Diffractions - Graduate Journal for the Study of
Culture
Issue 5 | Urban Imaginaries
Deadline for articles: April
30 2015
As James Donald put it long ago, “there is no such thing as
a city”. As a complex product of both material and imaginary forces, cities are
plural entities at the intersection of geographically and historically specific
institutions, governmental intervention, global market relations, political
participation and creative transgression. In this constitutive diversity, Donald
argued, the city “is above all a representation”. Indeed, the city is
continuously made and remade through acts of imagination, grounded as much in
the materiality of physical space as in the historically constituted ideas about
urban life. In the vein of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”, cities,
as nations, can be conceived as spaces imagined into existence through multiple
forms of representations and collective interactions.
Cities have become,
more than ever, an outlet of often clashing social energies, where internal
tensions and translocal connections intersect to shape but also contest the way
urban life is configured and experienced. The popularity of the term
“glocalization” - “the simultaneity – the co-presence – of both universalizing
and particularizing tendencies” (Robertson, 1992) - suggests that global fluxes
have led both to globalizing impulses and to multiple reactions against cultural
uniformity through the “production of locality” (Appadurai, 1996). As social
spaces where contradictory impulses coexist, cities are the site of political,
legal and economic regulation, but also of creativity and dissenting
practices.
Several authors have proposed the term “new metropolitanism”
(Lenz et al. 2006) as a new concept to account for urban agency with regard to
the material, cultural, social, and political processes that inform daily
practices in a metropolitan setting. Drawing a divide between the history of
modern metropolis - thoroughly scrutinized by the likes of Walter Benjamin and
Georg Simmel - and contemporary world cities, the term “new metropolitanism”
pays attention to the reorganization of present-day urban spaces, driven by
cosmopolitan ideals, multicultural imaginaries, global economic transformations,
political participation and creative vitality. At the same time, the term can be
an analytic resource to tackle the conflicting forces at play in contemporary
cities, seen as sites of emancipatory fantasies and associative imagination, but
also of control, coercion and exclusion.
Rather than unified forms then,
cities are heterogenous spaces where “urban cultures of difference” (ibid, 19)
come into contact, where conflict and struggle constitute experience and drive
change (Brantz et al, 2014). This issue wishes therefore to examine the ways in
which cultural and political imagination have shaped and contested the
configuration and experience of historical and present-day urban
space.
Topics may include but are not restricted to the
following:
- Metropolitanism and urban cultures of
difference
- Globalization, translocality and placemaking
-
Austerity urbanism and post-industrial cities
- Dynamics of creativity
and gentrification
- The right to the city: Urban citizenship and
participatory culture
- Boundaries, centres and peripheries
-
Ghost cities
- Cities and colonial imagination
- Experiencing the
city: tourism and authenticity
- City branding
- Entrepreneurial
and smart cities
- Surveillance and Public Space
- Cities as
affective spaces
- Urban imagination in literature and the
arts
We look forward to receiving full articles of no more than 20 A4
pages (not including bibliography) and a short bio of about 150 words by April
30 2015 at the following address:
submissions@diffractions.net<mailto:submissions@diffractions.net>.
Diffractions
welcomes articles written in English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Please
follow the journal’s submission guidelines at
http://www.diffractions.net/submission-guidelines.
DIFFRACTIONS
also accepts book reviews that may not be related to the issue’s topic. If you
wish to write a book review, please contact us at
reviews@diffractions.net<mailto:reviews@diffractions.net>.
Diffractions
is the online, open access and peer-reviewed journal of the doctoral program in
Culture Studies hosted by the Lisbon Consortium and the Catholic University of
Portugal. Find us online at
www.diffractions.net<http://www.diffractions.net/>.
