“The city” is everywhere. Both public and academic discourse are endlessly fascinated with it; with the city of the future and the past; with megacities; with the voting behavior of city dwellers as opposed to that of the inhabitants of the countryside; with urban riots; with gentrification; with the city as utopia, dystopia, or heterotopia, to name but a few of the ideas which come to mind. Is there then still anything to say about a concept that has been so thoroughly explored, and about which academic disciplines ranging from geography, sociology, and urban studies to literary and cultural studies are already supplying a constant stream of publications?
Of course, this is at least partly a rhetorical question, coming as it does in the introduction of another such publication—in a place, that is, which implies that the intended answer will be, yes, of course there is still something interesting to be said about the city that has not been said yet, and that will follow in this volume. We believe that of course. But the question is not meant quite so dishonestly. After all, the concept which supplies the framework for the following chapters is not simply the city itself, but its narrative construction. This means that it is precisely the ideas and debates which we have just named which will themselves be under scrutiny. They all stand for specific ideas of the city, and in this volume such ideas of the city will be analyzed for their narrative construction and its implications.
Indeed, the idea itself that the city is constructed in and through narratives arguably needs some scrutiny, too, and we intend to provide that in this introduction. It is, to begin with, surely an appealing idea, even in its most paradoxical-sounding form. To give an example: in his essay “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde plays with the idea that art has the power to change reality—including the city. It is art, according to Wilde, which has created the famous London fogs:
The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of art. […] There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess.1
The Aestheticist point about life imitating art in Wilde’s witty play on the line between the plausible—artistic representation creating awareness of the fog—and the implausible—artistic representation creating the fog itself, and “carry[ing it] to excess”—is not quite the same point that a literary scholar today might want to make about the relationship between art and urban space. As for the actual London fogs themselves, they were not a natural phenomenon that had existed “for centuries” without being noticed, but a form of smog, not quite as recent as Wilde makes them, but still historically specific and largely the product of coal rather than art. But the nineteenth-century London fogs as a cultural phenomenon are arguably a completely different thing from a twenty-first-century smog, which carries all the implications of air pollution and the necessity of countermeasures, but which does not lend itself to crime fiction or impressionist painting in the same way as the nineteenth-century version. Therefore, the London fogs, in a sense, really “did not exist till art had invented them.”
Urban space is never just the product of architects and urban planners, that is, but it is also constituted by works of art, by the media, and by academic discourse—it is also, for instance, constituted by stories such as Wilde’s little genealogy of the London fogs. In any case, writers clearly like to suggest that they are really the ones who construct a city. For instance, in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, one of the protagonists claims that it is the absence of fictional versions of Glasgow which is to blame for the inhabitants’ lack of appreciation of their city.
“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. […] “Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively”2
The choice of verb is interesting here; “using” a city seems a very profane formula for something which is, at the same time, described as an act of creation, no less. In addition to that, in their wider context, the characters’ comments draw attention to the fact that the novel Lanark itself is “using” Glasgow and therefore supplies the reader with one possible way of inhabiting a version of this city imaginatively; that the novel itself is already in the process of transforming the city into one that is the subject of, and constructed by stories. The underimagined city is one of the stories on offer, but by no means the only one.
After all, as we will explain in the following, the narrative construction of the city always implies conflicting narrative versions of the same city. It is not simply about emphasizing the constructedness of the built environment and its representations. The city is clearly a construct, but it is no less powerful for that. At least since the emergence of the modern metropolis, that is, the city has become one of the most crucial topoi in the representation and reflection of human experience. Through the immediate encounter of various cultural and class backgrounds the city has therefore become the central location for negotiating as well as articulating different identities and interests. All of these constitute performative acts that take part in the semantic formation of urban space and at the same time open it up to constant and ongoing redefinition.
The City in Times of the “Spatial Turn”
The city is also subject to constant academic scrutiny and redefinition. In recent years, urban life as well as various medial representations of the city have been discussed in a number of studies, using, among other things, terms, and concepts taken from the writings of Henri Lefebvre, as well as other authors who have been rediscovered in the wake of the “spatial turn.”3 This redefinition of space has been followed by studies of the city from the point of view of various disciplines—such as literary studies,4 history,5 and theater studies6—as well as a number of explorations of (representations of) a single city.7 This is the context in which we would like to place our own collection. Its discussion of urban theory as well as its case studies aim to enrich and complicate the notion of the city as a space with the notion of the city as narrative, and it does that from a transdisciplinary perspective.
The immediate context for our approach to the city is thus provided by the spatial turn. After all, the academic discussion of space has a long history in various disciplines, but since the 1990s in particular, its social and cultural layers as well as their vital importance to the constitution of space have once again been foregrounded. The interaction between the architectural design of space, its material aspects with questions of accessibility and mobility, social as well as cultural, have also received increased attention in academic discourses. Considering the sheer amount of distinct theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of space, we must surely hesitate to use the term “re-definition” with regard to notions of space. Nevertheless, speaking as literary scholars, we observe that discourse in the humanities concerning space clearly has changed in the wake of the spatial turn. Academic publications on the subject of space have taken on a more interdisciplinary character. And it is exactly this point of intertwinement of various seemingly distinct fields of research that seems to us the most promising and fruitful approach to the city.
Nonetheless, the sociocultural redefinition of space as formulated in the wake of the spatial turn is by no means the first time the semantic implications of the constitution of space have been described. In literary studies at least, the spatial turn draws heavily upon previous approaches. To name only a few, Ernst Cassirer outlined in his reflections on mythic, aesthetic, and theoretic spaces in 1931 the vital importance of perception to any constitution of spatial structures.8 Walter Benjamin’s work stresses the relevance of movement and temporal layers in experiencing the modern industrial metropolis—and claims that the phantasmagorical entity of the city refuses any narrative approach. In the middle of the twentieth century Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault focus on space as reflection and articulation of power relations, albeit in very different ways. Their writings have helped us to see that spatial structures are being constituted through various individual and discursively articulated performative practices and are thus the product of the ways in which discursive power locates itself within the relational network of urban space.9 Here, modes of inclusion and exclusion as spatial dynamics receive an attention which the social construction of space was until then denied. As a result, space can now be understood as part of social practices. Indeed, this was the original aim of the spatial turn. The term was first used in a chapter heading in Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (1989), “Uncovering Western Marxism’s spatial turn.”10 Subsequently, the key word has then been taken up by theorists (including Soja himself11), who have changed its meaning in the direction of a turn in the sense of a paradigm change.12 In its first context, the phrase described a shift back to prioritizing space rather than time within Western Marxism—a shift represented mainly by the works of Lefebvre.13 From the beginnings of the spatial turn on, spatial practice has thus been regarded as inseparable from social practice.
The literary construction of space is such a spatial practice, and therefore a social practice, too. The concept of narration has a valuable contribution to make here. After all, long before the call for a reconsideration of space was formulated in the spatial turn, the interconnection of the act of narration and the constitution of spatial representations in various art forms has all along been at the center of the work of some literary scholars, such as Michail M. Bakhtin and Yuri M. Lotman. Semantic layers inscribed into literary space are foregrounded in their crucial importance to the process of meaning-making with regard to works of literature and are thus established as a means of making literary space accessible to an...