Mansfield vignette “I” (evoking a literary London)

“Away beyond the line of dark houses there is a sound like the call of the sea after a storm – passionate, solemn, strong. I lean far out of my window in the warm, still night air. Down below, in the Mews, the little lamp is singing a silent song. It is the only glow of light in all this darkness. Men swilling the carriages with water; their sudden, sharp, exclamations; the faint, thin cry of a very young child, the chiming of a bell from the church close by – these are the only other sounds, impersonal, vague, intensely agitating.
It is at this hour and in this loneliness that London stretches out eager hands towards me, and in her eyes is the light of knowledge. ‘In my streets,’ she whispers, ‘there is the passing of many feet, there are lines of flaring lights, there are cafes full of men and women, there is the intoxicating madness of night music, a great glamour of darkness, a tremendous anticipation, and, o’er all, the sound of laughter, half sad, half joyous, yet fearful, dying away in a strange shudder of satisfaction, and then swelling out into more laughter.’ The men and women in the cafes hear it. They look at each other suddenly, swiftly, searchingly, and the lights seem stronger, the night music throbs yet more madly.
Out of the theatres a great crowd of people stream into the streets. There is the penetrating rhythm of the hansom cabs.
Convention has long since sought her bed. With blinds down, with curtains drawn, she is sleeping and dreaming.
Do you not hear the quick beat of my heart? Do you not feel the fierce rushing of blood through my veins?
In my streets there is the answer to all your achings and cryings. Prove yourself, permeate your senses with the heavy sweetness of the night. Let nothing remain hidden. Who knows that in the exploration of your mysteries you may find the answer to your questionings.” (p.4)

Ref: (italics in original) Ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (1990) Poems of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland, Melbourne, Oxford: Oxford University Press

cities: ‘the intersections of multiple narratives’

“Doreen Massey describes cities as ‘the intersections of multiple narratives’, a nexus of distinctive and coexisting stories.” (p.1)

“But when does a city become a global city and is this the same as a ‘metropolis’? And what of the ‘modern’ city? In one of its main uses, emphasizing the economic, technological and social character of urban development, the ‘modern’ city was the ‘industrial city’, with nineteenth century Manchester as its pre-eminent example. In the related sense deriving the modern from the Enlightenment tradition of rational scientific and human progress, the example would be late nineteenth century Paris. Other European cities (and this is a Eurocentric tradition), such as Vienna or Berlin, though of lesser stature and with their own distinctive characters, followed this second modern type. But both types were then decisively outdistanced by London at the end of the nineteenth century. The term ‘metropolis’ had been used earlier in the century to help comprehend London’s growing size and its national and international function, and by the 1840s it had emerged ahead of manchester as ‘the Empire’s commercial stronghold and as the world’s financial capital’. By 1890, London was the largest city the world [-p.5] had known with a population of 5.5 million, and easily qualified for the description, ‘A modern big city of international importance’ as Andrew Lees glosses the related term ‘Weltstadt’. London was, however, a distinctively imperial capital, at ‘the heart of the empire’ in C.F.G. Masterman’s pointed title of 1901, whose every advantage, especially its ports, maintained its commercial, administrative and political hegemony in the world. Schneer prefers on these grounds to describe the London of 1900 as an ‘imperial metropolis’. And this helps emphasise the type of global city London was – one whose pre-eminence was founded on a commanding economic and political position and depended on the mechanisms of military, ideological and administrative power. Globalization in this case, therefore, or this kind of globalization, implied conquest and exploitation, and the ideological processes of conversion, assimilation and subordination. The term ‘metropolis’ (from Greek ‘mother city’), further implied that London performed a co-ordinating role in the nexus of power and control that defined Empire. Arguably, the shape and style of the city as well as its major forms of employment supported it in this role. Thus, in the 1900s, London employed 20,000 colonial administrators, while colonial investments enabled the wealthy to settle in the West End and to enjoy its developing communications systems, theatre and new department stores (Selfridges opened in 1909, Heals in 1917). The very physical appearance of turn of the century London – the use of ‘Edwardian’ or ‘classical baroque’ for buildings in Whitehall and elsewhere and the construction of Kingsway as an imperial avenue from the Strand to Holborn – played its part too in asserting the merits and magnificence of Empire.
Other European cities developed as variations on this model of world or imperial global cities. New York, however, introduced a new type. For it was not a political but a commercial capital, and was above all a cultural city in which the famous symbolic verticality of its skyscrapers, the ambitious iron work of its bridges and its elevated transport system conveyed a sense of the modern as ‘newness’ in the here and now. By the 1920s, new York was ‘the type of the modern metropolis’, a model which spoke of the present and of an imagined future society in a way London, Berlin or Paris did not. This symbolic role was part, we have to recognize too, of New York’s own global identity: the shape of things to come, calling other older nations and their citizens to a new future.
Saskia Sassen suggests this future has come to pass, after a fashion at [-p.6] least. For ‘the agglomeration of high rise corporate offices we see in New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo… has emerged as a kind of representation of advanced city form, the image of the post-industrial city’. But this homogeneity of urban forms in the economic sectors of cities worldwide, is intersected, Sassen adds, by other tendencies in outlying districts associated with the traditional working class and new immigrant communities ‘beyond the central urban core’. Thus finance capital and old labour, white middle class and immigrant poor, coexist in uneasy juxtaposition and Sassen goes on to detail the disparities as well as the connections between these groups and neighbourhoods.
“How is this different from an earlier New York? In terms of its general structural morphology it is not different. Like other global cities, New York continues to exhibit tensions throughout the period between homogenization and decentralization, between the transnational and the local, or between rationality and pluralism There are differences in scope and scale, however, bordering on a difference in kind. For in the later period globalization has produced a different ‘World Order’ in which the technologies of power are controlled by an ‘electronic herd’ (Friedman, 1999), rather than Tammany Hall, and the instrumental rationality which served mid-century capitalism has shifted from the boardroom to the faceless, indeed placeless, information and finance networks or ‘flows’ which circuit the globe. The last two decades have seen the undermining if not erosion of the manufacturing base of the first generation global cities, the widely noted expansion of the service sector, the growth of uniform consumer outlets, the recruitment of workers in all sectors to short term contracts and the extremely rapid development and inescapable penetration of information and media technologies.
These are the features of ‘post-Fordism‘, so named because of the passing of a way of work and of life embodied in the production techniques, work practices and controlling influence of the magnate Henry T. Ford over his workforce and their families. Fordism presents a model of monopoly capitalism, or of early to mid-century modernity: the emblem of a productivist economy before the swing into predominantly consumer societies. In post-Fordism the rock-like associations instilled by the Fordist factory regimen between class, masculinity, workplace and hours of work, and of women and the home, have proved porous, while our social, ethnic, sexual and psychic lives have been further moulded by media technologies. The world is in the home: by way of the PC monitor or TV screen, or, what might be the [-p.7] same thing, is nowhere particularly. The effect, as many writers and commentators have noted, is dramatic, especially in the city, where these developments have produced a sense of new possibility and self-invention alongside a sense of unbelonging and an urban mentality of fear, paranoia or nostalgia..” (pp.4-7)

“…from the beginning of the century… The metropolis was thought to be without balance and harmony, a landscape of physical and psychic extremes in which the modern citizen was subjected to the mayhem of the city’s ungoverned, shapeless sprawl, or to the tedium of its unrelieved sameness. Either way, the metropolis appeared to spell the end of community. Both the imagined national and collective class communities were in a sense defined by these conditions but constituted themselves outside and against them.
At least one further kind of community of a different type did emerge from within these conditions, however: the artistic community comprised of a temporary and fragile alliance of emigres who, as Williams puts it elsewhere, shared the medium of their art and the divergent project we have come to know as modernism. The artistic medium, which centrally held their interest, was reworked to express an altered mentality and simultaneously register the time of a new modernity. For if realism was the representational mode of the earlier type of community and experience of synchronous time, new modes were required to capture the experience of the anonymous crowd and multiple times of the metropolitan scene.” (p.18)

“But if community depends on sameness, what, in a world of mobile peoples and circulating commodities, where local, national and global intersect, remains the same?” (p.22)

“Certain key and recurrent terms […] – estrangement, collage, hybridity, syncretism – begin to offer a common vocabulary for reflexive modern and postcolonial communities and for the mixed discourses of a reflexive aesthetic.” (p.23)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold mine) Peter Brooker (2002) Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film, and Urban Formations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan

More urban change questions

More interesting questions about humans and cities and nature…

“What is the relationship between humans and nature? How does this question play out in the specific micro-environments of cities?” (p.71)

Ref: Nicholas Low, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Green and Darko Radovic (2005) The Green city: Sustainable homes, sustainable suburbs. Routledge, Abingdon and New York; and UNSW Press, Sydney

urban change questions

These questions are posed in the context of sustainable urban development, but I think them both interesting and relevant to fictional concerns (perhaps especially those of urban fantasy and fiction more generally?):

“Ultimately,” write, “the green city will reflect a rather different future for work. On this topic there are some very large questions: can a future of cities competing against one another in world markets be reconciled with a benign future for the environment? What are the limits of competition and how can they be enforced? Does economic growth itself have limits? How can growth be steered into environmentally benign forms of production? What forms of governance are required to regulate world markets in order to guarantee social security and environmental conservation? How do culture, place and climate influence work patterns, and consequently the physical accommodation of work?” (p.132)

Ref: Nicholas Low, Brendan Gleeson, Ray Green and Darko Radovic (2005) The Green city: Sustainable homes, sustainable suburbs. Routledge, Abingdon and New York; and UNSW Press, Sydney

Steampunk – ok I think I get it

My partner asked me to define steampunk and I got stuck when he said, ‘so, like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea‘. I realised I couldn’t offer a ‘clear’ ‘definition’ and wasn’t sure how the genre wrote its own history, so… I got my hands on Henry Winchester’s Steampunk… easy to read, lots of direction on how to explore the genre (across genres), beautiful art, thank you thank you…

‘Push past the artificial boundary of time to ask the real questions: What does it mean to be human? What are we going to do with all this technology? How can we create the future we want and need?’
James H. Carrott (quoted p.14)

“Steampunk is such a wide and varied term that it’s quite difficult to nail down, but in a nutshell it’s a way of looking at the future based on the collective imagination of the past. The past in question is generally defined as the period of Queen Victoria’s rule in Britain, from 1837 until 1901. During this time the Industrial Revolution caused huge social and economic change, and steam-powered factories and vehicles completely changed the face of the Western world. However, steampunk doesn’t just take ideas from this period – it also raids other parts of history, such as Wild West conflicts and 1930s Art Deco.” (p.10)

“As we look back through time, it’s easy to see things that we could now consider ‘steampunk’ – the design of the submarine in Disney’s movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), or the premise of Ronald W. Clark’s novel Queen Victoria’s Bomb (1967), in which a nuclear weapon is created during the Victorian Era. But steampunk as we know it today began primarily as a form of literature in the early 1980s. Its analogue, mechanical nature was intended as a riposte to cyberpunk’s tales of the digital and the binary, and a big part of steampunk’s attraction remains the way in which it rejects sleek modern technology in favour of something more primitive.” (pp.10-13 (pictures only on pp.11,12))

“There remains a great divide in the steampunk world between those who simply embrace its unique aesthetic, and those who delve into its rich literary trappings. It’s best summed-up by Reginald Pikedevant’s humorous song ‘Just Glue Some Gears On It (and Call it Steampunk)’, in which he states that: ‘Calling things “steampunk” to try to sound cool makes you look like a bloody fool!’ It’s an incisive view into what steampunk has become to some people, transferred from a well-informed and meaningful discourse into the mere act of applying a layer of fake brass to an everyday object and, indeed, gluing some gears on it.” (p.14)

“The Industrial Revolution changed everything in the Victorian era – including fashion. The sewing machine was arguably as important an invention as the car or the steam engine, and huge factories could pump out hundreds of items of clothing a day. It became critically important for the ruling classes to be well dressed. However, this revolution was contrasted with a prudish attitude towards what women could wear….” (p.21) “The Victorian era saw the beginnings of a shift in gender politics towards women.” (p.21)

“Of course, if you dress in a purely Victorian style you’ll be mistaken for someone from the nineteenth century. The word ‘punk’ was added to steampunk for a reason, and the late-1970s movement pioneered both music and fashion. Key to the latter was the idea of recycling items found in charity shops, and customizing second-hand clothes with rips and badges. It parallels the steampunk movement nicely as both are based on ideas of taking something from the past and retrofitting it to create something modern and eye-catching.” (p.24)

“Despite being such an aesthetically-based movement, steampunk’s roots lie primarily in literature. It plucks elements of classic novels by Dickens, Shelley and Wells and stirs in modern facets, or says what could have only been whispered in Victorian times. Steampunk is, in a way, a set template onto which authors can apply their own ideas and build upon those of others. One author may write about the role of women in Victorian society by creating a superpowered heroin, whereas another may comment on the class system by envisaging a race of clockwork robots who do humans’ dirty work.” (p.32)

Apparently, the phrase was coined by K. W. Jeter, who “forwarded a copy of Morlock Night to the influential science fiction magazine Locus, accompanied with a letter. ‘Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself,’ he wrote. ‘Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like “steam-punks”, perhaps.'” (p.44)

Cityscapes

One thing that does interest me is the apparent importance of cities to this genre. Hadn’t put two and two together there. Certainly, Winchester places the subtitle ‘Cityscapes’ at the forefront of his whole discussion; in this he writes: “Our journey begins a long time ago, in a place familiar yet different: London in the Victorian age. It was a time of great change, of tectonic shifts that changed the face of the earth. But this isn’t London as you or anyone remembers it. This is a London that’s been mutated by the obsessions of the modern age. It’s a London in which empires never fell, in which vampires came to occupy the throne, in which steam powers just about everything.” (P.9)

Further on, he notes: “Victorian London is the setting for the vast majority of steampunk, but it’s not the only one – some stories take place in a far-flung, post-apocalyptic future, whereas others take place in an alternative version of the present day. As a genre it fits broadly into science fiction, which predicts tomorrow based on today’s technology, but the twist is that it’s predicting tomorrow based on yesterday’s technology. Steampunk also pulls in many other genres, such as the romance, mystery, adventure and horror novels, all of which are blended to create interesting and exciting tales.” (p.32)

“Strange cities certainly took a hold on steampunk in the early 2000s. Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines (2001) applies Darwinian thought to the evolution of cities themselves….” (p.50)

“Metropolises are an ideal setting for steampunk illustrations and artists can go to town (literally!) on background details.” (p.97)

‘The punk in steampunk is partly nineteenth century adventure, which was not self conscious, crossed with twentieth century characters who are self-conscious.’ Tim Powers
(quoted p.42)

Reference: Henry Winchester (2014) Steampunk: Fantasy Art, Fiction, Fashion and the Movies. London: Flame Tree Publishing

NB websites the book refers us on to include:

http://www.steampunk.wikia.com
http://www.ministryofpeculiaroccurrences.com
http://www.steampunkscholar.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.steampunklab.com
http://www.steampunkworkshop.com
http://www.thesteampunkhome.blogspot.co.uk

http://www.steamcon.org
http://www.steampunk.synthasite.com
http://www.steampunkworldsfair.com

http://www.steampunkcostume.com

http://www.littlesteampunkshop.co.uk

http://www.steamwords.wordpress.com (though Winchester notes that KW Jeter is more active on Twitter @kwjeter)
http://www.jamespblaylock.com
http://www.theworksoftimpowers.com

http://www.philip-pullman.com
http://www.multiverse.org
http://www.nealstephenson.com / @nealstephenson
http://www.stephen-baxter.com
http://www.chinamieville.net
http://www.philip-reeve.com
http://www.stephenhunt.net
http://www.ekaterinasedia.com
http://www.gailcarriger.com
http://www.scottwesterfeld.com
http://www.gdfalksen.com

Also note, The Libratory Steampunk Art Gallery (in Oamaru) http://www.localist.co.nz/l/giznva

gated communities as barometers

According to Atkinson & Blandy:

“Gated communities represent a new or at least relatively novel form of housing development in the European context and their number is increasing. With growing consumer and media interest the US and South African models of such development may form templates for understanding this direction in preferences, primarily directed by fear, privacy and predictability. What is less clear is why such development is growing in societies characterised by lower prevailing crime rates and higher levels of social cohesion. In this sense perhaps gated communities might be seen as barometers indicating the future shape and scale of social forces linked to social fear and aspirations toward ex-territoriality (Bauman, 2000). In this sense the significance of gated communities lies less in their number and more in what they say about a wider bundle of social pressures now directing where and how people live.” (p.184)

“The club good of security and neighbourhood services represented by gated communities resemble new medieval city-states wherein residents pay dues and are protected, literally as their ‘citizens’. With the growth of these gated mini-states, the argument has been that gated residents should not have to pay twice for services they already receive. This may ultimately have the effect that entitlements to vital aspects of citizenship, such as security, welfare and environmental services, become based on which neighbourhood one lives in.” (p.185)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold, mine) Rowland Atkinson & Sarah Blandy (2005): Introduction: International Perspectives on The New Enclavism and the Rise of Gated Communities, Housing Studies, 20:2, 177-186

Gated communities – Atkinson and Blandy

Introducing a volume of papers on gated communities, Rowland Atkinson & Sarah Blandy explain that:

“Gated communities (hereafter GCs) have been defined in a number of ways. These definitions tend to cluster around housing development that restricts public access, usually through the use of gates, booms, walls and fences. These residential areas may also employ security staff or CCTV systems to monitor access. In addition, GCs may include a variety of services such as shops or leisure facilities. The growth of such private spaces has provoked passionate discussion about why, where and how these developments have arisen. This volume presents an opportunity to gather together contemporary and diverse views on what is at least commonly agreed to be a radical urban form.
The apparently ‘unique’ characteristics of GCs present immediate problems for an accurate definition. Should we include flats with door entry systems, tower blocks with concierge schemes or partially walled housing estates, even detached houses with their own gates? Among this confusion we suggest that the central feature of GCs is the social and legal frameworks which form the constitutional conditions under which residents subscribe to access and occupation of these developments, in combination with the physical features which make them so conspicuous.

Living in a gated community means signing up to a legal framework which allows the extraction of monies to help pay for maintenance of common-buildings, common services, such as rubbish collection, and other revenue costs such as paying staff to clean or secure the neighbourhood. However, such legal frameworks can also be found in many thousands of non-gated homeowner associations in the US, and indeed in blocks of leasehold flats in England. This leads us back to the important physical aspects of these developments. Where a combination is found of these socio-legal agreements and a physical structure which includes gates and walls enclosing space otherwise expected to be publicly accessible, we can finally achieve some clarity of definition. Gated communities may [-p.178] therefore be defined as walled or fenced housing developments, to which public access is restricted, characterised by legal agreements which tie the residents to a common code of conduct and (usually) collective responsibility for management.” (pp.177-178) [although Atkinson and Blandy do note further down that many residents are not well-read on the nature of these agreeements (p.183)]

Atkinson & Blandy continue: “While this definition may be useful it is often argued that gated communities express more than a simple constellation of particular physical and socio-legal characteristics. In the built environment around us we increasingly see examples of an attempt to boost defensible space and the means to exclude the unwanted. This has meant that we can now observe a continuum of ‘gating’ which can be seen moving between symbolic and more concrete examples. Suburban areas with booms across private roads, housing estates with ‘buffer zones’ of grass and derelict land, and cul-de-sacs all express a mark of exclusion to non-residents with varying degrees of efficacy. All of these built forms suggest a lack of ‘permeability’ in the built environment directed at achieving increasingly privatised lifestyles, predominantly through the pursuit of security. It is this attempt at self-imposed exclusion from the wider neighbourhood, as well as the exclusion of others from the gated community, which has driven a much wider debate about the relative merits of gating and other strategies to achieve security, when set alongside other key concerns such as freedom of access to the wider city, social inclusion and territorial justice.” (p.178)

Under the title “The Fortified Neighbourhood” (which I rather like), Atkinson and Blandy acknowledge that “It is now well documented that gated communities can be seen as a response to the fear of crime (Atkinson et al., 2004) but other drivers also appear significant. In particular the desire for status, privacy and the investment potential of gated dwellings all form important aspects of the motivation to live behind gates.” (p.178)

“Many have argued that GCs represent a search for community with residents seeking contact with like-minded people who socially mirror their own aspirations. While advertising by developers (primarily in America) draws on this communitarian ideology it has been clear to some that the idea of a gated ‘community’ is something of an oxymoron. Increasing numbers of recorded neighbour disputes and conflict between residents and their management companies suggest at least as many problems as are found in ‘normal’ developments (see for example, Linford, 2001). …. In this volume Evan McKenzie picks up on this theme and argues that gated communities increasingly contain residents openly hostile to the strictures to which they have signed up…. The possibility that GCs contain some kind of built-in obsolescence may become increasingly apparent.” (p.179)

“Even before getting into a debate about the relative merits of gating we find systematic research which suggests that the shelter from fear that gated communities appear to
represent soon fades once residents move in. Research by Low (2003) suggests that living ‘behind the gates’ actually promotes fear of the unknown quantities of social contact
outside them. The lack of predictability and experience of people in social situations outside these compounds appears to play out most strongly for the young, particularly those brought up in gated communities. / In fact, perceived safety and actual crime rates have been found to be no different between gated communities and similar, but non-gated, high-income American neighbourhoods.” (p.181)

“We have argued that the contractual legal framework is an essential characteristic of GCs. These detailed rules indicate a different and much more formal structure than the framework of informal rights and rules developed in a neighbourhood through “neighbours understanding the importance of maintaining a shared and reciprocated set of values and neighbourhood attributes” (Webster, 2003, p. 2606). It has been suggested [-p.183] that GCs are an example of a much wider rise in contractual governance, resulting from the new relationship between state, market and civil society, designed to address concerns about social order: the contract of membership takes centre stage in the age of ‘responsibilisation’, in which “exclusion from club goods may be tantamount to exclusion from key aspects of citizenship.” (Crawford, 2003, p. 500).” (pp.182-183)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold, mine) Rowland Atkinson & Sarah Blandy (2005): Introduction: International Perspectives on The New Enclavism and the Rise of Gated Communities, Housing Studies, 20:2, 177-186

The right to the city – Marcuse

Considering the global crisis in its historical context, Peter Marcuse poses the question:

“What does the Right to the City mean? More specifically: Whose Right are we talking about? What Right is it we mean? What City is it to which we want the right? Henri Lefebvre popularized the slogan in 1968, but he was more provocative than careful in its usage. The best definition he gave is:
‘… the right to the city is like a cry and a demand. This right slowly meanders through the surprising detours of nostalgia and tourism, the return to the heart of the traditional city, and the call of existent or recently developed centralities.’ (Lefebvre, 1967, p. 158)
In other places he has it meandering through:
‘the right to information, the rights to use of multiple services, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in urban areas; it would also cover the right to the use of the center’. (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 34)
So: whose right, what right and to what city?” (p.189)

According to Marcuse, “Lefebvre’s right is both a cry and a demand, a cry out of necessity and a demand for something more. Those are two separate things. I would reformulate them to be an exigent demand by those deprived of basic material and existing legal rights, and an aspiration for the future by those discontented with life as they see it around them, perceived as limiting their own potentials for growth and creativity.

“The demand comes from those directly in want, directly oppressed, those for whom even their most immediate needs are not fulfilled: the homeless, the hungry, the imprisoned, the persecuted on gender, religious, racial grounds. It is an involuntary demand, those whose work injures their health, those whose income is below subsistence. The cry comes from the aspiration of those superficially integrated into the system and sharing in its material benefits, but constrained in their opportunities for creative activity, oppressed in their social relationships, guilty perhaps for an undeserved prosperity, unfulfilled in their lives’ hopes.” (p.190)

“Looked at economically, the cry for the Right to the City here comes from the most marginalized and the most underpaid and insecure members of the working class, not from most of the gentry, the intelligentsia, the capitalists.” (p.191)

“The right to the city is a claim and a banner under which to mobilize one side in the conflict over who should have the benefit of the city and what kind of city it should be. It is a moral claim, founded on fundamental principles of justice, of ethics, of morality, of virtue, of the good. ‘Right’ is not meant as a legal claim enforceable through a judicial process today (although that may be part of the claim as a step in the direction of realizing the Right to the City). Rather, it is multiple rights that are incorporated here: not just one, not just a right to public space, or a right to information and transparency [-p.193] in government, or a right to access to the center, or a right to this service or that, but the right to a totality, a complexity, in which each of the parts is part of a single whole to which the right is demanded. The homeless person in Los Angeles has not won the right to the city when he is allowed to sleep on a park bench in the center. Much more is involved, and the concept is as to a collectivity of rights, not individualistic rights. The demand is made as a right not only in a legal sense but also in a moral sense, a claim not only to a right as to justice within the existing legal system but a right on a higher moral plane that claims a better system in which the demands can be fully and entirely met.” (pp.192-193)

“What city?” Marcuse asks, replying: “Lefebvre is quite clear on this: it is not the right to the existing city that is demanded, but the right to a future city, indeed not necessarily a city in the conventional sense at all, but a place in an urban society in which the hierarchical distinction between the city and the country has disappeared.” (p.193) … “And in fact not a city at all, but a whole society. The ‘urban’ is only a synecdoche and a metaphor, in Lefebvre (1967, pp. 158, 45)….” (p.193)

“The principles that such a city would incorporate can be set forth in general. They would include concepts such as justice, equity, democracy, the full development of human potentials or capabilities, to all according to their needs, from all according to their abilities, the recognition of human differences. They would include terms such as sustainability and diversity, but these are rather desiderata in the pursuit of goals rather than goals in themselves. But there is a limit to how much benefit can be gained from trying to spell those principles out in clear terms today. Such a city is not to be predicted in detail, as Lefebvre often said….” (p.193)

“What all but the most old-fashioned utopian proposals …have in common is a rejection of the idea that the most desirable future can be spelled out, designed, defined, now, in advance, except in the most broad principles. Only in the experience of getting there, in the democratic decisions that accompany the process, can a better future be formed. It is not for lack of imagination or inadequate attention or failing thought that no more concrete picture is presented, but because, precisely, the direction for actions in the future should not be preempted, but left to the democratic experience of those in fact implementing the vision.” (p.194)

“A critical urban theory, dedicated to supporting a right to the city, needs to expose the common roots of the deprivation and discontent, and to show the common nature of the demands and the aspirations of the majority of the people. A critical urban theory can develop the principles around which the deprived and the alienated can make common cause in pursuit of the Right to the City. How to politicize most effectively that common ground? We already have sectors of society where the commonality is visible, where action for people, not for profit, is the rule.” (p.195)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in blue bold mine) Peter Marcuse (2009): From critical urban theory to the right to the city, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 13:2-3, 185-197

ABSTRACT: The right to the city is becoming, in theory and in practice, a widespread, effective formulation of a set of demands to be actively thought through and pursued. But whose right, what right and to what city? Each question is examined in turn, first in the historical context of 1968 in which Henri Lefebvre first popularized the phrase, then in its meaning for the guidance of action. The conclusion suggests that exposing, proposing and politicizing the key issues can move us closer to implementing this right.

Reference is to: Lefebvre, H. (1996 [1967]) ‘The Right to the City’, in E. Kofman and E. Lebas (eds) Writings on Cities, pp. 63–184. London: Blackwell.

the fear of crime as a phenomenon shaping the life of cities

Over a decade ago (and, perhaps significantly(?), before 9/11), Rachel Pain reviewed the literature on “fear of crime as a phenomenon shaping the life of cities” (p.899), focusing on  “debates on race, age, gender and fear in the city, as these are the social identities which have received most attention.” (p.899). She wrote:

“Much thinking about social identity and fear of crime has tended to be dichotomised. … For example, different groups of young people are widely constructed either as threatening, or threatened; there are powerful discourses which position people of colour as offenders or victims; and in much of the literature men are viewed as fearless but fear-provoking, and women as fearful and passive. Such dualisms reflect a wider criminological fallacy that certain groups commit crime and other are victims of it (except for people in low-income areas who are widely viewed as involved in both). Recent research is pointing to the diversity and complexity of issues around social identity and fear; so that although theoretical frameworks can and should be developed (one which emphasises social exclusion is applied in this paper), the currency of stereotypes and even the usefulness of gender, race and age as social categories need to be critically appraised and the intersections between different identities in their relationships to crime and fear require further exploration. Another set of dualisms which the geographical literature has begun to problematise is around the spaces and places in which fear is situated—for example, public versus private, safe versus dangerous, low-income estates versus suburbs—and the ways in which people negotiate them. In fact, most discussions of fear in the city deal only with public spaces which are shared with strangers. As recent research has shown, crimes such as domestic violence, acquaintance violence and elder abuse also have a role to play in the construction of fear. This paper includes in its scope homes, workspaces and other private and semiprivate places, which are as much a part of ‘the urban’ as streets, shopping malls and parks. While many people strongly associate fear with speciŽfic places, reflecting wider [-p.900] ideologies of public space as dangerous and private space as safe, fear and safety in different spaces are interconnected—for example, experiences of danger in private space affect feelings of security in public at an individual and societal level.” (pp.899-900)

For the purposes of this paper, Pain defines ‘fear of crime as “as the wide range of emotional and practical responses to crime and disorder made by individuals and communities.” (p.901)

“Fear of crime can be considered to create and reinforce exclusion from social life and from particular urban spaces in a number of ways [which she goes on to discuss ].” (p.902)

“Almost every survey of fear of crime Ž finds that women report being more fearful of crime than men. Whether in the home, the workplace or the city, it is fear of sexual violence and harassment from men which underpins women’s higher fear (Gordon and Riger, 1989; Valentine, 1989). Feminists have viewed women’s higher fear of crime as a manifestation of gender oppression and a damaging form of control of women’s lives, reproducing traditional notions about women’s ‘place’ in society (Hanmer and Saunders, 1984; Pain, 1991; Valentine, 1989).” (p.903) “However, there are some conflicts between theoretical development and empirical evidence around women’s fear of urban spaces […and it has been suggested] that men’s fear may be considerably higher than previously thought….” (p.903)

“Much relevant research on women’s fear has revolved around two key paradoxes. / The Ž first and earliest is the paradox between levels of fear and violence discussed in the introduction—when women’s high fear of crime was Žfirst discovered, it appeared far greater than their actual risks of victimisation….” (p.903) “A second paradox has been identiŽfied and explored by geographers—most research shows a mismatch between the types of location in which physical and sexual violence usually occur (private space) and the locations in which most women fear (public spaces), calling into question the idea that levels of victimisation can explain fear alone. To resolve this spatial paradox, feminists have argued that women are misinformed about the main location of danger, through the institutions of the family, the education system and the media (Hanmer and Saunders, 1984; Valentine, 1989). More recent research has indicated that misinformation does underlie fear in public space; most women are aware that domestic violence is more common than stranger attacks, but this knowledge has little effect on their fear of crime unless they have personal experience of domestic violence (Pawson and Banks, 1993; Pain, 1997).” (p.903)

“…feminist writers such as Wilson (1991) have emphasised that the city is frequently a place of excitement and opportunity for women, not just a place to be feared. City centre spaces at once have varying meanings to different people (Pain and Townshend, forthcoming). / Different notions of femininity are also entwined with different constructions of the fear of crime. For example, some have suggested that the emphasis on ‘fear’ and its negative consequences in writing about women and crime reproduces notions about feminine weakness (Segal, 1990).” (p.904) [I couldn’t help thinking about the typical kick-ass female protagonist of much (recent!) urban fantasy here…]

“Koskela’s (1997) analysis of women’s fear of attack in Finland emphasises that women respond to the threat of crime with ‘boldness’ as well as fear and ‘spatial conŽfidence’ as well as spatial avoidance.” (p.904)

Meanwhile, “In direct contrast to women, men’s low reported fear of crime appeared anomalous from the earliest crime surveys because they experienced relatively high rates of violence. Aggregate data suggest that men are largely at risk from strangers and acquaintances in public places including streets, pubs and clubs, but there is also a risk from partners in the home.” (p.905)

“Where men have been the subject of qualitative research, this has suggested that, at least for some, the effects of fear may be just as great as for women (Gilchrist et al., 1998; Stanko and Hobdell, 1993). Gilchrist et al. (1998) examine the cases of fearful men and fearless women in order to demonstrate that fear and boldness, although they may be gendered, are not essentially female or male qualities.” (p.905)

“…it is inappropriate to deal with race, gender, age and other social identities simply as descriptive categories in analysis of the fear of crime. Rather, in each case, fear of crime (and the crimes feared) are often structured by age, race and gender, as this paper has outlined. When gender, age and race are viewed as social relations which are based upon unequal distributions of power, they begin to explain who is most affected by fear, and where.” (p.910)

Ref: (emphases in blue bold, mine) Rachel Pain (2001) Gender, Race, Age and Fear in the City Urban Studies, Vol. 38, Nos 5–6, 899–913

Psychogeography and song

According to Anthony Hutchison: “Country music is a genre defined by a sense of place. From its inception, however, the ethnomusicology and academic treatment of ‘roots’ music was more informed by temporal than spatial ideas.” (p.268) Describing the spatial aspect of John and Alan Lomax’s seminal work in the field, Hutchison observes that “There were, nevertheless, a number of tentative spatial dimensions to [Alan] Lomax’s analyses and theorizations that ran alongside the more historically oriented elements. In ‘America Sings the Saga of America,’ […] for instance, Lomax details what he describes as a number of ‘dangerous potentialities’ that folklore movements must reckon with. Among these are the processes of industrialization and urbanization that have radically altered much of the spatial context for American folk music: [-p.269]
[‘]Rural folklore can be, falsely, opposed to city folklore, thus creating or widening the split between city and country populations. We are coming to find, however, that oral literature exists in the factories and slums, as another aspect of the rural folklore.[‘]
As well as noting the significance of the city as a site of American folklore, Lomax is also alert here to heterogeneous spatial elements at a national level that might account for regional patterns in the origins and geographical spread of the various forms of roots music. This extends to questions of taste and preference as well as others of genre and style as ways in which the relationship between musical forms and specific cities, states, or regions might be determined. These were issues that were undoubtedly pressing given the new technologies of recording reproduction and dissemination that drove the ‘nationalization’ of roots music in the postwar period. The fact that such forms had once been largely confined, in terms of both their production and reception, to relatively circumscribed geographical zones of origin undoubtedly gave this music much of what was regarded as its cultural integrity; it also nonetheless ensured an immense degree of variation across regions. This variation, however, could only be widely recognized once the technologies became available to bring it to wider attention. As Lomax notes in his introduction to Folk Songs of North America, ‘the map’ sings.” (pp.268-269)

“[By the 1970s, i]t was time, according to the cultural geographers, for American folk music to be subjected to “a locational analysis [that seeks] to understand why various phenomena are where they are.” The first edition of The Sounds of People and Places, a landmark work in this field edited by George O. Carney, appeared in 1978, and was the culmination of an enormously fruitful first wave of scholarship. Despite a subsequent slowdown, by 1993 a network of more than fifty of those interested in the sub-discipline had been established and, in 2003, Sounds itself moved into a fourth edition. In recounting the various experiences he acquired in a career given over to this topic, Carney has also usefully tabulated a number of “conceptual subdivisions” that have helped him to organize Sounds, such as “spatial variation” and “culture hearth” (which denote musical taste preferences and origins as they relate to region or locale). Yet just as Lomax identified possible concerns that would later be taken up by more spatially [-p.270] oriented musicologists and folklorists, so too has Carney pinpointed potential areas of study for those who might wish to permeate the boundaries of his own geomusicological research. It is the subdivision of “psychological and symbolic elements” more commonly negotiated by cultural critics that perhaps offers the most potential among the possible new fields identified by Carney. Such psychological and symbolic factors inherent within musical forms, Carney believes, can effectively reconstruct the spatial environment out of which they emerge; that is, they can enrich or perhaps even reconceptualize what we take to be the actual “character of a place.” The example he invokes for illustrative purposes is that of “surfin’ rock” as a crucial cultural component in shaping perceptions of Southern California (16).” (pp.269-270)

“The term “psychogeography” first appears in Guy Debord’s 1955 essay “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” where it is defined as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” For Debord, the need for a form of critical inquiry premised on the relationship between geography and human consciousness arises out of the novel conditions of postwar urban existence. Crucial to this postwar transformation of urban life is the rise of the automobile and the refashioning of cities such as Paris in response to what Debord describes as the demand for “the smooth circulation of [automobiles’] rapidly increasing quantity” (5).” (p.270)

Ref: (italics in original, emphases in bold blue, mine) Anthony Hutchison ‘Following the Ghost’: The Psychogeography of Alternative Country, pp.268-281 in Esther Peeren, and María del Pilar Blanco (Eds.). Popular Ghosts : The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2010.

Reference is to: George Carney, The Sounds of people and places: a geography of American Folk and Popular Music (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 2

Guy  Debord ‘Introduction to a critique of urban Geography’ reprinted in ken Knabb, ed. Situationist International Anthology (Berkely: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 5