medium term. A closer look reveals, however, that spectacular international art museums such as the Tate Liverpool or the Nationalgalerie and Kulturforum tend to remain distanced lighthouses, seldom interacting directly with the neighbouring areas and often remaining outside the commercial structure of the city. On the imaginative level of the cityscape, the local museums have succeeded in taking up the challenge of connecting to the city and its various meanings. By contrast, the international art museums, in spite of their conceptual interaction with the city around them, remain remote and therefore relatively unchallenged by urban change. The local museums in Liverpool and Berlin are open to the discussion of local identity, the museum buildings and the exhibitions housed there being the initial impetus for the interaction between museums and communities. In their open structure and their wish to connect to the urban population in general, these museums interact with the area around them, attaching meaning to the post-war, Cold War and post- Cold War changes in both cities. As these museums interact with various sections of the local public, they constantly need to revise their position regarding changes in the social and physical structure of the urban environment. The Museum of Liverpool Life, the Merseyside Maritime Museum and (to a lesser degree) the Berlin DTMB have managed to rise to this challenge, redefining their positions in the larger urban context. With regard to the changes in their immediate surroundings, however, the museum policies have been less perceptive. The Liverpool museums have been unable to forge an imaginative link between the new docklands and the neighbouring inner-city area, whilst the DTMB has not developed its local links, thus not answering the need for an imaginative redefinition of a faltering Kreuzberg neighbourhood and the need to connect the new national and global Berlin of Potsdamer Platz with the local Berlin of Kreuzberg. In the environment of a plethora of partisan counter-myths both in Liverpool and in Berlin, the local museums need to incorporate many voices to remain interesting to their visitors. But which of these voices and narratives could successfully promote urban renewal?

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Victorian museums would have seen the wealthy citizens as their clients and the only relevant part of the community, the motors, as it were, of economic progress. In contrast, contemporary museums are meeting places in which different community views can be negotiated (see Kreps 2003, 10). The various urban groups who are likely initiators of urban growth, however, do not necessarily or automatically hold a central stake in the presentations of urban narratives by the museums. As a result of their social inclusiveness and the competition of various social groups and institutional stakeholders for the promotion of their view through exhibition space, complex and sometimes contradictory messages are issued. Thus, the messages sent out by the local museums, by their site, architecture, exhibitions and virtual presence, relate in different ways to the city and its regeneration. Most urban groups can, however, become involved in museum planning. This is shown in the contrast between the rather arcane early stages of Liverpool’s Paradise Street Project and the public discussion around the – now abandoned – project of a Fourth Grace at Pier Head.

References Architekten- und Ingenieursverein zu Berlin. 1981. Schinkel-Wettbewerb 1981/1982. Berlin: Architekten- und Ingenieursverein. Architektenwerkstatt Pitz-Brenne-Tomisch, Planungsgruppe IKOS / HessSchophaus. 1980. Stadträumliche und bauhistorische Untersuchung des Standortes für das Museum für Verkehr und Technik. Bericht im Auftrag des Senators für Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Berlin: unpublished paper. Barker, Emma. 1999. The Museum in the Community: the New Tates. In Contemporary Cultures of Display, ed. E. Barker, 178-99. New Haven and London: Yale and Open University Press. Bennett, Tony. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Bodenschatz, Harald, Hans-Jachim Engstfeld, and Carsten Seifert. 1995. Berlin: Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Zentrum. Hamburg: Junius-Verlag. Brühl, Christine. 2003. Der Hamburger Bahnhof. Berlin: Kai Homilius Verlag. Cosgrove, Denis, and Stephen Daniels, eds. 1989. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deutsches Technikmuseum (DTMB). 2001. Jahresbericht. Berlin: DTMB. Duncan, Carol. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside the Public Art Museum. London and New York: Routledge.


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Foucault, Michel. 1991 (1977). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin. Frank, R., D. Haneberg, D. Hoffmann-Axthelm, H. Klein, G. Kühne, and G. Peschken. 1992. Platz und Monument. Die Kontroverse um das Kulturforum Berlin 1980-1992. Berlin: Berlinische Galerie / Museumspädagogischer Dienst / Reimer Verlag. Giebelhausen, Michaela. 2003. Introduction: the Architecture of the Museum – Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts. In The Architecture of the Museum. Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts, ed. M. Giebelhausen, 1-14. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gottmann, Günther. 1981. Museum für Verkehr und Technik oder Sanierung einer Kulturlandschaft. In Jubiläumsschrift des Verkehrsmuseums Berlin e.V., ed. Verkehrsmuseum Berlin, 23-25. Berlin: Verkehrsmuseum Berlin. Gottwaldt, Alfred. 1990. Züge, Loks und Leute. Eisenbahngeschichte in 33 Stationen. Ein Katalog. Berlin: Museum für Verkehr und Technik Berlin / Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung. Harvey, David. 1989. The Urban Experience. Blackwell: London. Hill, Kate. 2000. ‘Civic Pride’ or ‘Far-Reaching Utility?’ Liverpool Museum c. 1860-1914. The Journal of Regional and Local Studies 20: 3-28. Hochreiter, Werner. 1994. Vom Musentempel zum Lernort. Zur Sozialgeschichte deutscher Museen 1800-1918. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Jones, Ron. 2004. The Albert Dock Liverpool. Liverpool: Ron Jones Ltd. Kreps, Christina. 2003. Liberating Culture. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and Heritage Preservation. London and New York: Routledge. Lefebvre, Henri. 1998. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Liverpool City Council. 1987. An Arts and Cultural Industries Strategy for Liverpool. A Framework. Liverpool: City Council. SSS. 2004. Regeneration and Development in Liverpool City Centre 1995-2004. Liverpool: marketing@liverpool Liverpool Royal Institution. 1835-1843. Minutes of the Museum Committee. Vols. 1 and 2. University of Liverpool Special Collections RI ARCH 52.19 /LRI 1.2.1. Liverpool Vision. 2001. Liverpool Vision Business Plan. Liverpool: Liverpool Vision. SSS. 2004a. Kings Waterfront. Liverpool: Liverpool Vision. SSS. 2004b. Liverpool City Centre Development Potential to 2008. Liverpool: Liverpool Vision. SSS. 2004/2005. Liverpool City Centre. Development Update. Vols. 11 (June 2004) and 12 (February 2005). Liverpool: Liverpool Vision. SSS. 2005. Kings Waterfront. Hotel Opportunities within a World Class Development. Liverpool: Liverpool Vision. Lorente, J. Pedro, ed. 1996. The Role of Museums and the Arts in the Urban Regeneration of Liverpool. Leicester: Centre for Urban History (Working Papers 9).

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Merseyside Development Corporation (MDC). 1997. Post-Implementation Project Appraisal. Albert Dock. Liverpool: MDC. Merseyside Maritime Museum. 2004. Spirit of the Blitz – Liverpool in the Second World War. Merseyside Maritime Museum, 10 July 2003 to 5 December 2004. www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/exhibitions/blitz/home.asp (15.07.2005). SSS. 2005. Transatlantic Slavery – Against Human Dignity. Gallery description, Liverpool Maritime Museum. www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/ slavery/index.asp (15.07.2005). Museum für Verkehr und Technik Berlin (MVT). 1985. Schätze und Perspektiven. Wegweiser zu den Sammlungen. Berlin: Nicolaische Buchhandlung. Museum of Liverpool Life. 2005. Living It Up: The Tower Block Story. Museum of Liverpool Life. 12 February-15 June 2005. www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ liverpoollife/exhibitions/livingitup/ (15.07.2005). National Museums Liverpool. 2004. Maritime Liverpool. The Guide to Merseyside Maritime Museum, HM Customs and Excise Museum, Museum of Liverpool Life. Liverpool: Jarrold Publishing. The Paradise Project. 2005. Information pack. (‘Overview and General Background’, ‘The Team’, ‘Six Districts’, ‘Key Facts’). Liverpool: The Paradise Project. Searing, Helen. 2004. Art Spaces. The Architecture of Four Tates. London: Tate Publishing. Senat von Berlin. 1977. Vorlage für das Abgeordnetenhaus: Über die Errichtung eines Verkehrs- und Baumuseums. Berliner Amtsblatt, Drucksache 7/837, 22.04.1977. Mit Anlagen: Ergebnis der Standortprüfung; Stellungnahmen und Auswertungsergebnisse zur Planung eines technischen Museums in Berlin (Claus-Peter Gross, 31.08.1978). Senat von Berlin. 1979. Vorlage Nr. 32 für das Abgeordnetenhaus: ‘Über die Errichtung einer nichtrechtsfähigen Anstalt Berlins mit dem Namen Museum für Verkehr und Technik’. Berliner Amtsblatt, Drucksache 9/483, 25.01.1979. Sharples, Joseph. 2004. Liverpool. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Tate Gallery Liverpool. 2004. Project Space, Kara Walker: Grub For Sharks. A concession to the Negro populace. Exhibition 1 May-31 October 2004. www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/walker/ (15.07.2005). Taylor, Brandon. 1999. Art for the Nation. Exhibitions and the London Public 1747-2001. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, John. 1994. A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Croom Helm/Fontana. Wilson, Arline. 1998. The Florence of the North? The Civic Culture of Liverpool in the Early Nineteenth Century. In Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: MiddleClass Identity in Britain 1800-1940, eds. Alan Kidd and David Nicholls, 34-46. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Zukin, Sharon. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. London: Blackwell.


IDENTITY BY INVOCATION OR BY DESIGN? HOW PLANNING IS CONJURING UP A NEW IDENTITY FOR MALMÖ

Lia Ghilardi

Abstract In studying the exemplary case of Malmö, this paper is concerned with the process of change typical of that of many European cities, in which high-tech and knowledge-intensive activities are replacing the old, traditional industrial structure. It has been claimed that what is happening to this second-tier city is nothing but a ‘gigantic social experiment’ attempted by local policy-makers through the conscious implementation of a series of infrastructural and community development programmes. However, this paper argues that this idea of a ‘re-branding by policy design’ of Malmö is somewhat misleading and that instead an ‘accidental’ form of branding may be at work in the city. By examining key infrastructural projects and the associated effects these have had on the image of the city over the past decade, the author argues that the new profile and the regional position claimed by Malmö are the result of a new and unique ‘trial and error’ form of managing identity and change. Imagined Cities With the building of the bridge between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmö, Sweden, water ceased to be a barrier. Zealand and Scania are linked. New opportunities are opened. Two countries are brought together in one region. Öresund is born (quoted in Berg et al. 2000, 83).

These are the words of the official brand book, the manual issued in 1999 to, literally, brand the new Öresund Region, which covers both Copenha-

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gen and Malmö and links Denmark and Sweden. As well as summing up the excitement surrounding the construction of the fixed link between the two nations that opened in the summer of 2000, this statement also highlights a perception among policy-makers that the bridge was going to be instrumental in the development of a region. The bridge also joins two cities: the Danish capital, Copenhagen, and Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden and for both of these cities the bridge represents first and foremost the desire to disconnect themselves from an old industrial past and to connect instead with the ‘new economy’. This paper will look at how Malmö has embraced this largely conceptdriven form of regionalisation (see Ristilammi 2005, 87) and turned it into the centrepiece of an ‘unwritten’, and yet efficient, broader strategy aimed at redefining the character, function and identity of the city. I want to argue that, in the case of Malmö, the construction of a new meaning for the city – often a self-conscious and rational effort in large policydriven regeneration developments – appears to take a somewhat less coherent (yet real) character by greatly relying on the implementation, since the opening of the Öresund bridge, of a series of piecemeal schemes amounting to a ‘collective’ imagining of a new identity. This is reminiscent of a famous passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed (…). Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspective deceitful, and everything conceals something else (Calvino 1974, 44).

What Calvino was looking for in his journey through the invisible cities was the key to unlock the space dilemma, where both imagination and the physical boundaries merge together to give meaning and create a sense of place. It is this reverie of the real which makes a city not only a lived place but also, at the same time, a dreamed one, as Pierre Sansot (1993) argues. Philosopher and urban commentator Armando Silva appears to share this view when he writes that cities and urban formations are spaces not so much produced concretely, but imagined collectively (2003, 33). This critical questioning of our understanding of the urban as one, fixed and limited by its physical scope, is also present in the work of French sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In particular, he argues that space is the combination of the physical boundaries and the networks of exchange, desire, fantasy, sensorial evocations and everyday confrontations experienced by

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those who live in it (Lefebvre 1991, 280). This understanding of the complex and often contradictory nature of space is further explored in Lefebvre’s notion of ‘the production of space’. ‘Space is permeated with social relations; it is not only supported by social relations but it is also producing and produced by social relations’, states Lefebvre (1991, 286). He then adds that every society in history has shaped a distinctive social space that meets its intertwined requirements for economic production and social reproduction. It is this socio-cultural notion of the ‘reproduction’ of space that I propose to use as the starting point for my analysis of the Malmö case study. In particular, I want to look at how, in a ‘non-scripted’ way, Malmö has used spatial transformations and public pronouncements about policies to translate a new cultural identity into a spatial reality. These transformations, which take the form of large infrastructural and regeneration projects, I will argue, act as powerful tools for generating a constant state of expectation of, or alertness to, the possibility of a new meaning, while at the same time displacing the old. Malmö is today a cosmopolitan and multicultural city where high-tech and knowledge-intensive activities are slowly replacing the old, traditional industrial structure that since the 1960s had given it its ‘working class’ character. The integration of the Öresund region brought about by the link with Copenhagen in 2000, and other major infrastructural investments such as the redevelopment of the Western harbour are putting the city on the map along with advanced European ‘second tier’ centres such as Rotterdam or Lille. However, this mode of action, essentially governed by a need to play a role in the new economy, is highly problematic from the point of view of governance, coming as it does at a time of great change in the city. With 24% of its current population of 270,000 born abroad, Malmö is the most multiethnic city in Sweden, yet it has a rate of gainful employment below that of the national average, and continues to display a geographical and cultural segregation inherited from the industrial past. Given these somewhat contradictory conditions, my assessment of Malmö’s present attempts to reorient its image must begin with a discussion of the historic, political and social environment in which change is taking place.

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Thinking Big Collectively Industry and commerce – and in particular the shipbuilding, engineering, construction, textile and food production industries and wholesale trade – played a decisive role in developing Malmö into a prosperous city during the twentieth century. Prosperity reached its high point at the beginning of the 1960s, a period dominated by the Social Democratic Party. This was also a time of great urban expansion of both the inner city and of the suburbs, achieved through carefully nurtured relations between the political establishment and the public sector, the banks, and the construction industry. But in the mid-1970s, Malmö ran into trouble when the industries responsible for the wealth of the city entered a period of decline and outmigration. At the start of the 1990s, the city hit the bottom when some 27,000 jobs disappeared in the space of three years.1 At the same time, a steady increase in population, partly due to immigration,2 only compounded the negative effects of the crisis. In addition, the public sector – which up until then had been growing steadily – also suffered a setback, due to the decline of tax receipts resulting from the loss of jobs in industry. The net result was that in 1995, the City Council faced a budget deficit of more than one billion Swedish Kronor.3 It was at this point that the city realised that from being a national centre of industrial production, Malmö was slowly turning into a regional service centre of some importance but with an identity yet to be defined. This was a brash, blue-collar city hoping to become a key hub for information technology while at the same searching for a role in the new Öresund territorial configuration. This, I believe, was a turning point for the city, and I want to focus on two key strategic plans adopted by its politicians in reaction to the 1990s crisis. The staging of the European Housing Exhibition Expo Bo01 and the regeneration of the Western Harbour (spearheaded by the building of the Öresund Bridge) are two projects that, happening as they did, almost 1 In 1997, SAAB’s car manufacturing operations closed down with further loss of employment. 2 The population increased in 1997 for the thirteenth year running by more than 3,000 people. For an explanation of the trends in population, see City of Malmö 1998a. 3 For a detailed description of the labour market and employment dynamics affecting the city in the 1990s, see City of Malmö and County Labour Board of Scania 1999.


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simultaneously, have contributed to the symbolic and spatial transformation of Malmö for decades to come. The question here is: why these projects – what was the urban, political and cultural logic behind such decisions? Swedish sociologist Mikael Stigendal argues that ‘it seems indeed possible to explain the present state of Malmö through these words: transformation, boundaries and dialogues’ (2004, 2). In particular, he points out that the still ongoing regeneration of the Western Harbour area exemplifies the scale, scope and depth of transformation more than any other place in the city. To Stigendal’s interpretation, I would add that there is a history in the city of ‘dreaming big’ and collectively, but while in the past such transformations were the result of a shared, carefully planned vision, today they seem to happen in order to conjure up a new urban reality. In other words, still preoccupied with the task of building trust and consensus, this time in a highly unstable economic and socially fragmented environment, Malmö’s politicians, planners and other agents representing the public sphere are choosing big projects and events in order to create new meanings about place. Looking Back Urban transformations on a grand, utopian scale have a privileged position in Malmö’s history. From the Pildammarna Park with its artificial lake, created in the heart of the city in connection with the Baltic Exibition in 1914, to the modernistic rings of the Ellstorp, Augustenborg, Nydala and Lindängen neighbourhoods inspired by the welfare society of the 1960s, down to the Housing Expo and the current redevelopment of the Western Harbour we can see, albeit in different guises, the same grand social vision at work. This vision can be traced back to the locally rooted post-war expansion of the Swedish welfare state when the administration of welfare programmes was given to both municipalities and county councils. At local level, the implementation of these programmes was often dependent on political coalitions led by ‘strong men’ (Social Democrats backed by a strong party organisation) and an urban welfare regime based on an alliance between a Social Democratic state, local politicians and business interests linked to the housing sector (see Rojas 2005, 35-42). Priority was given to infrastructural investments which favoured local businesses, so that the benefits of economic growth would filter down through society

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and there would be surplus enough for distribution by the ‘strong men’ in charge of local government. The aim of the old Swedish welfare model was to give everyone a basic degree of social and economic security and to allow universal access to welfare services such as education and health care. The concept of folkhem, the ‘people’s home’, was the moral backdrop for a society that was inspired by the compassion and solidarity typical of an idealised vision of a good family. This welfare model continued successfully until well into the 1970s with a stability guaranteed by an essentially Fordist regime of accumulation. However, in the 1980s, economic and ideological challenges put into question the concept of comprehensive, rationalist planning, and welfare policies took on a new character, based on ideologies and practices aimed at decentralisation, deregulation, competitiveness and consumerism. Malmö consistently voted for the Social Democrats from the 1930s to the 1970s. There was consensus on a massive scale, governed by civic pride. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the coalition between politics and capital was at its strongest, housing associations such as HSB were providing a vision for future living accessible to everyone. Urban transformations such as the building in 1964 of Kronprinsen, the 26-storey housing project which, at the time, boasted of being the highest in Europe, had the support of the city’s inhabitants. The cityscape was changing, and the project of an ideal welfare-based society was driven by the principles of stability and solidarity. Consensus was achieved through the recognition by Malmö citizens that a limited freedom of choice was a price well worth paying in exchange for the security provided by the welfare state. Change found legitimacy in the deeply felt cultural and social understanding that public sector intervention was pursuing a shared ideal of a harmoniously planned society. Today, those factors that contributed to the success of the Swedish model – ethnic homogeneity, a strong nation state, rapid industrial growth, technology based on mass production and standardised organisation – are not present any more, and new social contracts are being tested out in the local arena. Malmö is a case in point as the organisation of the European Housing Expo Bo01 and the regeneration of the Western Harbour show.


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The City of Tomorrow For many decades, the Western Harbour (Västra Hamnen) area was associated with the shipyard Kockums, which through the 1970s was one of the largest in the world in terms of tonnage. The area also housed the headquarters of Skanska, the building company founded in Malmö in 1874. Skanska and Kockums were the industrial giants of the city, virtually written into its genetic code, to the point that in the early 1970s, the majority of Malmö’s working class worked at Kockums, lived in houses built by Skanska and voted for the Social Democrats (see Stigendal 2004, 3). Following the decline of these two companies, the area became partly derelict between the late 1970s and the 1990s. Then, the re-building of the Western Harbour started in 2001 with Expo Bo01. Prior to that, however, in 1998, the University College campus was built in a disused part of the harbour. This was the first hint, perhaps, that this tightly knit, highly regulated industrial space of the past was giving way to a more fragmented narrative of space: that of the ‘weightless economy’4 (Leadbeater 1999, 28). Both Expo Bo01 and the University also signalled that the city was now working within the logic of the ‘new economy’, and words such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘quality of life’ began to appear in the official city plans, together with economic concepts such as ‘competitiveness’, ‘opportunities’ and ‘skills’. 5 However, in this new ‘entrepreneurial’ climate, the attitude of the local government is not unproblematic, and even, at times, contradictory. For example, the planning of Expo Bo01 looks as if it was conceived within the old, top-down, planning logic of the ‘blank sheet’. A contaminated stretch of land was cleaned and completely emptied of both biological and cultural history, and then turned into a post-industrial ‘neighbourhood’. This was subsequently repackaged during a four-month long event (May to September 2001) into a centrepiece of a new model of housing and sustainable regeneration which combined ecological living, working and leisure with aesthetic purity. This dream of a perfect future (still in the making) was made up of the old Swedish ingredients of meticulous planning and a quality of housing and urban design of such standard that Expo Bo01 has been heralded as a proto4

Today, in the Western world we produce nothing that can be weighed, touched and easily measured, argues Leadbeater (pp. 28-36). This mode of production is light because it produces services, information and analysis, and very little that can be stockpiled in warehouses anymore. 5 See City of Malmö 1998b and the official brochure for the Bo01: City of Tomorrow (2001).

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type for a new European urbanism. Size is another element in this equation and the construction for the Expo Bo01 pilot – comprising more than 500 ecologically sustainable housing units, along with the landscaping of two parks and the creation of a sea promenade – is quite an achievement. At present, the rest of the regeneration in the Western Harbour area is a work in progress with a proposed completion date of 2010, but what is exciting and at the same time unsettling is both the breathtaking speed of the transformation and the scale of the vision. In the space of a decade, the site will have changed from 160 hectares of harbour front brownfield land into a fully developed new ‘neighbourhood’ of 10,000 inhabitants. The point here is not to speculate on whether this will become a living neighbourhood or a semi-detached, gated suburb, but to seek to understand the broader underlying elements of this new grand vision that Malmö is trying to realise at a time of great uncertainty for the city. This regeneration strategy is made up of at least two key elements, the first of which must be the use of physical transformations to act as trailblazers, or testing grounds for a new identity. The second is the introduction, by trial and error, of flexible, ad-hoc, forms of governance and consensus-seeking aimed at coping with the practical delivery of such projects. Learning by Doing Sociologist Maurice Roche (2000) argues that mega-events and spectacles tend to operate as a cultural vehicle for the reproduction and renegotiation of social communities and political discriminations in times of high uncertainty. Roche’s take on events is certainly true for Malmö and Expo Bo01, except that there is a further added ingredient here: that of learning by doing. By this I mean that through the implementation of projects such as Expo Bo01, and, more generally, the regeneration of the Western Harbour, the policy-makers have been learning that, in order to manage the new identity of the city, there is a need for both new forms of management and more transparent forms of democratic accountability. But because this is by no means a one-way process, the people of Malmö, in turn, are learning about themselves, their aspirations, and their new role as citizens in the post-welfare society. To support this statement I will briefly revisit the process that led to the opening of Expo Bo01 in May 2001 and will comment on the learning process that accompanied the development of this initiative. Expo Bo01 was opened in May 2001 amidst a controversy generated in the media about the political and financial scandals that surrounded the


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organisation of the event.6 As media expert André Jansson points out, initially, the visionary element encoded in the event by the city planners and the entrepreneurs saturated the news coverage (2004, 7). Then, as the opening approached, attention turned first to the issues of bad leadership and the heavy and indirectly tax-financed expenditure for the event (the Expo eventually ran into bankruptcy), and then to the divisive role the Expo was playing in the regeneration of the area. The focus was now on the image this new neighbourhood was acquiring as a place designed only for those who could afford to live there. This touched a nerve among those in Malmö brought up with the idea that good affordable housing came almost as a right for those living in the city. The stigmatisation of the area continued well after the closing of Expo Bo01 in September 2001, only to be reinforced by the insecurity caused by global events such as the 9/11 terror attacks, the collapse of the .com economy and doubts about the sustainability of the Öresund fixed link. Essentially, the unsold apartments left over from Expo Bo01 acted as a warning to the city that, from now on, they would have to learn to operate in a much less stable environment and one where planning had to go hand in hand with consensus. The dust only settled more than a year later with the news that 90% of the houses in the Expo Bo01 area had finally been rented or sold. Today, though still somewhat lacking in urban cohesion and connectivity between the different uses, the Western Harbour development has continued apace with the opening of a new University building, the creation of MINC, a new high-technology incubator, and the construction of the first part of the City Tunnel, which will link the area directly to the Öresund Bridge. The city is now so confident that this development will succeed that it is selling the Western Harbour as ‘a world class development’, providing ‘beauty, community, stimulation’, along with the assurance that it is accessible to all.7 What has Malmö learned from this process? First of all, those in charge of the Western Harbour regeneration appear to have become more aware of the risks involved in using techniques such as big transformations and large flagship regeneration programmes as spectacles for selling new identities to the outside world. The history of big events is littered with examples of 6 For a detailed account of the controversy surrounding Expo Bo01 and the symbolic impact this had on both the people who chose to live in the area and on the rest of the city, see Jansson 2004. 7 See Bo01 City of Tomorrow brochure and www.malmo.se

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failures due to economic and symbolic miscalculations and the risk of such failure has increased due to growing competition for public attention in the global marketing of cities (see Jansson 2004, 4). Ethnologist Per-Markku Ristilammi argues that spectacles are a flexible machinery affecting people by giving them an emotional experience that impacts on their everyday work and on their organisations (2005, 93). To this, I would add that, in the case of Malmö, the excessive ‘mediatisation’ of such events has posed a serious challenge to the way in which policy-makers and planners alike had previously communicated their vision to the local community. As a result, Malmö is learning to manage image-exposure in a more strategic way by putting in place participation mechanisms such as, for example, the City Planning Forum. Created in 2003, the Forum is a permanent place for the Planning Department to hold exhibitions, meetings and seminars on the subject of Malmö’s urban developments (especially those in the Western Harbour area). This is a strategic tool put in place not only for the dissemination of information to the general public, but also as a way of inducing a collaborative approach to the design and planning of the areas in need of transformation.8 Critics have argued that the Forum is nothing more than a sophisticated marketing tool to re-brand the city (see Lundgren 2003, 14). My reading is somewhat different, especially because in addition to the Forum, the city’s planning department also set up the Western Harbour Co-operation Group. This is part of the strategy which the city calls ‘Build-Live Dialogue’ [ByggaBoDialogen]. The group, which includes thirteen developers, a test panel of citizens and a group of experts from the City of Malmö, aims to encourage a comprehensive vision through cross-disciplinary work and participation. The idea is to let go of traditional roles in order to utilise everyone’s collective knowledge. Participants must be constantly willing to challenge their profession and traditional ways of doing things. The Co-operation Group and the Forum are only two of the experimental projects the city is implementing as testing ground for the improvement of governance and participation, but there are also a number of new planning tools that the city is in the process of elaborating, all of which represent a break with tradition.

8 For an analysis of the City Planning Forum’s role in the regeneration of the Western Harbour, see Lundgren 2003.


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One such tool is called Q-books; it is another example of learning by doing, and concerns the plans for the expansion of the University. The University’s actual rate of growth, about two thousand students per year, puts a heavy demand on planners to come up with solutions aimed at integrating it into the existing urban and social fabric of the city (in this case into the Western Harbour). Here the City Council has adopted a strategy which puts quality (hence Q) at the centre of future sustainable developments. Inspired by examples in the Netherlands, Q-books is a quality management programme based on guidelines that bind both planners and developers to build according to high standards of materials and form. Q-book 1 deals with the overall urban strategy, while Q-books 2 and 3 deal with land and the building of parks, streets and the waterfront. Finally, Qbook 4 focuses on art in public spaces. The innovative element of Q-books is that of setting in motion a process of dialogue between stakeholders on the subject of the urban and social function of regeneration before this takes place. If this approach sounds like ‘common sense’ to planning experts elsewhere, for Malmö it represents a further attempt to put in place new ways of dealing with the city’s new identity in a concrete way. In terms of identity management, the lesson that the city is learning is that today’s Malmö is not the homogeneous city of forty years ago and that the top-down grand Swedish narrative of ‘planning and re-branding by design’ has collapsed into a more fragmented, diverse set of visions, all of which have the same legitimacy over the city. The experience learned from the mobilisation of urban transformations suggests that Malmö’s identity has to be built around a careful negotiation between a variety of aspirations and visions. This is why the old top-down attitude is beginning to be replaced by a more ‘adaptive’ approach to identity management involving more transparency, accountability and openness. This process is characterised by a ‘learning by doing’ attitude mixed with a strong collective willingness to ‘dream up’ a new reality for the city by organisations, institutions and local actors alike, resulting in a new and unique ‘trial and error’ form of managing identity and change. The result of these experiments may lead to further challenges for Malmö, and the city is well aware of the risks involved in raising too many expectations. However, the advantage that Malmö has over bigger European cities (for example, Copenhagen) is that of having learned to adapt to changing circumstances. The failures of the past have helped the city to develop coping mechanisms that allow room for innovation and public-

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private partnership building in an environment which still sees the public sector’s role as key in urban and community development.

References Anon. 2001. BoO1 City of Tomorrow. Malmö: European Housing Exhibition. Berg, Per Olof, Anders Linde-Laursen, and Orvar Löfgren. 2000. Invoking a Transnational Metropolis: The Making of the Öresund Region. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company. City of Malmö. 1998a. Facts about Malmö. Malmö: City of Malmö Publications. SSS. 1998b. Draft Comprehensive Plan for Malmö, 1998-99. Malmö: City of Malmö Publications. SSS. and County Labour Board of Scania. 1999. From Crisis to Growth? A Report on Labour Market and Employment Issues in Malmö. Malmö: City of Malmö Publications. Jansson, André. 2004. Re-Encoding the Spectacle, Urban Fatefulness and Mediated Stigmatisation in the City of Tomorrow. Unpublished paper delivered at ACSIS, Norrköping 25 May, 2004. Leadbeater, Charles. 1999. Living on Thin Air: The New Economy. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lundgren, Maria. 2003. Building a Collaborative Design Approach for the Development of the Western Harbour. Unpublished paper presented at the 16th Nordic Conference for Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, Norway, 1517 August 2003. Our New Region. Vår nya region. Vores nye region. 1999. Copenhagen and Malmö: City of Copenhagen and City of Malmö. Ristilammi, Per-Markku. 2005. Spectral Events: Attempts at Pattern Recognition. In Magic, Culture and the New Economy, eds. Orvar Löfgren and Robert Willim, 87-95. Oxford and New York: Berg. Roche, Maurice. 2000. Mega-events: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London: Routledge. Rojas, Mauricio. 2005. Beyond the Welfare State: Sweden and the Quest for a Post-Industrial Welfare Model. Kristianstads: AB Timbro. Sansot, Pierre. 1993. L’imaginaire: la capacité d’outrepasser le sensible. Société 42 : 411-17. Silva, Armando. 2003. Imaginaries. In Urban Imaginaries of Latin America, ed. A. Silva, 23-45. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Stigendal, Mikael. 2004. Transformations, Boundaries, Dialogues: A Perspective on Malmö. Paper written for the 22nd Nordic Sociology Congress, Malmö, 20-22, August 2004. Consulted on www.mah.se, July 2005.


CONFESSIONS OF A PLACE MARKETER Paul Brookes, interviewed by Franco Bianchini

Abstract Paul Brookes has developed a reputation in the UK as an innovative place marketing specialist through his work for Bradford’s bid for the title of European Capital of Culture 2008 from 2001-2003 and for the ‘Leicester Revealed’ project initiated by Leicester Shire Promotions (2003-2006). The interview highlights the importance of flagship events in place marketing, and the huge expectations which are often placed on the process of marketing cities. Place marketing is in many cases seen as a road to salvation for cities, as a way of reinventing local economies which are in structural decline or of attempting to become successful tourist destinations, in a context of increasingly fierce global competition in the tourism market. In other cases place marketing is seen as a tool to support and develop a city’s distinctiveness, and to enhance local pride, a sense of community, cohesion, and belonging. Paul Brookes argues that managing the often unrealistic expectations of local politicians and policymakers, other stakeholders, the media and the general public is one of the key tasks for a good place marketer. With regard to this, Brookes also raises the complex issue of the democratic legitimacy of unelected place marketing agencies, which in some cases make decisions which should be subject to proper scrutiny by voters. The concept of the ‘Leicester Revealed’ initiative was influenced by the publication of Chris Murray’s Making Sense of Place: New Approaches to

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Paul Brookes, interviewed by Franco Bianchini 1

Place Marketing , a book which advocates the importance of an interdisciplinary and creative approach to understanding places as complex and multi-faceted cultural entities. The book takes issue with the posi2 tion of Philip Kotler, author of Marketing Places and one of the most influential authors in place marketing. Kotler writes that ‘places are, indeed, products whose identities and values must be designed and marketed’ (quoted in Murray 2001, 64). Murray concludes that ‘the notion of designing identities for places should be rejected as in the end it leads to disaffection (…) and there is insufficient evidence that it works’ (2001, 73). Murray’s proposal for an alternative to Kotler’s designing of place identities needs further elaboration. However, in one passage of his book he draws inspiration from a quote from Paul Klee (‘art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible’) to suggest that ‘place marketing needs to move from derivative reproduction to revealing the unique, in the same way’ (Murray 2001, 14, my emphasis). Murray collaborated with Leicester Shire Promotions in the establishment of the ‘Leicester Revealed’ initiative. In the interview Paul Brookes subscribes to some of the philosophical principles underpinning Chris Murray’s approach, but agrees with Kotler and other advocates of traditional place marketing when he argues that it is important for each city to have a short encapsulation of its ‘brand value’. He says he achieved this in his work in Bradford – by coining the phrase ‘One landscape, many views’ (which was adopted by the local authority in its corporate communication) – but not in Leicester. He highlights the similarities but also the differences between the two cities. The latter include the absence in Leicester of a serious crisis bringing the different stakeholders together, and acting as a spur to action, and of a long-term strategic vision like the Bradford 2020 document. Another theme in the interview is the need for a relationship in place marketing between form and substance, image and reality. Brookes argues that a campaign which is not matched by real initiatives on the ground, which have a tangible impact on how local people and visitors experience the city, will soon lose credibility and not be 1

Murray, Chris. 2001. Making Sense of Place: New Approaches to Place Marketing. Bournes Green: Comedia (in association with the International Cultural Planning and Policy Unit, De Montfort University, Leicester). 2 Kotler, Philip. 1993. Marketing Places. New York: The Free Press.

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sustainable. Lastly, Brookes stresses that place marketing is a process which requires long term political and funding commitment. The ‘Leicester Revealed’ experiment was affected by funding difficulties and changes in political leadership following the defeat of the Labour administration, and the rise to power of a Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition on Leicester City Council at the 2003 local elections. FB: Paul, how did you start working in place marketing? PB: I didn’t get to the job of place marketer in any conventional way. I was trained as a film maker and then worked in arts administration, allocating resources for film production. I became Chief Executive of the Arts Council’s Year of Photography and the Electronic Image (also known as Photo 98), with responsibilities for programming, marketing and fundraising, in 1998. The aim was to build a relationship between the event itself and all households in the UK, as photography is an activity which everybody understands. The Year of Photography taught me a lot about product and brand marketing, as well as place marketing. After the Photo 98 experience, I created The Culture Company in Huddersfield. The Culture Company organised three conferences in the space of three years, all debating the European City of Culture scheme 3 and the activities related to them. While I was working on the 2002 conference (in October 2001), I was appointed as Director of Bradford’s bid for the European Capital of Culture ECC 2008. Of all the jobs I have done, it is the one that has given me most satisfaction. It was a very intense one and a half years, building partnerships and writing a bid proposal while at the same time building confidence among local people. It was about building a popular momentum among the citizens of Bradford to raise their aspirations; in short it was about using the hook of the ECC bid to produce a climate for change and regeneration. We organised a large number of events to raise the profile of Bradford, but in October 2002 we had the huge disappointment of finding out that Bradford had not been short-listed. 3

The 2000 conference looked at the European City of Culture scheme as a whole; in 2001, we debated the involvement of the sciences in the cultural programmes for the European City of Culture events; and the 2002 event concentrated on sports activities as part of culture.

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Paul Brookes, interviewed by Franco Bianchini

I then worked on the legacy of the Bradford bid until I came to Leicester in June 2003. FB: What were the most important lessons you learnt from your work at Photo 98 and at The Culture Company in terms of their relevance to place marketing? PB: There were four main lessons I learnt. Focusing of resources: all big events like the ECC, conceived to raise the status and profile of a place, can become monsters whose ambitions grow and grow, up to the point of trying to deliver everything for everybody. Managing expectations becomes a key challenge. Some expectations, particularly in the area of economic regeneration, are unrealistic, and cannot be met – although place marketing can have an influence on perceptions and help create a climate of optimism. Press and PR: the press feeds off itself. If you get it right, it is a fantastically cheap way to do your marketing. You cannot control the press, though. As a place marketer, you are not the person shaping the story. The relationship with the press is vital, because if you get it wrong it can undermine all your place marketing initiatives. Later, while in the job in Bradford, I learnt that you have to understand the other person’s agenda. There are different agendas for different kinds of newspapers. You have to give them something they want to have. A ‘simply good news’ story is often of no interest to the press. News stories have to have an edge and a level of potential controversy, which you then have to be able to turn to your advantage. In the case of Bradford 2008 the starting point was cynicism about whether Bradford could be a suitable ECC candidate. ‘Bradford European Capital of Culture?’ became an advertising slogan, which people found dead funny. The reaction to this slogan gave us the opportunity to say that, yes, we had the determination and the required qualities to be European Capital of Culture. This was a good starting point, following the appalling press the city had had after the 2001 riots. We later developed a broad concept on the back of this slogan, which had a lot of resonance. One of my colleagues found the words ‘One landscape, many views’ in the subtitle of Bradford-born David Hockney’s photomontage work Pear Blossom Highway. This concept worked for us, because of the ethnic diversity of the city (at the time 23% of the population was


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Muslim, mainly from Pakistan and Bangladesh), and because of the social, cultural and physical variety in the towns which form part of the Bradford district, with a mixture of urban and rural areas. The reference to ‘one landscape’ stressed the importance of finding unity among the many different views which were present in the city. This was especially crucial in the aftermath of the 2001 disorders, which followed the riots in Bradford after the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in the 1980s and another riot in 1996. The slogan seemed to sum up exactly what everybody was feeling, and was so successful that it became the corporate logo for the City Council, which used it in place of its civic crest on many occasions. This slogan became a rallying call, and it was one of the legacies of the ECC bid. Wider objectives: place marketing is about a wider agenda. It is important to be ambitious, and to have wider objectives but one has to think about how to deliver them in the long term. How will these objectives continue to be met after the end of the bidding process? How do they influence the way people work in the long term? As practitioners it is easy to be concerned only with the short and medium term; and wider, longer term objectives can be forgotten. In the case of Bradford 2008, the primary wider objective was to rebuild confidence in the city, internally and externally, and to build ‘one landscape’ of collective will. It meant trying to have the general public think ahead about what the city should become. Bradford knew that it did not deserve to be ECC in 2001; the objective was to deserve to gain the title in 2008. Bradford City Council and other stakeholders had already produced a good strategic vision document called ‘The 2020 Vision’. The ECC bid was an integral part of this vision. The regeneration cycle in Bradford in 2001, though, was completely stuck. Bradford could not gain the confidence of investors. The city centre and several neighbourhoods of the city looked and were very run down. We therefore tried to challenge the notion that Bradford was on the down economically, and argued that as a district, rather than just as a city, Bradford was reasonably successful as a tourist destination. The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television was the most visited museum in the UK outside London; Saltaire (the village built in the nineteenth century by the Victorian philanthropist Sir Titus Salt, to provide self-contained living space for the workers at his woollen mills) had recently been declared a World Heritage Site,

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and Brontë Country was a popular destination, particularly for Japanese and American tourists. It was important to make sure that Bradford was part of the Yorkshire brand, which is attractive in tourism terms. Another lesson from The Culture Company’s three conferences and from Photo 98 was that money breeds money. The only way to gain money is to spend money. Bradford 2008 went up and up until the moment the city was not short-listed in October 2002. The darkest times of Photo 98 came when one of our principal sponsors withdrew. The only way out was to spend more money on marketing and communications. This then convinced Canon to make a bigger investment than that made by the sponsor who had withdrawn. FB: Our book, Urban Mindscapes of Europe, argues that landscapes of the mind are as important as physical landscapes in tourism and place marketing. Did you use any notion of mindscape or social imaginary in your work, for example drawn from Bradford-born novelist, playwright and critic J.B. Priestley in relation to the Bradford 2008 project? Did you work with people who know about cultural representations of places, and make use of them? PB: I came from a practitioner background to place marketing, with expertise mainly in commissioning artworks and event management, rather than from an intellectual or theoretical background. Part of the learning was to build the best possible team of people to deliver the project, with the right mix of skills. You have to learn from other people, even if you stay essentially a layman. Within the Bradford 2008 team there was a recognition that there had to be a range of different influences. We wanted to maintain a degree of originality and integrity. We were looking for iconic interpretations of the place. We also wanted to avoid clichés if at all possible. Referring to the Brontës or J.B. Priestley was felt not to be contemporary enough. We were always looking for cultural representations that would make people think: ‘that’s different’. We commissioned more artistic work than many of the other 2008 bidding cities. In fact only Belfast and Bradford commissioned artists to prepare their audio-visual material. We commissioned a poet to work with digital images, with film makers and with a musician, and produced a video which still has a strong emotive im-


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pact. The poem offers a personal portrait of Bradford, and the whole thing was more like a work of art than a corporate video. The chair of the 2008 judging panel, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, thought the video was excellent. Clearly the artists we commissioned did some research on mental landscapes and local social imaginaries. FB: What were the main innovations of the Bradford 2008 campaign? PB: The opening of the ‘Bradford Embassy’ in London was an important initiative. It was a development of the concept ‘Bradford European Capital of Culture?’. It gained huge coverage and was featured by every terrestrial TV channel in the UK as well as by CNN and Sky. We booked the top floor of a hotel overlooking Trafalgar Square, including the roof garden, and kitted out the rooms to be exhibition showcases on Bradford’s tourism and cultural strengths. The Embassy was open for only three days. We printed Bradford passports and invited former Bradfordians to reunite with their lost city and receive their personal Bradford passport. We invited ambassadors and cultural attachés from various countries to have high tea, and organised an evening for arts lovers. We also interviewed 1,000 Londoners and asked them to locate UK cities, including many of the ECC bidding cities. The ignorance of Londoners about these cities was appalling. FB: What was the structure of the Bradford 2008 bidding team, and what would you say were the main strengths and weaknesses of your work for the bid? PB: Place marketing in relation to a themed year or a flagship event has to be owned by the principal players in a particular city. One of the principal players is always the local Council. However, councils are notoriously bureaucratic, and it is difficult to work with them in a creative way. Some cities would take the view that the teams working on themed or flagship events should be located as far away from the local authority as possible. This could be a mistake, because if you are too far away from the centres of power you have little influence. In Bradford there was a fortunate alignment of circumstances, where as director of the ECC bidding team I was director of a Council department, but was located in a building with no other Council staff. The

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overall Bradford 2008 partnership board included politicians, cultural leaders and representatives from the business community. The group had enormous clout. The peer group of other bidding cities all expected Bradford to be on the shortlist. The shock not to be included was considerable. How do you deal not just with the personal disappointment of the bidding team but also with managing the dashed expectations of your partners and the public? The official feedback from the judging panel was that the main problem was Bradford’s insufficient infrastructural capacity to host the ECC event, both in terms of arts venues and hotels and other tourism infrastructure. The tragedy was that it would have been enough for Bradford to only make the shortlist for the momentum to be unstoppable. Making the shortlist would have had a very positive effect on property values, and an important impact on house prices and investment by developers. The saving grace, and main legacy, of the bid was the development of a masterplan for the city centre prepared by architect Will Alsop. It was an incredibly ambitious architectural vision, and it was published nine months after Bradford’s failure to be short-listed. Undoubtedly it would not have happened if Bradford had decided not to bid for the 2008 ECC. There is now a masterplan company which is implementing part of this vision. FB: After the Bradford job, you became Director of the ‘Leicester Revealed’ place-marketing initiative. What was different about Leicester and your new job, for example in terms of the understanding of place marketing in the Leicester context? PB: When I moved to Leicester in spring 2003, what hit me initially were the similarities with Bradford: a similar sized city surrounded by some beautiful countryside, with a culturally diverse community (superficially similar to Bradford), and deindustrialisation in the textiles sector. Rather similarly to Bradford, Leicester was also suffering from negative perceptions both by outsiders and by insiders. One of the dissimilarities was that the development of the ‘Leicester Revealed’ place marketing programme, which I was appointed to head, had started way before I arrived. A strong partnership involving some


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of the key organizations in the city and led by Leicester Shire Promotions had emerged. The partnership work had been successful and had built a pretty good common understanding of what the problems were and what was needed. There was agreement that Leicester had to counter internal and external negative perceptions of the city, and lack of confidence, again both within the city and externally. One important difference between the two cities was that Leicester was constantly referred to by people as being apathetic. There wasn’t in Leicester a catalyst for action comparable to the ECC bid for Bradford. Leicester also did not have an agreed cross party vision about the future of the city, comparable to Bradford’s 2020 vision. Another difference between the two cities was that Leicester Promotions – the agency responsible for local place marketing and tourism development – was in the process of becoming Leicester Shire Promotions, with a county-wide role as an independent not-for-profit agency with financial support from the City and the County Councils, and from other public sector agencies. It was in a weaker structural position than the ECC unit in Bradford. We got off to a great start by using some of the lessons of Bradford. The plan to publish in mid-November 2003 a supplement in the Guardian (written by Guardian journalists with assistance from ‘Leicester Revealed’) about Leicester’s ‘hidden assets’ which was directly mailed to various Tourism Information Centres was a success. We also followed a parallel track of producing ironic posters and placing them in the city centre, starting with ‘Boring, boring Leicester’ and ‘Leicester – nothing to shout about’. These negative statements were initially not accompanied by images, but later the same messages were juxtaposed with images showing that Leicester was not boring and did indeed have something to shout about. This was to challenge the perceptions of local people of their city, and provoke a reaction, to encourage them to recognize and value the good things about Leicester. The campaign generated a lot of interest in the media, and snowballed, producing extensive coverage. The cost of the campaign was less than £1,000 and resulted in over £200,000 worth of advertising value. South African and Canadian state radio, for example, picked up the ‘Boring, boring’ message. Radio journalism, in particular, loves a sense of humour. The Observer did an article saying that the ‘Leicester Revealed’ campaign was

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one of the most original place -marketing campaigns ever, beaten only by the Bangladesh campaign ‘Come before the tourists do’. FB: How did ‘Leicester Revealed’ develop after this good start? PB: We then wanted to move the campaign on, to explore the good things about the city. The first themed year for ‘Leicester Revealed’ was ‘Taste Leicester!’ (2004). The second was ‘Create Leicester’ in 2005, highlighting innovation and creativity. The way I chose to interpret ‘Taste Leicester!’ was to focus on encouraging people to taste the cultural identity of the city as it is today, ranging from its cuisine to the arts and sports. A good place marketing campaign has to be as much opportunistic as it is planned. One opportunity was a book published for Christmas 4 2003 on ‘extreme ironing’ by a local author. It fitted with our ‘Boring boring Leicester’ theme. Extreme ironing was invented in Leicester in 1997 as a creative response to the boring and repetitious nature of ironing. Inspired by David Blaine’s - very boring - stunt in central London, we got Phil Shaw, the author of the book, to iron the longest piece of sari cloth in the world in a transparent box suspended above Humberstone Gate in Leicester city centre. This obtained a lot of coverage in every BBC regional radio station around the country, and on breakfast TV. As we moved through 2004, ‘Leicester Revealed’ focused on what people wanted for the future and on Leicester’s assets, and the poster campaign’s tone became more positive. This has become problematic: who are we at Leicester Shire Promotions to ask people what 4

Phil Shaw. 2003. Extreme Ironing. London: New Holland Publishers. From the book’s blurb: ‘in 2003, extreme ironing is the world’s newest adrenalin sport, combining the thrill of extreme outdoor activity - rock climbing, mountaineering, canoeing, scuba diving or surfing - with the satisfaction of well-pressed clothing. Participants of the sport are known as ironists and pride themselves on returning to work on Monday morning in a shirt which was ironed at the weekend whilst dangling from a rock face or riding the rapids. From its humble beginnings in the English East Midlands city of Leicester in 1997, the sport has gone global, with the first Extreme Ironing World Championships being held in Munich 2002. Since then even more people have taken ironing outside, under the sky, where it belongs. Written by the sport's founding father, this book, illustrated throughout with photographs, is a guide to equipment and clothing; a description of the different styles of extreme ironing; and an overview of worldwide developments.’


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they want for the future? There is a problem of legitimacy, and a problem in the strength of the local partnership. There has to be a strong connection between city marketing and all aspects of urban policy. People won’t engage in dialogue in a place marketing campaign unless they can see that this is reflected in things that are happening on the ground. You cannot deliver an effective place marketing campaign if it does not reflect reality. The extent to which improvements are made in the maintenance and appearance of the city centre, the regeneration of the city, the standard of education in schools, the transport system, or the range of cultural facilities, cannot be separated from the place marketing campaign. Place marketing is not just about the interpretation of places, but also about their transformation. The difficulty for ‘Leicester Revealed’ is that the different agendas and policies have not been joined up to a significant level. By the end of 2004, the ‘Leicester Revealed’ initiative started to experience some difficulties, as the level of political support and available resources were changing. There has not been sufficient financial support for us to be able to commission new work as part of the programme of the themed years, and we have had simply to promote and market existing activities. Themed and centenary years for cities, when there are not enough resources, tend to become mere re-packaging exercises. During the 2004 ‘Taste Leicester!’ campaign, the City Council (following the fall of the Labour administration and the rise to power of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2003) took the decision to cut grants to the voluntary sector. You cannot have a successful city without a thriving voluntary sector, working alongside successful private and public sectors. Although many of the cuts were later reversed, that decision had major repercussions. It is difficult to tell journalists ‘Leicester is on the way up’ when extensive cuts to the voluntary sector have just been announced. There was also a slower momentum to the regeneration of the city than had been hoped for. We had to be careful not to shout from the rooftops too quickly, until there was more evidence of regeneration on the ground for people to see. FB: I have recently heard an ‘urban myth’ about the city where we both work. It seems that, with regard to the successes of former Leicester City manager Martin O’Neill, football legend Brian Clough once de-

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clared that ‘anyone who has achieved anything in Leicester, but make a jumper, must be a genius’. Do you think that there is a widespread perception that Leicester is still a difficult place in which to make things happen? PB: It is difficult to make things happen anywhere. There are some cities in the UK which continue to prosper irrespective of the policies which are put in place there. There are other places which have fantastic commitment and plans but are struggling nevertheless, because of their geographical locations and/or socio-economic structures. Leicester is positioned in an economically favourable part of the country. The problem is that Leicester does not utilise its opportunities for new developments successfully. I am confident about the prospects for the economy and for the cultural sector but less confident that, at least in the short term, the tourism sector will grow, especially in terms of overnight stays, due to an insufficient number of attractions to make the city a first choice destination. FB: One of the starting points of ‘Leicester Revealed’ was to adopt the alternative approach to place marketing proposed in Chris Murray’s book Making Sense of Place. Are you in a position to say whether this approach works, or has Murray’s approach perhaps not yet been fully tried in Leicester? PB: I was invited to work in Leicester partly because of the approach I had adopted in Bradford, which had used artistic and creative work to explore and celebrate the different identities of that city. The job description for the post of Director of the ‘Leicester Revealed’ initiative was influenced by Chris Murray’s book, which argues that a place is not a product and does not have a single brand value. A place in fact is more like a person in its complexity, and the exploration and revelation of different aspects of it, is a long term process which is about engaging people. This is a point of view to which I certainly subscribe. The downside of Murray’s approach, though, is that every place in the end needs an encapsulation of its brand value. Leicester hasn’t yet found the shorthand to express, represent and encapsulate the complex organism that it is. I cannot wait until the ‘Leicester Revealed’ campaign is completed in 2010 to find this encapsulation. There is cur-


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rently no common agreement among stakeholders on how to describe Leicester. Different partners favour different emphases, concepts and shorthands. We have to find a phrase that belongs to Leicester in the way that ‘One landscape, many views’ belongs only to Bradford. Each city, like each person, is unique. Each city, therefore, deserves a unique description of its essence. Postscript Paul Brookes left Leicester Shire Promotions in February 2006. Largely due to insufficient commitment of financial resources by its partners and insufficient political support, the ‘Leicester Revealed’ campaign is being re-evaluated, with its structures and plans discontinued in their current format.


r o d o p i [email protected]–www.rodopi.nl

The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde (1906-1940)

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2006 290 pp. (Avant-Garde Critical Studies 19) Bound € 60 / US$ 75 ISBN-10: 9042019093 ISBN-13: 9789042019096

Edited by Sacha Bru and Gunther Martens

In 1906, for the first time in his life, F.T. Marinetti connected the term ‘avantgarde’ with the idea of the future, thus paving the way for what is now commonly called the ‘modernist’ or ‘historical avantgarde’. Since 1906 the ties between the early twentieth-century European aesthetic vanguard and politics have been a matter of debate. With a century gone by, The Invention of Politics in the European AvantGarde takes stock of this debate. Opening with a critical introduction to the vast research archive on the subject, this book proposes to view the avant-garde as a political force in its own right that may have produced solutions to problems irresolvable within its democratic political constellation. In a series of essays that combine close readings of texts and plastic works with a thorough knowledge of their political context, the book looks at avant-garde works as media producing political thought and experience. Covering the canonised avant-garde movements of Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism, but also focussing on the avant-garde in Europe’s geographical outskirts, this book will appeal to all those interested in the modernist avant-garde.

USA/Canada: 295 North Michigan Avenue - Suite 1B Kenilworth, NJ 07033, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): 1-800-225-3998 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations

r o d o p i [email protected]–www.rodopi.nl Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2006 314 pp. (Critical Studies 29) Bound € 65 / US$ 81 ISBN-10: 9042016396 ISBN-13: 9789042016392

The Matrix in Theory Edited by Myriam Diocaretz and Stefan Herbrechter

The Matrix trilogy continues to split opinions widely, polarising the downright dismissive and the wildly enthusiastic. Nevertheless, it has been fully embraced as a rich source of theoretical and cultural references. The contributions in this volume probe the effects the Matrix trilogy continues to provoke and evaluate how or to what extent they coincide with certain developments within critical and cultural theory. Is the enthusiastic philosophising and theorising spurred by the Matrix a sign of the desperate state theory is in, in the sense of “see how low theory (or ‘post-theory’) has sunk”? Or could the Matrix be one of the “master texts” for something like a renewal for theory as now being mainly concerned with new and changing relations between science, technology, posthumanist culture, art, politics, ethics and the media? The present volume is unashamedly but not dogmatically theoretical even though there is not much agreement about what kind of theory is best suited to confront “post-theoretical” times. But it is probably fair to say that there is agreement about one thing, namely that if theory appears to be “like” the Matrix today it does so because the culture around it and which “made” it itself seems to be captured in some kind of Matrix. The only way out of this is through more and renewed, refreshed theorising, not less.



Our House The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2006 268 pp. (Nature, Culture and Literature 2) Paper € 54 / US$ 73 ISBN-10: 9042019697 ISBN-13: 9789042019690

Edited by Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft

Space has emerged in recent years as a radical category in a range of related disciplines across the humanities. Of the many possible applications of this new interest, some of the most exciting and challenging have addressed the issue of domestic architecture and its function as a space for both the dramatisation and the negotiation of a cluster of highly salient issues concerning, amongst other things, belonging and exclusion, fear and desire, identity and difference. Our House is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays taking as its focus both the prospect and the possibility of ‘the house’. This latter term is taken in its broadest possible resonance, encompassing everything from the great houses so beloved of nineteenth-century English novelists to the caravans and mobile homes of the latterday travelling community, and all points in between. The essays are written by a combination of established and emerging scholars, working in a variety of scholarly disciplines, including literary criticism, sociology, cultural studies, history, popular music, and architecture. No specific school or theory predominates, although the work of two key figures – Gaston Bachelard and Martin Heidegger – is engaged throughout. This collection engages with a number of key issues raised by the increasingly troubled relationship between the cultural (built) and natural environments in the contemporary world.

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Isaiah Berlin A Value Pluralist and Humanist View of Human Nature and the Meaning of Life Connie Aarsbergen-Ligtvoet

Value pluralism, a philosophical perspective belonging to the humanist and liberal family, is meeting with increasing attention and support in contemporary political and moral philosophy. Its starting point is that (personal and social) human life is characterized by conflict between the various (good) values and ends that are pursued. Value pluralism takes cultural and moral diversity seriously and thereby also denies the validity of – in their view – potentially dangerous monisms that promise a perfect, tension-free human life. But does value pluralism itself not lead to another danger – that of moral relativism and questioning the meaning of human life itself? This study describes the anthropology of Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), value pluralism’s founding father. Berlin wants to protect both moral and cultural diversity against monist tendencies but at the same time struggles to avoid moral relativism. This study follows Berlin critically in this dilemma, thereby giving insight into how value pluralism differs from contemporary postmodernist and conventionalist positions. Through this study profound insight can be gained into the anthropological assumptions behind value pluralism. This study reveals the basic assumptions in Western and liberal thought that often remain implicit and hidden, leading to much misunderstanding and conflict. Berlin’s ideas can enrich existing theories of pluralism and contribute to intercultural and interreligious dialogue. And, last but not least, Berlin’s value pluralism helps us to understand the roots of ideologically and religiously inspired violence.

Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2006 VIII-202 pp. (Currents of Encounter 27) Paper € 42 / US$ 53 ISBN-10: 9042019298 ISBN-13: 9789042019294

CONNIE AARSBERGEN-LIGTVOET (1961) teaches philosophy, ethics and anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. She also organizes workshops for organizations facing with (internal) value conflicts in a value pluralist world. Her current research interests include philosophy of religion, interreligious dialogue, ethics, anthropology and politics. This study is part of a research project conducted by the research group Encounter of Religious Traditions at the Faculty of Theology at the Vrije Universiteit.


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