The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries

Christoph Lindner, Miriam Meissner, Christoph Lindner, Miriam Meissner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351672689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries delves into examples of urban imaginaries across multiple media and geographies: from new visions of smart, eco, and resilient cities to urban dystopias in popular culture; from architectural renderings of starchitecture and luxury living to performative activism for new spatial justice; and from speculative experiments in urban planning, fiction, and photography to augmented urban realities in crowd-mapping and mobile apps.

The volume brings various global perspectives together and into close dialogue to offer a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical overview of the current state of research on urban imaginaries. Questioning the politics of urban imagination, the companion gives particular attention to the role that urban imaginaries play in shaping the future of urban societies, communities, and built environments. Throughout the companion, issues of power, resistance, and uneven geographical development remain central. Adopting a transnational perspective, the volume challenges research on urban imaginaries from the perspective of globalization and postcolonial studies, inviting critical reconsiderations of urbanism in its diverse current forms and definitions. In the process, the companion explores issues of Western-centrism in urban research and design, and accommodates current attempts to radically rethink urban form and experience.

This is an essential resource for scholars and graduate researchers in the fields of urban planning and architecture; art, media, and cultural studies; film, visual, and literary studies; sociology and political science; geography; and anthropology.

1

Introduction

Urban imaginaries in theory and practice

Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner

Why urban imaginaries?

Urban imaginaries are everywhere: from new visions of smart, eco, and resilient cities to postcard images of urban vintage and nostalgia; from architectural renderings of starchitecture and luxury living to performative activism for new spatial justice; and from urban utopias in film, photography, and literature to augmented urban realities in location-based gaming and mobile apps. Urban imaginaries form part of our everyday lives in the city, encompassing tourism, city branding, art and architecture, planning, policymaking, and more. Urban imaginaries travel old and new media, and – importantly – they are studied in disciplines spanning the humanities, social sciences, and art and design fields.

But why study urban imaginaries? Cities tend to be seen as complex sets of social, spatial, and material characteristics. They are understood in terms of design and infrastructure, inhabitation and density, diversity, economic activity, political organization, ecology – the list goes on. Imagination is often posited as secondary to such definitions of the urban. At the same time, however, contemporary urban studies increasingly acknowledges the role that imagination plays in shaping cities, especially in relation to the future. This shift is reflected in a growing body of research on urban visions in social futures and transition studies; in the escalating controversies around smart city futures in urban planning, architectural, and policymaking discourses; and in the scholarly attention given to urban social movements and activism as practices of resistance against authoritarianism, repressive politics, austerity, and global neoliberalism.

The issues tackled in this line of research are wide-ranging. To what extent can eco-city experiments achieve sustainable development? How do urban activist interventions – from Occupy Wall Street and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement to Istanbul’s “Standing Man” and the Rebel Clown Army – revise global ideas of public space and democracy? What are the risks of imagining urban futures predominantly in technological terms? And, under what conditions can smart city plans also become roadmaps to urban social equality and resilience in the face of uncertain futures? As these questions suggest, urban imaginaries are not just “matters of the mind”, but also manifest and find expression in lived urban space.

Therefore, to answer the question “why study urban imaginaries?” it is important to understand space as simultaneously material, conceptual, experienced, and practiced. Historically, this way of thinking about space is largely attributed to the so-called “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, it developed from the Chicago School of Urban Sociology as well as the writings of scholars such as Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Kevin Lynch, Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja. In this chapter, we aim to outline the contribution that some of these scholars have made to the concept of the urban imaginary. First, however, we want to highlight that the spatial turn in social and urban thinking has distinct geographical and gender coordinates. While it has propelled an understanding of knowledge as something that is shaped by its locus in social space, the spatial turn itself has been largely ascribed to a predominantly male group of Western thinkers.

The same critique of gender and geographic imbalance applies, of course, to many fields and traditions within urban studies. In Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006), for example, Jennifer Robinson shows that current concepts of the “global city” and “modern city” are predominantly based on a Western tradition of urban thought and design that hierarchizes cities according to levels of development and marginalizes a vast array of different potential visions, understandings, and practices of contemporary urbanity (Robinson, 2006).

Much of the recent scholarship on urban imaginaries has developed in an attempt to rethink urbanism beyond this gendered, Western perspective. To this end, it explores urban imaginaries across multiple media and geographies in order to de-centre and diversify current concepts of the city (see Dibazar et al., 2013). This is particularly relevant given the various global challenges that cities face today. These challenges include environmental change, social inequality, transnational migration, and the privatization of public spaces and services, to name just a few. Along with qualities such as solidarity, determination, and ethical capacity, coping with these challenges requires creativity. As creativity draws on imagination, it is paramount within urban studies to map, examine, and critically question the various forms of urban imaginaries that exist in contemporary urban theory, arts, and culture, as well as in everyday life. To that end, this book sets out to provide a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical overview of the current state of research on urban imaginaries. In so doing, the book directs special attention to the role that urban imaginaries play in shaping the future of urban societies, communities, built environments, and ecologies.

In this introduction, we first outline how a number of key thinkers have contributed to the development of the concept of urban imaginaries in critical spatial theory. Building on these insights, we map the current state of urban imaginaries research, which is influenced not only by global political and ecological transformations but also to a large extent by technological and new media innovations. Finally, we reflect on the role that urban imaginaries play in shaping global-urban futures. We conclude by providing an overview of the different sections in this book and their thematic organization and content.

Spatial thinking and the urban imaginary

The twentieth century has produced an extensive range of critical theory on space and urbanism. Exploring the conditions of early-twentieth-century metropolitan life, theorists such as Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin were amongst the first authors to highlight the entanglements of urbanism and the human mind. While Simmel examined how the myriad stimuli of the modern metropolis affected the “mental life” of its inhabitants, Benjamin analyzed how the urban flâneur perceived and made sense of the dazzling shopping arcades of late-nineteenth-century Paris. Theorists such as Simmel and Benjamin were instrumental in establishing urban imaginaries as an object of interest in urban research, even if they did not explicitly employ the concept in their writing. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century, however, that the concept was fleshed out, popularized, and eventually coined.

Urban planner Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, published in 1960, contains one of the first and most explicit explorations of the role of imagination and cognitive processes in shaping the human experience of cities:

What does the city’s form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city’s image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion – imageability – and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities.

(MIT Press, 1960)

As this blurb for The Image of the City indicates, Lynch’s theory of planning and design makes urban inhabitants’ mental images of the city a key field of concern. Exploring the individual impressions that people had of different American cities in the 1950s, Lynch argues that urban inhabitants tend to perceive cities in a highly individualized, partial, and fragmented manner (Lynch, 1960: 2). Beyond that, cities are dynamic places. The city “is the product of many builders who are constantly modifying the structure for reasons of their own” (ibid.). The role of the urban planner, Lynch argues, is to “shape the city for sensuous enjoyment” (ibid.). For him, this means organizing the everyday chaos of urban experience according to principles of imageability. In particular, Lynch insists that cities ought to be “legible” to their inhabitants.

To create this legibility, Lynch proposes organizing the city’s “visual quality” (Lynch, 1960: 3) according to coherent structuring elements, such as nodes, districts, pathways, and landmarks. He proposes that this visible organization of the city “is fundamental to the efficiency and to the very survival of free-moving life” (ibid.). Lynch’s idea of urban theory favours a totalizing, top-down approach to urban design. The city is to be structured by the planning mastermind, who orders urban chaos into a preconceived grammar and syntax. Moreover, his theory is prescriptive. It aims to provide a manual for modern urban planning and design.

This rationale was later criticized by the urban theorist Michel de Certeau, who regarded modern, top-down visions of the city an “oblivion and a misunderstanding” of everyday urban practices (De Certeau, 1988: 93). De Certeau, writing some 20 years after Lynch, compares different forms of urban imaginary in order to shift the urban focus from plan to practice. In his essay “Walking in the City”, De Certeau contrasts the panoramic vision of New York as seen from the top of the former World Trade Center (WTC) with the street experience of the urban pedestrian. De Certeau’s main critique is that top-down urban visions exclude a range of relevant urban sensations and activities. Therefore, the urban panorama is wrongly assumed to provide the most knowledgeable perspective on urban life. The urban panorama is a “concept city”, a “fiction of knowledge” (ibid.), that neglects crucial details of urban street life, including non-visual qualities such as sound, smell, and touch.

De Certeau’s reflection on the urban panorama is not just a critique of top-down planning perspectives but also a critique of vision as such. In urban life, vision tends to be treated as a privileged sense. This tendency is also reflected in Lynch’s focus on the “visual quality” of the city. Yet, as De Certeau explains, the ordinary, everyday practice of the city begins “below the thresholds at which visibility begins” (De Certeau, 1988: 93). The city is produced or “written” by urban practitioners “whose bodies follow the urban thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (ibid.). De Certeau demonstrates how urban life is shaped not only by the urban visions of planners, architects, or cartographers, but – just as significantly – through the everyday actions of inhabitants, whose urban imaginaries are neither complete nor fully visual but instead partial and practical.

Regardless of this critique, it is worth noting that Lynch’s The Image of the City contributed immensely to the recognition of urban imaginaries as key factors in city life. As Lynch suggests, to understand “environments at the urban scale of size, time, and complexity … we must consider not just the city as a thing in itself, but the city being perceived by its inhabitants” (Lynch, 1960: 3). His work therefore laid an important foundation for the understanding of urban life as simultaneously built form, idea, and experience, combining objective elements (“the city as a thing in itself”) with subjective elements.

Social theorist Henri Lefebvre further developed this understanding of urbanity in conceptual terms. In The Production of Space, first published in French in 1974, Lefebvre criticizes common notions of space in everyday language as well as in philosophy for failing to recognize that space, much like human ideas, is a social product. Space, he argues, is socially produced. What may, at first glance, appear as a platitude, gains further significance when considering that Lefebvre refers to space not only as a physical “living space” but also as a concept. Lefebvre laments that:

we are … confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global. Not to mention nature’s (physical) space, the space of energy flows, and so on. … [I]t should be pointed out that the multiplicity of these descriptions and sectionings makes them suspect. The fact is that all these efforts exemplify a very strong – perhaps even the dominant – tendency within present day society and its mode of production. Under this mode of production, intellectual labour, like material labour, is subject to endless division.

(Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 8)

Inspired by Karl Marx’s critique of idealism, Lefebvre applies historical materialism to space as both a physical thing and an abstract concept. Both are shaped by the same capitalist system of production, which is based on class division and the exploitation of labour. In this context, hegemonic concepts of space (for instance the distinction between urban and rural space) form part of the so-called superstructure – the ideological system that maintains and reproduces capitalist conditions of production. His project, therefore, is to advance a more critical understanding of space as a “social product”, the product of power relations, and to “demonstrate the active – the operational or instrumental – role of space, as knowledge and action, in the existing mode of production” (Lefebvre, 1991 [1974]: 11).

Lefebvre makes an important contribution to the study and critique of urban imaginaries as instruments of power. Interestingly, his writings on social space coincide historically with the elaboration of similar insights in the field of visual studies, including John Berger’s book and television series Ways of Seeing (1972) as well as Laura Mulvey’s (1975) writings on the “male gaze” in narrative cinema. Examining renaissance artworks (Berger) and mainstream Hollywood cinema (Mulvey), Berger and Mulvey show how visual perspectives, as tools of representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas/screen, both express and reproduce social power relations, in particular, gender inequalities. Lefebvre himself often resorts to visual art in order to illustrate the ideological nature of space. For example, in his 1956 essay on the painting L’Ouvrier mort by Éduard Pignon, Lefebvre interprets the artist’s inobservance of geometric rules of visual representation as a break-away from “the mechanism of capitalist technology” (Elden, 2004: 182).

Another noteworthy historical coincidence is that The Production of Space was published at almost the same time as Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), which is recognized in critical theory for demonstrating a strategic interrelation between space and power in modern Western societies. In this work, Foucault analyzes the spatio-visual workings of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a form of prison that facilitates surveillance through architecture. In the panopticon, the prison guard is located in a tower in the middle of the prison, while the cells are positioned in a surrounding circle. While the guard has the ability to observe any and all cells, inmates cannot know if and when they are being observed. Foucault presents the panopticon as indicative of the means by which social control is exerted in modern societies. The intended effect of the panopticon is to “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1995 [1975]: 201).

According to Foucault, architectural structures such as the panopticon constitute technologies for producing “docile bodies”. Because they have internalized dominant rules of discipline – both physically and mentally – such bodies integrate seamlessly into a range of other, similar modern institutions, including the school, the factory, and the military. In terms of the history of spatial thinking, Foucault’s work is significant because it shows, through empirical examples, how spatial structures produce cognitive-behavioural patterns and vice versa. Additionally, Foucault’s theory highlights the way space can acquire an almost technological function, serving as a mac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: urban imaginaries in theory and practice
• PART I: Eco and resilient
• PART II: Smart and digital
• PART III: Connected and consuming
• PART IV    Uneven and divided
• PART V: Speculative and transformative
• Index