Urban Space and Representation

Maria Balshaw

Description

Theories of urban space have become the focus of a great deal of work by scholars in cultural geography, urban studies and critical theory. This volume contributes to that debate by analysing the relationship between theories of urban space and literary and visual representations of the city – an emergent area of confluence in literary, film and cultural studies.



The contributors address themes such as visual culture and spectacle; class and capital; community and public space; and nation, diaspora and belonging. Cities covered include New York, Chicago, Jerusalem, Paris, London, Birmingham and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Artists and writers discussed include Piet Mondrian, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Sarah Schulman, Jonathan Larsen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Paul Auster and Wayne Wang.
Acknowledgements



Contributors



Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy, Introduction



Part One: SPACE AND VISION



1. Douglas Tallack, City Sights: Mapping and Representing New York City



2. Richard Ings, A Tale of Two Cities: Urban Text and Image in The Sweet Flypaper of Life



3. Pascal Pinck, From the Sofa to the Crime Scene: Skycam, Local News and the Televisual City

Part Two: SPACES OF DIFFERENCE



4. Al Deakin, Fear and Sympathy: Charles Dickens and Urban (Dis) Ability



5. Maria Balshaw, Elegies to Harlem: Looking For Langston and Jazz



6. Peter Brooker, The Brooklyn Cigar Co. as Dialogic Public Sphere: Community and 7. Postmodernism in Paul Auster and Wayne Wang’s Smoke and Blue in the Face



8. Liam Kennedy, Paranoid Spatiality: Postmodern Urbanism and American Cinema

Part Three: (POST) NATIONAL SPACES



9. Myrto Konstantarakos, The film de banlieue: Renegotiating the Representation of Urban Space



10. Stephen Shapiro, ‘Whose Fucking Park? Our Fucking Park!’: Bohemian Brumaires

(Paris 1848/East Village 1988), Gentrification, and the Representation of AIDS



11. Gargi Bhattacharyya, Metropolis of the Midlands

12. John Phillips, Singapore Soil: A Completely Different Organisation of Space

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• Political Science
• Democracy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849645065
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Edited by Maria Balshaw
and Liam Kennedy
Urban Space and Representation
Pluto P Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIAFirst published 2000 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 21066–2012, USA
Copyright © Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy 2000
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1349 3 hbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Urban space and representation / edited by Maria Balshaw and Liam
Kennedy.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–7453–1349–3 (hbk.)
1. Open spaces—United States. 2. City and town life in
literature. 3. Arts, Modern—20th century—United States—Themes,
motives. 4. Arts, American—Themes, motives. I. Balshaw, Maria.
II. Kennedy, Liam, 1946– .
HT167.U7534 2000
307.76'0973—dc21 99–37925
CIP

Disclaimer:
Some images in the original version of this book are not
available for inclusion in the eBook.

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton
Printed in the EU by TJ International, PadstowContents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction: Urban Space and Representation 1
Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy
Space and Vision
2 City Sights: Mapping and Representing New York City 25
Douglas Tallack
3 A Tale of Two Cities: Urban Text and Image in The Sweet
Flypaper of Life 39
Richard Ings
4 From the Sofa to the Crime Scene: Skycam, Local News and
the Televisual City 55
Pascal Pinck
Spaces of Difference
5 Fear and Sympathy: Charles Dickens and Urban (Dis) Ability 71
Al Deakin
6 Elegies to Harlem: Looking For Langston and Jazz 82
Maria Balshaw
7 The Brooklyn Cigar Co. as Dialogic Public Sphere:
Community and Postmodernism in Paul Auster and
Wayne Wang’s Smoke and Blue in the Face 98
Peter Brooker
8Paranoid Spatiality: Postmodern Urbanism and American
Cinema 116
Liam Kennedy
(Post) National Spaces
9 The film de banlieue: Renegotiating the Representation of
Urban Space 131
Myrto Konstantarakosvi URBAN SPACE AND REPRESENTATION
10 ‘Whose Fucking Park? Our Fucking Park!’: Bohemian
Brumaires (Paris 1848/East Village 1988), Gentrification,
and the Representation of Aids 146
Stephen Shapiro
11 Metropolis of the Midlands 162
Gargi Bhattacharyya
12 Singapore Soil: A Completely Different Organisation of Space 175
John Phillips
Notes on Contributors 196
Index 198Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board
for their generous support of Dr Balshaw’s research during the writing of
this project. We would also like to thank the AHRB for their continued
support of the Three Cities project, based at the University of Birmingham
and the University of Nottingham. The collaborative work we have
engaged in as part of the Three Cities project has been very important to
the collection; particular thanks go to Professor Douglas Tallack and Dr
Anna Notaro.
We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of
Birmingham in providing for Dr Kennedy’s research leave, and Dr
Kennedy would like to thank the University of Iowa’s IFUSS programme
for generously hosting his three-month research sabbatical in the USA.
We would like to thank Anne Beech at Pluto Press for her enthusiastic
support of this project, and for the patience Pluto have shown in awaiting
its completion.
We extend our gratitude to the colleagues and friends whose work,
support and criticism have shaped the intellectual framework of the
collection. We would particularly like to thank all the members of the
Birmingham Urban Cultures group – notably Peter Brooker, Jude Davies,
Danielle Fuller, Matthew Hilton, Michael Green, Helen Laville, Carol
Smith – whose lively discussion and enthusiastic commitment to urban
studies have helped provide a focus for this collection. Great thanks are
also due to all the contributors to this volume, whose excellent work and
commitment to the collection have made the editorial task much easier.
Finally, as academics who have shared personal as well as intellectual
commitments we would like to thank all those whose childcare and
domestic assistance made writing and editing this book possible: without
Colette and Walter Balshaw, Cath Wood, Helen Laville and Scott and
Ryan Lucas this book would never have reached its end. This book is
dedicated to Nathan and Jake Kennedy who remind us that intellectual
work is not the only pursuit we are involved in.viii URBAN SPACE AND REPRESENTATION
Photographs
George Bellows, New York, 1911, collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon,
photograph copyright of Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art,
Washington.
George Bellows, Blue Morning, 1909, Chester Dale collection, photograph
copyright of Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 1
Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy,
University of Birmingham
Introduction: Urban Space
and Representation
The city, long a subject for cross-disciplinary study in the humanities
and social sciences, has in recent years become the focus of a great deal
of new theoretical work by scholars in the increasingly distended fields
of urban studies. This current thinking highlights the spatial formations
of identity and calls into question commonplace conceptions of
the city as a synthetic totality, pointing to a loss of coherence or legibility
in the category of ‘the city’. An important result is that the city, as a
universal object or category of analysis, has been demythologised and
positioned as a site of spatial formations produced across diverse
discursive regimes and everyday practices. This thinking – aided by
common perceptions of the heightened semiology of urban experience at
the end of the twentieth century – has helped spur the dissemination of
fresh theoretical interest in urban studies across many disciplines. This
collection of essays brings together new work which reflects and expands
upon this theorising while focusing upon cultural productions and
textual representations of urban space.
Space and Representation
Space has become an increasingly irrepressible metaphor in
contemporary cultural and critical theorising and a point of convergence
for the work emerging from the disciplinary meltdown of the humanities
and, to a lesser extent, of the social sciences. This is already apparent,
for example, with geographers’ attraction to the spatial models of Michel
Foucault, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the literary theoretical
discourses of bell hooks, Homi Bhabha and Fredric Jameson among
others. David Harvey observes that literary theory has ‘permeate[d]2 URBAN SPACE AND REPRESENTATION
social theory’ in analysis of urban space while others point to the
emergence of a new ‘cultural geography’ embracing aesthetics and
1cultural critique. There has been a generation of new vocabularies
which are reframing questions of identity, location, positionality,
territoriality, diaspora and interstitiality. These disciplinary and theoretical
convergences and intersections (which, to continue our use of spatial
metaphors, still require some form of critical mapping) have not provided
a unitary method or agreed-upon lexicon of terms and issues. However,
as theory itself travels from one locus to another, we can detect the
emergence of a common interest: the making of space as a social product.
Our common understanding of space is that it is simply there,
intangible but given. Attempts to fix it in language can quickly tumble
into tautologies and negations – not surprisingly, as we can no more
think outside of metaphorisations of space than we can live outside its
representations. To approach space as a social product, though, prompts
fresh consideration of the instrumentality of space as a register not only
of built forms but also of embedded ideologies. This entails a demystifying
of space as natural and transparent so that it is understood as a social
entity with particular, localised meanings. Such demystification has
already been well advanced by the work of Foucault, Henri Lefebvre,
Edward Soja and others who have tapped the critical potentials of
spatiality as a positive response to the decline of historicism (the waning
sense of history and grand narratives) in the postmodern era. For
Foucault, space can no longer be treated as ‘the dead, the fixed, the
undialectical, the immobile’; it is to be understood as intricately operative in
2the constructions of social power and knowledge. While Foucault’s
explicit commentary on space is dispersed in fragments of prose and
interviews, Lefebvre has produced voluminous mediations on ‘the
production of space’, advancing schematic and typological analyses
which have had a major impact on contemporary studies of urban space
3and spatiality. Soja has built on the ideas of these French theorists in
Anglo-American contexts through his analysis of how space becomes
‘filled with politics and ideology’, both inscribing and concealing the
con4tradictions of global capitalism.
Questions of representation figure centrally in the work of these
theorists on the production of urban space, though often in a querulous
or anxious form. Lefebvre wants us to see that space is not simply the
parameter or stage of social relations and actions, rather it is operative in
the ‘assembly’ of these. He argues that traditional dualities of physical
space and mental space are bridged by the processes of the production of
space, especially as these are enacted through ‘spatial practice’ which
he founds not on political economy (the more obvious Marxist focus),
but on the material experience of social relations in ‘everyday life’. While
stressing the complexities of interconnections between physical and
mental space, he has reservations about what he sees as theINTRODUCTION: URBAN SPACE AND RE