cities: ‘the intersections of multiple narratives’

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“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

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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

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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

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Steampunk

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)

Fiendish SchemesSteampunk 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)

the adventures of langden st ives“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))

Fullmetal Alchemist“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)

Perdido street station“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)

the court of the air“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)

Leviathan“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)

Reeve's Infernal DevicesApparently, 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

the city of lost childrenOne 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. alchemy of stoneAs 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

Thief_box_arthttp://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

Mysthttp://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

The future of cities – Batty

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In a recent editorial, Michael Batty states that “Suddenly, ‘cities’ have become the hottest topic on the planet.” (p.191). (The ‘Suddenly’ caught my eye – in surprise – but he qualifies this marker in terms of recent government activity.)

“Some of this interest [in the city] is undoubtedly due to the fact that we recently passed the point when, according to official statistics, more than 50% of the world’s population are now deemed to be living in some sort of city; in short, the point where more than 50% of global population is urbanised (UN, 2008), although it is arguable that this point was actually passed some time ago at the end of the last century. Definitional matters aside, it appears that by the end of this century most of the world’s population will be urbanised and, to all intents and purposes, will be living in ‘cities’ (Batty, 2011). But a stronger force for elevating cities to the point where they become the focus of interest is that the largest cities—world cities if you like—now appear to be acting more like city-states, driving economic development and  acting on a global stage that cuts across the nation-state in ways that are confusing, liberating,  and confounding.

Yet the most powerful force in this revival of interest in cities is undoubtedly the transition from a world based on energy to one based on information: from an industrial to a postindustrial world where the majority of pursuits are information based and where many previous occupations involving agriculture and manufacturing will be entirely automated. Most of our cities still reflect the built environment shells that were appropriate to a previous era, one wedded to the internal combustion engine, to an industrial base that in many places contained over half the workforce, and to patterns of living that tended to reinforce localities rather than more distant places. However, what takes place in our cities is now very different from the economic and social activities that defined them at the end of the 19th century. Most manufacturing employment has disappeared from more developed countries and, in any case, there has been a progressive loss of jobs due to automation in the manufacturing industries that have moved offshore in the last fifty years. Agriculture is now highly automated and it is very likely that it will be completely so by the end of this century; what will remain in terms of traditional farming lifestyles will be in small but persistent pockets of deep rural poverty amidst a much wider sea of cities where occupations will be essentially urban.” (p.191)

One of the major reasons why big cities have come back onto the agenda is because they are now regarded as the places where the future will be defined. In an increasingly competitive global world, cities are seen as the hot spots in terms of business, economic vibrancy, wealth and of course, as they have always been, the sources of economic and political power.” (p.192)

“…until quite recently, our love affair with the city was highly muted despite a longstanding recognition that cities were the keystones to the economy. In fact most of the 20th century was a reaction against the idea of the industrial city which was seen as an evil, polluted, sprawling place, out of control. Our planning then, and even now, was very much to contain the city by green belts, to disperse its functions to new towns, to regenerate activity at a regional rather than urban level.” (p.192)

“There is, however, one clear message in thinking about future cities: it is that such analysis and study should concentrate on the multiple repercussions over time and space that now characterise change in the contemporary city.” (p.194)

I can’t help wondering where urban fantasy fits in this picture.

Ref: (emphases in blue bold, mine) Michael Batty (2013) Editorial Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, volume 40, pages 191 – 194

The history of the city

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The BBC has a couple of podcasts on the rise of the city – possibly an important concept to understand if some of the more recent urban fantasy is to be understood!!! …