Weiss-Sussex-Urban Mindscapes of Europe

EUROPEAN STUDIES
23
EUROPEAN STUDIES
An Interdisciplinary Series in European Culture, History
and Politics
Executive Editor
Menno Spiering, University of Amsterdam
m.e.spiering@uva.nl
Series Editors
Robert Harmsen, The Queens 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
23
URBAN MINDSCAPES
OF
EUROPE
Edited by
Godela Weiss-Sussex
with
Franco Bianchini
Amsterdam, New York, NY 2006
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ISBN-10: 90-420-2104-7
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Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
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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 9
FRANCO BIANCHINI
Introduction. European Urban Mindscapes: Concepts,
Cultural Representations and Policy Applications 13
METHODOLOGY AND CONCEPT FORMATION
ROLF LINDNER
The Gestalt of the Urban Imaginary 35
JUDE BLOOMFIELD
Researching the Urban Imaginary:
Resisting the Erasure of Places 43
BETTY NIGIANNI
An Avenue that Looks Like Me:
Re-presenting the Modern Cityscape 63
GIANDOMENICO AMENDOLA
Urban Mindscapes Reflected in Shop Windows 81
NICOLAS WHYBROW
Encountering the City: On Not Taking Yourself With You 97
CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CITY
NEAL ALEXANDER
Strange City: Belfast Gothic 113
KEITH WILLIAMS
Seeing the Future: Urban Dystopia in Wells and Lang 127
8 EUROPEAN STUDIES
BARRY LANGFORD
Strangers (to) Themselves: Cityscapes and Mindscapes
in 1980s European Cinema 147
HUGH O'DONNELL
Once in TVs Royal City:
Television Coverage of Royal Media Events 163
MATTHEW REASON
Cartoons and the Comic Exposure
of the European City of Culture 179
LEVENTE POLYK
Drifting Bridges: Semantic Changes of the Bridge Metaphor
in Twentieth-Century Budapest 197
STUART PRICE
Reconstructing the Ancient City:
Imagining the Athenian Polis 211
APPLICATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF URBAN MINDSCAPES
KLAUS SIEBENHAAR
The Myth of Berlin: the Imagined and the Staged City 227
GODELA WEISS-SUSSEX
Berlin Literature and its Use in the Marketing
of the New Berlin 237
DORIS TESKE
Sites and Sights: the Urban Museum
in a Changing Urban Structure 259
LIA GHILARDI
Identity by Invocation or by Design?
How Planning is Conjuring up a New Identity for Malm 275
PAUL BROOKES, interviewed by FRANCO BIANCHINI
Confessions of a Place Marketer 287
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 Presi-
dent of AIS (Italian Sociological Association) from 2001 to 2004. He is
author of several books, the most recent of which are La Citt 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 Citt Prossima Ventura (2000); Paure in citt (2003); Il
governo della citt sicura (2003); Anni in salita paure e speranze degli italiani
(2004).
FRANCOBIANCHINI is Director of the International Cultural Planning and
Policy Unit (ICPPU) at De Montfort University in Leicester. His publica-
tions include Cultural Policy and Urban Regeneration: The West European Expe-
rience (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 organisa-
tions including the Arts Council England, the Council of Europe and the
European Commission.
JUDE BLOOMFIELD is an independent researcher on urban cultures, plan-
ning 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 Re-
search Unit at De Montfort University, Leicester and is currently meth-
odology advisor and researcher on the Comedia/Rowntree Foundation
project The Intercultural City. She is author with Franco Bianchini of Plan-
ning for the Intercultural City (2004).
PAUL BROOKES was Director of Place Marketing for Leicester Shire Pro-
motions from 2003-2006, and Director of the Leicester Expo, a five day
street festival. Previously, he was Director of Bradfords 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 -
10 EUROPEAN STUDIES
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 devel-
opment 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).
BARRY LANGFORD 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 Markers politics; revisionist Westerns; narrative tempo-
ralities 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.
ROLF LINDNER is Professor of European Ethnology at the Humboldt
University Berlin. His research interests are in the fields of Urban An-
thropology/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 (sec-
EUROPEAN STUDIES 11
ond edition 2002), and Walks on the Wild Side. Eine Geschichte der Stadt-
forschung (2004).
BETTY NIGIANNI 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 prac-
tices, 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 Austers The New York Trilogy in Gramma. Journal of
Theory and Criticism, vol. 11.
HUGH ODONNELL 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 be-
yond), and has published widely on mediated sport (World Cups, Sum-
mer and Winter Olympics, Wimbledon, the Super Bowl), domestic soap
operas and telenovelas in all Western European countries, and represen-
tations of monarchy in the European and American media. More recent
projects have included cross-cultural analysis of the news and of advertis-
ing. He is currently working with a colleague on the internationalisation
of the sitcom.
LEVENTE POLYK 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 Buda-
pest, 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 journal-
ism 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 Uni-
versity of Glasgow. Publications include a special edition of the Edin-
12 EUROPEAN STUDIES
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 Man-
agement (Institut fr Kultur- und Medienmanagement) at the Free Uni-
versity, 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 develop-
ment 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 pub-
lished 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.
1
I would like to thank Jude Bloomfield and Godela Weiss-Sussex for their com-
ments on an earlier version of this chapter, and the UKs Arts and Humanities Re-
search Council (AHRC) for their support for my work on this book, through an
award under their Research Leave Scheme (September 2005-April 2006).
EUROPEAN STUDIES 23 (2006): 13-31
INTRODUCTION
EUROPEAN URBAN MINDSCAPES:
CONCEPTS, CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS AND POLICY
APPLICATIONS
1
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 mind-
scapes, and their application to urban policy generally, and more spe-
cifically 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 persons or a commu-
nitys 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 peo-
ples visual and cultural perceptions of it. Mindscape can also have the
14 Franco Bianchini
meaning of landscape of the mind. In this sense, a citys mindscape can
be represented as an urban image bank. This consists of local and exter-
nal images of a city, which are manifested in forms including the follow-
ing:
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 exam-
ple, through surveys and focus groups (adapted from Bianchini
1999a).
In her contribution to this volume, Jude Bloomfield highlights the impor-
tance 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 physi-
cal environment (1992, 422).
The concept of urban imaginary is closely related to Donalds idea of
the city as an imagined environment, and to the notion of urban mind-
EUROPEAN URBAN MINDSCAPES 15
scape. The specific components of both urban mindscapes and imagina-
ries include media and cultural representations of meanings and memo-
ries. 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 Bloomfields chapter explains that Arman-
do 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: mind-
scapes 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 Bloomfields chapter, many contemporary bodily prac-
tices 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 peoples 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 Rabans 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 mate-
rial 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 improvisa-
tions. The ways in which people creatively negotiate the urban environ-
ment produce a different space, which de Certeau calls an anthropologi-
cal, poetic and mythic experience of space () (a) metaphorical city thus
slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city (quoted in Don-
ald 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
16 Franco Bianchini
() an environment shaped by the interaction of practices, events and rela-
tionships 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 flneur, 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. Lefebvres 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 peoples potential for creative and
autonomous self-activity (Curtis 1997, viii). In Lefebvres theory,
limaginaire 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 problem-
atic which is derived from the analysis of reality (1996, 15). Lefebvres
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 aspira-
tions 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 in-
vite us to give greater depth to our own existence (and) bring about a
change of being (1994, xxii). The poetic quality of many urban mind-
scapes and imaginaries can raise peoples 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 imagina-
ries interact with the changing physical, economic, social, political and
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 Donalds 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 imagina-
ries of cities in the professional discipline of place marketing and promo-
tion, and, more generally, in urban policy.
Rolf Lindners 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 Sennetts 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 theorys
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 inte-
grated 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, disembed-
ding 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 Silvas adoption of an approach
which recognises the plurality of the imaginaries of different individuals
and social groups in a city. She argues that Lindners notion of the gestalt
18 Franco Bianchini
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 ODonnells 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, ODonnells study shows how people taking part con-
structed 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 spe-
cific urban mindscape, which in ODonnells 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. ODonnell 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 citys 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 Polyk adds to the debate on the political and
commercial struggles over the control of urban mindscapes, by consider-
ing 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.
Polyk explains how, after the fall of Communism, political parties vied
for their exclusive identification with the Chain Bridge, which symbol-
ises tradition and a European flair at the same time. Over the same pe-
riod, the Elisabeth Bridge (which in the years immediately after its open-
ing 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 citys collective imaginary,
however, through its role as a political message board () host to flags
of diverse kinds of political resistance, appearing or remaining only for a
few hours or days, before being taken off by the police.
Matthew Reasons contribution also highlights the difference between
the official city narratives developed by policy-makers and the self-narra-
tives of local people, a discrepancy which is explored in depth by Ruth
Finnegans 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 Glasgows year as
European City of Culture in 1990, and the possible motivations behind
such cynical representations, which enact a comic exposure of the events
grandiose claims, and articulate continuing scepticism and prejudices
about the legitimacy of culture-led city marketing and urban regenera-
tion exercises.
Stuart Prices chapter explores the cultural and political centrality of
the Acropolis to Athenss 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 dur-
ing the nineteenth century. The current process of gradual reconstruction
of the Parthenon, the Nike temple and the other buildings of the Acrop-
olis can be interpreted as a denial of historical complexity. This, as Price
makes clear, is motivated by the Greek governments 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. Prices contribution shows how
urban mindscapes can be produced by elites as the result of the manipu-
lation, and in some cases the downright invention, of history and tradi-
tion (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
Betty Nigiannis chapter considers the story I Think That Syngrou
Avenue Looks Like Me by Manos Kontoleon, which describes the pecu-
liar identification of the writer with a busy road linking central Athens
with the seaside. Nigianni adds to the books discussion of urban mind-
scapes 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 contri-
butions. The permeability, porosity, tolerance and inclusiveness of the life
of Syngrou Avenue are the convincing reasons for Kontoleons identifi-
20 Franco Bianchini
cation with it: the avenue as Nigianni points out is a space for creativ-
ity 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 indisput-
able 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
todays 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 trans-
formation of European cities into narrow, consumption-oriented mind-
scapes 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 Hannigans 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 transforma-
tion 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 Aug defines as non-
places:
() 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).
Aug sees non-places as typical of a world surrendered to solitary indi-
viduality, 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 perspec-
tive of a Benjaminian flneur to reflect on an aeroplane journey from
London Heathrow to Berlin Tegel. He explains that, in Augs 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 al-
lows human beings to recognise themselves. In supermodernity ac-
cording to Aug 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 ex-
plains that this translation is somewhat incomplete, as it does not fully
convey the German terms connotations of unhomeliness, insecurity,
foreboding and fear. Augs 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 (Aug
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 Alexanders essay returns to the theme of fear as a key compo-
nent of urban mindscapes and imaginaries. Kevin Robins observes that
fear and other collective emotions are all too often ignored in the dis-
course 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 collec-
tive emotional life of cities is rather limited (1995, 59).
22 Franco Bianchini
Alexander discusses literary representations of Belfast as a secular, mate-
rialistic, industrial, money-making and therefore ungodly, un-Irish, bleak-
ly utilitarian and infernal city. The chapter argues that these representa-
tions of Belfast have to be understood in the context of the wider Euro-
pean tradition of urban gothic, in which the city is the favoured location
of the Freudian Unheimliche. Drawing on Tnniess 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 Gesell-
schaft. 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 simu-
lated.
Fear in urban mindscapes and in cultural representations of cities is
often linked in the literature with the theme of urban dystopias. Keith
Williamss chapter discusses H.G. Wellss scientific romance When the
Sleeper Wakes (1899), and its complex relationship with Fritz Langs silent
epic Metropolis (1926). Langs film is a classic of the genre, and has influ-
enced important urban dystopia sci-fi films like Ridley Scotts Blade Run-
ner (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 cin-
ema, Barry Langfords contribution discusses three European films of the
1980s: Nicolas Roegs Bad Timing (Great Britain, 1980), Alain Tanners In
the White City (Portugal/Switzerland, 1984) and Wim Wenderss Wings of
Desire (Germany, 1987). Langford argues that these films constitute Euro-
pean alternatives to the version of the postmodern metropolis popular-
ised by Blade Runner and its ilk. Europes 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, Wenderss 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 histori-
cal events and by the male protagonists different attitudes to female
sexuality. Langfords conclusions about the differences between urban
mindscapes in European cinema and American urban dystopias like Blade
Runner chime with the findings of Arnaldo Bagnasco and Patrick Le
Gals (2000). They highlight the differences between contemporary Eu-
ropean 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 no-
tion of the city which is largely American.
The chapters grouped in the books 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 Teskes contribution, is how a citys cultural
institutions interact with urban mindscapes. The chapter focuses on
museums in todays 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 citys 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 Zukins study of the role of interna-
tionally 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 Teskes conclusions. Zukin writes: as
universalistic high culture institutions, museums stand completely outside
a specific urban context of neighborhood constituencies and local identi-
ties (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 pro-
motion of cities in particular.
Lia Ghilardi discusses the use by policy-makers in Malm of large
scale events and infrastructural projects like the European Housing Expo
Bo01 and the wider plan for the regeneration of the citys Western Har-
bour, 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,
24 Franco Bianchini
and to the contraction of public sector employment. The opening in 2000
of the resund Bridge linking Malm with Copenhagen encouraged the
citys policy-makers to develop more imaginative regeneration strategies.
Malm 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
Malms history. However, she adds that in the past such transforma-
tions were the result of a shared, carefully planned vision, while in the
early twenty-first century Malms 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 Plgers 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 market-
ing is in many cases seen as a panacea to address complex and multi-
dimensional 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 Pro-
motions. 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 cul-
ture, 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 Lindners thesis about the
existence of a gestalt of the urban imaginary. Siebenhaar argues that place
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 myths system of information creates a distinctive web of
stories, serving as the (self-)interpretation of a citys 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 repre-
sentations of the city, but also urban policy and place marketing strate-
gies. He discusses the four main initiatives in Berlins 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 re-
unification, including innovations like the spectacularisation of the pro-
cess 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 citys
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 strate-
gic 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
Murrays 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 citys wealth of literature festivals,
grassroots literary activities, newwriting 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. Weiss-
Sussex argues that focusing on the new, the hip and the cool can lead to
26 Franco Bianchini
a loss of strategic direction, and produce vacuous claims and bland mes-
sages. The essay criticises also Siebenhaars use of the notion of the
Berlin myth. Weiss-Sussex quotes Roland Barthess definition of myth
as surreptitious faking, and points out that the Berlin myth, as used in
the New Berlin strategy, has denied the citys historicity. She stresses the
fact that the citys eventful twentieth-century history is the main reason
why tourists visit the city. The essay argues that literature has the poten-
tial to convey Berlins 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 con-
cerned, it is founded mainly on the analysis of the citizens needs and on
surveys of views, opinions and attitudes (particularly of influential peo-
ple, 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 Brookess 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 citys pool of cultural resources encompasses the following
elements:
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, gas-
tronomy, 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, cafs and restaurants;
local milieus and institutions for intellectual and scientific innova-
tion, including Universities and private sector research centres;
the repertoire of local products and skills in the crafts, manufactur-
ing 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 analy-
sis 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 citys 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 multi-
faceted entity, which combines a local economy, society, built environ-
ment, 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 cre-
ative 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,
28 Franco Bianchini
engineers, economic development specialists, place marketers and tour-
ism and cultural development officers, but also specialists in urban mind-
scapes and imaginaries, including urban historians, sociologists, anthro-
pologists, 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 exhibi-
tions, 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 com-
plexity of a citys 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 mem-
ory 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 Mo-
zarts Salzburg) there are powerful vested economic interests, related to
tourism, which demand the continuous reproduction of a certain mind-
scape, 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 citys 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. Mod-
els of urban development conceived in countries like the US, Canada and
Australia which have different traditions of urbanism and, largely be-
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-of-
town 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 sur-
rounded 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 imbal-
ance often reflects power structures in a city. There is a need for empiri-
cal 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 com-
plex 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 pro-
cess.
By opening itself to dialogue with a citys 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 environmen-
talists, the working class, different ethnic minorities in poor marginalised
neighbourhoods, the bohemian and professional middle classes, women, the
elderly, young people or children.
Levente Polyk, also in this book, asks important questions on how ordi-
nary citizens can contribute to revitalised forms of local democracy:
30 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 under-
standing 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 policy-
makers to enter into dialogue with the collective imagination.
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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 oppo-
site 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 citys imaginary product of the histor-
ically 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 sym-
bolic 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
36 Rolf Lindner
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 sec-
ond, the equation of the imaginary with an image, with a sign system
which can be arbitrarily invented and changed. Both these misconcep-
tions 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 be-
yond it in the sense of adding something extra. In other words, the imagi-
nary 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 Sansots poetic formu-
lation, is the reverie of the real. Therefore it cannot be invented arbi-
trarily. Like a dream the imaginary is latent and deeply rooted. It is ante-
cedent to any wilful act of imagineering. This does not mean, however,
that images disseminated by campaigns cannot become part of the imagi-
nary; 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 intro-
duced 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
THE GESTALT OF THE URBAN IMAGINARY 37
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 Ingle-
wood) is enough to vividly convey a whole character. Origins still matter,
and, as we well know, sometimes in a painful way. Strausss sourcebook
and Wohl and Strausss 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 neces-
sary 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 under-
stood 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 anec-
dote 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 them-
selves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole (Wertheimer 1938,
2). As is evident from Margaret Meads 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], enjoy-
ing the poets he met and developing a new interest in pattern, an out-
growth of our interest in Gestalt psychology, she writes in her memoir. I
read and lent him Koffkas 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,
38 Rolf Lindner
genuine cultures in Edward Sapirs sense have their own aesthetic, which
finds expression in their gestalt. [The genuine culture] is inherently har-
monious, 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 exoge-
nous 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 im-
ages, typifications and collective representations. What makes Suttless
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 pejo-
rative 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
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 Viennas
Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) with Pre 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 Bosto-
nian, New Yorks city slicker, Chicagos hog butchers, Los Angeles
stars and Houstons wildcatters (Suttles 1984, 291).
For Suttles, local cultural representations display a remarkable durabil-
ity. Their number certainly increases over time, but they do not funda-
mentally change. That is what is meant by the cumulative nature of local
culture, which is not least the result of a process of continuous inter-
textual 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 evi-
dent, 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 repre-
sentations 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
40 Rolf Lindner
deplaziert, quelque chose est deplace. The feeling that creeps up on us that
something doesnt 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 mag-
azines, 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 mne-
monic relatedness (Suttles 1984, 294). This unity results from the many-
voiced variation of a basic theme (or basic themes) and leads to a stereo-
typical 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 Wertheimers 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 psychologys 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 con-
cerned 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
citys 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 exam-
ple of this. Out of the literary translation of the dominant sector of Chi-
cago, 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 Chi-
cago appear as stormy, husky, brawling, as a tall bold slugger set vivid
against the soft little cities, as it says in Sandburgs 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-descrip-
tion 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 citys 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 eccen-
trics, 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 clichs
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 Edu-
cation. 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. Lambiance urbaine: un dfi pour lcriture ethno-
graphique. 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. Beitrge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme.
Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
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Sansot, Pierre. 1993. Limaginaire: la capacit doutrepasser le sensible. Socits 42:
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Blackwell.
Strauss, Anselm. 1968. Some Varieties of American Urban Symbolism. In An
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cago: Aldine Publishing Company.
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can Journal of Sociology 90: 283-304.
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Willis D. Ellis, 1-11. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
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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 de-
sires and construct imaginary social alternatives which form part of a
long utopian tradition. Even though the visual and virtual predomi-
nates in modern media, the assertion of bodily practices in contempo-
rary art underlies the continuing importance of face-to-face experi-
ence in the public sphere. Memory plays an important role in framing
urban imaginaries, because it is constructed in the present. Conse-
quently, struggles around memorials, museums and the built environ-
ment 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, espe-
cially 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 enmesh-
ing in global, long-distance relations, whether in the sphere of informa-
tion, ideas, images or interpersonal networks as well as those of capital
44 Jude Bloomfield
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 soci-
ety 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 ig-
nores 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 situ-
ated (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 rela-
tionships, the site of connection, meeting and social interaction, if not
integration, remains local, in the city or town (or village to which mi-
grants 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 45
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 lo-
cally 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 citys function within the world order, the inter-
national 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 peoples 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 Fer-
guson 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 inte-
grate the self and others who come from inside and outside, and from
ideas that come from all over of the world. Therefore the memory, his-
tory and identity of a city are not the emanation of an enclosed, hermeti-
cally sealed, pure group and their past, but the ongoing social construc-
46 Jude Bloomfield
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-mate-
rial, symbolic and psychological dimensions to the constitution of cities.
Urban imaginaries focus on sensory and emotional experience and prac-
tices, on the imprint of collective memory on imagining how the city
could be, on the different, often conflicting, social constructions of the
citys 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 con-
structions 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 individuals lifetime, rather than being bound by an
objective place, historical time or memory, and thus oriented to the fu-
ture, not the past:
We are witness today to a very new phenomenon such as the non-correspon-
dence 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 sys-
tems, 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 repro-
duce social distinctions in culture. Habitus incorporates both social and
physical place habits and habitat, through internalisation of the bound-
aries of appropriate behaviour, dos and donts, 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 an-
other example, natural rights. This imaginary produces symbols and
images that inform and transform practice, even though they are mytho-
logical 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 genera-
tions as well as being layered through representations of the past. Thus
memory is not set in stone but an ongoing process of social reconstruc-
tion 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 in-
voked by a medieval cathedral with the singular sense of sight which a
48 Jude Bloomfield
skyscraper calls upon, the visual has come to predominate in the contem-
porary 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 rela-
tive to the written word. However, the emergence in the visual arts of
sensory and bodily practices of urban exploration such as walking, look-
ing, 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 experi-
ence and consumption of pre-packaged images; it focuses on the migra-
tory movement rather than static occupancy (see Phillips 2005), and
allows a re-engagement with the spirits of a place, opening up its imagina-
tive 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 mes-
sages, signs and symbols, very few actually participate in shaping or trans-
mitting them; less than 1% of the globe actually has access to the
Internet. Cities are only just beginning to experiment with telematic com-
munication and electronic forms of democracy, but these projects aim to
enhance access to the public space, giving information about facilities,
welfare entitlements, educational opportunities, whats on listings, or to
engage deprived and dispersed groups in intercultural and intergenera-
tional 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 partici-
pating 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
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.
resistance to cities being reshaped from the outside, often by diktat, with
only weak or absent political alternatives and inchoate desires un-
expressed 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 demo-
cratic mandate to determine the citys future. In shaping an alternative
vision, in keeping with the aspirations of its people for whom it has cul-
tural 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 perspec-
tives that go to make up a citys 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 Glas-
gow under the upus of shipbuilding
1
, Birmingham as the car city, or Chi-
cago as the meat packing city (as outlined by Rolf Lindner in this vol-
ume).
This singular, coherent vision may have been applicable for the indus-
trial 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 eco-
nomic 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 con-
tested 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 refer-
ent, namely the dominant industry or service that comes to embody the
50 Jude Bloomfield
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-pre-
sented 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 author-
ities, 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 eco-
nomic 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 Silvas approach of
gathering multiple urban points of view and parallel or alternative repre-
sentations 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 citys
autonomy inevitably leads to defensive closure, parochial or racist territo-
rial exclusion? How open, cosmopolitan and innovative can civic resis-
tance 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 imagi-
native resources does the city have, in the stories, memories, and desires
of its citizens to create a more democratic and inclusive civic life?
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 citys inhab-
itants would retrace the citys cultural history and reconnect it with for-
mative 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 citys culture
would facilitate the development of the rooted or vernacular cosmo-
politanism 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 attach-
ments that arise from participation in a community founded in a shared
past or collective memory (Appiah 2005, 230). Rooted cosmopolitan-
ism, while not seeking to undermine commitment to a specific commu-
nity, 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 con-
tributes 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
52 Jude Bloomfield
over access to and control of resources and collective myths (see Low
and Lawrence-Ziga 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 Lows case of the changing composi-
tion of the Plaza in Costa Rica, or McDonaghs 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, interna-
tional cultural influences from Americanisation and global commercial
youth culture and shifts in policy and dominant discourse of local politi-
cal 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 outsid-
ers.
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 con-
test 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, memo-
ries and identities of their citizens and reassert their collectively self-de-
fined distinctiveness and openness against the global monolith of com-
mercial 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 frame-
work may contribute to forming that counter movement, anticipated in
Simmels 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 devel-
oping the resistance of citizens as subjects (see Gupta and Ferguson
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 pre-
cisely, 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 psychoana-
lytic theory on the pleasure principle in childhood at the expense of the
reality principle. For Schachtel (1959) two modes of perception are pres-
ent in childhood, the autocentric, a lower form based on emotional, subjec-
tive, 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 embedded-
ness 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-
54 Jude Bloomfield
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 cher-
ished places.
All attachments imply permanence and stability of relationship al-
though 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 citys 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 reinter-
preted in the light of present needs and perspectives.
However, there is value in studying monuments. According to Aug
(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 Intro-
duction to The Art of Forgetting (1999), the embodiment in material ob-
jects/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 mem-
ory:
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
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 trans-
posing the individual onto a collective, symbolic plane where (s)he be-
comes a symbol of something bigger than him/herself. Thus war memo-
rials, 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 Resis-
tance 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 or-
ganised Jewish community was deliberately excluded. At a later stage,
Roma and Sinti joined in the protest over the exclusively Jewish dedica-
tion 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 oper-
ates 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).
56 Jude Bloomfield
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 mar-
ket 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 subjec-
tivity 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 sensi-
tive groups such as cyclists and city walkers. It would be enriched by
including those who, like Mamma Roma in Pasolinis 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 de-
struction 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
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 imagina-
ries. 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 as-
pects of attachment (1992, 168).
3. The Gatekeepers of the Archive
However, collective memory is not just a compilation of individual mem-
ories 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 com-
parative 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, archi-
tecture 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, Bourdieus concept offers a
rich line of inquiry into the different uses and attachments to places,
landmark buildings and lieux de mmoire 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).
58 Jude Bloomfield
2
The Berlin Siegessule [victory column] was erected in 1873 after the war against
France in 1871, to celebrate Germanys national power.
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. Topo-
graphical 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 transgres-
sion, 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, articu-
late 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 Coes Rotters Club and Closed Circle on Birmingham or Bali Rais
novels on Leicester, and urban poetry, like Roy Fishers work on Bir-
mingham. Equally it can be extended to films which have a strong influ-
ence 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
Siegessule
2
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, trans-
port, 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 develop-
ment. Part 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 mi-
norities in poor marginalised neighbourhoods, the bohemian and profes-
sional 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.
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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 Kontoleons 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
64 Betty Nigianni
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 Phas. 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).
constructed, in 1904. The story bears the title I Think That Syngrou
Avenue Looks Like Me
1
and in short deals with the inextricable connec-
tion that is developed between the writer and the road, eventually form-
ing 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 memo-
ries 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
RE-PRESENTING THE MODERN CITYSCAPE 65
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 rela-
tionship between urban space and its inhabitants. He goes on to describe
his familys physical features: he writes about his fathers boldly curved
eyebrows and eyelids that added a sense of mystery to his look, as well
as his grandfathers fingers which had taken that yellow colour of to-
bacco and the marks of an old illness that scarred his nostrils (37);
then he intermingles these features with the city: Well I used to won-
der , can a city be sometimes the eyelids that hide a mystery, sometimes
the scars an old illness leaves on the nostrils ()? (39)
66 Betty Nigianni
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.
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
subjects relation to those contents. As Kontoleons story develops, it
becomes clear that this interconnection between spatiality and the em-
bodied subject makes possible a dynamic, even transgressive being-in-
space, confirming Groszs argument that space makes possible different
kinds of relations, but in turn it is transformed according to the subjects
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! shed invite me, and Id 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 Id stretch out my hands
trying to reach the bottom ()
Gently, softly, my hands were fumbling and trying out touches and shapes,
till theyd 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 mothers abandoned home city an object to
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).
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 imagina-
tion, since the chest refers symbolically to the lost city. For Gaston
Bachelard, that is actually the only way to approach the intimate dimen-
sion. 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 mem-
ory, 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 cup-
board 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 intimate-
ly 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 mothers 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 au-
thor 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 Id discover and love Syngrou Avenue,
this long and straight road which headed to the sea. ().
68 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 Id love Syngrou avenue.
Spatial apprehension is sketched once more primarily as an experience of
the body and of the imagination: the writers 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 couldnt see its end.
Tell me, hows this road called?
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 Ariadnes 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 inti-
macy 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 houses
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 Kontoleons 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 contempo-
rary 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:
70 Betty Nigianni
5
In her essay The Body and Geography, Robyn Longhurst notes that social
sciences were developed in the nineteenth century according to the dominant concep-
tion 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 instrumen-
tal 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 spatio-
temporal 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).
During the day, the road dons the suit of an entirely respectable business
and locks itself up in air-conditioned offices or shines behind squeaky-
clean 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. Neverthe-
less, 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
Freuds investigation of the role of the
body in the formation of the ego
7
and his understanding of the psyche as
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 Kants 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 Aristotles concept of place as
surface, Bachelards definition however moves away from the Aristotelian sense-
bound 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 tech-
nique 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.
having a spatial dimension
8
have been very influential in this respect.
Bachelards suggestion of a topoanalysis in accordance with psychoanal-
ysis draws on a conception of place as psychic: as not only and neces-
sarily physical, but as a surface on which images with a localising qual-
ity appear.
9
Topoanalysis, therefore, would look for the placial proper-
ties 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 so-
called 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 Sum-
mer, 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,
72 Betty Nigianni
13
Both these poems are quoted by Kontoleon in his story.
14
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.
to cleanse us of our sins (Seferis 1995, 89). Similarly in Syngrou Ave-
nue, 1930, when you let your heart and your thought become/one/with
the blackish river that stretches, stiffens and/goes away:/Break Ariadnes
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 1950s
14
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. Philolo-
gist 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 embodi-
ment of modernity: the straight road, direct and unswerving (Kontoleon
1999, 46) becomes a powerful poetic image, symbol of the modern plea-
sures of the car and of speed;
15
its heading towards the sea only comes to
reinforce the associations with masculinity and sexuality that these plea-
sures 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 seas embrace! Into the blue body of a
mermaid! I chose a mans road () (Kontoleon 1999, 43).
16
Lefebvre actually uses the term psychoanalysis of space (1991, 99).
17
As presented in Lacans famous essay Le Stade du Mirroir (translated into English
as The mirror stage, included in crits: 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 homogene-
ity), a representational space (the phallic), as well, apart from an arena of practical
action, also an ensemble of images, signs and symbols (288).
Henri Lefebvres critique of modern space as abstract and phallo-
centric also draws repeatedly on a psychoanalytical framework.
16
In The
Production of Space, Lefebvre employs Lacans theory of the mirror-stage
which deals with how corporeality and spatiality are related to the forma-
tion of identity
17
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 Carrolls 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
Phallo-
centrism 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 faades 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 oth-
74 Betty Nigianni
20
Every society and particularly the city, has an underground and repressed life,
and hence an unconscious of its own (Lefebvre 1991, 36).
ers, creates an underground life in the city, a kind of inseparable uncon-
scious that comes back to haunt it.
20
In Kontoleons 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 citys spatial double is, however, controlled and placed under sur-
veillance 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 activi-
ties). 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 com-
pany, 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 apparentlymasculine, 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
21
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).
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 de-
signed to channel traffic from the city to its port and coastline (Biris
1999, 189), subject to the survey of the planners eye and to the
writers male gaze of his childhood the avenue becomes a truly perme-
able 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, trans-
forming the place intoa layered environment of dislocated objects. Perme-
ability 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). Post-
modern 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 perme-
able reflects a political awareness of the mechanisms of the ever-com-
peting 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 Certeaus 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 deteriorat-
ing page of a book, refers to a different mode of territorial unity, of socio-
economic 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 citys spatial order to a biological organism. Comment-
76 Betty Nigianni
22
A term borrowed from Walter Benjamin, who used it in order to describe
precapitalist Naples (see Benjamin 1986). Burgin discusses Benjamins 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 autobio-
graphical book 1o Fovero Vima.
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 interrup-
tions 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 macro-
level of the built environment to the micro-level of the body. As de-
scribed in Kontoleons 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 Groszs 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 Bordens words,
24
Quoted from Kandinskys book Du Spirituel dans lArt (published in French in
1969), in which he traces all spatial experience back to a primordial childhood experi-
ence of space conceived mainly in psychoanalytic terms.
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 non-
sensual space of abstraction, only to become a site for more transgres-
sions on the social and political terrain.
Bachelards 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 out-
side are not abandoned to their geometrical opposition (230), which is
something only topoanalysts and poets would do. Bachelards 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 con-
demns 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, Kontoleons representation of urban space marked by
a personal story annuls the planners dehumanised cityscapes. The writer
fulfills Bachelards 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 reestablish-
ment of modern space as social space. He dreamt of a diversification of
space that would create fixed, semi-fixed, movable or vacant appropri-
78 Betty Nigianni
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 psychoanaly-
sis 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).
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 subjects 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 Kontoleons representation of Syngrou Ave-
nue comes close to the Lefebvrian dream as it reconstructs the place
through the narration of an erotic event in which any distinctions be-
tween 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 doesnt need to prove its identity. It is what it is: self-
sufficient 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).
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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 todays 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 peoples 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 muse-
ums 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 shop-
ping mall. In Paul Mazurskys and Woody Allens 1991 film Scenes from a
Mall, a marriage parabola (love, betrayals, romance, love again, etc.) is
82 Giandomenico Amendola
1
The movie is set in Los Angeles, though the real mall used as the film set is
borrowed from New Jersey.
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 coun-
ters 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 environ-
ment 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 flneur 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, shop-
ping 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 an-
chors of residential islands. Without shopping, suburbs could not sur-
URBAN MINDSCAPES REFLECTED IN SHOP WINDOWS 83
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 cen-
tre), 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 Romeros 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 peoples desires, traditional garage- or shoe box-
like shopping centres were transformed into fragments of city environ-
ment, 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 archi-
tecture, 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 cafs (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.
The artificial but dream-like cityscape of the shopping mall has been
the general rehearsal of the contemporary shiny and appealing city cen-
tres 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 pecu-
liar relationship between shopping, city life and urban fabric are a con-
temporary 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 activi-
ties where not accepted or welcome. In Rome, marketplaces became
spacious and attractive under Emperor Trajan. They became city monu-
ments: the multilevel Trajani markets in Rome are still a wonder of func-
tionality 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 flneur of the Paris passages, described by Baudelaire and Benjamin,
and providing inspiration to urban sociologists Simmel and Wirth, be-
came the epitomy of the modern urban man as both dreamer and utilitar-
ian (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 con-
nectors 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.
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 rgime 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 entertain-
ment 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 Pas-
sages de lOpra 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
Augs terms (1995), the Passages were non-places not because they
belong to a lower class of places, but, because, like contemporary shop-
ping malls and airports, they are very special places: they are temples of a
new era.
Parisian Passages are a milestone in the relationship between shop-
ping and the city because they show that there is a demand for experi-
ence and people are willing to pay for it. The Passages provided the link
between the baroque experience of the ancient rgime and the budding
bourgeois society and its city. Using the successful engineering of emo-
tions, a particular achievement of baroque architecture, to attract people
and to convert visitors into buyers, they were at the same time state-of-
the-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 nine-
teenth 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 pas-
sages 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 dtre, 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 spe-
cial 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 depart-
ment 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
able to build its own identity and lifestyle. Department stores were the
school for modernity, the classrooms in which the new urban bourgeoi-
sie learned to convert its buying power into life styles and social habits.
In Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), based on the first Parisian depart-
ment store Au Bon March, Zola describes the store owners 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 en-
chantment was the mirror, whose function was not only to boost artifi-
cial 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, Flauberts 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 nine-
teen hundreds, not only department stores, but the number of shops and
cafs, too, continued to grow with an accelerated rhythm all over Eu-
rope. 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, busi-
ness, 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
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. Jacobss alternative urban model was based on her neigh-
bourhood: 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 so-
called fantasy city (Hannigan 1998) , shops and shopping play a central
role, both in practical and in symbolic terms. Because of the ongoing
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 advo-
cated more attention to peoples 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 design-
ing. 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 lan-
guages, 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 archi-
tecture, 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 architectures main
principles must intercept peoples desires and match them. This pre-
cept 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 turbu-
lent marketplace where supply exceeds demand. Demand centred strate-
gies 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
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 econo-
mies, 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 administra-
tors 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 van-
guards. 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 An-
geles, 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 newcompetitors are
the city centre shopping streets, which have been changing as a reaction
to the shopping malls and have developed aggressive marketing strate-
gies. 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 shop-
ping malls fake streets. Baudrillard coined the term hyper-reality for
this phenomenon: reality in order to be accepted must imitate the imagi-
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 peoples imagination. The most com-
mon of these are the Gruen transfer and the Jerde transfer. These imita-
tive 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. Gruens projects, from the groundbreaking South-
dale 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 peoples 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 Euro-
pean historical towns, enriched by elements of Disneylands 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 fromanother 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 faade of Treasure Island Casino in Las Vegas. The
synthesis of Jon Jerdes 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 fromthe nostalgic dreams of Disneys
main street. The designers aim was to create a veritable urban atmo-
sphere, and to provide the experience of a full immersion into metropoli-
tan 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. Visi-
tors flock into Walt Disneys Main Street looking for the lost order and
the coherence of a bygone world. In Disneyland and in Disneyland-like
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 Vitruvios Renaissance man (sketched by Leonardo) who is the cen-
tre of a universe he can master. Even the scale of Disneylands 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 Citys 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 (fromNew
York Citys Times Square, Londons Piccadilly Circus or Berlins
Kurfrstendamm). Amplification, bombardment of the senses, entertain-
ment, are the means by which City Walk or Fremont Street change the
modern flneur 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 Venturis 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 Disney-
land Main Street and in Jerdes City Walk and Fremont Street, it is possi-
ble 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 com-
ing from the media world was the model for the theme park stage. In
the span of a few years, millions of visitors, mainly Americans, have
become so familiar with Disneys Main Street to make it the prototype of
a small communitys public space. Nothing is more real than Disneys
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
Disneys 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 trans-
fer.
The Jerde transfer is becoming circular as well. In Fremont Street,
originally designed after New Yorks Times Square, speed, stimuli, ex-
citement are everywhere. They are in the shops lights, in the high vol-
ume music, in the crowds of people; everything is accelerated and exag-
gerated. 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 re-
newal promoters are following are those of Los Angeless and Las Ve-
gass 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 diffi-
cult: 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 flneur or a passer-by into an eager consumer can-
not 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 archi-
tecture is to produce the aura of the product (may it be shoes, suits or a
car) and to embed this aura in the consumers experience. The equivalent
to experience shopping is Rem Koolhaas experience architecture. The
contemporary city is designed and built according to peoples 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 dream-
like 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 flneur 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 win-
dows 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 Al-
ices mirror (the door to get into Wonderland) and Dorian Grays picture
(that never gets older).
Shop windows reflect desires and buildings, mindscapes and city-
scapes. There is nothing more real than the mindscape reflected by win-
dows 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.
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de la Maison des Sciences de lhomme.
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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 pres-
ence 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 Augs 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 sus-
pended 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, unset-
tling boundaries, and always moving on not unlike the visitors or
walkers experience of the city. And that is the other point of view I
grant myself, that of a modern-day Benjaminan flneur, 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 citys own unforeseen movement as it seeks to
negotiate identities for itself: I move because the city does. So there is a
98 Nicolas Whybrow
dialectic that emerges between how cities move and how you move in
them. In Neil Leachs 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 unfamil-
iar. Hence, losing yourself as well as losing sight of yourself emerge as
prerequisite for encountering the unknown city In ways that are remark-
able 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
Ill 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, lets 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.
ENCOUNTERING THE CITY 99
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 present-
day 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 pur-
pose 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 impor-
tant 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 desig-
nated 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 deaths 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.
100 Nicolas Whybrow
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 crews 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 eventuali-
ties. 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 Heathfields article
Facing the Other: the Performance Encounter and Death usefully sums
up the notion of the social organisation of cultural production as origi-
nating in a defensive reaction to the threat of mortality:
Modern societies are predicated on survival strategies which frequently
involve the temporary resolution of deaths 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 delica-
cies: 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 pre-
tend to find it alluring. I may not be God well be hearing from him
later, I expect, delivering his report on the state of play 35,000 feet above
Hanover or thereabouts but Ive certainly got some sort of minor
fiefdom to my name. As the air gets thinner and the alcohol begins to
cloud my brain, Im not in heaven just yet, but it is giving me a pretty
good foretaste.
But where am I in fact? In between, no-mans land (or air), no-where?
Well, it could be the occasion of my last supper. But that is a retrogres-
sive 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 delir-
ium. 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 depar-
ture area, that constant stream of people parading past my observation
post outside Prt 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
havent seen; there must be more. In some respects the activity suggests
the aimless strolling of the flanur. In fact, it is the antithesis because its
possibilities are finite and predictable. You cannot get lost, only point-
lessly ensnared.
The anthropologist Marc Aug 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 im-
parted to us, as is the case today for a lot of people (Aug 1995, 10-11).
Augs notion of the abstractly familiar recalls Freuds 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 Austers alter ego muses in The Inven-
tion of Solitude, the state of not belonging to the home (Auster 1988,
102 Nicolas Whybrow
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 Heathfields 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, Freuds
actual thesis is based on the curious way in which heimlich (homely, famil-
iar, 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).
Aug concludes that in the world of supermodernity people are
always, and never at home (Aug 1995, 109). Non-places not only pro-
duce a form of suspended identity (or temporary non-identity), they also
or therefore preclude significant interaction with the subjects envi-
ronment. Like white noise, they effect a blanding out, a state of alien-
ation 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 signif-
icant trace is left either in or by you although, paradoxically, it is a loca-
tion 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. Augs non-places evoke a return which produces an absenting.
Paradoxically, the traveller accedes to his anonymity only when he
has given proof of his identity, according to Aug, 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 passengers name must first be presented at the
airport desk; proof that the contract has been respected comes at the immi-
gration 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 (Aug 1995, 101-3).
The English version of the French non-lieu (non-place) does not, as the
translator of Augs 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 Aug himself states: In a way, the user of
the non-place is always required to prove his innocence (Aug 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 latters etymology (ab + esse: away from being) reveals
its link to the ancient philosophical puzzle of non-being, the paradoxical
nature of things that dont 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 super-
fluous. You werent 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.
104 Nicolas Whybrow
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 re-
verse 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 travellers 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 them-
selves 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 guillo-
tine. 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 acknowledge-
ment of something else, as if s/he were saying: I know how this must look,
but whats 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 associa-
tions 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 adver-
bial intensifier meaning incredibly (as in incredibly interesting). The
unknown place is just that: incredible, but in a dual sense; that which you
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 authen-
ticity in this place. There was a case to answer, but one, which in true
Kafkaesque style, you yourself were not actually capacitated to effectu-
ate. Ultimately, it was an experience that was unforgettable. Even now,
Aug suggests, the countries of Eastern Europe retain a measure of
exoticism, for the simple reason that they do not yet have all the neces-
sary means to accede to the worldwide consumption space (Aug 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 significa-
tion that serves to deny or forget the extraordinary or unlikely. As Eden-
sor 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 latters unregulated stimulation
of both desire and fear (Edensor 1998, 215-16).
Tegel Terror
Were 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 Ohlers novel Mitte maintains: If you look down
from a plane, the buildings form letters which spell NOT HERE (trans-
lated 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 spin-
dly, 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 Chatwins
writings his last which I havent 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 didnt consider such punc-
tuation to look good on the cover (see Clapp 1998, 175). I also recall
reading now that one of Chatwins intentions before he died was to walk
106 Nicolas Whybrow
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 experi-
ence 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 re-
opened Brandenburg Gate. Reunification not yet in place, I received a
token DDR stamp in my passport, placed neatly, but to me with stag-
gering nonchalance the frontier guard grinned and winked, I swear
alongside some of the other ones I had chalked up in the mid-80s. Per-
haps, 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 mun-
dane.
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-mans land in recent history has disap-
peared, and with it, seemingly, the GDR.
But thats a view from above. As Walter Benjamin proposes in One-
Way Street, a landscape is only experienced properly by walking through
it:
The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the land-
scape, 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 Benjamins spatial invo-
cations, 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
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 its 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 migrants
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 cura-
tive 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 Grnbein (1999, 89). (A third is going over to the en-
emy, 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 transi-
tion 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
108 Nicolas Whybrow
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 havent 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 Im
about to negotiate. In his review of Franz Hessels 1920s book about
flnerie in Berlin, Benjamin isolates its deepest insight as being the writers
observation that (w)e see only that which looks back at us
(Benjamin1999, 265). Thus there is a reciprocal or performative relation-
ship between viewer and viewed, one which echoes the transitive prac-
tice 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 inter-
twined as the fragments of modernity are reconfigured into a montage
based on encounters with the city (Liggett 2003, 103).
References
Aug, 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 Uni-
versity.
SSS. 1999. The Return of the Flneur. 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. Rich-
ards, 335-376. London: Penguin.
Grnbein, Durs. 1999. Transit Berlin. Grand Street 69 (Berlin issue)18, no.1: 85-
89.
Heathfield, Adrian. 1997. Facing the Other: the Performance Encounter and
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field, 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 Per-
spectives 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. Fausts 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 citys 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 Tnnies, 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: Cains 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, Cains 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
114 Neal Alexander
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 ODowd 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, Belfasts cult of
moneymaking and secular materialism was simply further evidence of the
citys parvenu Philistinism, although it was possible to go further and
imply that the city had sold its soul for worldly riches like Louis
MacNeices 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 Ervines novel, Mrs. Martins 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 mans 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 Belfasts 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 citys projected self-image as a City of Success (Pim
1917). The imagery of sinful corruption with which the city is identified
BELFAST GOTHIC 115
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
citys 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 OFaolains travel
narrative An Irish Journey, which conveys OFaolains 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
116 Neal Alexander
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 (OFaolain 1941, 241-42).
OFaolains reluctant, almost fearful, approach to the city both literally
and as a subject for literary representation immediately ups the dra-
matic 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 unin-
spired 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 citys 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. Bel-
fasts 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, OFaolains image of Belfast clearly in-
vokes the Freudian concept of das Unheimliche the complex, often terri-
fying, experience of the uncanny. For, at the crux of Freuds tortuous
examination of the uncanny and its linguistic underpinnings is the realisa-
tion 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). More-
over, 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 OFaolains
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 real-
ism of the city is St John Ervine, but he is lacking in poetry, and has
BELFAST GOTHIC 117
only succeeded in making it taste like reboiled mutton gone cold
(OFaolain 1941, 242).
As we have seen, Ervines city is not entirely free of sinister associations,
although OFaolains 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 representa-
tional capabilities of realism per se what the city needs, claims
OFaolain, is an Irish Poe.
OFaolains representation of Belfast can usefully be seen in the con-
text 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 laby-
rinthine 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 citys 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 Stevensons The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde, Charles Dickens later novels, and James Thomsons 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 ema-
nating from the city (1998, 37). As Lehan convincingly shows, the sub-
genre 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 patho-
lopolis 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, OFaolains most important means of exploring the uncanny
118 Neal Alexander
otherness of Belfasts unlit streets. To this end, John Lechte argues that
(s)ince Baudelaire, we know that walking in the city opened up a mod-
ernist 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 disturb-
ing encounters and opening up a threatening and unbounded new
world.
Lechtes 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 OFaolains, which echoes it also pro-
vides 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 repeti-
tion, which forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescap-
able (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
Freuds experience of the city as an inescapable labyrinth neatly dovetails
with his initial formulation (following Jentsch) of the uncanny as some-
thing one does not know ones way about in (341). The citys 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
BELFAST GOTHIC 119
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 typi-
cally 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 Tnnies calls Gemein-
schaft and Gesellschaft:
All intimate, private, and exclusive living together, so we discover, is under-
stood as life in Gemeinschaft (community). Gesellschaft (society) is public
life it is the world itself. In Gemeinschaft (community) with ones family,
one lives from birth on bound to it in weal and woe. One goes into Gesell-
schaft (society) as one goes into a strange country (Tnnies 1955, 37-38).
For Tnnies, the strange country of Gesellschaft is embodied by the city,
and especially the metropolis, where urban lifes 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 Tnnies 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 citys industrial growth like that of many others was dependent
upon the migration of rural workers in the nineteenth century, a circum-
stance that becomes a thematic structure, for instance, in Michael
McLavertys Belfast novels Call My Brother Back (1938) and Lost Fields
(1941). The powerful psychic undertow accompanying this experience of
120 Neal Alexander
uprooting and relocation means that in Belfast fiction it is often the case
that country folk and Southerners (like OFaolain) approach Belfast with
considerable trepidation. For example, in Sam Hanna Bells 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 Healys A Goats 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
Parks The Healing, which follows young Samuel Andersons transplanta-
tion to Belfast from his South Down home. On arrival, Samuels experi-
ence of the citys chaotic unfamiliarity, its sinister nowhere world (Park
1992, 26), only exacerbates the nightmares that have tormented him
since his RUC fathers 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). Samuels 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 psy-
chological threat, one that is attended by morbid fantasies and gothic
portentousness.
BELFAST GOTHIC 121
Parks 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 reli-
gion, 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 wifes death and
the knowledge of his sons 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.
Its just like the Bible all over again, when the children of Israel were wander-
ing 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. Powers Children of the North Trilogy sustains its depic-
tion of Belfast as a godforsaken city (1987, 120) with grim, and some-
what wearying, determination. Powers 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, Powers Belfast is home to an ancient and
unchangeable evil that transmits its atavistic violence from one genera-
tion to the next, creating a fatalistic and unending cycle of violence
(1985, 113) that is impervious to the forces of history. In such represen-
tations, Belfast itself is overlaid by a superimposed terrain of moral and
symbolic significance Laura Pelaschiar describes Powers technique as
moral Gothicism (1998, 122) the city figuring less as a physical envi-
ronment 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) under-
pinning Belfasts violent history is much more adroitly handled in Eoin
McNamees Resurrection Man (1994), a novel that is now widely acknowl-
edged 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 novels relative merits or failings it should perhaps be made
122 Neal Alexander
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 dur-
ing 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-indus-
trial Belfast to a funereal stillness. Victors 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 Victors 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 Catho-
lic 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 simula-
tion 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 Ren Girard argues, the rite
of sacrifice constitutes a cathartic deflection of a communitys self-di-
rected 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 Dread-
noughts. 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 Belfasts urban geogra-
phy, 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-
BELFAST GOTHIC 123
tors 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, Victors attempts to master the urban environment are frustrated
by the citys 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 Victors attempt to replace the citys 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, Victors 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 indeci-
pherable, 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 Victors killings disseminate through-
out the novel and which haunts Ryans consciousness, is a plea for obliv-
ion: Please. Kill me (24). Indeed, Victor lives at the centre of an un-
heimlich 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. Its quiet. No call for words at
all (103); Victors girlfriend, Heather, feels trapped in the distorted,
uneasy silence of a horror film (175); and his father, James, having suf-
124 Neal Alexander
fered a stroke, can only articulate a wordless horror at his sons 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 Gothics preoccupation with the tomb, the crypt and prema-
ture burial (Punter 1996, 190).
Victors 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
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Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge.
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BELFAST GOTHIC 125
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Williams, Raymond. 1993 (1973). The Country and the City. London: Hogarth
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1
For Metropoliss 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.
SEEING THE FUTURE:
URBAN DYSTOPIA IN WELLS AND LANG
Keith Williams
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between H.G. Wellss early
futuristic fictions and Fritz Langs Metropolis (1926) and condsiders
their influences on the mindscapes of European cities. Despite Wellss
disowning of his own influence on Langs method and themes in his
review of the film, Metropolis has reworked Wellss early ideas in a
complex way. Sleeper and other early texts project the possibilities of
sound and image recording into totally urbanised, managerial societ-
ies. In them, the citys public and private spaces are saturated with
technologically advanced systems of marketing and/or panoptic sur-
veillance and control. Wellss 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 Wellss 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 ur-
ban mindscape of the European future were H.G. Wellss scientific ro-
mance When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) and Fritz Langs silent epic Metropolis
(1926). Strangely, key transactions between them remain unexplored.
1
Wellss speculations, only four years after the Lumires invented the
128 Keith Williams
2
For explanation of media simulations as the reals hallucinatory resemblance to
itself (i.e. the contention that their discourses create a hyperreality, at once appar-
ently 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 tlgraphie photographique (see Verne 1994, 70). Its industry is also run
by state monopolies and multinationals, with oppressed workers. Only recently redis-
covered and published, it is notable not as intertext so much as symptomatic response
to the emergent technologised city. Wells undoubtedly influenced SantElias designs
for the Citta Nuova (1914), key Futurist vision of metropolises to come, in vast geo-
metric architecture, traffic and high technology (see Gold 1985, 123-24 and Meyer
1995, 167-68). For Wellss wider influence on the international branches of Futurism,
see Hulten 1986, especially 454, 498, 501, 506, 566, 568 and 601-02, and Chialant
2005.
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 in-
sights into the construction of consumers and charismatic electronic
presence by hyperreal
2
means are crucial to this. This essay discusses the
principal legacy of Wellss 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 affin-
ity. 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 metropoliss
prominence in early film, suffusing it as much as Modernist art and litera-
ture. 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 posi-
tions about it. London overtook Paris as the worlds 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 charac-
ter 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
URBAN DYSTOPIA IN WELLS AND LANG 129
4
Wells alludes to the tradition of socialist Utopias his vision undercuts. E.g. Gra-
ham recalls Edward Bellamys Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), whose hero Julian
West wakes in a future Boston where poverty and social injustice have been elimi-
nated. Similarly, Wells deliberately challenges the anti-industrial arts and crafts com-
munism of William Morriss News From Nowhere (1891) (see Wells 1994, 51-52 and
120). Another likely (though unmentioned) intertext is Jules Vernes In the Twenty-
Ninth 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).
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 Wellss futuristic
fiction were one particular method. Hence his self-conscious visualisa-
tions of future London, saturated by media and mass forms of life.
As it developed, cinema screened the citys ambiguous appeal, simul-
taneously glamourising it and sponsoring its new mythology as modern
Babylon. The cumulative image offered urbanites a visual space for ad-
justing to the hectic, alluring and dangerous world they inhabited (Chris-
tie 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. Wellss 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 Benjamins flneur with his roving city
viewpoint) argues that a defamiliarising mobilised virtual gaze is charac-
teristic 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 Wellss 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 envi-
ronment. WTSWs 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 control-
ling his megalopolis panoptically, through a network of visual technolo-
gies, reflects the other. Hence this anti-capitalist urban dystopia is crucial
to understanding Wellss method of foreseeing urban modernity and his
influence. It warned that in the corporate tomorrow of 2100 media tech-
nology might not be driven by political progress and enlightenment, but
by managerial capitalism and commodity culture.
4
130 Keith Williams
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 sav-
age (Wells 1994, 117). Wells showed particular prescience about how
media spectacle constructs and interpellates modern urban subjects as
consumers. Grahamis immediately kitted out, using a miniaturised screen
with virtual manikin (Wells 1994, 30-31). Similarly, Wellss Story of the
Days to Come (also 1899) elaborates this marketing role. Its built envi-
ronment 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 futur-
istic 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 tri-
umph 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 Wellss dystopia.
Not only have screens replaced windows on the world outside, videos
have superseded books in the citys mass culture. Graham gleans its
history through a video feature, complete with sound and colour. An
angry young man from the white silk-clad lite, embryonic of Freder in
Metropolis, protests against the citys socio-economic injustice, perpetrated
in Grahams 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, Ostrogs radical niece, who, like
Langs Maria, triggers his social conscience. Like Maria too, Helen in-
spires 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 univer-
sality of power (50). Information is transmitted instantly by two-way
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).
videophone to manage the crisis of Grahams unexpected awakening
(29-30). Just as workers levels resonate with mind-numbing babble ma-
chines (giant phonographs, blaring propaganda), The Boss, Ostrog,
operates a panoptic network of surveillance and intelligence-gathering
half a century before Orwells all-seeing Big Brother and his telescreen.
Clusters of mobile camera-like specula (114) enable Ostrog to monitor
the metropolis from his crows 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
Benthams principle of the panopticon prison (a key development for
Michel Foucaults theory of surveillance culture) to a citywide scale.
Ostrogs means also recall European fictions first megalomediac: Fran-
cis Bennett, owner of the Earth Herald, from Vernes In the Twenty-
Ninth Century (1889). Verne imagines how media empires might de-
velop with the rise of American press magnates. Located in mega-
lopolitan 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 board-
room 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 Grahams authentic existence, but the effect of his
transmittable likeness as the ultimate branded signifier in the futures
commodity culture: The whole of this revolt depends on the idea that
you are awake, alive, and with us (100). Ostrog wants Graham simulta-
neously duplicated and broadcast round every city in the world as a vir-
tual electronic presence, a simulacrum testifying to the millennial mira-
cle of his awakening.
6
Thus Wells predicts media technologys role in
propaganda and news-management, mass-spectacle and the synthetic
mystique of celebrity (106).
Wellss influence made the issue of seeing the urban future and how
the future might see integral to the critically self-conscious videology of
132 Keith Williams
7
See Stewart 1985, 159-207, especially 162.
8
First serialised in Das illustrierte Blatt, from August 1926, six months before the
film premiered (see Elsaesser 2000, 12).
9
Langs films () deal primarily with modernitys systematic nature, its interlock-
ing 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 Yorks night skyline was inspirational according to Langs 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).
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 citys
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 cameras gaze and
screens-within-screens typifies the tendency towards allegories of vision
and modernity in Langs films.
9
Fredersens videophone is thus private
counterpart to inventor Rotwangs 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 Wellss 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 anti-
capitalist dystopia, with Fredersen its Ostrog-like magnate-dictator, while
Freder assumes Grahams nave playboy role.
Lang switches nominal location from Europe to a generically Ameri-
canised, technological city of the future to reflect anxieties about Ger-
manys post-Great War dependence on transatlantic capital under the
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 Wellss all-consuming urban
dystopia (for Mumfords cycle see introduction to Sutcliffe 1984, 2).
12
For an overview of Weimar culture of cities, see Willett 1984, 110-44.
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 WTSWs
way of seeing mechanised future urban space. In 1903, when Berlins
population topped four million, Georg Simmel (1997, 175) contrasted the
accelerated visual bombardment and fragmented spatio-temporal pattern
of the Grostadt 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
Endells Die Schnheit der groen 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 cash-
nexus meant urban consumerism went hand in hand with class division
and alienation of labour. Simmels 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 enor-
mous 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).
Grostadt 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 Spenglers reactionary
catastrophism which outdid anything in Wellss apocalyptic vision. His
Soul of the City chapter in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1922) de-
nounced 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
134 Keith Williams
13
The Canaanite idol was also a multivalent symbol in Weimar SF. Alfred Reifen-
bergs world domination fantasy was titled Des Gtzen Moloch Ende (1925), to symbolise
the monstrous international conspiracy keeping the Reich down. In Hans Richters
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).
liberal-capitalist metropolises with global connections and cosmopolitan
populations independent of, or antagonistic to, statehood. Hence nation-
alist attacks followed Spenglers cue. Nazis, worshipping Blut und Boden,
fulminated against Berlins 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. Gruenings
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 Fords contro-
versial assembly-line system on the one hand, imported mass culture on
the other and climaxing in Adolf Halfelds Amerika und der Amerikanismus,
published in 1927, the year of Metropoliss release.
14
WTSW was also a principal model for the social symbolism of Langs
sets. In the most extreme form of architectural determinism, hierarchy is
literally spatialised in the multi-levelled built environment of Wells Lon-
don.
15
Similarly, class is stratified in Metropolis: lite penthouses and orgi-
astic nightclubs above; below, monstrous machine rooms; subterranean,
the brutally stylised workers city. H. Lanoss illustrations to the Graphic
serialisation of Wellss text blend late-Victorian classicism with Art Nou-
veau curvilinear motifs, Europes proto-modern design style (Wells 1899,
41-561). Lang, a trained architect, updated this, topically incorporating
jazz-age Art Deco Amricain. But Lang was also attracted to the filmic
dynamism with which Wells alternates human scale and overwhelming
cityscape:
(Grahams) 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 faade was grey and dim and broken by great archings, circular
16
For such raumbildend motifs in Lang and others, see Eisner 1969, 119-27.
perforations, balconies, buttresses, turret projections, myriads of vast win-
dows, and an intricate scheme of architectural relief (Wells 1994, 34).
This gigantic glass hive with its kaleidoscope pattern of masses (colour-
coded 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 Grahams mov-
ing 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 com-
muters 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. Metropoliss opening super-
imposes machine parts over skyscrapers, suggesting the same
interchangeability. Fear of technologies implications for social organisa-
tion grew from their power and fascination, which film visualised in
136 Keith Williams
17
For an overview of technologised cities in Weimar films see Sutcliffe 1984, 152-58.
18
In Wellss The New Accelerator (1901), for example, metabolic time is artifi-
cially 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).
operation.
17
Dystopian extensions of the city-as-machine metaphor sati-
rised rationalising policies such as the American Frederick Taylors time
and motion studies. Taylorism is attacked when Freder takes a workers
shift, literally fighting the clock on a gigantic dial. His intertitle Father,
I never realised ten hours could last so long visualises a Wellsian para-
dox: simultaneous acceleration and dilation of temporality under moder-
nity 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 cinma, doubling Marias features on
the robot, is thus symbolic terminus of the citys mechanising effects on
bodies and minds.
However, Wells was notoriously unflattered by Langs intended hom-
age, believing he had outgrown such alarmism. His 1927 review of the
New York premiere declared that Metropolis compounded almost every
possible foolishness, clich, 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 WTSWs demographic predictions in his Antici-
pations, swapping megalopolis for suburban decentralisation, through
electrification, telephonics, etc. (see Wells 1902, especially 39-40 and 58-
9). 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 Wellss reaction was his own
misgivings returning to haunt him. Less surprising was Hitlers enthusi-
asm for Metropoliss 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
20
Metropolis was the most monumental product of Universum Film Aktien-
gesellschaft (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 Rotwangs control over technology has been
removed (2001, 162). For ambiguities in Langs 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 Wellss 1933 history
of the future, The Shape of Things to Come. A memorandum circulated to Alexander
Kordas production team still held Langs 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, Wellss 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 WTSWs
proto-totalitarian possibilities in relations with Germany after Hitlers takeover. Bann-
ed by the Nazis himself, he defended German writers from censorship and persecu-
tion 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 techno-
crats intentions.
accomplished (see Richie 1998, 470-74). Ironically, the shape of actual
things to come was slipping from Wellss 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, Metropo-
liss 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 Nazisms principal backers.
Nonetheless, Wells conceded that Metropolis wasted fine possibilities,
because the Weimar Republic, cradle of urban design, seemed so com-
mitted to modernisation (Wells 1928, 188). Yet he did not consider that
Metropolis might be symptomatic of the struggle in Germany itself be-
tween reactionary and progressive forces.
21
Ironically, it proved less about
the future as such, than where the immediate present was heading,
though Wellss review also marks the germination of his answering urban
technotopia.
22
Most tellingly, Wells ignored Langs extrapolation of his own foresee-
ing of totalitarian urban surveillance and control.
23
Ostrog rejects democ-
138 Keith Williams
24
In the novel, Fredersens Central Control Tower is known as Der Neue Babel
Turm (von Harbou 1984, 15).
25
Von Harbous novel features multiple pagan deities based on Wellsian imagery.
The factory hooter, voice of the city, is described as Behemot-Laut. Freder visual-
ises 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 Langs mooted title Neubabelsburg, punning on the studios
name, to be more apt (Wells 1928, 180).
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 Nietzsches master-
ing Over-man, and that modern conditions inevitably demand and jus-
tify dictatorship (166-67). He broadcasts the cult of the Sleeper as mirac-
ulous 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 twen-
tieth century (Minden 1985, 194),
24
and particularly for Berlin. Metropoliss
most famous allusions are Freders vision of the heart machine as Mo-
lochs jaws, devouring fresh human Futter, and Marias sermon against
Babel. Both are filtered through Wells.
25
The Canaanite idols name and
his 1895 Time Machines troglodytic cannibals the Morlocks resonate
with proximity. The mouth of their mechanised underworld is sur-
mounted 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
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 Futuras screen ancestry in forms of mechanical life
deconstructing ontological boundaries between human and artificial identity from
Mlis to Expressionism. See Kaes 2001, 155-57.
just WTSW and A Story of the Days to Come, but Wellss Lord of the
Dynamos (1894), The Cone (1895), etc.
The most important transposition of Wellss 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
Expressionisms preoccupation with artificial life. However, he did not
consider Langs robot as an analogue for simulation of life in moving
images, developing his own insights about projection of charismatic elec-
tronic presence through urban media.
28
Significantly, Lang displaced
WTSWs motif of the hypnotic double (to preserve Grahams 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 Fredersens strategy of ma-
nipulating 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 mass-
audiences in emotionally charged and/or propagandistic ways. Thus
Langs specific response to Wellss critique of mediation and loss of
authenticity in the modern city had a key impact on SFs self-referentiali-
ty. Postmodern mutations of this joint legacy into the existentially
undecidable replicants inhabiting the tech noir urban sprawl of Ridley
Scotts Blade Runner (1982) and CGI cyborgs of more recent retrofitted
dystopian environments testify to that.
Metropoliss urban media politics also have a gender dimension. The
Weimar constitution was arguably Europes most modern in terms of
sexual equality. But behind the polarisation of Marias image, Lang may
echo Wellss ambivalence about the emerging New Woman of the 1890s
(see Kaes 2001, 155-57). Significantly, bluestocking Helen Wotton politi-
cises 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
140 Keith Williams
30
Brigitte Helm played both mechanical femme fatale and heroine with Gish-Pick-
ford 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.
children, as quintessence of the modern city. In both novella and film,
the false Maria is associated with nightmares about the Whore of Baby-
lon (see Spengler 1928, 105, and von Harbou 1984, 113)). Similarly,
WTSW replaces maternal functions by faceless automata in corporate
crches (see Wells 1994, 178-79). Thus liberated city women become
sexual consumers (see 182-83). In contrast, Langs Maria is pastorally
feminine. Demurely dressed, she leads poor children to interrupt Freders
frolics with scantily-clad courtesans. His partners flirtation prefigures the
frenzied shamelessness of Marias doubles nightclub dance. Both echo
the virtual eroticism late-Victorian Graham finds so shocking: These
were no pictures () but photographed realities. Consequently, the
future citys mediated culture is dominated by systematised sensuality
(51-52). Similarly, the robots 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 Langs mediator plot as mystical hokum, though it also
derived from the Sleepers iconography. Freder fulfils Marias prophecy
about the chosen one who will heal divisions between capital and labour
in the citys 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 Mrchen (fairytale) was incompatible with socially aware film-
making.
31
But he downplayed Metropoliss own foregrounding of the cam-
eras potential for demystifying treatment of urban modernity. Through
Freders explorations, like Grahams, Metropolis makes visible underlying
relations betweensocio-architectonic strata, the spectator/reader discover-
ing these vicariously with respective protagonists. In German, Mittler,
mediator, also connotes medium, alluding to Langs visual technique.
His camera suggestively links zones of urban experience alienated by
ideological distance, a principle extended to representing actual metropo-
lises on location, through cross-cutting montage by documentarists such
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 Berlins charac-
teristic alternation between mimesis and the abstract, its symphonic patterning. Wells
also held up Ruttmanns magnificent production for setting new standards in the
treatment of modern themes by plotless means (see Wells 1929, 16 and 27).
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 modernitys
urban mindscape.
33
However, though Wells disowned Langs 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 prog-
ress. 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. Con-
versely, Just Imagine (dir. David Butler, 1930) countered European scepti-
cism about an Americanised future, dreaming a technotopian USA of
1980. A Depression citizen miraculously revives to wonder at the cloud-
piercing 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 films opti-
mism was reworked ironically in Aldous Huxleys Brave New World
142 Keith Williams
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 Langs key personnel, see Hake 2001, 54-57.
(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 Gtzs Vor
neuen Weltkatastrophen (1931) typified Nazi rejection of Americanisation
and Soviet social levelling, both threatening to brainwash the Volk into
urban automata. Conversely, Werner Illings 1930 Utopolis (in cheap edi-
tion from the Social Democratic book club) defended Futuras workers
paradise (complete with enlightenment by 3D cinema) against capitalist
counter-revolution. Ludwig Dexheimers 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 Hitlers take-
over
36
and so did the cinematic representation of Berlin. Putzi
Hanfstngls Hans Westmar (1933) caricatured it as degenerate, cosmopoli-
tan Babel, parasitic on the host nation. Most ominously, Der Herrscher
(1937) took up where Langs resolution to modernitys problems ended
ambiguously. Its Berlin was now the integrated, techno-industrial power-
house of a coming society, managed by upstanding Aryans under their
superhuman leader, not unlike that of the pseudonymous Schmids 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 mo-
ment of specific creative dialectic between Wellss and Langs 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.
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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 Roegs Bad
Timing (GB 1980), Tanners 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 subjects 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
148 Barry Langford
1
See amongst many others Bruno 1987; also Harvey 1989, 308-23.
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 Leighs 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
Antonionis LEclisse (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
CITYSCAPES AND MINDSCAPES IN 1980S EUROPEAN CINEMA 149
2
The version of postmodernism informing this summary will be generally
recognised as Fredric Jamesons (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 Garfunkels 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
Milenas scattered papers, Inspector Netusil turns up a postcard of a Schiele self-
portrait (whose scrawny naked body and shock of curly hair strongly resembles
Garfunkel as shot by Roeg in several key scenes).
narrative restitution even in the face of its ineluctable attenuation, other
US films proffered rapturous enactments of narratives 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
narratives 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 Roegs densely woven story of obsessive desire in a familiar fin-
de-sicle Vienna of Freud, Klimt and Schiele taking up an invitation -
offered by the film itself, which directly references all of these.
3
In so
150 Barry Langford
4
It may be worth noting that in Roegs 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 Mazowers (1999).
doing, such critics presumably aim to overlay the allure of fin-de-sicle
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 Dont
Look Now (1973). Cinematically, of course if one excludes studio-era
Habsburg fabrications such as Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)
Viennas most celebrated screen appearance came in a perhaps uncharac-
teristic guise, as the rubble-strewn, divided occupied city of the immedi-
ate post-war years in Carol Reeds The Third Man (1949). The film estab-
lished 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 di-
vided, spy-infested Berlin that inherited The Third Mans caustic combina-
tion of power politics and personal betrayal. In fact, Bad Timing not only
alludes in passing to Reeds classic film
4
in the zither we hear on the
soundtrack in a characteristically tortuous caf scene but also recalls to
the viewer the ineluctable implication of all of central Europes great
cities in the Cold War, the historical legacy of Europes dark twentieth
century.
5
Jeffrey Lanza combines these points of reference in invoking
Vienna, the words spy capital as well as Sigmund Freuds 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 Reeds 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.
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.
In the zither-scored caf scene, Alex is trying to obtain some insights into
his lover Milena Flahertys (Theresa Russell) marriage to Czech intellec-
tual 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 films 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
Milenas unremarkable apartment block, mentioned several times 2,
Schnbrunnstrae 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 politics
6
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. Alexs
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
152 Barry Langford
7
He eventually identifies Milenas street number to the emergency operator as
zwei.
8
As has frequently been noted, Roegs 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 wont
renew his contract at the University in Vienna and speaks vaguely of returning to
Boston (where he did his graduate work).
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 Turners druggy rock-star mnage in Performance (1970), the English
schoolchildren in the Australian Outback Walkabout (1971), the English
tourists John and Laura Baxter in Venice in Dont Look Now, the extra-
terrestrial 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 circum-
stances. The films bland Vienna may in fact be seen as a projection of
Alexs own inability or refusal to commit himself even to full participa-
tion 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 Alexs
number towards the end of the film, every scene is experienced by the
spectator from Alexs perspective (at various points, moreover, it is un-
clear whether the images onscreen depict actual incidents or Alexs fanta-
sies of them). The lack of a sense of place or of history in this
historically-freighted milieu thus becomes an index of Alexs own isola-
tion and egoism. Alexs 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
10
Pointing out the virtually identical design of the couples hotel room in Morocco
and Milenas 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 Netusils fantasy, although it has
been foreshadowed by Milenas copy of Paul Bowles The Sheltering Sky.
desire and need for community. Thus it is unsurprising that a willed
refusal of the social such as Alexs proves fragile as well as self-destruc-
tive. Netusil accomplishes his deconstruction of Alexs self-contained,
self-sufficient image, revealing the violence and destructive rage that fuels
his superficial cool, by retracing Alexs 20-minute journey through the
city earlier in the night. Netusil can read the semes of the city well enough
to recognise Alexs distorted rendition of them: he knows, for example,
exactly how long it would have taken Alex to drive to Milenas apartment
after receiving her telephone call (he dismisses as nonsense! his assis-
tants suggestion that the roads might have been congested at 1 am); he
knows too that the radio channel to which Alexs car radio was tuned
when he pulled up at Milenas stopped broadcasting at midnight thus
leaving an unaccounted-for gap of almost two hours between Alexs
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 decep-
tively sunny first date (as Salwolke notes [1993, 78], it takes place atypi-
cally in daylight and in the conventionally social locale of a caf), 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 Alexs perception of the citys 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 func-
tion 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 films/Alexs Vienna is mun-
dane 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.
154 Barry Langford
11
Now the headquarters of Metropolitan Life.
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 Id walk across the park Id 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 films coda, a scene that may be imag-
ined 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 Milenas 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 Klimts Judith at the start of the film, except that
Alexs mutilation is self-inflicted.
It seems as if New York functions for Alex as a kind of reality princi-
ple, figuring loss and specifically exposing the illusory nature of his own
control of his environment and of his narrative. The citys strong urban
signifiers (the immediately recognisable Pan Am Building
11
features
prominently in the Manhattan sequence) prevents Alex from either ignor-
ing, disassembling or dominating it as he has Vienna; while the character
and iconographic (Klimt) continuities from the Vienna story suggest that
Alexs control of his environment there is equally illusory. More specifi-
cally, and appropriately given the narrative centrality of psychoanalysis,
Alexs relationship to the city is exposed as taking place on a destructive
axis where the Symbolic (Alexs 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 narratives 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.
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. With-
out 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. Im tired. I would like to learn again how to say things. (Paul)
If Bad Timing centres on a densely compressed, aggressive and very spe-
cific contest to appropriate the citys meaning(s), Alain Tanners Dans la
Ville Blanche/In the White City depicts a much more attenuated and reflec-
tive relationship of the individual to the urban. Once again, however, it is
a transaction in which the individual is ultimately defeated and dimin-
ished 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 Citys 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 misunderstand-
ing. 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.
Pauls 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, punctu-
ate the films generally undemonstrative, meditative mise en scne. 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
156 Barry Langford
12
Compare for example the use of Super-8 to convey scenes of childhood memory
in Paul Coxs Man of Flowers (1983).
13
Oh! Mother Will Be Pleased!
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 Pauls inner life we can achieve.
Super-8 as Stephen Barber notes (2002, 90), already an almost ana-
chronistic medium in 1983, but also at this time undergoing rediscovery
by arthouse filmmakers for its suggestively poetic qualities
12
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
Pauls wife, impossibly, to project raw stock onto her apartment wall
immediately on receipt. In this connection, it seems suggestive that many
of Pauls films recall cinemas own earliest moments, when the new me-
dium 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 Hales Tours: see Kirby 1997); even the moment
when Pauls camera seems to penetrate his lover Rosas 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 Pauls own increasing immobil-
ity, the one is the objective correlative of the other: if the Super-8 films
capture (as we may imagine) Pauls 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 Pauls dismally unsuc-
cessful flnerie 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, Rosas 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 momen-
tum. 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, leav-
ing it open whether Pauls internalisation of the machinery of image-
making is to be read as a reintegration of the active/sensuous and imagin-
ing/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 womans
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 reach-
ing Basle and his wife, remains equally unresolved. Given that the urban
environment of Basle, as we briefly glimpse it in the scenes where Pauls
wife receives his letters and films, appears to share some of the qualities
of absence that are so pronounced a feature of Pauls wandering through
Lisbon, it also remains an open question whether this urban anomie is
after all Pauls projection or an objective attribute of the contemporary
European city.
158 Barry Langford
14
By an odd coincidence, Ganz was also Roegs first choice to play Alex Linden in
Bad Timing.
Wings of Desire (West Germany, 1987)
In Wim Wenders Der Himmel ber 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 obvi-
ously 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 heteroge-
neous 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 ren-
dered 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 cameras disembodied
gaze alights briefly promises to become a character through whom the
citys 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 (its impossible
to get lost in Berlin, as a line of dialogue has it, because you can always
find the Wall). This is a near-paradox, a narrative of absolute stasis
whose inability to progress threatens the annihilation of narrative alto-
gether: 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 cameras indifferent, universal gaze in the opening of the film
acquires a more ambivalent dimension. For Graf
the identification of the angels eye with the cameras 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 undiscrimi-
nating observation of all kinds of phenomena, in the world of physical ap-
pearance, 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
Falks 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 infi-
nitely serial pre-/procession of images is itself implicated in these recur-
sive patterns by its incapacity or refusal of meaningful discrimination. In
this sense, as David Harvey notes (1989, 314), realigning the photo-
graphic image with the telling of stories in real time becomes the films
central preoccupation. The narrative device through which this abstract
idea is explored is of course the angel Damiels increasingly urgent desire
to step out of the angelic sphere of pure phenomena for participation in
mortal experience.
Thus Damiels abandonment of the immortal but futile angelic do-
main for the fast-flowing River of Time (a recurrent metaphor in the film,
both spoken and visual), symbolically undertaken fromthe no-mans-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
160 Barry Langford
only in the terms of fantasy, or perhaps of art. Alongside the library and
the studio where Falks wartime epic is shooting, two other prominent
venues revisited by the films 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 transcen-
dence 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 architec-
tural presences that so often bespeak the city (the film famously opens
with Damiel standing atop Berlins 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 defin-
ing 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
films 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 Berlins 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
Europes 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
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 sug-
gests 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 defin-
itive visions of the city.
To some extent, Wenders vision in Wings of Desire predicated on the
assumption of Berlins paralysing historical petrifaction has been ironi-
cally countered by the unforeseeable thaw, just two years after the films
release, that restored both historical narration on the largest possible
scheme and jubilant collective appropriations of the citys 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 commodifica-
tion, market orientation and Americanisation (the latter of course a key
theme in Wenders earlier films in particular) that Berlin had been en-
abled to resist precisely through the temporal and narrative afflictions
depicted in Wings of Desire. Thus the film now stands as a historical docu-
ment in its own right, of a moment when European urban identities
sought a distinctive path for rendering the city both humanly apprehensi-
ble and historically meaningful at a trans-individual level a moment
which the restoration of historys dynamic momentum has consigned to
the past.
162 Barry Langford
References
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61-74.
Dimendberg, Edward. 2004. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA:
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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, 56-
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SSS. 1995. An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous
Spectator. In Viewing Positions, ed. L. Williams, 114-133. New Brunswick:
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London: Verso.
King, Geoff. 2000. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster.
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Kirby, Lynne. 1997. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Exeter: Univer-
sity 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 TVS ROYAL CITY:
TELEVISION COVERAGE OF ROYAL MEDIA EVENTS
Hugh ODonnell
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 mega-
event, 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
164 Hugh ODonnell
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 monarchys 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 ODonnell 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 Sandbk, 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 Roches
mega-events, their material location is always a city, they attract an
international (if limited) cast and they are clearly seen by the organisers
ONCE IN TVS ROYAL CITY 165
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 couples 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
166 Hugh ODonnell
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 com-
munitas: as Turner puts it, liminality is the dominant characteristic of
units of space and time in which behaviour and symbolism are momen-
tarily 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 momen-
tary 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 Turners 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) re-
mains 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 glori-
ous 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
Roches 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-rational-
ism (positive roles for science and technology), capitalism, universalistic
humanism, urbanism and transnational levels of organisation of communica-
tions and transport (2000, 9).
While it would be incorrect to say that such elements were entirely miss-
ing 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.
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 continu-
ity 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 horse-
back wearing imperial livery accompanying in many cases carriages like-
wise 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 wed-
ding, 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 Strget to the royal residence of Amalien-
borg, 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 consider-
ably, slowing down again only on entering Strget.
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 Dianas funeral in the UK
bore at least to some extent the imprint of New Labours recent election
victory (see Blain and ODonnell 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-dem-
ocratic discourse which, despite significant societal change (see, for exam-
ple, 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 Spains former
greatness alongside their claim to modernity, with Madrid in particular
168 Hugh ODonnell
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 citys most famous museums and other important public build-
ings. 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 Va were wrapped in reproductions of paintings
by Velzquez 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 pavs 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 Amsterdams
Nieuwe Kerk were particularly spectacular) and helicopter flyovers of
medieval town centres or monumental districts are now absolutely rou-
tine, 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 Mir 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
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 recon-
figured 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 author-
ity discursively inscribed in the buildings and in their uniforms. The
transformation of the streets into traffic-free medieval lanes or Enlighten-
ment 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 com-
munitas 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 im-
portant 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.
170 Hugh ODonnell
1
Christiania is an illegal squatter settlement dating from the nineteen-seventies. See
http://christiania.org/tale1/main/
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 Strget 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 (sixteenth-
century churches, Copenhagens first cinema and so on) these bridge-
heads 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 fathers shoulders enthusiastically waving a
flag, only to reveal that it was a McDonalds 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 character-
ised 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 reveal-
ing a tee-shirt bearing the words Save Christiania
1
, eliciting no acknowl-
edgement whatsoever from the commentators. Past and present can fuse
only on the fairy-tale terrain of picturesque or monumental once-ness.
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 increas-
ing 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 Dianas funeral in 1997, followed quickly by
the second Spanish wedding less than a month later.
In total I watched eight different televised versions of Dianas 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 Westmin-
ster 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 pur-
poses a tourist script, a point specifically reflected in CBS commentary
with veteran reporter Dan Rather pointing out buildings which, he sug-
gested, American viewers who had already visited London would recog-
172 Hugh ODonnell
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 view-
ers 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 Gaud. 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 com-
ponent 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
Spains 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
Its a postmodern festival () theres a popular festival atmosphere, its
almost carnivalesque.
Art Historian Tommy Srb on the Norwegian channel NRK1, 25 Au-
gust 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 ODonnell, 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
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 Dianas 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) con-
flate weddings and funerals into the single category of Coronations. My
own research over the last ten years has, however, led me to the conclu-
sion 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 audiences agenda and that of the organisers.
Were those in attendance at Dianas funeral procession wholehearted
participants in a discourse and practice of grief? The Channel 4
programme The Princesss People, screened on the first anniversary of the
funeral, tells a somewhat different story, one backed up by careful analy-
sis 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 Princesss 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 Princesss
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.
174 Hugh ODonnell
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 others
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 genu-
inely 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 Strget, 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 retrospec-
tive reporting formats (newscasts, current affairs programmes and so on)
openly reveal another side to the behaviour of the crowd. Thus in Copen-
hagen amateur dramatists were shown wandering around dressed in old-
fashioned clothes. During the Amsterdam wedding a woman asked if she
was enjoying the event enthusiastically replied, Yes, you dont see a
golden carriage every day, while unofficial bands struck up on the pave-
ments 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 crowds behaviour
shows that its relationship with the city is not necessarily uniformly that
of the organisers. Indeed, we are almost certainly witnessing the drama-
tised 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 occa-
sionally 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
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 ficti-
tious 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 post-
modern mixture was in fact summed up by Tommy Srb (quoted
above) in his analysis of the Oslo wedding: theres a crossover of high
and low, like and unlike and new things with the old () today its 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 nave 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, how-
ever 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,
176 Hugh ODonnell
we live in societies where power increasingly operates through circuits
which lie beyond the formal contours of the law, he argues that the con-
cept of sovereignty remains the linchpin of official discourses of author-
ity. 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 institution-
alised 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 simulta-
neously 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 reconfig-
ured 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 com-
munitas 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. Hlne Iswolsky.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Blain, Neil, and Hugh ODonnell. 2003. Media, Monarchy and Power. Bristol: Intel-
lect.
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 Knowl-
edge, transl. Robert Hurley. London: Penguin.
Klein, Naomi. 2001. No Logo. London: Flamingo.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1998 (1974). The Production of Space, transl. Donald Nicholson-
Smith. 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
Glasgows year as European City of Culture in 1990 is widely per-
ceived 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 Glasgows 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 narra-
tives. It describes how the cartoons both enact a comic exposure of
Culture City folly and articulate aspects of a citys 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 al-
ready-apparent cultural importance. The 1990 host city was scheduled to
be in the United Kingdom, with the British government holding a com-
petition to decide where should be awarded the title. Nine cities com-
peted including Bath, Bristol, Cambridge and Edinburgh with Glas-
gow 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
180 Matthew Reason
title. In a way this surprise was appropriate, as those behind Glasgows
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 per-
ceptions 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-indus-
trial cities across Europe and radically changing perceptions of the Euro-
pean City of Culture concept.
Forming part of a wider examination of media reporting on
Glasgows City of Culture carried out by the University of Glasgows
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 citys image chang-
ing 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 use-
fully employed in cultural and historical studies. Douglas, Harte and
OHara, for example, use cartoons to trace Anglo-Irish relations, stating
in their introduction that (p)olitical cartoonists at once reveal and re-
inscribe prevailing ideologies by reflecting back at us ideas and attitudes
which we already hold, but with such piquancy that our beliefs and prej-
udices may become graphically reinforced or challenged (1998, 1). It is
in a similar manner that this paper uses cartoons to explore Glasgows
Year of Culture and reveal perceptions of the citys urban identity and
mindscape.
The Image Issue
In 1988 Harry Diamond, Glasgows Head of Public Relations, stated
that less than two decades ago Glasgow was thought of by most outsid-
CARTOONS AND THE EUROPEAN CITY OF CULTURE 181
ers as Siberia in a kilt (1988). This, in short, was the image issue: Glas-
gows 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 enter-
prise organisation of business and council leaders, highlighted as central
in any strategy for city development, stressing (t)he need for a significant
improvement in Glasgows 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 Glasgows Miles Better campaign to
realign perceptions of the city. These initiatives did trickle through to
affect Glasgows external image, with for example the Burrell Collection
becoming Scotlands 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 Glasgows bid put it:
(The) European City of Culture will have an enormously beneficial
effect on the city in continuing the momentum of the regeneration pro-
cess and by providing the opportunity, perhaps once and for all, of con-
firming 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 Glasgows image. Today, looking
back on Glasgows 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
182 Matthew Reason
Year of Culture is frequently recalled as a central event in relation to the
citys general regeneration and specifically in terms of its image transfor-
mation. Ian Burrell, for example, describes how the City of Culture trans-
formed 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 Glasgows image has been prompted by cover-
age 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 Glas-
gow, 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 titles 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 citys 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
and equivocation and instead goes for the jugular. As cartoonist Martin
Rowson (2001) writes, cartoons present their case in a visceral and im-
mediate 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 un-
thought, gut responses of their authors, and less directly also their papers
and readers. By recognising this role of the cartoon in articulating under-
lying 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 sur-
prise. Nonetheless, this article believes that a closer look at these car-
toons allows access to the clichs and prejudices that surrounded Glas-
gows 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
Kingdoms 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 citys 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-saw-
dust pub (Philip Jacobson, 21 October 1986). Realising the ambitions of
those organising the event, this article clearly and straightforwardly posi-
tions the City of Culture initiative as an important and valid step in trans-
forming perceptions of Glasgow. The tone of the reporting is respectful
and open; its attitude to the news of Glasgows success is overwhelm-
ingly 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 Ill thump
anyone who says Im not cultured (Mel Calman, Times, 21 October
1986).
184 Matthew Reason
Figure 1. Mel Calman, 1986. Reproduced courtesy of M. & C. Calman.
The brutal articulation of surprise and incredulity at Glasgows nomina-
tion as City of Culture that is clearly present in this cartoon throws the
entire mainstream report askew. Suddenly it is the image of the uniniti-
ated 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 nation-
ality 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
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 well-
dressed couple: Hey Jimmy! Can ye spare a fiver for a wee drop of Cha-
teau 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 tramps 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
186 Matthew Reason
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 citys 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 signifi-
cant here.
The cartoons in the Mail on Sunday and Times articulate external im-
pressions 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 thirty-
two newspaper cartoons about Glasgows 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 juxta-
position of high culture with Glasgows 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! Ive 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 stereo-
type of the alcoholic Glaswegian. The jibe is doubly powerful in this
context, as the citys 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.
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
188 Matthew Reason
to the Pavarotti concert, each depicting an exchange between two
women: Senga McCallums jist had a wee boy an shes cain 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 hes 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
Year of Culture and described in an internal City Council document as
the 1990 press flagship (Warnock 1991). While the laughter of outsid-
ers, 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
cartoonists 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 hy-
perbolic 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 fromthe event were cosmetic, masking or undermining
the citys 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
governments actual ambivalence towards the project and the political
origins of the event itself, there existed little or no accompanying
190 Matthew Reason
anti-European political antagonism. This is certainly indicative of the low
profile that Europe as a concept actually occupied in Glasgows Euro-
pean City of Culture.
Reflecting the conceptual origins of the initiative, Glasgows 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 Glasgows presence in other European City of Cultures, particu-
larly 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 domes-
tic, 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 car-
toons as scorning Glaswegians for their cultural ignorance, could they
not be asserting the citys 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 demon-
strated 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 anti-
heroes) 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:
Paw, whit is Culture?
Its 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 perpetuat-
ing 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 Glasgows population alienated geographically, economically
and culturally from the City of Culture project. It is this cultural alien-
ation that is most relevant here, particularly in terms of the assertion of
an alternative, and more real, Glaswegian popular culture and self-my-
thology.
Glaswegian Self-Mythologising
Almost all of the cartoons on Glasgows 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 dont think a year o cul-
tures 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 stand-
ing 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.
192 Matthew Reason
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 citys
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 vio-
lent men who disdain culture, not the other way round.
These mythologies of masculinity are central to Glasgows
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 Glasgows
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 domi-
nated by razor gangs, misogyny and poverty, has been adopted in part as
source of wayward pride, emphasising the citys 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 Glasgowthat embodies this sometimes sentimen-
tal but always self-aware willingness to tell the citys story. Indeed, retell-
ing Glasgows story was a feature of many prominent Year of Culture
events, including The Ship, a popular narration of Glasgows working
class, industrial identity, set in an engine shed in Govan. In a very differ-
ent manner, Alan Grant and Jim Wagners 1998 comic book retelling of
Humphrey Bogart movies in Glasgow, partly set against the backdrop of
the City of Culture, also shows the citys instinct for a comic
self-narration that is both self-mocking and self-aggrandising.
This conscious awareness of humour as central to Glaswegian iden-
tity, alongside the frequent acceptance of and even revelling in negative
stereotypes, presents another possible explanation of the content of the
cartoons mocking Glasgows pretensions to be a European City of Cul-
ture. 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 car-
toons as performing a self-affirming function.
In relation to the City of Culture, the traditional Glasgow mythology
of the working mans city (with the implicit sexism, by exclusion at least,
that this image contains) leads to the rejection of 1990 witnessed in the
cartoons. The years 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 mythol-
ogy, 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 ten-
sion is identified by Boyle and Hughes, who suggest that attempts to
change Glasgows image from above (t)he new image has been con-
structed from the drawing board and exposed to Glaswegians in a mar-
keting campaign for the year were contested at grass-roots level. This
imposed mythology is contrasted with Glasgows embedded identity,
described as one sedimented down the years in Glasgows conscious-
ness (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
194 Matthew Reason
movement. This way, Glasgows reputation as socialist city becomes
more than a political allegiance but also a part of its mythology as Sen
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 con-
sciously constructed through popular representations in humour, litera-
ture, storytelling and cartoons, which together construct the psychologi-
cal 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 Glas-
gows autobiography becomes a mindscape in its own right the psy-
chology 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 politi-
cal 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 Glasgows
tenacity and ability to reinvent itself in the face of adversity. This possi-
bility 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 tour-
ist guide, cultural ongtrapanoor and proselytiser for the new city. Inevi-
tably not unproblematic, this new Mr Glasgow sets up a series of con-
trasts 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 Ill thump anyone who says Im 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 Glasgows Year of Culture. How-
ever, 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,
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, Ive
decided to start wearing a tie with my shell suit (Robert Thompson, The
Observer, 8 June 2003). This cartoon parallels almost identically the hu-
196 Matthew Reason
mour and message of that which appeared in the The Times seventeen
years before; an echo of Glasgows experience that casts doubt on the
effectiveness of such large-scale and centralised initiatives in transform-
ing underlying social mindscapes.
References
Boyle, Mark and George Hughes. 1991. The Politics of the Representation of
the Real: Discourses from the Left on Glasgows Role as European City of
Culture. Area 23, no. 3: 217-80.
Damer, Sen. 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 OHara. 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: Sup-
plementary 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 Thistles 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 Polyk
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 Hungarys entrance into the European Union
was placed on the agenda, Budapests 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
198 Levente Polyk
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 pre-
emphasised 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 citys 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).
DRIFTING BRIDGES 199
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.
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, Budapests
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
200 Levente Polyk
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.
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 citys own self-image.
The Bridge as a Symbol
A technical structure bearing a road, a pathway, a power, gas or post-
line between two different concepts, views, principles, beliefs of per-
haps 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 exhibi-
tion 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 travers-
ing 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 commu-
nism, 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 buda 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
from his memory the obsolete slogans and ideals, the novelist Gyula
Krdy wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century (1963, 151). Going
even further, Ern Szp 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 worth-
while 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 Berlins modernity, Margaret
Manale explains the importance of the postcard in the collective experi-
ence 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 imme-
diately identifiable by the addressed. These images detain the rare elements
that last for a long time, and that, like common places, allow collective mem-
ory 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. Fre-
quently used, widely known representations create frames through which
the city is collectively perceived, experienced and re-represented. In
Andrea Kahns 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
202 Levente Polyk
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.
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 lo-
cated 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 plan-
ning 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 war-
time 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 citys 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 reconstruc-
tion 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-
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 transforma-
tion, 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 monu-
ment 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 Budapests self-image as a tourist destination di-
verged from its ideological message in a specific way: while images of the
city mediated values of the socialist society factories and young work-
ers, new schools and housing estates towards its inhabitants and other
countries of the Eastern Block, Budapests tourist image was built on its
architectural past, its heritage. This contradiction is resolved by the au-
thor of the aforementioned tourist brochure The New Hungary: The new
Budapest is proud of its heritage, of the Chain Bridge for instance, be-
cause 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 struc-
ture, without any ornaments, gaining its shape from its traffic function.
With its glaring whiteness it looks sharply out of place, and with its junc-
tions it detaches and cuts itself off from its surroundings. Plans and
photos of the bridge reveal an abstract, utopian object that feeds narra-
tives of progress, velocity and technology. Its distance was maintained by
its special protection in the communist era: being a military object, no-
one could even dream of using it in a non-functional way.
204 Levente Polyk
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 anec-
dotes 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 set-
ting, for example for car chases, of which we can see a stylized reprise in
Ferenc Andras film Dgkeselyu [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 Fishermens Bastion. The paradigm of the
Elisabeth Bridge and the world associated with it seemed to vanish. De-
spite the supposed inertia of all architectural forms, age matters: the
bridge simply did not fit into the reconstructed nineteenth-century atmo-
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.
sphere of the city. This process can be illustrated spectacularly by the
choice of scenery in a cult movie of the late 1980s, Pter Gothrs 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 Bridges 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, self-
confident 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 representa-
tion.
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.
206 Levente Polyk
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 symbol-
ises tradition and a European flair at the same time, it is crucial for politi-
cal 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 Gza Beremnyis film The Bridge Man (2002), which
centred on the life of count Istvn Szchenyi, who had initiated the build-
ing of the Chain Bridge. This film was subsidised by the former right-
wing 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, perma-
nence, 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 ani-
mated video: a convoy of long, red trucks led by Santa Claus, crossing the
same bridge.
7
See for example Llegzet 2002, no. 126: 8-10.
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 be-
come a terrain of different conflicts.
The Elisabeth Bridge has been the location of several large demon-
strations in the last twenty years. For example, protests against a planned
dam on the Danube originally designed as a joint project by Czechoslo-
vakia and Hungary, and continued by the Slovak government took
place on it. Similarly, in 2002, members of right-wing political organisa-
tions chose this bridge for their sit-down strike against government poli-
cies, 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 politi-
cal 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 na-
tional 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 messen-
ger 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 strik-
ing also in the latest debates about the citys future. Before the 2002
referendum on Hungarys membership of the EU, the Government
initiated a huge campaign for a Yes vote. In this campaign the notion of
208 Levente Polyk
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.
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 discus-
sions. Again, it became clear that the question of the usage and construc-
tion of bridges is in fact the very frontline where different concepts of
Budapests 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 Euro-
pean Union was celebrated in Budapest with the decoration of the citys
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 Ern Szps cited line is reversible: life is like the
Chain Bridge.
Conclusions
In this chapter I intended to show how Budapests 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 syn-
ecdoche 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 aes-
thetic 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 projec-
tion 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 todays 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-
210 Levente Polyk
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 ques-
tions 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, 237-
51. London and New York: Routledge.
Krdy, Gyula. 1963. Hdavats. In G. Krdy, Pesti levelek, 148-53. Budapest:
Magvet.
Leach, Neil. 2002. Erasing the Traces. The Denazification of Post-Revolution-
ary 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 Modernit 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.
Szp, Ern. 2003. A Lnchd s az Alagut. Budapest: Szukits.
Szerb, Antal. 1969. A szzves Lnchd. In A. Szerb, A varzsl eltri plcjt, 482-
88. Budapest: Magvet.
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.
RECONSTRUCTING THE ANCIENT CITY:
IMAGINING THE ATHENIAN POLIS
1
Stuart Price
Abstract
This chapter identifies the ways in which the Athenian polis is concep-
tualised as both a cultural site and as the origin of democratic prac-
tices. The Acropolis and its environs is often presented as the em-
bodiment 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 symbolismof 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
212 Stuart Price
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.
come to represent the material archetype
2
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 Athens
3
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
IMAGINING THE ATHENIAN POLIS 213
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.
Eastern kingdoms (1967, 9). In Martins 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 archon
5
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
214 Stuart Price
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 colo-
nists, 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 Burckhardts work on Greek culture. Yet Burckhardts nine-
teenth century study, published as The Greeks and Greek Civilisation, was
only translated into English in 1958. It seems more likely that the idealisa-
tion of the Greek polis was first suggested in Aristotles description of the
Athenian constitution. Although Manville describes the polis as a politi-
cally autonomous community of people living in a defined territory
(1990, 53), this ancient form of collective organisation was not the exclu-
sively 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 -
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.
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 modernity
6
. 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 clichs (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 dont 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
216 Stuart Price
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 Holtorfs clichs), 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
sites 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).
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 photog-
raphy of the sites.
Attempts to reproduce a pure Periclean environment, as an
archaeological aim or even within representational art (the paintings of
Alma-Tadema are an example
7
), 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, men-
tions 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 ar-
chaic 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 characteris-
tic Greek ethos (1962, 9).
It is clear that different authors proceed from quite divergent perspec-
tives, with Rhodes maintaining that any general understanding of the
Periclean Acropolis requires some consideration of the religious tradi-
tions 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 asser-
tion should not obscure the enduring obligation which the inhabitants of
Athens recognised, through sacrifice and attendance at religious ceremo-
nies, 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.
218 Stuart Price
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 reproduc-
tion of plans, artistic reconstructions, and models, as well as the creation
of television programmes which follow the process of excavation. An-
other aspect of the depiction of the past is, as demonstrated above, the
use of evocative prose. Villings account of the Athenian city, for exam-
ple, 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 sym-
bolised 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 character-
ises modernity; he too uses the power of the imagination to try to imag-
ine 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 monu-
mental 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 monu-
ments 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 resto-
ration 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 domi-
nant cultural fashion.
One of the most important and influential aspects of the Acropolis
restoration (pursued since 1975 by the Committee for the Conservation
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 for-
eign 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 Byrons condemnation of Elgin.
The esteem in which the Greek monuments were held was not, how-
ever, always in evidence. Many artefacts on the Acropolis were systemati-
cally defaced, during the period when the Parthenon was used as a Chris-
tian church. A number of sculpted metopes suffered considerable dam-
age 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 ana-
lyse (de Polignac 1995, 3). Adherence to this tradition tends, therefore,
to obscure other aspects of Athenian history, including the imperial char-
acter 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 com-
munity 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
220 Stuart Price
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 440s, 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
Plutarchs 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 thousand-
talent 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 refer-
ence. 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 bodys own forces and energy in
the new Athenian manner (2005, 17). In drawing attention to the perfec-
tion of the best of fifth century sculpture, contrasts are often made with
the more inflexible and limited Archaic style which preceded it. Cook
identifies the difference between the forward-looking artists who pro-
duced 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 wed-
ding 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 de-
mands 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 rela-
tive weakness of military opponents, who are often shown being over-
come 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 pres-
ence of the Athenian warrior. In an analysis of Greek concepts of iden-
tity, 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 impor-
tance of social reproduction ensures that gender relations are often seen
as the essence of cultures, passed from generation to generation (Yuval-
Davis 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
222 Stuart Price
8
Elgins 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.
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 Acropo-
lis as a prime signifier of Western cultural heritage, may partly be attrib-
uted 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
Elgins 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 posses-
sion 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 recon-
struction 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 com-
pleted at some time between 2030 and 2050, the Museum is confined to
describing individual artefacts and the religious myths and civil institu-
tions 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
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).
Nazis in the Second War), provides an uncomfortable object-lesson in
the struggle over the moral obligation of nations; Britains 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 contro-
versy but, it seems, their physical location and status as the property of
nation states.
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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
citys 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 citys 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 citys
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
228 Klaus Siebenhaar
1
Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.
(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 citys 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 myths system of
information creates a distinctive web of stories, serving as the (self-)
interpretation of a citys 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 citys
own identity which transcends the respective historic epochs and can
only be explained by the citys 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 mainstreamculture and fringe scenes were
characteristic of both parts of the city. From the late seventies onwards,
West Berlin began integrating its underground scene into tourist-
THE MYTH OF BERLIN 229
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 Berlins 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 citys 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 Haussmanns reconstruction of Paris. Berlin became
Europes boom town, with a disregard for its own tradition parallelled
only by American cities. Even before the roaring twenties, the
metropolis Berlins 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
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 citys 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 ep-
och 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 quint-
essential thought in Karl Schefflers 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. Brechts 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 ones 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
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 impres-
sive 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 labora-
tory 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 tourist-
orientated 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 ingredi-
ents of which powerful Berlin advertising and marketing are made. Inno-
vation, 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 insight-
ful, and can be varied and passed on indefinitely. This is especially impor-
tant in the context of modern marketing, which relies on the recognition
that the post-industrial society of experience values staging, perfor-
mance, theming, magic and myths. In the competition for tourists, entre-
preneurs, scientists, budgets and infrastructure, the citys 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, stimulat-
ing identification. Myths, perceived images, attitudes and traditional nar-
ratives 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
completely different conditions. Berlin was forced to reinvent itself once
more in a very definite way. This was done whilst keeping in mind the
citys 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 initia-
tors, 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, bar-
gain 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 Berlins 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 re-
birth of the spirit of the twentieth centurys first two decades. The un-
equalled socio-political constellation of the post-Wall period produced a
momentum reminiscent of Berlins 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 Berlins
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 recon-
struction and construction of important districts such as Potsdamer Platz,
Friedrichstrae, the government district, Alexanderplatz and Lehrter
Bahnhof. Berlin was heralded as Europes 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
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
fr Berlin-Gesellschaft fr Hauptstadtmarketing mbH a public-private
partnership set up in 1994 by private companies, professional associa-
tions 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 Ger-
man capital better in the international market. In particular, Partner fr
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 resi-
dents 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 pro-
jects on Potsdamer Platz, in Friedrichstrae, near the Reichstag and
Lehrter Bahnhof became permanent spectacles, forging a hitherto un-
known sense of identification with the city among Berliners and visitors
to the capital. Political mise-en-scne, 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:
This year again, the Schaustelle offers a whole summer of opportunities to
see Berlin in its new shapes and colours with ones own eyes. What was
planned and built over many years has taken shape impressively. Even Ber-
liners 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 capitals char-
acteristic 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).
Schefflers 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 citys
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 fr 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 consoli-
dates and gives international credence to Berlins 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 fr 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 far-
reaching cross-over in culture-based city marketing is now being propa-
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 ber die Generation Berlin. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25/9/1998: 41.
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 citys marketing
campaigns. Although faced with serious economic problems, the so-
called 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 Krgers 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 Kunst-
vermittlung in Berlin. In Die bewegte Stadt. Berlin am Ende der Neunziger, ed.
Thomas Krger, 159-164. Berlin: FAB.
Diepgen, Eberhard. 2000. Introduction to Partner fr Berlin Gesellschaft fur
Hauptstadt-Marketing mbH., Schaustelle Berlin (brochure), 3. Berlin: Partner
fr 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. Identitt, Ansichten,
Leitbild. Berlin: FAB.
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-Grmig 1998. With reference to the tradition of urban theory of the
BERLIN LITERATURE AND ITS USE IN
THE MARKETING OF THE NEW BERLIN
1
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 pro-
poses two ways in which literature could successfully be used to
project a citys complex identity. The article argues that the mar-
keting of Berlin as a tourist destination could be enhanced firstly
by promoting the contemporary literary scene as part of Berlins
cultural diversity; and secondly by using Berlin literature to con-
vey 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 Kotlers 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 mar-
keting 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
public policy context.
2
The second objection raised is that the com
238 Godela Weiss-Sussex
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 mate-
rial produced by various cities is remarkably similar (35). In 2001, Chris Murray
came to much the same conclusion.
plexity of cities does not allow for them to be marketed under a
single brand definition.
3
Recognising this problem, recent place mar-
keting 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
citys 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 ap-
proach 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 citys
identity.
4
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
BERLIN LITERATURE AND THE MARKETING OF THE NEW BERLIN 239
newly manufactured products; their identity cannot be designed from
scratch. Recent theories of city marketing thus advocate a more care-
ful 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 tour-
ism 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
citys 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 citys cultural variety and
complexity and of its historically determined identity.
Both of these dimensions are emphasised in the citys tourism
concept for the period 2004 to 2010 (Tourismuskonzept fr die
Hauptstadtregion Berlin), published in March 2004 by the city govern-
ment 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 citys 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 Berlins 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 fr 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 citys 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.
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.
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 citys literature in the tourism marketing of
Berlin. In 1998, the year of the centenaries of Theodor Fontanes
death and of Bertolt Brechts 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 representa-
tive explained that firstly, literature is an unwieldy area. You cannot
market it; and secondly, it was not worth it.
5
Taking into account
the costs for the printing of brochures, the preparatory research, the
organisation of guided tours etc., he estimated that every Berlin visi-
tor 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. Berlins cultural diversity could be highlighted
by showcasing the citys contemporary literary scene, while Berlins
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 citys 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, enter-
tainment 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 archi-
tecture and sport respectively. International events taking place in
Berlin, such as the MOMA exhibition in 2004 and the football
6
Thomas Flierl, Berlins 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 Berlins greatest strengths by the various contributors
to the volume BerlinKultur(haupt)stadt, ed. Eckhardt 2003.
8
See for example the interviews reported in Jrg Burgers 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.
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
multicultural diversity. Whether you turn to government reports,
6
to
surveys of the citys cultural identity,
7
or to statements from the
many artists who have moved to Berlin since 1990,
8
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.
Berlins literary scene lends itself to be highlighted in future mar-
keting 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
June/July
9
and the International Literature Festival in September. The
latter in particular is a very large-scale, multi-strand event with enor-
mous 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
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 fr Literatur and Roter Salon (Volksbhne). 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 Volksbhne building in 2004.
12
Organisers: the Berlin-Brandenburg section of the Brsenverein des
Deutschen Buchhandels.
13
Organiser: Neue Gesellschaft fr Literatur.
14
Organisers: Neue Gesellschaft fr Literatur and Mrchenland e.V.
15
They are the Literarische Colloquium (LCB), with perhaps the most academic
approach; the Literaturhaus off Kurfrstendamm, with a caf 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
Dnges 2001.
16
The salonires 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 calen-
dar of events. Each Saturday, they jointly offer an event entitled Kantinenlesen.
Verbal Art [Maulhelden] in January,
10
the Lesershow in
April/May,
11
the Berlin Book Festival in June,
12
the International
Berlin Comic Festival in August,
13
and the Berlin Fairy Tale Festival
14
in November.
Apart from these festivals, an astonishing number of public read-
ings take place across the city every day: in institutions subsidised by
the federal or city government, among them no fewer than four litera-
ture houses, all with slightly different remits;
15
in commercial venues,
such as bookshops and reading cafs; in literary salons some com-
mercial, such as the monthly event organised by Britta Gansebohm
in the Podewil cultural centre, and some not, for instance the literary
agent Karin Grafs more sporadic evening readings;
16
and in centres
and activities set up by individual boroughs and local community
groups as culture in the community [Kultur im Kiez]. The im-
mensely popular Lesebhnen (reading stages) and open mike events
should also be mentioned here.
17
The emphasis of these events is on
18
See also the Berlin Chamber of Commerces 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 Schtz and Dring 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 Brsenverein des deutschen
Buchhandels Berlin-Brandenburg on 25 November 2004 listed 156 publishing
houses in the area (see www.berlinerbuchhandel.de).
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 Lesebhnen have turned
literature from a slightly elitist minority interest into a lively manifes-
tation of popular culture, in which the texts presented are as impor-
tant as the readings themselves.
Berlin is not only a thriving literary venue, but also an outstand-
ingly 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
(2000), claims.
18
It would warrant a separate article (or book) to pro-
vide an overview of contemporary Berlin writing.
19
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 citys 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 publish-
ing houses were founded,
20
and Berlin has been able to attract pub-
lishers established elsewhere either to move to the city or at least to
open a subsidiary there.
21
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 devel-
oped to be, in 2004, one of the strongest areas in Berlins cultural
economy both in terms of profit and employment (Flierl 2004, 31).
22
Conversely, however, some publishers have left the city (the high
23
See press statement of the Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft and the Bundes-
zentrale fr 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.
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 publish-
ers have not been able to survive for long. City government policy
would need to continue supporting this sector in order to further
strengthen Berlins attractiveness as a city of literature.
City government support is also needed to promote another as-
pect 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 reli-
gious and cultural communities (LCB 1997, 2), it shapes and trans-
ports identity. To make use of the full potential of this function of
literature, the multicultural richness of the citys 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 citys unique selling
proposition. Given this, these events should be supported and in-
cluded in Berlins cultural policy agenda and the tourism marketing
strategy of the city. Indeed, policy advisers at the highest level have
recognised that the future of cultural policy is intercultural.
23
Two ways in which this recognition could be put into practice are,
firstly, by the organisation of guided tours with a focus on immi-
grant literature, and secondly, by the addition of a dedicated literary
strand to the highly successful and high-profile Karneval der
Kulturen,
24
an event that is organised on an annual basis by the
Werkstatt der Kulturen and supported by the Commissioner 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 topical-
ity of text or any other recognisable pattern.
Berlin Senate for Integration and Migration. Its purpose is to reflect
Berlins 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 events concept and the citys profile.
Overall, Berlins literary scene, even though representative of the
citys heterogeneous and vibrant culture, is still largely untapped by
tourist marketing. Many of the events are virtually ignored by the
official tourism websites.
25
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 fr 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 docu-
ment, namely the citys historical identity. Since the opening of the
Wall, the suppression of Berlins historical identity in the official
image promoted of the city has been deplored repeatedly. Uwe Rada
(1997) and Rgine Robin (2002), authors of Haupstadt der Verdrngung
(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 Berlins public poli-
cies, the same criticism could be raised in relation to the citys mar-
keting campaigns.
The point made at the beginning of this article, that cities identi-
ties cannot be designed from scratch, is particularly pertinent in the
case of Berlin. Looking at the discourse that has dominated the citys
marketing material during the past fifteen years, the casual observer
might be forgiven for thinking that Berlin was an entirely new prod-
uct. Under the umbrella slogan of New Berlin, it has been the build-
ing 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
26
Interview conducted by the author with Bettina Thormeyer of Partner fr
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 first-
grade 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 cars 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 Siebenhaars article in this volume for a discussion of the Berlin
myth in the context of Berlin city marketing.
city as location for economic investment. Indeed, Partner fr 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
points to the citys past.
26
But this exclusion of references to the past
has also been echoed in the image of Berlin promoted to tourists.
27
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 with-
out 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 BTMs recent description of
Berlin as the source of todays zeitgeist and the centre of the
world;
28
or into the future, referring to a somehow never quite ful-
filled 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 cafs, 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
myth of Berlin,
29
the roots of which reach back into the nineteenth
century. This quality was captured by Karl Scheffler in 1910 when, in
30
Klaus Siebenhaar, one of Berlins most prominent cultural management and
marketing experts, has always propagated the use of the Berlin myth in the market-
ing of the city. In 1994, he suggested that one of the main tasks for Berlin market-
ing 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 publica-
tion with Erhard Schtz one year later, where he located the future of the Berlin
image in the trends of tomorrow which he saw originating in Berlin. The techno-
scene and Love Parade are cited as examples (Schtz and Siebenhaar 1995, 46).
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
Berlin.
30
But even so, the vagueness and reductive nature of the myths
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 power-
ful tool for city marketing. However, in Roland Barthes terms, myth
is depoliticised speech () it organises a world which is without contra-
dictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallow-
ing 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 empha-
sis). Elsewhere, he is even blunter, asserting that myth is a surrepti-
tious 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 formu-
lates 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 con-
nected 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
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 dont need any new memo-
rials 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 Strae 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 fr Touristen, Der Tagesspiegel, 6 October 2003).
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 Hfe, 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
citys eventful twentieth-century history.
31
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 fr Berlin 2002, 64).
It is encouraging to see, therefore, that the marketing strategists
seem to be relaxing their determined and exclusive foregrounding of
the future as tourism potential.
32
The emphasis in the 2004 -
Tourismuskonzept on the historical dimension of change in the
positioning of Berlin corresponds to the citys visitors perceptions
and expectations, and it also corresponds to the Berliners mind-
scapes of their city. It offers the opportunity to ground the projected
image in the local populations experience and in their perception of
the citys identity. In this respect, it is in accordance with the recom-
mendation of two recent reports on the citys economic development.
Both the OECDs Urban Renaissance Berlin (2003) and the Konrad
Adenauer-Stiftungs Ideen fr Berlin (2004) highlight the economic
dimension of identity (understood as characteristics of the city as
well as the identification of the citys inhabitants with their city),
33
For references to Berlins 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).
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 pe-
riod. The transformation from Prussian capital to a centre of the
avant-garde and a democracy with a prominent proletarian and so-
cialist contingent, then to Nazi capital, to divided city and metaphor
of the Cold War, and finally to capital again, of the reunited Ger-
many all occurred in the space of 135 years.
33
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 experi-
enced by todays 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 com-
plex 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 experi-
ence, 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 remind-
ers of the past, the use of literature is particularly apt. As the Cana-
dian 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
34
The Literaturhaus, for instance, hosted a colloquium on Georg Hermann in
1996, and Karin Kiwus of the Akademie der Knste 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 Hoch-
schule fr Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch.
35
Among them are the Berliner Autoren Fhrungen, Berlin Starting Point, and
even the pleasure boat company Spree-Cllnische 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 (sun-
set on the Havel river)). Out of these 37 tours, two were offered on literary themes:
one on great writers [groe Dichter], and one on Fontane, Brecht und Co. die
Friedrich-Wilhelm-Stadt.
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
citys literary institutions.
34
But whereas contemporary Berlin litera-
ture 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.
Literary guided tours are being offered by several organisers,
35
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 peo-
ple, encouraging the participants own literary reactions to their
36
See http://berlin.stattreisenberlin.de/06stattrundg/index.html for further
information.
37
Wolfgang Feyerabend, founder and director of Berliner Autoren Fhrungen,
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.
encounters with the city.
36
The level of interest in these literary tours
warrants the running of one tour per month in the case of a few of
the authors/themes on offer, but most are just run on demand.
37
However, if integrated in the citys 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
to the citys literature lends support to this assumption.
38
A consideration of Berlins 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 citys 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 Vormrz literature of
critical spirits such as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Brne encapsu-
lates 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 char-
acter Nante, the loiterer at street corners, has become almost emblem-
atic of the Berlin character and in the early twentieth century in
Heinrich Zilles stark but humane drawings and texts.
Theodor Fontanes 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 flneurs Karl Scheffler and Franz Hessel should also
be mentioned here. They characterised Berlin as the epitome of the
ever-unfinished, ever-changing city, just like the journalists Alfred
Kerr, Kurt Tucholsky and Egon Erwin Kisch, who provided a run-
ning cultural commentary on the developing metropolis.
Bertolt Brechts writings and Alfred Dblins 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 Berlins culture.
This list could be continued through the 1930s, the post-War
period and the post-1989 literature. But from this very brief inven-
tory alone, at least four constant aspects of Berlin identity are dis-
cernible throughout Berlin literary history, aspects that could be used
in the promotion of the image of Berlin. The first is Berlins capacity
for change and re-invention, the second trait repeatedly highlighted
as a defining characteristic of Berlin and its population is the con-
cept 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 twenti-
eth century, to Berlin becoming a centre of the international avant-
garde. Finally, the strong proletarian tradition in the citys 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 memori-
als 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 Eichen-
dorff are represented here, and so are Fontane and the twentieth-
century women writers Else Lasker-Schler 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
39
See www.parchiletterari.com.
40
For further information, see www.artangel.org.uk.
41
Herr Gnther, Senatskanzlei (Presse- und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin,
12 August 2003).
as models which could be adapted to form part of Berlins 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. BBCs 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
Italy.
39
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. Artangels projects include the use of film, music, sculpture,
soundscapes, etc. and focus on facilitating and enhancing the experi-
ence of the city and the sense of place.
40
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 citys historical identity, several hurdles have
to be overcome.
Firstly, better recognition is required of literatures potential to
enhance the visitors experience of Berlin. During an interview with a
representative of the Berlin government press office,
41
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 rep-
resentative claimed: Berlin has not got much to offer in this area
and continued: Fontane was too long ago and Dblin would be
thinkable, but proletarian Berlin is not exactly attractive, is it?
42
Telephone interview conducted by the author on 19 August 2003.
It is worth noting in this context that since the late 1990s, awareness
of Berlin literary heritage seems to have dwindled. The journal Lese-
zeichen, 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. Its an atti-
tude, 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 litera-
ture of the twenties and before is being ignored.
42
Interestingly,
Spiess claims that Berlin authors of the early twentieth century were
being read avidly before the fall of the Wall, but that with reunifica-
tion, this interest has fallen away. Large-scale projects such as a 23-
volume 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. Con-
sciousness of the citys past and identity, the awareness of the citys
literary history, seems to be confused with parochialism and is conse-
quently 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 BTMs fruit-
less 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 vari-
ety and a palimpsest city.
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 Brgermeister von
Berlin/Senatskanzlei 2003.
44
See www.kupoge.de/presse/erklaerung.pdf and Der Regierende Brgermeister
von Berlin/Senatskanzlei 2003, esp. 53-72.
Thirdly, there needs to be improvement in communication, co-opera-
tion and co-ordination between city marketing and cultural policy.
Awareness of the need to change the citys 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 strate-
gies for Berlins economic future, of which tourism is an important
part.
43
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 inter-
cultural aspects into the citys cultural policies has recently been
emphasised by several policy makers.
44
Except for the large scale
festival of Karneval der Kulturen, the multi- and intercultural ele-
ment of the citys culture has to date found no place in Berlins
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 characteris-
tics of the city to a greater extent than has so far been the case. Cer-
tainly, no one will expect an equivalent to the Dublin campaign
which opens its website with a reference to the importance of litera-
45
Literary and popular, nostalgic and dynamic, Dublin is always warm in its
welcome. Open your heart and welcome its soul (www.visitdublin.com).
ture to the citys identity,
45
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 gehts 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.
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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 mean-
ing. Thus, it is not surprising that contemporary town planning has
used the establishment of new museums as flagships for urban regen-
eration. While architectural and tourism interest as well as museologi-
cal and geographical research has focused on the spectacular modern
art museums such as the new Tate Galleries or the Guggenheim Mu-
seums (most recent, Giebelshausen 2003), a closer look at the devel-
opments 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
260 Doris Teske
Daniels 1988). Both -scapes describe both a physical unit, an arrange-
ment 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 imagina-
tive 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). Strik-
ing 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 Giebel-
hausen 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 archi-
tectural 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 plan-
ning. Their basic functions, their clientele and their way of promoting an
urban identity, however, are very different. This difference can be ob-
served in Liverpools 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.
THE URBAN MUSEUM IN A CHANGING URBAN STRUCTURE 261
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 con-
cerned.
2
This area along Bold Street and Duke Street is currently marketed under the
name The Ropewalks.
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 expand-
ing 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. Georges 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. Georges 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 con-
trast, 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.
262 Doris Teske
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 muse-
ums 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 Liver-
pool Royal Institution 1835-1843), the architectural style and the format
of most museums were intended to discourage and discipline the unedu-
cated 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 Foucaults disciplinary spaces.
Museums as flagships of urban regeneration in Liverpool
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, as the Victorian citys-
cape 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 Liverpools significance by putting
the waterfront to new use. In cooperation with the MDC, national devel-
opment 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 Heads Three Graces).
While the MDC succeeded in attracting the Tate Gallerys northern
branch to the Albert Dock as the cultural magnet for the new leisure
quarter, the city government realised plans for several local history muse-
ums. 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 har-
bour 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
264 Doris Teske
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 na-
tional tourists who had little interest in the city beyond. The idea of spec-
tacular 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 fo-
cusing on redefinitions and improvements in the area and its close vicin-
ity.
In contrast, Liverpools local government expected the docks to have
a sustained positive impact on the wider area, with the new cultural mag-
nets effecting a general urban renaissance. It was hoped that the develop-
ment 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 im-
pact on the national and international image of the city as well as to visi-
tor numbers and sales of or leases on property. The Albert Dock devel-
oped 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 defin-
ing 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 in-
crease between 1985 and 1990, the development had become less pre-
dictable 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 Docks Britannia Pavilion and Colonnades.
3
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 Liverpools 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).
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 exten-
sive criticism exposing the Albert Docks as a problematic symbol of
success,
4
however, the policy of investing large sums in flagship devel-
opments continues: the envisaged Kings Dock redevelopment is repeat-
ing, 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 area
5
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 cele-
brated as an ideal exhibition space because of its functionality, its flexibil-
ity 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 moder-
266 Doris Teske
6
Two exceptions to this disconnectedness are the Liverpool Biennial partly staged
by the Tate, and Tates Project Space, in which recent exhibitor Kara Walker had the
lower floor of the Tate Gallery interact with Liverpools 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.
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 Mari-
time Museum demonstrate a principle concern to connect with the every-
day life of the people of Liverpool. Both touch upon everyday life situa-
tions 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 citys 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 citys industrial and
maritime heritage.
7
By looking at shipping, at emigration and immigra-
tion, and at the impact of slavery, various groups of Liverpools popula-
tion 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 espe-
cially well in the 2003-2004 exhibition on the Blitz experience at Mersey-
side, which became a major attraction, uniting different groups of Liver-
pudlians, 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 initi-
ated 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.
Liverpools traditional identity is celebrated, its former subordinate cul-
tures have found their symbolic home, and a greater Liverpool commu-
nity 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 accesso-
ries of Liverpools maritime past have no connection to the working-class
heritage of the harbour area. It still remains uncertain whether the mu-
seum will find a way of accommodating these disparate groups by defin-
ing 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 Sdliche Friedrichstadt quarter south of the old centre the new
East Berlin losing its function of servicing the area around Leipziger
Strae and Friedrichstrae. The area remained an inner-city wasteland,
while the symbolic centre of West Berlin developed between Zoo and
Kurfrstendamm, Ernst-Reuter-Platz and Lietzenburger Strae.
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 re-
mained aloof, failing to connect symbolically with the buildings at the
northern end of Potsdamer Strae 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
268 Doris Teske
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 regen-
eration filling the holes left in the post-war years had become an impor-
tant objective of city planning. The theme of the museum and its defini-
tion 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 pov-
erty, unemployment and a high percentage of migrants. Gnther
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 refer-
ence 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 derelic-
tion of the area as a challenge (see Architekturwerkstatt Pitz-Brenne-
Tomisch 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 fa-
voured 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 open-
air 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
the urban planning for the area north of the museum, where self-con-
tained 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, ex-
tending 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 percep-
tion of the area. During a first phase of extension parallel to the redevel-
opment of the urban area north of the Landwehrkanal, a stronger empha-
sis was placed on the interaction with other local museums in Sdliche
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 Berlins heritage, however, meant that local links to the
Kreuzberg district and the immediate neighbourhood, i.e. the transporta-
tion heritage, were neglected.
With the fall of the Wall and the relocation of the national govern-
ment and important national agencies in the area around a rebuilt Pots-
damer Platz, DTMB had to meet new challenges, once more re-evaluat-
ing its former position in the urban structure. As the Sdliche Friedrich-
stadt area has partly re-established its old function as thoroughfare be-
tween 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 Sdliche 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.
270 Doris Teske
Figure 3. Deutsches Technisches Museum Berlin.
The exhibition, too, shows this neglect: links to the present-day multi-
cultural 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 compara-
ble to the changes in Londons 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 influ-
ence the perception of the city. With their location, with the language of
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 re-
generation and reinvention. In all the cases mentioned, this strategy ini-
tially seemed to work, as civic consciousness was boosted in the short or
medium term. A closer look reveals, however, that spectacular interna-
tional 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 muse-
ums 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 pub-
lic, 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 imagi-
native link between the new docklands and the neighbouring inner-city
area, whilst the DTMB has not developed its local links, thus not answer-
ing 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 narra-
tives could successfully promote urban renewal?
272 Doris Teske
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 mes-
sages 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 Liverpools Paradise Street
Project and the public discussion around the now abandoned project
of a Fourth Grace at Pier Head.
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IDENTITY BY INVOCATION OR BY DESIGN?
HOW PLANNING IS CONJURING UP A NEW IDENTITY
FOR MALM
Lia Ghilardi
Abstract
In studying the exemplary case of Malm, 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 exper-
iment attempted by local policy-makers through the conscious imple-
mentation of a series of infrastructural and community development
programmes. However, this paper argues that this idea of a re-brand-
ing by policy design of Malm is somewhat misleading and that in-
stead 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
Malm 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 Malm,
Sweden, water ceased to be a barrier. Zealand and Scania are linked. New
opportunities are opened. Two countries are brought together in one region.
resund 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 resund Region, which covers both Copenha-
276 Lia Ghilardi
gen and Malm 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 Malm, 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 Malm has embraced this largely concept-
driven 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 Malm, the construction of a new meaning
for the city often a self-conscious and rational effort in large policy-
driven regeneration developments appears to take a somewhat less
coherent (yet real) character by greatly relying on the implementation,
since the opening of the resund 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 Calvinos 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 ap-
pears 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 com-
bination of the physical boundaries and the networks of exchange, desire,
fantasy, sensorial evocations and everyday confrontations experienced by
HOW PLANNING IS CONJURING UP A NEW IDENTITY FOR MALM 277
those who live in it (Lefebvre 1991, 280). This understanding of the
complex and often contradictory nature of space is further explored in
Lefebvres 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 Malm case
study. In particular, I want to look at how, in a non-scripted way,
Malm 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.
Malm 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 resund region brought about by the
link with Copenhagen in 2000, and other major infrastructural invest-
ments 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, Malm 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 indus-
trial past. Given these somewhat contradictory conditions, my assessment
of Malms present attempts to reorient its image must begin with a
discussion of the historic, political and social environment in which
change is taking place.
278 Lia Ghilardi
1
In 1997, SAABs 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 Malm
1998a.
3
For a detailed description of the labour market and employment dynamics affect-
ing the city in the 1990s, see City of Malm and County Labour Board of Scania 1999.
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 Malm into a prosperous city dur-
ing the twentieth century. Prosperity reached its high point at the begin-
ning 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 construc-
tion industry.
But in the mid-1970s, Malm ran into trouble when the industries
responsible for the wealth of the city entered a period of decline and out-
migration. 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 com-
pounded 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 indus-
try. The net result was that in 1995, the City Council faced a budget defi-
cit 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, Malm 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 resund
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 resund Bridge) are two projects that, happening as they did, almost
simultaneously, have contributed to the symbolic and spatial transforma-
tion of Malm for decades to come.
The question here is: why these projects what was the urban, politi-
cal and cultural logic behind such decisions? Swedish sociologist Mikael
Stigendal argues that it seems indeed possible to explain the present state
of Malm through these words: transformation, boundaries and dia-
logues (2004, 2). In particular, he points out that the still ongoing regen-
eration of the Western Harbour area exemplifies the scale, scope and
depth of transformation more than any other place in the city.
To Stigendals interpretation, I would add that there is a history in the
city of dreaming big and collectively, but while in the past such transfor-
mations 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,
Malms politicians, planners and other agents representing the public
sphere are choosing big projects and events in order to create new mean-
ings about place.
Looking Back
Urban transformations on a grand, utopian scale have a privileged posi-
tion in Malms 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 Lindngen 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 expan-
sion 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 depend-
ent 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
280 Lia Ghilardi
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 peoples 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 ideologi-
cal challenges put into question the concept of comprehensive, rationalist
planning, and welfare policies took on a new character, based on ideolo-
gies and practices aimed at decentralisation, deregulation, competitiveness
and consumerism.
Malm 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 pro-
viding a vision for future living accessible to everyone. Urban transforma-
tions 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 citys 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 Malm 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 interven-
tion 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 organisa-
tion are not present any more, and new social contracts are being tested
out in the local arena. Malm is a case in point as the organisation of the
European Housing Expo Bo01 and the regeneration of the Western
Harbour show.
4
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 Malm 1998b and the official brochure for the Bo01: City of Tomorrow
(2001).
The City of Tomorrow
For many decades, the Western Harbour (Vstra 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 Malm in
1874. Skanska and Kockums were the industrial giants of the city, virtu-
ally written into its genetic code, to the point that in the early 1970s, the
majority of Malms 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 har-
bour. 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 qual-
ity 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. Acontaminated 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 Septem-
ber 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 proto-
282 Lia Ghilardi
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 newneighbourhood 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 Malm 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 trailblaz-
ers, or testing grounds for a newidentity. 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 uncer-
tainty. Roches take on events is certainly true for Malm 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 Malm, in turn, are learning about
themselves, their aspirations, and their new role as citizens in the post-wel-
fare 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
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
organisation of the event.
6
As media expert Andr 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 open-
ing approached, attention turned first to the issues of bad leadership and the
heavy and indirectly tax-financed expenditure for the event (the Expo even-
tually ran into bankruptcy), and then to the divisive role the Expo was play-
ing 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 Malm
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 econ-
omy and doubts about the sustainability of the resund fixed link. Essen-
tially, the unsold apartments left over fromExpo 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 resund 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, commu-
nity, stimulation, along with the assurance that it is accessible to all.
7
What has Malm 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
284 Lia Ghilardi
8
For an analysis of the City Planning Forums role in the regeneration of the
Western Harbour, see Lundgren 2003.
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 Malm, 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, Malm 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 De-
partment to hold exhibitions, meetings and seminars on the subject of
Malms 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 citys
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 Malm, 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 everyones
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.
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
Universitys 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, Q-
book 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 Malm it represents a
further attempt to put in place new ways of dealing with the citys new
identity in a concrete way.
In terms of identity management, the lesson that the city is learning is
that todays Malm 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 Malms 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
Malm, and the city is well aware of the risks involved in raising too many
expectations. However, the advantage that Malm 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-
286 Lia Ghilardi
private partnership building in an environment which still sees the public
sectors role as key in urban and community development.
References
Anon. 2001. BoO1 City of Tomorrow. Malm: European Housing Exhibition.
Berg, Per Olof, Anders Linde-Laursen, and Orvar Lfgren. 2000. Invoking a Transna-
tional Metropolis: The Making of the resund Region. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company.
City of Malm. 1998a. Facts about Malm. Malm: City of Malm Publications.
SSS. 1998b. Draft Comprehensive Plan for Malm, 1998-99. Malm: City of Malm
Publications.
SSS. and County Labour Board of Scania. 1999. From Crisis to Growth? A Report on
Labour Market and Employment Issues in Malm. Malm: City of Malm Publica-
tions.
Jansson, Andr. 2004. Re-Encoding the Spectacle, Urban Fatefulness and Mediated
Stigmatisation in the City of Tomorrow. Unpublished paper delivered at ACSIS,
Norrkping 25 May, 2004.
Leadbeater, Charles. 1999. Living on Thin Air: The New Economy. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Lundgren, Maria. 2003. Building a Collaborative Design Approach for the Develop-
ment of the Western Harbour. Unpublished paper presented at the 16th Nordic
Conference for Media and Communication Research, Kristiansand, Norway, 15-
17 August 2003.
Our New Region. Vr nya region. Vores nye region. 1999. Copenhagen and Malm: City of
Copenhagen and City of Malm.
Ristilammi, Per-Markku. 2005. Spectral Events: Attempts at Pattern Recognition. In
Magic, Culture and the New Economy, eds. Orvar Lfgren 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. Limaginaire: la capacit doutrepasser le sensible. Socit 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
Malm. Paper written for the 22nd Nordic Sociology Congress, Malm, 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 Bradfords bid for
the title of European Capital of Culture 2008 from 2001-2003 and
for the Leicester Revealed project initiated by Leicester Shire Pro-
motions (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 re-
inventing 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 citys distinctiveness, and to enhance local pride, a sense of com-
munity, cohesion, and belonging. Paul Brookes argues that manag-
ing the often unrealistic expectations of local politicians and policy-
makers, 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 Murrays Making Sense of Place: New Approaches to
288 Paul Brookes, interviewed by Franco Bianchini
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.
Place Marketing
1
, a book which advocates the importance of an interdis-
ciplinary and creative approach to understanding places as complex
and multi-faceted cultural entities. The book takes issue with the posi-
tion of Philip Kotler, author of Marketing Places
2
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). Murrays proposal for an alternative to Kotlers de-
signing 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 reveal-
ing the unique, in the same way (Murray 2001, 14, my emphasis).
Murray collaborated with Leicester Shire Promotions in the establish-
ment of the Leicester Revealed initiative.
In the interview Paul Brookes subscribes to some of the philosophi-
cal principles underpinning Chris Murrays 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 initia-
tives on the ground, which have a tangible impact on how local people
and visitors experience the city, will soon lose credibility and not be
CONFESSIONS OF A PLACE MARKETER 289
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 program-
mes for the European City of Culture events; and the 2002 event concentrated on
sports activities as part of culture.
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 ad-
ministration, 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 didnt 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 Councils 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 market-
ing.
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
and the activities related to them.
3
While I was working on the 2002
conference (in October 2001), I was appointed as Director of Brad-
fords 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.
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 persons 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 Euro-
pean 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 reso-
nance. One of my colleagues found the words One landscape, many
views in the subtitle of Bradford-born David Hockneys 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
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
Rushdies 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 prac-
titioners 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 desti-
nation. 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,
and Bront Country was a popular destination, particularly for Japa-
nese and American tourists. It was important to make sure that Brad-
ford was part of the Yorkshire brand, which is attractive in tourism
terms.
Another lesson from The Culture Companys 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 com-
munications. 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, play-
wright 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 clichs if at all possible. Referring to the Bronts or J.B.
Priestley was felt not to be contemporary enough. We were always
looking for cultural representations that would make people think:
thats different. We commissioned more artistic work than many of
the other 2008 bidding cities. In fact only Belfast and Bradford com-
missioned artists to prepare their audio-visual material. We commis-
sioned 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-
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 excel-
lent. 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 impor-
tant 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 Bradfords 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 attachs 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 depart-
ment, but was located in a building with no other Council staff. The
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 Bradfords 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 develop-
ers. 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 Bradfords 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 Re-
vealed 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 (super-
ficially 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
of the key organizations in the city and led by Leicester Shire Promo-
tions 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 coun-
ter 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 re-
ferred to by people as being apathetic. There wasnt in Leicester a cata-
lyst 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 Bradfords 2020 vision.
Another difference between the two cities was that Leicester Promo-
tions the agency responsible for local place marketing and tourism
development was in the process of becoming Leicester Shire Promo-
tions, 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 Guard-
ian (written by Guardian journalists with assistance from Leicester Re-
vealed) about Leicesters 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 accompa-
nied by images, but later the same messages were juxtaposed with im-
ages showing that Leicester was not boring and did indeed have some-
thing 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 mes-
sage. Radio journalism, in particular, loves a sense of humour. The
Observer did an article saying that the Leicester Revealed campaign was
4
Phil Shaw. 2003. Extreme Ironing. London: New Holland Publishers. From the
books blurb: in 2003, extreme ironing is the worlds newest adrenalin sport, com-
bining 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 dan-
gling 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.
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 cul-
tural 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
2003 on extreme ironing by a local author.
4
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 Blaines - 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 cover-
age 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 Leicesters assets, and the
poster campaigns tone became more positive. This has become prob-
lematic: who are we at Leicester Shire Promotions to ask people what
they want for the future? There is a problem of legitimacy, and a prob-
lem in the strength of the local partnership. There has to be a strong
connection between city marketing and all aspects of urban policy.
People wont 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 interpreta-
tion 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 avail-
able 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-packag-
ing 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 ONeill, football legend Brian Clough once de-
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 fantas-
tic 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 Murrays
book Making Sense of Place. Are you in a position to say whether this
approach works, or has Murrays 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 de-
scription for the post of Director of the Leicester Revealed initiative
was influenced by Chris Murrays 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 revela-
tion 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 Murrays approach, though, is that every place in the
end needs an encapsulation of its brand value. Leicester hasnt yet
found the shorthand to express, represent and encapsulate the complex
organism that it is. I cannot wait until the Leicester Revealed cam-
paign is completed in 2010 to find this encapsulation. There is cur-
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.
The Invention of
Politics in the European
Avant-Garde (1906-1940)
Edited by Sacha Bru and
Gunther Martens
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In 1906, for the rst time in his life,
F.T. Marinetti connected the term avant-
garde with the idea of the future, thus
paving the way for what is now commonly
called the modernist or historical avant-
garde. 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 Avant-
Garde 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 Europes geographical
outskirts, this book will appeal to all those interested in the modernist
avant-garde.
Amsterdam/New York, NY,
2006 290 pp. (Avant-Garde
Critical Studies 19)
Bound 60 / US$ 75
ISBN-10: 9042019093
ISBN-13: 9789042019096
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 uctuations
The Matrix in
Theory
Edited by Myriam Diocaretz and
Stefan Herbrechter
USA/Canada:
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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.
2006 314 pp.
(Critical Studies 29)
Bound 65 / US$ 81
ISBN-10: 9042016396
ISBN-13: 9789042016392
Our House
The Representation of Domestic
Space in Modern Culture
Edited by Gerry Smyth and Jo Croft
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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 speci c
school or theory predominates, although the work of two key gures
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.
2006 268 pp.
(Nature, Culture and
Literature 2)
Paper 54 / US$ 73
ISBN-10: 9042019697
ISBN-13: 9789042019690
USA/Canada:
295 North Michigan Avenue - Suite 1B, Kenilworth, NJ 07033,
Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79
Isaiah Berlin
A Value Pluralist and Humanist View of
Human Nature and the Meaning of Life
Connie Aarsbergen-Ligtvoet
USA/Canada:
Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79
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2006 VIII-202 pp.
(Currents of Encounter 27)
Paper 42 / US$ 53
ISBN-10: 9042019298
ISBN-13: 9789042019294
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 con ict 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
pluralisms 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 con ict. Berlins ideas can enrich existing theories of pluralism
and contribute to intercultural and interreligious dialogue. And, last but not least,
Berlins value pluralism helps us to understand the roots of ideologically and religiously
inspired violence.
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 con icts 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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