Research Group Cultural History & Literary Imagination

Imagining the City


sponsored by:
The British Academy
The Tiarks German Fund
St John's College
Download the full programme as a PDF file
Download the registration form (for non-contributors) as a PDF file
(deadline: 16 July)
Urban culture, its impact on the creative imagination, and the representation of both individual cities and the general nature of life in cities have provided a rich seam of inquiry in recent years for those who work in literary and cultural studies as well as in sociology, geography, and architectural history. The purpose of the conference is to provide a forum for experts in these fields to compare notes on the role of the imagination in conceiving the city as a symbolic place for the intersection of historical and cultural identities, and in representing the city through the media of literature, art, film and performance. The organizers have sought to develop a programme which will look beyond the familiar images of cities in antiquity, the Renaissance, the industrial and the post-industrial world, and focus rather on such aspects of the city as the following:
Programme
FRIDAY, 30 JULY
10.00 Registration

10.30 Welcome

11.00
Plenary Session 1
Peter Burke (University of Cambridge), Performing the Self in the Early Modern City

12.00
Parallel Session A: Boundaries & Interfaces
Parallel Session B: Structures & Spaces
13.00 Lunch

14.00
Parallel Session A: Boundaries & Interfaces
Parallel Session B: Structures & Spaces
15.30 Coffee Break

16.00
Parallel Session A: Boundaries & Interfaces
Parallel Session B: Structures & Spaces
17.45
Plenary Session 2
Carolyn Steele (Cullum & Nightingale Architects, London), Feeding the Wen: Alimental Portraits of London

18.30 Reception at St John's College (sponsored by the Department of German)

19.30 Conference Dinner at St John's College
SATURDAY, 31 JULY
9.00
Parallel Session A: Cities of Modernity
Parallel Session B: Imagined Cities
10.30 Coffee Break

11.00
Parallel Session C: Configuring Manhattan
Parallel Session D: Infernal Cities?
12.00
Plenary Session 3
Susanne Hauser (Technical University Graz), The Modernist City

13.00 Lunch

14.30
Parallel Session E: Parisian Tropes
Parallel Session F: Simulations of the City
16.00 Coffee Break

16.30
Parallel Session G: Surrealist Cities
Parallel Session H: Envisioning the City
19.30 Dinner
SUNDAY, 1 AUGUST
10.00
Parallel Session A: The Spatial Imaginaire
Parallel Session B: Ideologies of Reconstruction
11.30 Coffee Break

12.00
Plenary Session 4
Nigel Thrift (University of Oxford), Violent Cities

13.00 Lunch

14.30
Parallel Session C: The Politics of Urban Space
Parallel Session D: Event, Action, and Performance
16.00 Coffee and Final Discussion


ABSTRACTS
(in alphabetical order)
Silke Arnold-de Simine (University of Mannheim), Urban Utopia or Dystopia? Phantasmagoria of Glass and Steel from Walter Benjamin to W.G. Sebald
In the writings of the twentieth century, urban utopian visions as well as memories were often attached to glass architecture, such as skyscrapers or arcades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this glass and steel architecture had caught the imagination of avant-garde architects, artists, writers and philosophers such as Paul Scheerbarth, Walter Benjamin, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Lyonel Feininger or Bruno Taut. For some these "new paradises" were fantastic, transparent worlds full of light. To others the modernity glass architecture has been associated with was not without ambiguity. According to Walter Benjamin the ephemeral flair of glass architecture seemed to defy any memory attached to it by denying its own potential status as a ruin. At the end of the twentieth century, however, in W.G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz, glass architecture has come to be associated with an apocalyptic and dystopian vision of the city and modern civilisation.
 
Franz J. Bauer (University of Regensburg), De Chirico as Architect: Urban Space and the Void in Conceiving the City in the Interwar Period
"Der ganze noch im Entstehen begriffene moderne Mythos", so schreibt André Breton in seiner Anthologie des Schwarzen Humors, "stützt sich an seinem Anfang auf die beiden, ihrem Geist nach fast nicht zu unterscheidenden Werke von Alberto Savinio und seinem Bruder Giorgio de Chirico".-In der Tat schuf De Chirico in den Jahren vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg, während noch die kubistischen und futuristischen Avantgarden die Szene beherrschten, mit seiner pittura metafisica den neuen, zukunftsweisenden Formenkanon der 'klassischen' Moderne. Die enigmatischen Stadtvisionen der piazze d'Italia, die De Chirico zwischen 1909 und 1919 in vielen Varianten hervorbrachte, wurden zur Matrix einer italianitˆ moderna im Gewande zeitloser Urbanität. In den urbanistischen Gestaltungen der drei§iger Jahre ist der dechirichianische Archetypus dann allgegenwärtig-mit Ausstrahlung weit über Italien hinaus. Der vorliegende Beitrag sucht die Wurzeln von De Chiricos metaphysischer Stadt bei Nietzsche auf und fragt nach dem sozio-kulturellen 'Sinn' ihrer Wiederkehr im Architekturdiskurs der Zwischenkiegszeit.

Jennifer Burns (University of Warwick), Provisional Constructions of the Eternal City: Figurations of Rome in Recent Italophone Writing
In this paper I will consider figurations of the city of Rome in the works of italophone migrant writers. This city -for centuries the object of complex projections-becomes the metonymic focus of the economic, cultural, and emotional needs and aspirations which the migrant brings to the destination country. My focus is Mohsen Melliti's novel, Pantanella (1990), the title of which is the name of a derelict warehouse on the periphery of Rome, which becomes the home of a community of illegal immigrants. The battered and fragile structure standing out against the skyline of the city establishes itself in the text as a visual and conceptual metaphor for not only the precarious subsistence of the migrants housed there, but also the now damaged and vulnerable utopia which, in the minds of its inhabitants, Italy and, more particularly, Rome, have become.

Kate Daniels (University of Cambridge), The "Mixed" City-Ports of Jaffa, Haifa and Acre: Representations in Modern Arabic Literature
Before 1948, the ancient city-ports of Jaffa, Haifa and Acre were predominantly Arab-Palestinian. Now predominantly Jewish-Israeli, these cities continue to have sizable Arab minorities, affording a high degree of social, cultural and political interaction between the two communities. This paper examines literary representations of these so-called 'mixed' cities, produced after 1948 by Palestinian and other Arab writers. In 1948, most Palestinians fled Jaffa, Haifa and Acre, becoming refugees. Those who remained assumed the (often conflicted) identity of 'Arab-Israeli'. This paper looks at the literature produced by writers from both groups: those who fled, and used their cities as symbols of their lost communities, to sustain a sense of national history and a coherent cultural memory; and those who remained and became a minority within the Jewish-Israeli majority. Other writers examined are those Arabs who harness the symbol of the mythical 'Arab' (i.e. pre-Israel) city, for Palestinian nationalist or pan-Arab purposes.

Claire Damery / Sylvie Miaux (C.N.R.S.), La Panorama en ville: Itinéraire d'un lieu patrimonial
Notre réflexion porte sur la symbolique du panorama dans la ville ˆ partir de laquelle nous nous interrogeons, en tant que géographe, sur l'articulation entre la dimension patrimoniale du panorama et l'expérience qu'il suscite. Dans cette perspective, nous faisons un double usage du mot "itinéraire": d'une part nous souhaitons nous intéresser ˆ la constitution des valeurs du site patrimonial panoramique, de sa publicisation, et donc de l'itinéraire d'une image socio-historique de la ville dans l'espace et dans le temps; d'autre part, nous voulons pointer l'expérience du sujet au cours de l'itinéraire qui l'invite ˆ la découverte de ce panorama. En quelque sorte nous nous intéressons ˆ confronter l'itinéraire né de la mise en scne du panorama par les urbanistes ˆ l'itinéraire de la mise en scne du sujet qui le parcourt pour appréhender la forme de lieu qu'est le panorama. Notre contribution questionnera ainsi le triptyque lieu patrimonial / mise en scne / itinéraire par l'intermédiaire de l'étude de l'expérience des usagers dans la découverte du panorama, et s'appuiera sur l'exemple du Boulevard des Pyrénées, un site fondateur de la culture urbaine paloise.

David Darby (University of Western Ontario), Telling Berlin's Stories
This paper examines the theorization of storytelling and the representation of urban storytellers in a selection of essays and imaginative narratives spanning the last two centuries. Storytelling, be it a representationally adequate or an (occasionally absurdly) inadequate response to the city, is important because it posits a logical organization of time and human experience, rendering coherent a world that, as the canon of modernist representation attests, resists linear narrative order. Storytelling, I propose, thus does for the experience of time and history what walking does for the human experience of space in the age of technical transportability, and the successes and failures of urban storytellers can be seen as experiments in the organization of time, memory, and emotion in the imagination of the city.

Davide Deriu (University College London), Aerial Images and Urban Imaginations: The Rise of the Modern planeur in Interwar Europe
While the figure of the fl‰neur has been largely investigated by social, cultural, literary, and architectural historians of modernity, limited critical attention has been paid to the emergence of another, typically modern, viewing subject-which I tentatively call planeur, or aerial observer. This paper discusses the impact of the aerial imagination upon the ways in which the image of the European city was reconfigured in the 1920s and 1930s, when the alliance of techniques of perception and aviation opened up a new mode of vision. The focus is on the dissemination of aerial cityscapes in the illustrated press, which played an instrumental role in the visual rhetorics of such discourses as photo-journalism, travel literature, and political propaganda. The reproduction of aerial photographs in the mass-media of the time suggests that the rise of the aerial observer brought about a modern urban imagery predicated upon an "aesthetic from above".

Alex Dougherty (Trinity College, Cambridge), Theatre and the City in the Baroque Imagination
I will introduce the ideological foundations of urban Baroque culture as a radical institution of theatre as its field of self-understanding. Through a tense interplay of text and image, urban settings were transformed into rhetorical stages for the Christian drama of incarnation and salvation during the period (e.g. Rome, Shakespeare's Globe). This was founded on a re-interpretation of the Augustinian paradigm of the city as symbol of order in terms of theatre, as worked out in texts such as those of Boaistuau and Boissard. Also, the revival of classical theatre and the art of memory resulted in the creation of permanent theatres in which the city is represented, in the manner of the Serlian stage set (e.g. Palladio's Teatro Olimpico). A rich combination of classical myth and Christian narrative thus transforms the image of the city via theatre, materialising this festive fusion into a permanent vision of an idealised time and space. Perspective will be seen as instrumental in this transformation, and in the problem of infinity, central to Baroque culture,which extends consideration towards modern conceptions of spatial organisation.

Jill Fenton (Royal Holloway, University of London), Contemporary Surrealist Imaginary Geographies of Utopia and Dystopia
"We have to discover the city by setting down to work an imaginary architecture in constant outpouring" (B. Schmitt, 2001).-On a map of Paris, members of the Paris group of the contemporary surrealist movement delineate utopian and dystopian place.  With reference to symbolism and  imagination that evoke a poetic city, they plot ideas for re-enchanting Paris.  Similarly, in their exploration of  the city and  participation with other politicised voices against dominant systems, they establish an alternative form of engagement. In discussing their  practices, this paper connects with   debates in cultural geography that critically examine the  city as utopia and dystopia and as a symbolic place for the formation of new political imaginaries.

Stephen Forcer (Keble College, Oxford), Dreaming Spires: Imaginary Architecture, "History", and Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'Or (1930)
In this paper I want to address issues of urban representation, myth-making and historiography in Luis Buñuel's Surrealist classic L'Age d'or. In so doing, I hope to present a fresh account of the film that extends beyond Surrealism, and which shows L'Age d'or to raise a range of engaging cross-disciplinary questions to do with historical consciousness and its relationship to real and imagined European/Imperial cityscapes. Broadly speaking, I will use critically informed textual analysis to argue that L'Age d'or presents the city as a psycho-sexual entity where commerce, desire and cultural history all combine in complex ways; I will in turn argue that Buñuel's film offers a strikingly full critique of the city as an ideological space where historical myths are continually made and recycled.

Heidi Hein (University of Marburg), Die Vorstellung Lembergs (L'viv) als Bollwerk gen Osten
Im polnischen historischen Bewusstsein hat sich seit der Frühen Neuzeit die Vorstellung entwickelt, dass Polen eine Vormauer der Christenheit (antemurale christianitatis) sei. Einen besonderen Aspekt stellt die Bollwerk-Funktion dar, die vor allem Lemberg zuerkannt und mit einer besonderen kulturellen Mission verbunden wurde. Es wurde als östlicher Vorposten Polens gesehen. Dieses Bild resultiert aus der historischen Entwicklung Lembergs insbesondere in der Teilungszeit Polens und den Kriegen nach Wiedererrichtung Polens im Jahre 1918, da erst der Zusammenprall der politischen, sozialen und nationalen Entwicklungen und Herausforderungen im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert Lemberg nicht nur zum östlichen Vorposten des Polentums, sondern auch zu der "blühenden" Metropole machte, wie sie im kulturellen Gedächtnis überliefert ist. Im Vortrag soll die Vorstellung von Lemberg als Bollwerk gegen Osten skizziert und deren Funktionen für das nationale historische Bewusstsein nachvollzogen werden.

Britta Herrmann (University of Bayreuth), Irrender Blick, beweglicher Raum, simuliertes Leben: Metropole und Film (Blade Runner)
Der Beitrag wird anhand von Ridley Scotts Blade Runner dem Konnex von skopischer Raumstrukturierung, moderner aesthetik und (medial vermittelter) urbaner Affektregulierung nachgehen. Dazu soll zunächst untersucht werden, inwiefern die skopische Raumstrukturierung der Kamera analog zu dem bei Walter Benjamin beschriebenen Blick des Flaneurs ein "Kolportagephänomen" produziert, dessen heterogene und dynamische Struktur imaginäre Ordnung einfordert-und zugleich verweigert. Anschlie§end wird der Stadt-Raum zum einen als Metonymie moderner €sthetik analysiert, zum anderen aber als topos einer schwindenden ontologischen Differenz zwischen Subjekt und Objekt aufgrund der Affektregulierung innerhalb einer künstlichen Umwelt der S(t)imulationen. Die Stadt erscheint dabei zunehmend als conditio posthumana, der mental und emotional konditionierte "Typus des Städtebewohners", wie ihn Walter Benjamin und Georg Simmel um 1900 beschrieben haben, avanciert um 2000 zum potentiellen Replikanten.

Yvonne Houy (Pomona College, Claremont), The Situationist Metro/Electro Polis: Reimagining Political Activism at the Turn of the Millenium
Socially constructed technologies permeate the urban experience of the post-modern subject as the Metropolis blends with the Electropolis: Hailing a cab while SMSing, they/we navigate easily between physical and virtual space. What does this blending of the virtual and physical mean for political activism? I argue that googling and spamming, flash mobs, hackers, and net.citizens are creating what could become a kind of "public sphere" of the future, if they are nurtured. In particular I analyze how the representational strategies developed by Guy Debord's Situationist International are being retooled for the Metro/Electro Polis experience ask/answer this question: While the metropolitan Situationists used the spatial organization of the metropolitan streets of mid-twentieth-century Paris to create "situations" reimagining social relations, how are (cyber)activists using/transforming the architecture of socially constructed information and communication technologies and urban spaces to create potentially revolutionary ways of imagining social and economic organization?

Steven Jacobs (Ghent University), From Flaneur to Chauffeur: Driving Through Cinematic Cities
Cinema and the automobile are roughly the same age and they have been closely connected from the start. In Hollywood cinema in particular, cameras have cherished cars extensively. Whereas the popularity of the car is undoubtedly partly the result of cinema, its social status and fetish quality have been motifs in many films (Playtime, Crash). In addition, driving a car joins perfectly the essence of the cinematic medium: movement. Films, by consequence, have often celebrated motorized speed-from slapstick in the early twentieth century up until the spectacular rubber-burning sequences of 1970s action movies (Bullit, The French Connection). The car, moreover, attempts at performing a task of cinema itself: the breaking of spatio-temporal boundaries. Not coincidentally, cars play an important role in the development of cinematic language. This is the case in Griffith's cross-cutting techniques or in Soviet montage, in which looking at film answers a specific perceptual modus, characterized by stimulus-response mechanisms, which also determined the modern metropolis with its motorized traffic and dazzling, kaleidoscopic visual effects. Moreover, the filmic experience of driving a car has often been noted. The observation of a shifting landscape through a frame was the perfect instrument of cinematographic self-reflection in modernists such as Hitchcock, Rossellini, Antonioni, Godard and Tarkovsky. In light of this, the driver can be considered a flaneur. The flaneur, according to Benjamin the paradigmatic nineteenth century urbanite, is not a mere stroller but someone who turns the city into an artwork by means of a certain gaze showing similarities with photographic and cinematic ways of seeing. The cinematic chauffeur also intentifies the urban experience and turns it into a work of art. Even in the talking heads aesthetics of Hollywood cinema, car scenes are often long sequences uninterrupted by dialogue-looking at the city through the windshield suffices to make entertaining images. Finally, the history of cinema, by contrast, illustrates that the car has participated in the dilution and destruction of the city. Some famous car scenes (Taxi Driver) often evoke urban decay or the claustrophobic effects of traffic congestion (Otto e mezzo). The road movie, not coincidentally, is closely connected with dystopian urban images (Weekend, Vanishing Point).

Dominic Janes (Birkbeck College, London), "Something Lived and Something Dreamed:" Imagining the "End" of the Antique City
This paper will examine the importance of imagined cities in thought about the post-Roman world. The ancient world was, in some ways, a world of cities, in that many forms of social, economic and political power found their strongest expression in urban centres. The post-Roman world was, on the other hand, a place in which urban space was shrunken, transformed, and in some areas of the former empire, eliminated. These issues can be examined historiographically in relation to entrenched notions of the eclipse of ancient urban life in the understandings of historians from Gibbon to the present day. The famous response of Augustine to the threatened physical magnificence of the worldly empire was to advance the notion of the City of God, a spiritual city which would triumph where the other failed. I shall be examining the presence of imagined cities in post-antiquity and how such ideas can influence our understanding of those who lived near the physical ruins (the "not city").

Catherine Keen (University of Leeds), Boundaries and Belonging: Imagining Urban Identity in Medieval Italy
This paper proposes an exploration of the city as a symbolic space in medieval Italy, focusing on evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It concentrates on political verse, one of the dominant modes of contemporary cultural expression, exploring the deployment of symbolic oppositions between city and wilderness in texts by both serious poets working within the courtly tradition, and by more subversive or parodic "comic-realist" poets. The study investigates how the changeability of civic space and society troubled the poets' political imaginary, contaminating idealised conceptions of urban security and cohesion with a sense that both boundary walls and the rights of belonging could prove unstable. The paper explores tensions, ambiguities, and attempted resolutions in the poets' construction of civic identity, as they alternately cast the city as a utopian or dystopian social form.

Simon Kemp (St John's College, Oxford), Urban Hell: Infernal Cities in Butor and Echenoz
This paper explores the combination of realism and fantasy in the representation of urban dystopia in post-war French literature. Michel Butor's L'Emploi du temps and Jean Echenoz's Au piano critique contemporary urban life, situating their narratives in initially familiar city environments. Yet, as they build from this foundation into the phantasmagoria of the urban nightmare, they reach back to the influence of the Romantic cityscapes of early nineteenth-century writers, and create a new perspective in the collision of the fantastic and the everyday. My paper argues that the techniques inherited from very different spheres of fiction do not contradict or undermine one another, but rather that the elements of the fantastic provide a critical, semi-satirical gloss on the social and environmental exactitude to which they are attached. The unreal world of the infernal city, the paper claims, serves only to sharpen the criticism of the reality it is based upon.
 
Gil P. Klein (Wolfson College, Cambridge), Oral Towns: Talmudic Discourse and the Understanding of the Late Antique Jewish City
This paper will examine the relationship between the oral tradition of the Talmudic discourse and the cities in which it was formed. The tension between the Greco-Roman setting of Galilean cities, such as Sepphoris and Tiberias, and their Jewish symbolic articulation will fall within its main concern. Talmudic discourse is unique for its dialogical nature, which generates the narrative within a spatial situation. However, the city is never a mere platform for dialogue but is also itself the object of discussion. It is a representation of the collective values as well as a mediator between the divine and human spheres. As such, the city in Talmud is simultaneously a place of mundane urban life and sacred Torah study. Jerusalem, which provided for the most significant mediation of the divine, before its destruction in 70 A.D., was transformed by the rabbis into a paradigm of the heavenly city that exists only as a promise. This allowed for the word of God to be mediated by the sages through the composite nature of earthly towns.

Hsiu-ling Kuo (University of Edinburgh), Weltstadt of a National Socialist Germany-The Greater Berlin Project
National Socialist architectural propaganda embraced the notion of architecture as symbolically representing German culture and history. It was the vehicle through which the image of a politically unified and culturally dominant Germany was forged. Albert Speer, appointed by Hitler as Generalbauinspektor, was responsible for remodelling Berlin as Germania. Modernists in the years after the First World War initiated the idea of the "city crown" - constructing representative focal point(s) in a city. Their vision of a modern urban utopia helped to establish unity and authority in a city, which would be guided by the elite. Ambitious to transform Berlin into a Weltstadt incorporating monumentality and the most advanced technology, Speer modelled his Berlin Project on plans developed by his modernist predecessors, including Ludwig Hilberseimer, Martin Mächler and Martin Wagner. In an attempt to reconcile inconsistent and competing aspirations both for historicity and for technological advancement, the planning of Berlin reflects the paradoxes of National Socialist ideology.

Andreas Kossert (German Historical Institute, Warsaw), "Promised Land?" Urban Myth and Shaping Modernity in Industrial Cities (Manchester-Lodz)
Two major European industrial cities, both myths of unlimited economic and social growth. So far, the cultural dimension of the myth as the industrial "Promised Land" has been largely ignored. Migrants of all social strata focused their desires on the overall goal of making that myth a reality. It has to be asked, how Manchester and Lodz were conceived as symbolic places and myths from outside as well as from their own citizens. The cities' fascinating attraction in nineteenth-century literature and culture became also one of the most persistent elements of urban society, though constantly challenged by the extreme changes of urbanisation and industrialisation. This paper offers an attempt to look more closely at how the cities' self-perception of the myth contributed to the shaping of everyday life and how the cities' imagination occupied public spaces in all its diverse aspects. Cultural exchange as well as intercultural tension dominated as a constitutive element the personal lives and constantly questioned the concept of the "Promised Land".

Christoph Lindner (University of Wales, Aberystwyth), Manhattan between the Sublime and the Uncanny
Using examples from a wide range of cultural production including literature, photography, painting, and architecture, this paper examines the cultural representation of Manhattan's modern skyline to consider how and why the changing silhouette of the city has come to emblematise various key moments of modernity. In particular, the paper draws on recent thinking in critical theory and urban studies to trace a line of cultural critique that runs in various directions from the visual iconography of photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbott to the urban meditations of writers like Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Toni Lorenzen (Humboldt University, Berlin), Marzahn im Kopf: Untersuchung des imaginären Potentials einer Gro§siedlung
In meinem Beitrag zu der Konferenz Imagining the City möchte ich untersuchen, welche Rolle imaginäre Vorstellungen in den unterschiedlichen Entwicklungsphasen der Gro§siedlung Marzahn im Nordosten Berlins gespielt haben. Der Vortrag wird zunächst einen †berblick über die Geschichte der Bilder von Marzahn geben und dabei schwerpunktmä§ig untersuchen, welche Bilder und Zukunfts-Visionen von dem Bezirk nach 1989 neu entstanden sind. Dabei will der Vortrag anhand des Beispiels Marzahn der Frage nachgehen, wie das bildhafte Potential von Städten beschrieben und erfasst werden kann. U.a. folgende Ebenen sollen betrachtet werden: das Image des Bezirks, in Bauten gefasste symbolische Repräsentationen sowie Visionen der zukünftigen Gestalt Marzahns. In einem weiteren Schritt werden die Bilder Marzahns in Beziehung gesetzt zu Veränderungsprozessen an anderen Orten der Stadt Berlin. Indem ihre symbolischen Dimensionen gelesen werden, trägt die Untersuchung zur Erarbeitung einer 'symbolischen Topographie' der Stadt Berlin nach 1989 bei und erweitert diese bis in die Peripherie der Stadt.

Oscar J. Martinez (University of Arizona), Imagining Ciudad Ju‡rez, Mexico: Myths and Realities of a Legendary Border City
This presentation will examine the historical forces that have contributed to the building of the decidedly notorious reputation of Ciudad Ju‡rez, a major urban center on the U.S.-Mexico border. Over time Ciudad Ju‡rez has acquired many epithets, including "Sin City," "Sodom," "Gomorrah," "Divorce Capital," "Drug Center," "Cheap Labor Town," and "Crime City." Among geographic circumstances and historical developments shaping Ciudad Ju‡rez's negative image are the border location, proximity to U.S. military bases, frontier conditions, economic dominance by the United States, liquor prohibition (1920-1933), exploitative assembly plants, and, more recently, runaway corruption and violence spawned by the "War on Drugs."  To the extent that time permits, I will address recent developments associated with hundreds of homicides and other crimes in Juarez over the last decade.

Lorna McNeur (University of Cambridge), NYC WTC 911: Native New Yorkers and the Soul of the City
"Death is a part of life, just as winter is a part of spring ...death means change. We can't expect one gift from the Creator without accepting the other. We can't live forever, or prevent anything from changing. We can only prepare ourselves for change.Nevertheless, it is tragic that so many who had so much to share with the world died so quickly." Following the destruction of the World Trade Centre, these haunting words hold as true today as they did for the Native Americans, whose chief wrote them three hundred and fifty years ago, following the desecration of their people, land, and culture on Manhattan Island;on the same soil as the lower Manhattan financial district, home of"Ground Zero". In this paper, I explore the transformations in the Manhattan landscape: from the once sacred island of the Native New Yorkers,the battles for land and life between the Native New Yorkers and the European Settlers, the gridding of the landscape and the erasure of all natural conditions. I discuss the messages emitted and the quality of life ensuing in the midst of a productivity and efficiency minded gridded urban landscape. I then look at how the essence of this urban ethos was embodied in the World Trade Center towers. Throughout, I am looking at the imbalances that can occur when there is superimposition rather than integration and appreciation for the inter-relationships between culture, politics, landscape and lives.

Irina Novikova (University of Latvia), Post-socialist Cities: Gendering Urban Imaginaries
This paper focuses on how gender constitutes urban political/cultural imaginations in Kiev and Riga in the span of the 1990s, the time of intensive geopolitical imaginations of "Europe." The paper addresses the complexity of post-socialist/post-Soviet cities as distinct spatial formations and imaginaries in the comparative perpsective. A basic interest of the paper is to understand the urban political imaginary as a gendered/gendering process in its relation to concepts like image and ideology in the specific historical context of post-socialism and the construction of new cultural identities. The cities selected for the presentation-Kiev and Riga-are interrelated urban entities in terms of their historical, cultural, symbolical productions of meaning. Historical forms of colonialism, and later, socialism, Sovietism and post-socialism have reproduced these cities' forms in complex and contested spaces layered with symbolic resonances, brutal histories, current conflicts and claims of projections towards their ideal futures as post-socialist answers to "the question of Utopia" that "would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change" (Jameson, 1991). Changes are imagined in both cities in the status of revived national capitals and in the context of geopolitical changes and concomitant political imaginations. The momentum of an enlarging European Union (Latvia has joined, Ukraine is only dreaming of joining) and of a broadening NATO alliance is pushing forward crucial changes of emphasis in dominant relations of power associated with issues of gender, race, ethnicity in both Eastern and Western parts of Europe. This implies the important question of "continuity in transformation"-what is the symbolic capital and which are the "texts" to be used in the process of re-imagining a place or a city? I propose the comparative analysis of how gender constitutes the diachronical and synchronical interfaces of the imaginative structure of a post-socialist city and engages "western" and "global" social structures of power and value, which also inform the professional ideologies of art, architecture, urban design, and planning-the professions which shape the "city."

Jenny Rahel Oesterle (University of Münster), The Topography of Sacral Space: Shaping City Structures for the Representation of Power in Early Medieval Europe and the Islamic World
This paper will focus on the exploitation of symbolic space by rulers in early medieval Islamic and European cities. The medieval European king as well as the Islamic caliph were sacral and political rulers at the same time. In both cultures, the changing of city structures by the ruler for matters of representation accordingly had on the one hand a political-representative and on the other hand a liturgical-religious impact. The links between both kinds of Herrschaftsrepräsentation and their expressions in the topography and architecture, especially the construction of symbolic settings in the city structure will be emphasized in my paper. The changes of the cities will be read as a source for the expression of the political and religious imaginary and the interdependencies of both. The particular interest of my inquiry lies in the question of symbolical use and change of the city for the formation of political imaginaries. How did the abbasid/fatimid Caliph and the Ottonian king express their political and sacral rulership in the city? In which way did they exploit symbolic places and/or construct symbolic settings, and what conflicts arose around symbolic places of the city if they were used for the ruler's representation?

Tony Phelan (Keble College, Oxford), Reading Paris: Political Hermeneutics in Heine's Lutezia
Heine's Lutezia recognizes the struggle for allegorical control in urban monuments and architecture, and achieves its critique by emphasizing and even indulging the ambiguity of cultural symbols and the allegories they set in motion. Heine observes the various attempts to harness significance for conflicting causes against the background of a long history.  Lutezia - Lutetia Parisorum - is a Roman name for Paris, from Book VI of Caesar's Gallic War. Paris-Lutezia, the modern city which still reveals the lineaments of an ancient city, is a space in which a classical tradition, of Empire as well as republicanism, is being contested.  In the passage from antiquity to modernity, the meaning of the past must be continually reassessed. In the day to day politics of the July Monarchy this struggle for the past is played out between a number of different parties: supporters of the constitutional monarch, the Bourbon legitimists, republicans, and communists. But Heine also recognizes various attempts to lay claim to the revolutionary and imperial traditions through the subordination and exploitation of the cultural and economic life of the city. Heine had remarked years earlier, ˆ propos of the fortification of Paris: 'Durch das Medium der Architektur gelangen wir daher vielleicht in die grö§ten Bewegungen der Politik.' However, there is a dominant form in which the July Monarchy rehearses its classical aspirations. The imitation of renaissance interiors and renaissance 'design' in the 1830s and 1840s indicates a special affinity. Heine's commentary in Lutezia brings a subtle analysis to bear on the renaissance style and on the psychology of fashion in general. Francis I is credited with having brought renaissance architecture from Italy to France. The present is haunted by the 'ghastly magic' of this period, like the memory of circumstances from a dream.  Heine indicates here that there may be an unconscious bond between changes in public taste, expressed in fashionability, and the political and ideological framework in which they occur.

S’ofra Pierse (University College, Dublin), Sincerely Imaginary: The City in Voltaire and Rousseau
To a writer like Voltaire, the city space offers great potential mobility, but arguably it presents a great threat for Rousseau. Working within a mobility/fragility paradigm which I have identified as a key characteristic of the portrayal of the city in eighteenth-century French literature, this paper proposes to take a new look at how the city space is manipulated, invented or exploited in a selection of texts by Voltaire and Rousseau. Starting from the premise that the city in fiction derives from the individual writer's imagination, this paper will focus on treatment of extra-urban exile (voluntary or otherwise), on depiction of the city in history, on the construction of urban identity, on concrete criticism and on idealistic symbolism. In the writing of two key figures of that century, each of these aspects will be assessed for traces of the imaginary city.

Genevive Québriac (University of Rennes), La Ville-espace de rencontre événementielle
Dans les pratiques artistiques contemporaines, la ville se manifeste comme un lieu de rencontres, d'expériences et de connaissances. L'Ïuvre d'art constitue un événement et engage la  sensibilité  du passant devenu acteur. Inscrite dans le tissu urbain, elle se manifeste sous forme commémorative (monument) et poétique (flottement de drapeau, enseigne, figure incongrue). A l'instar de jalons signalétiques, l'Ïuvre ponctue le tissu urbain ou opre comme point de ralliement. Ainsi, le jeu de co-présence physique du passant et de la ville, introduit cet acteur du thé‰tre urbain dans le spectacle en le faisant participer ˆ son élaboration cognitive. La ville support de mémoire et de discours tisse des liens avec la vie publique, politique et artistique. C'est en cela que la promenade urbaine retrace la chronologie d'évnements qui font appel ˆ la mémoire individuelle et collective.

Joan Ramon Resina (Cornell University), The Eye in Motion: Trains and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Barcelona
Arriving in Barcelona by train in 1873, the Italian writer Edmundo De Amicis experienced the transformation of the city through mechanized locomotion. Barcelona, the first Spanish city to introduce the railroad, was transformed by this innovation. With distances shortened, Catalonia was shrivelling to the size of a large conurbation, the Catalunya-ciutat, as Eugeni d'Ors would call it at the turn of the century. The revolution in transportation had multiple and enduring consequences. As the region shrank, places lost their previous identity. Multiplying the relations among formerly scattered centers, the railway transformed Catalonia from an imagined community into a perceived one at the very moment when industry disenchanted the natural world. The decade of 1876-1886, known to Catalans as "the gold rush," was the brightest in the century, and Barcelona was its epicenter. In his novel, La febre d'or, Narc’s Oller recreates the history of Barcelona in this period, when the city was filling out the topographic armature laid out by the engineer Ildefons Cerdˆ. Cerdˆ was persuaded that movement and communication, rather than architecture, were the principles of urban futurity. Putting this vision into practice, he designed the streets of the new Barcelona according to a futuristic conception of cities as stopping places in the infinite movement of world traffic, something like stations in the developing web of railroad transportation, from which he received inspiration.

Dorothy Rowe (Roehampton University of Surrey), Seeing Imperial Berlin: Lesser Ury, the Painter as Stranger
This paper will explore a metropolitan discourse of vision in which Berlin is iconographically structured for the purposes of looking and in which such acts of looking serve to smooth over "the infinite variety of the most divergent moods, emotions and thoughts" that, for Georg Simmel at least, could more readily be found in the oral and olfactory senses. Simmel's writings on space and on the senses offer a framework for the consideration of the dialectic between Berlin as a city of sight structured through a selection of Berlin street paintings produced by the artist Lesser Ury (1861-1931), who employed optimal painterly strategies in his rendering of some of the key visual tropes of urban modernity, and Berlin as a city of sounds, smells, tastes and touch subordinated to secure the panoramic gaze constructed and maintained through the move towards modernist visual culture in Ury's work and its critical reception during the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras.

Cornelia Ruhe (University of Konstanz), "Villes préméditées:" L'Imaginaire des métropoles
Le caractre dystopique des métropoles recourt ˆ un imaginaire commun pour la construction duquel la littérature a son mot ˆ dire. De Fjodor Dostoievskij (Carnets d'un sous-sol) ˆ Bernard-Marie Koltés (La nuit juste avant les forts), en passant par Albert Camus (La chute), un dialogue s'établit entre des textes d'origines différentes, qui contraste avec les monologues de leurs protagonistes. Il tisse un réseau intertextuel et interculturel dont la reconstitution permet d'accéder ˆ un nouveau niveau de lecture.

Ruth Schilling (Humboldt University, Berlin), Defending the Autonomy, Confirming the Hierarchical Order: The Ritual Definition of Boundaries in Early Modern European City Republics around 1600
Boundaries of territories and the definition of power positions in the pre-modern era were asserted by political ritual. Especially independent cities had to avoid carefully any formal mistake in receiving and accompanying foreign guests in order to secure themselves against attempts to diminish their status. The proposed paper shall look at the different forms of ritual definitions of independent cities' boundaries which did not only condition the city's appearance to the outside but also influenced the inner imagination and representation of the city's community. The period covered is the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, examples will be given from Venice and the Hanseatic Cities of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg.

Anatol Schneider (Berlin), Die Stadt der Gesellschaft
Der Begriff der Stadt ist semantisch ambivalent: einerseits meint er das bauliche Gefüge der Gebäude und Plätze, andererseits das soziale Leben, das sich dort abspielt, kurz: die Gesellschaft. Dies der Grund dafür, weshalb die Gesellschaft ihre Idealisierungsmöglichkeiten wie ihren moralischen Verfall stets im Bild der Stadt imaginiert hat. Der Vortrag verfolgt diese semantische Zweidimensionalität des Begriffs der Stadt und möchte zugleich Zweifel an seiner Verwendbarkeit angesichts der veränderten urbanen Situation in der Moderne wecken. Die These lautet: während die Tradition im Spiegel der Stadt die Gesellschaft zu sehen versuchte, geht es heute darum, im Spiegel der Gesellschaft die Stadt, oder besser das zu sehen, was an ihre Stelle getreten ist: die Agglomeration.

Anna Schober (University of Vienna), Political Squats: Cinema and City as Movers of the Real
Throughout the twentieth century different social and political groups constituted themselves around cinemas and handled them euphorically as spaces which seem, more than other city-spaces, suited to making interventions in ideological frameworks, to educating "the people" and deconstructing dominant myths. This paper investigates the tactics of these different groups and relates them to other tendencies and developments in urban social spaces of the last century-for example to a history of perception and of the direction of belief, to a change in public and private sphere and to a history of self-presentation. It will be shown that modern and postmodern cities and the cinema are constantly transforming themselves and are nevertheless bound together in a relationship of mutual need-they are both effects as well as agents of a certain change in perception and ways of existing in the western world since the nineteenth century.

Mireille Senn (University of Geneva), Venise-sujet ou objet de mémoire
L'histoire de Venise est une succession de mythes, certains sont anecdotiques et fantaisistes, d'autres se basent sur une réalité sociale: ils célbrent la vertu, la sagesse, l'inventivité et la liberté des Vénitiens, ou au contraire ils condamnent la tyrannie et les vices des citoyens de la République Sérénissime. De plus, ce sont des mythes qui ont la vie dure, au point que l'on peut dire avec Frederic Lane, historien spécialiste de cette ville, qu' "ˆ Venise, certains mythes sont devenus réalité tant ils ont faonné l'histoire." Si une ville peut tre conue comme l'endroit de l'intersection de l'identité historique et culturelle, qui se traduit par des représentations au travers de la littérature, de l'art pictural et architectural, des films et des perfomances, c'est Venise.

Janet Stewart (University of Aberdeen), Public Space, Public Speaking (Berlin-Vienna)
It has been argued that despite the abiding interest we have seen throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first in the city as an object of academic study, it is impossible to grasp such a complex entity in its entirety. Concurring with this view, this paper approaches the topic by focusing on one particular aspect of the whole: the status of each as a locus of oral culture. The paper is informed by the idea that there is a dialectical relationship between the metropolis and public speaking; the metropolis is both subject and site of public discourse. This paper explores this link between 'thought and discourse about space' and 'thought and discourse in space' by focusing on examples of the architecture of communication in two major European cities: Berlin and Vienna.

Werner Suppanz (University of Graz), Parade Ground of Modernity: The City as Metaphor of Competing Political Visions in the Habsburg Monarchy around 1900
This paper focuses on the discourse of relevant political parties (Social Democratic Party, Christian Social Party, and the German-national parties) in the Habsburg Monarchy around 1900 that held different concepts of the city (and of its Other, the country). What they had in common was the interpretation of the city as representation of modernity. Their different, often antagonistic ascriptions of meaning to modernity were likewise expressed by their attitudes to city life. Major themes of political discourse were e.g. the city as place of modern production, of individualized lifestyle, of loss of community and moral decay, of cosmopolitism respectively loss of national identity and character. These subjects contributed to the position of the parties within the discourse on modernity and modernization, at the same time they were used as arguments in the political struggle between urban center (Vienna) and rural periphery ("province").

Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway, University of London), The Anatomy of Paris: Monster Theory in the City
Literary depictions of Paris have frequently been read as commentaries on the artistic, political, social or economic nature of the city. The Paris of the nineteenth-century novel in particular has often been mapped by both authors and critics as a means of charting the French nineteenth-century. However whilst the state of the city has functioned as a kind of shorthand for the state of the French nation, another element of the nineteenth-century fascination with Paris has been overlooked. C.W. Thompson has recently argued that in Les Misérables, Victor Hugo establishes an elaborate set of metaphorical connections between the city and the human body. The bodies of his protagonists are described in terms borrowed from descriptions of the city whilst the city is described in strikingly bodily terms. And Hugo is not the only nineteenth-century novelist to imagine the city in terms of the human body. Sand, Balzac, Flaubert and Zola all employ similar metaphors. By reading the City as a Body, this paper uses the theories associated with the latter-specifically Monster Theory-to illuminate the former. This new approach to the city demonstrates that far from being a familiar space, nineteenth-century Paris is as disturbing and as visceral as the human bodies to which it is so often compared.

Maiken Umbach (University of Manchester), Nature in the Urban Space around 1900
The proposed paper arises from my current research on a group of architects and urban planners who worked in various German cities in the early twentieth century, and to whom I refer as 'vernacular modernists'. I focus particularly on the work of Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher, Richard Riemerschmid and Karl-Ernst Osthaus, all members of the German Werkbund, who were active principally in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Hagen respectively. The reformed city they sought to create promoted a socially more inclusive vision of citizenship; representations of civic 'history' were supplemented by allusions to a more generic collective memory; old traditions of burgher-liberty and particularism were transposed into the modern idioms of regionalism and vernacularism. These efforts were shaped by central dilemmas of liberalism. On the one hand, the reformers' designs mapped out a vision of spatial and social openness, which they identified with modernity. On the other hand, they were concerned to control the dynamics inherent in this openness, by resorting to historical prototypes and at times quite authoritarian spatial configurations. Their attitudes towards nature exemplify this ambiguity. From about 1900, the trope of nature and the 'natural life' had become buzzwords of political reform in Germany. Through aesthetic allusions to nature, but also in terms of urban planning (the garden-city movement, the creation of large-scale urban parks, and in new suburbs, where houses were harmoniously embedded in generous gardens), vernacular modernists in Germany sought to mobilize the perceived social benefits of nature for life in the city. At the same time, distinctive patterns of 'order', aesthetic, social and psychic, were inscribed into these green spaces, managing the movement and perceptions of people moving through them. This is exemplified by a close reading of some of Muthesius' suburban homes in Berlin, and Schumacher's Hamburg Stadtpark as well as the development of the banks of the river Alster.

Kristin Veel (University of Copenhagen), Cybercitizen: Urban Identity in Net Art
Traditionally the internet is regarded as an exponent of a globalised world of an urban character in which cultural, geographic, social, and economic differences are evened out between those who have access to the new technology. I wish to probe this assumption by taking a look at three artworks, which works and are displayed on the internet. The purpose is to examine the extent to which these artworks on one hand draw on traditional notions of identity as linked to geography and nationality and on the other hand the extent to which they seem to initiate an urban trans-geographical and globalised set of references which address an international audience. The three artworks chosen all attempt to create a dialog between physical and virtual space and interestingly enough the space chosen in all three examples are urban space. A fact which seems to reflect the way in which the so-called information society is an increasingly urban society and the ways in which it can be argued that traditional notions of identity and nationality in art are being by accompanied by the experience of urban space as a universal category.

Simon Ward (University of Aberdeen), The City of Ruins, the Ruins of the City?
The ruin is an ideal space of the imagination which offers the spectator a projection surface for new significations. Far from being a general anthropological figure with a single meaning, the ruin is functionalized differently in different historical contexts and within different forms of discourse. This paper examines how both future-oriented conceptions of the city as 'new' or more nostalgic conceptions of previous forms of urban organization are mediated through the meanings which are attributed to material remnants located in the urban space of West and East Berlin after 1945. This illustrates how far these familiar images of the city relate to other important cultural factors, such as the relationship between the human and the technical, and the symbolic and emotional meanings attached to urban space. Concluding with an examination of the meanings established for the remnants on the (re-)constructed Potsdamer Platz, the paper illustrates the role of such ruins in the ongoing debate concerning what constitutes urban space.

Stephanie Warnke (ETH Zurich), The Cold War of City Landmarks: Architecture in the Media in Berlin, 1950-70
The perception of urban space and its architectonical elements is strongly influenced by the mass media. During the post-war period, Berlin media conveyed concepts of urban space and visions of city planners to the public. Which part of the architectural debates reached a wider public? How did the media and popular literature mirror the search for a new, "democratic" architecture in the west or the claim for a new, socialist and at the same time national architecture in the east? To answer these questions, I will examine the reports of and comments on the most famous examples of city planning projects in post-war Berlin during the 1950s and 1960s in mass media and their representations and symbolic use in popular literature. The two main tasks of my paper are to understand more thoroughly how the perception of architecture is influenced in modern society, and to examine the correlation between the texts and images in the age of the "pictorial turn" of the media in the 1950s.

Edward Welch (University of Durham), Imagining the City of the Future: Paul Delouvrier's Schéma directeur and the Iconography of aménagement
This paper explores the texts and documents of the Schéma directeur d'aménagement et d'urbanisme de la région de Paris, the development plan for the Paris region drawn up in 1965 by Paul Delouvrier, which gave rise to some of the most significant environments of post-war Paris. It highlights in particular the pre-eminent role played by visual imagery in the construction and articulation of the project. Examining the importance accorded to maps, models and illustrations in expressing the planner's vision, and also the significant role they play in its mediation to the public at large, it argues that the iconography of the Schéma directeur is a privileged site for analysing the ideologies which drive the plan, and especially the Gaullist vision of society and modernity of which it is the clearest manifestation.

Albrecht Wiesener (Center for Research in Contemporary History, Potsdam), Socialist Modernity and Its Reverberations: The Construction of New Towns in Eastern Germany
In the 1950s and 1960s utopian expectations concerning urban life in the new socialist towns were widespread in Eastern Germany and openly discussed in architectural chronicles and in the literature of socialist realism. The problems of everyday life in the new socialist towns, however, the contradictions between the political expectations from above and the everyday experiences of urban dwellers were soon disconnected from the public discourse in Eastern Germany. By the end of the 1960s the concept of dwellers becoming New Men had been given up and the concept of a "Socialist City" was no longer considered the ultimate answer to the ambiguities of capitalist modernity. In my paper I will try to explain the decisive part the concept of a "Socialist City" played for the legitimacy and the political imaginary of communist rule in Eastern Germany over a period of 20 years. By focusing on the ovious gap between the general political ambitions and the everyday experiences of architects, local politicians and dwellers my paper will discuss the "Socialist City" as a highly contested symbolic space and distinct place of utopia.

Haim Yacobi (Ben Gurion University/Bezalel Academy of Art and Design), The "Mixed" City of Lod: Counter-Imagination, Power Relations, and Identity
In this paper I will present findings from fieldwork carried out in the "mixed city" of Lod. These include the development of a qualitative methodology-mainly discourse analysis-based on interviews with Arab inhabitants of the city. The main focus of the research is on personal urban narratives and imagination that explore the meaning of space in the construction of personal and collective identities. This perspective has been neglected by the urban field that tends to focus mainly on the quantitative aspects of social reality in contested cities, while ignoring the "hidden" aspects of everyday life and experience which are embodied within the structures of power-relations. The city of Lod, which will stand at the core of my paper, is defined by Israeli rhetoric as a "mixed city", an urban locus shared by an integrated population of both Jews and Arabs. However, a critical analysis of the socio-political and spatial dynamics in the city points to a different contested reality. Historically, until the war of 1948 and the establishment of the Israeli State, Lod was a Palestinian city. Since then the city has witnessed rapid transformation in the shape of Judiazation on one hand and de-Arabization, including the expulsion of most Palestinians on the other. Today, the Arab population of the city is a segregated ethno-national minority, subject to discrimination and socio-spatial exclusion. The findings to be presented in this paper analyze the effect of this socio-political context on the construction of personal and collective identities and imagination of the Palestinians I have interviewed in the city, as well as on their sense of belonging. Furthermore, in relation to some distinctive social theorists such as Bordieu and Lefebvre, this paper seeks to conceptualize the findings into a wider theory of power, identity and space.
Further information can be obtained from the organisers:

Dr David Midgley, Director of Studies in Modern Languages, St John's College, Cambridge CB2 1TP, United Kingdom, Telephone: +44 (0)1223 338779, Fax: +44 (0)1223 337720, E-mail: drm7@joh.cam.ac.uk

Dr Christian Emden, Assistant Professor, Rice University, Department of German & Slavic Studies, Houston, TX 77005, USA, Telephone: (+1) 713-348-5312, Fax: (+1) 713-348-4863, E-Mail: emden@rice.edu, URL: http://lang.rice.edu/germanfaculty/emden.html