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Chapter 5 Hallucinated cities ties In one peculiarly odd digression in Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’, Petersburg is blurred through the narrator’s failing memory. In an aside to the reader after having lost track of his hero along some side street, the narrator explains, Где именно жил пригласивший чиновник, к сожалению, не можем сказать: память начинает нам сильно изменять, и всё, что ни есть в Петербурге, все улицы и домы слились и смешались так в голове, что весьма трудно достать оттуда что-нибудь в порядочном виде.1 (Where exactly the clerk who had invited [Akaky
[T]he cities, with the problems that they raised, and the particular forms that they took, served as the models for the governmental rationality that was to apply to the whole of the territory. There is an entire series of utopias or projects for governing territory that developed on the premise that the state is like a large
This chapter moves the focus from the localities of the previous two chapters to city-centre space. Visually, the city centre of Belfast epitomises the city’s status as a ‘post conflict’ city. As O’Dowd and Komarova ( 2013 : 527) point out, ‘the recasting of Belfast as a new capitalist city is frequently represented not just as a means of moving beyond violent conflict
omnibus network to sell their wares: ‘Just as the flag links the empire’s commerce, so does the General link up the world’s greatest city’. Other London Underground posters promoted visits to military, naval and explorers’ memorials as ‘pilgrimages of empire’, and a similar rhetoric was exploited in publicity for exhibitions at Wembley, the Science Museum and the Imperial Institute (‘the empire under one roof’). If in this rhetoric Whitehall was ‘the high-street of empire’, South Kensington or Kew Gardens were the places to see
7 Colonial cities: Valletta, Rangoon and new capitals The explosive growths and resultant buildings of many of the great cities of empire in the second half of the nineteenth century have been examined by a number of historians. In the case of Melbourne, for example, there is the classic essay by Asa Briggs.1 The historian James Belich placed cities like Melbourne and Toronto into his category of mega-cities and their architecture has received a good deal of attention.2 Representative buildings in these cities have been mentioned earlier in the book, but this
4 Reluctant cities: how London and Birmingham said no to dispersal The respective situations of the two major British cities have already been touched upon. But London’s and Birmingham’s paramountcy in racerelations debates post-1945 and the fact that they accommodated the largest New Commonwealth populations in the country certainly warrant an in-depth analysis of their approaches to dispersal. More specifically, it is the complexity of the rifts within the Birmingham administration as well as the categorical rejection of dispersal in the Inner London
African cities and collaborative futures: Urban platforms and metropolitan logistics brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the nature of African cities – the interactions of residents with infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability, seen through local narratives and theories. This groundbreaking collection, drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, offers a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. Each of the chapters, using case studies from Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we ‘see like a city’ in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision-makers and international practitioners can work together to achieve better outcomes.
In the early years of the cinema and into the 1910s and 1920s, it was less the film than cinema-going itself that attracted urban publics. In this era, people were enthusiastic about technology and the achievements of modernity; while at the same time they felt anxious about the rapid and radical changes in their social and economic life. In Germany, this contradictory experience was especially harsh and perceptible in the urban metropolis of Berlin. The article demonstrates how within city life, Berlin cinemas – offering the excitement of innovation as well as optimal distraction and entertainment – provided an urban space where, by cinema-going, appeal and uncertainty could be positively reconciled.