| Project description Project objectives Project philosophy |
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| This is a collaborative project initiated by the Departments of American & Canadian Studies at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham. A successful joint application to the AHRB/Funding Councils' Institutional Fellowships Scheme has permitted the appointment of two Research Fellows, Dr Anna Notaro in Nottingham and Dr Maria Balshaw in Birmingham. The overall project director is Professor Douglas Tallack at Nottingham and Dr Liam Kennedy directs research at Birmingham. The project is an inter- and multi-disciplinary study of the iconography, spatial forms and literary and visual cultures of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles (1870s to 1930s). It utilises the expertise of critics and theorists of American literary and visual culture, historians and cultural geographers in the service of a wide-ranging textual and historical study of representation in the modern America. The likely areas of research include the artistic, architectural, literary and cinematic dimensions to "mapping" the city; and visuality and spatiality (e.g. gendered spaces; the spatial construction of ethnic and racial identities in urban contexts; protocols of urban living; and city plans as conceptualisations of urban space). One limited project at Nottingham on documentary photography in New York at the turn of the century has also demonstrated the particular advantages which IT brings to the study of urban culture, especially in its visual dimension. Dissemination will be through
the traditional outlets of articles, monographs, and collections, as well as colloquia and
conferences and an exhibition, but also through an Electronic Book. |
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2 To produce an Electronic Book on the American city in the "modern" period which - of late - has been neglected in favour of "postmodern" concerns. It is worth stressing that the "making available" in virtual form of city plans and panoramas (to take just two examples) and the "reading" of such material as an integral part of a research project is an important step away from the purely pedagogical use of IT which has been (rightly) dominant to date. 3 To invite international scholars of established reputation and postgraduate students who work in areas related to the urban cultures of the three cities to publish their essays as work-in-progress on this Site. 4 The use of IT is a prominent objective at both Nottingham and Birmingham because while inter-disciplinarity is primarily a matter of intellectual co-operation, a project with an IT orientation also stimulates new ways of thinking and working through common methods of presentation of materials. 5 To bring together scholars through conferences: Nottingham, 16 May 1998; Birmingham 3-4 September 1999. An international conference is planned for 2003 with a shared focus upon New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. 6 Discussions are taking place with local galleries to accompany the final (2003) conference in the project. 7 A co-ordinated programme of individual papers or panels at key European and American conferences has been initiated so that the work of the group is disseminated. 8 Two research seminar programmes are being run from Nottingham and Birmingham. These act as a local focus for academics and postgraduates in the Midlands.
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Project
Philosophy: Introduction To approach the modern American city as a space of representation invites theoretical consideration of the conditions and effects of representation. The city is inseparable from its representations, for it is both the subject and the product of the signifying practices, discourses and images which give it legible form. Questions of legibility have long stimulated efforts to ‘plan’, ‘map’ or ‘read’ the city; to render it legible has also meant to make it coherent and knowable, integral and governable. Representation does powerful cultural work in a wide variety of forms to produce and maintain common notions of urban existence. Literature, film, architecture, tourist guides, postcards, photography, city plans - all provide selective representations of the city and shape the metaphors, narratives and syntax through which the modern experience of urban living takes on meaning. They illuminate transitions in the development of the urban environment, they produce a sense of place for urban dwellers, they map boundaries of communal identity, they mediate desires, fears and fantasies about urban existence. As a space of representation the city is simultaneously real, imaginary and symbolic; it exists as material environment, as visual culture and as psychic space. Our own attempt to interpret representations of selected American cities will foreground the cultural work of representation, paying close attention to the spatial and visual productions and reproductions of modern urbanism.
Methodologies In order to understand the cultural work of urban representation we need to develop a fresh consideration of the instrumentality of space (current thinking in cultural geography and critical theory provide guidelines) as a register of contemporaneous aesthetic, social and political ‘mappings’ of the urban landscape. This might mean examining how the plasticity of space celebrated by modernists as an aesthetic concern also existed as an everyday characteristic of urban experience. At the very least, it entails a demystifying of space as natural and transparent so that it is understood as a social product with particular, local meanings. A critical focus on the uses and perceptions of urban space in representation promotes close attention to the constructions of private and public spheres in the city and relations between these. Places of leisure, work, and consumption have distinctive spatial components, physical and psychological, which mediate the protocols of human interaction in the city. The spatial arrangements of city life are systems of representation which regulate social patterns of centralisation and segregation, and delineate senses of placement and identity.
Representation Issues of representation became urgent preoccupations in the period and locations of this project. Diverse spheres of social life were dramatically affected by the emergence of new experiences of time and space which we have come to understand as the signature of modernity. New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, in different ways, acted as epicentres of the new formations, rhythms and spectacles of urban life. These cities developed distinctive representations of ‘the modern’ in relation to rapid restructurings of populations, communication systems, consumption patterns, and social relations. They produced a heightened semiology of the urban environment, reflected in fresh modes of perception and consciousness, new ways of seeing and knowing the city - kaleidoscopic, impressionistic, panoramic, and contingent. The new co-ordinates of time and space in these cities should not be too casually viewed as the work of a universal modernity, however, rather they need to be examined historically and dialectically in relation to representations of specific urban forms and experiences. The different geometries of architectural development and of transport systematisation in New York and Los Angeles, for example, influenced different modes of temporal and spatial awareness for the inhabitants of these cities and different representational images for their boosters.
Visual
Theory The heightened semiology of modern urbanism privileges, even as it distorts, vision and the visual. The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of new visual technologies, forms and texts. This proliferation affected the ways in which the urban landscape was represented and the ways in which the constructed landscapes were inhabited. Visual representation may be said to bring the city into focus: it frames recognition of urban forms (architectural syntax, street signage); it offers legibility through the reproduction of what is seen (in maps, plans, guides, and images); it unites aesthetic and spatial apprehension of the urban scene (levels, planes, perspectives); it mediates scopophilic and voyeuristic desires(to look, to be seen); it technologises the act of seeing (the fusion of the eye and the camera lens); and it alters ways in which people negotiate the urban environment. The new forms of visual representation and apprehension accentuated the growing abstractions of space and inaugurated the ‘society of the spectacle’ in urban form. The design and building of the cityscapes of New York and Chicago encode new visual understandings of urban space as spectacle - the expanding production of monumental buildings visualised progress itself and popularised the visual delights of the panorama. Attention to the visual components of modern urbanism is essential to an understanding of how cities frame and are framed by representation.
Identity
and Community To the generative relations of space and vision in urban representation we must add considerations of urban identity, the correspondences between individuals and communities and their urban habitats. The massive social changes of modernity were experienced differentially and the modern American cities we examine emerged as crucibles of new social relations and divisions. The new social relations took on idealised form in representations of urbanity as the very essence of city life. Urbanity refers to a positive interpretation of varied forms of social interaction and interdependence in the city - the erotic and aesthetic variety of street life, the close encounters with strangers, the freedoms of access and movement in public spaces - positing these as the necessary conditions of democratic citizenship in the modern polis. (We find an example in the Progressives’ view of public parks, following Olmstead, as sites of civic ‘communicativeness’). Such representations, though, tended to gloss the socio-spatial restructurings of race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexual identities which are key features of modern urbanism. The selected cities exhibit distinctive geographies of social differences and power relations, where space functions as a modality through which urban identities are formed. Spatial relations of inclusion and exclusion are reproduced in literary and visual representations of the cities, providing metaphorical manifestations of the power structures which regulate social patterns of centralisation, segregation and discrimination. We might look to representations of ghettos in this historical period to examine how these urban spaces are constructed - in social planning, documentary photography and naturalist novels - as exotic sites of delinquency and foreignness. The framing of the ghetto in representation not only registers the tensions of urban coexistence but also maps relations between producers and consumers of representation. Narrative pathologisations of urban poverty, for example, frequently appear as ‘tales of the lower depths’, inviting a voyeuristic, even imperialistic, relationship between the implied reader or viewer and the alien urban world depicted.
Space and Subjectivity Urban space and subjectivity are intricately related and we can analyse the formations of conscious and unconscious responses to urban scenes in literary and visual representations. Urban forms and spaces are imbued with affective connotations, charged with emotional and mythical meanings. On the one hand, there is wide resonance in the symbolisation of the city as the abstract locus for national concerns (about progress, crime, immigration), often drawn in broadly utopian or dystopian terms. On the other hand, there are localised stories, images, and memories associated with urban spaces which provide meaningful cultural and historical bearings for individuals and communities. In many immigrant testimonies and autobiographies, for example, the city is represented as a conglomeration of ‘urban villages’, cultural enclaves within the metropolitan mass which have their own distinct communities, customs and languages. Such representations, however documentary in form, display the correlations of space and identity - often, the intense identification with the everyday culture of street life in immigrant writings reproduces urban iconography as a mirror of self-development. More generally, we find that representations effectively reproduce the symbolic order of the city as a psychic space. In many novels and films of the period this process is focalised through a split urban consciousness (divided between civilizing rationality and primitive urge) and projected onto scenes of order and degradation. As psychic space the city represents not only conscious but also unconscious impulses; it is often figured as ‘uncanny’, a space of displacement and dislocation in which repressed material erupts in paranoid or obsessional form. Literary and visual representations of modern urbanism map the fears and fantasies of urban living, offering us valuable cartographies of the American city as an imaginary space.
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