Literatures of Urban Possibility 9783030709082, 9783030709099, 3030709086

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LITERARY URBAN STUDIES

Literatures of Urban Possibility Edited by Markku Salmela · Lieven Ameel · Jason Finch

Literary Urban Studies

Series Editors Lieven Ameel, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Jason Finch, English Language and Literature, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland Eric Prieto, Department of French and Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Markku Salmela, English Language, Literature&Translation Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary mediations and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “citiness” of its study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban condition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series’ focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international and cross-disciplinary audience. Editorial Board Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15888

Markku Salmela · Lieven Ameel · Jason Finch Editors

Literatures of Urban Possibility

Editors Markku Salmela Tampere University Tampere, Finland

Lieven Ameel Tampere University Tampere, Finland

Jason Finch Åbo Akademi University Turku, Finland

ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic) Literary Urban Studies ISBN 978-3-030-70908-2 ISBN 978-3-030-70909-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Kadir Celep/EyeEm/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

It would be fair to say that the inception of this book took place almost a decade ago, when the Helsinki Literature and the City Network (HLCN) was founded—an organisation that has since been transformed into the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS). HLCN/ALUS aims to connect scholars working in the field of literary urban studies (broadly defined) and wants to establish this field in a discipline in its own right. In part, the activities of HLCN/ALUS have been structured around regular symposia and biannual conferences. Starting in 2013, three biannual conferences have been organised in Finland: City Peripheries/Peripheral Cities in Helsinki (2013), Literary Second Cities in Turku (2015), (Im)Possible Cities in Tampere (2017). On the basis of the first two conferences, two edited volumes were developed, Literature and the Peripheral City (2015) and Literary Second Cities (2017) respectively, both published by Palgrave Macmillan. The present volume can be considered a continuation of these previous books—a closing of sorts, to a trilogy that we have seen developing over these years of close collaboration. The (Im)Possible Cities conference was in many ways an unusual—and unusually inspiring—event. The conference theme straddled a variety of fields, including literary urban studies, urban planning theory, cultural geography, and future studies. The two keynote speakers, Ayona Datta (then at King’s College London) and Eric Prieto (University of California, Santa Barbara) represented this variety of perspectives. The conference v

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was set up back-to-back with another urban studies conference, Re-City, which focused on urban studies and urban planning and shared the focus on urban possibility. The two conferences took place on the same campus and the conference programmes partly overlapped, with one joint panel session. Re-City’s keynote speaker for 25 August was David Pinder (Roskilde University), and the collaboration between these two conferences and different approaches to (im)possible cities continues into this volume, for which David Pinder has written the afterword. We would like to thank the University of Tampere, our colleagues who organised the Re-City Conference, and the City of Tampere for the excellent collaboration that enabled discussions and dialogue to thrive, with this volume as one of the concrete outcomes. Indeed, the city of Tampere is an apt vantage point for the conclusion of our book trilogy. Despite being undoubtedly peripheral from a global perspective, and a rather typical second city, as a hub along Finland’s northward artery, it has recently seen several developments that mirror the concerns of this book. Some of these are large-scale construction projects, such as the 2.3-kilometre road tunnel now bypassing the city centre, the tramway scheduled to open in 2021, or the grandiose Deck and Arena complex being built atop the railway tracks. One of the editors of this book has observed the daily progress of the last of these through his office window (except during the period of remote work in 2020), an experience that has powerfully illustrated the openness of cityscapes to rapid change. Such development projects aim to maintain and improve the vitality of the city as a whole, a concern prominent in the first part of this volume. But Tampere also evidently appeals to individuals as a site of possibility (the main theme of the second part of this book), consistently topping the polls as the most attractive residential destination in Finland. As students continue to flock to Tampere, one of the biggest structural changes has been seen in academic life. During the 2017 sister conferences on possible cities, the city’s two universities, which collaborated in organising the events, were preparing to merge. Although the decisive motives for the change may have little to do with city image, the language employed in branding the merger was highly familiar from smart-city visions. Potentials were unleashed, creative synergies tapped, and old-school academics occasionally found themselves thrust into the role of cutting-edge innovators whether they liked it or not. By now, this fiercely contested process has been mostly completed, and the phoenix emerging from the ashes is called Tampere University. Both the utopian

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rhetoric from the new university’s leadership and the dystopian registers of the most vocal critics have become somewhat more muted. One lesson to be drawn from the merger is just how profoundly literary administrative procedures can be, both in terms of the defamiliarising language driving them and the gallery of characters they bring into the spotlight. In this case, the narrative unfolded within a setting that combines the urban and the academic, with plenty of local colour added. Perhaps observations like this can serve as further evidence of the ever-expanding possibilities of literary urban studies as a field. The activities of the Association for Literary Urban Studies have considerably expanded during these past years and have led to the establishment of the Palgrave Macmillan series in Literary Urban Studies, which has seen the publication of two volumes at the moment of writing, with several other books already accepted for publication. We are grateful to Palgrave for their commitment to the series as an active shaper of the burgeoning field of literary urban studies. In many ways, we think it is fitting that the present book should be able to be published within the series. Many thanks to everyone at Palgrave for their work on this volume, and to the external reviewers for their encouraging feedback. The most recent ALUS conference, (Un)Fair Cities, took place in Limerick in December 2019; several publications are planned on the basis of the conference. Future conferences and symposia are in preparation. We would like to thank all members of ALUS, and all participants in the events, for their contribution, and look forward to future developments. Tampere, Finland Turku, Finland Turku, Finland

Markku Salmela Lieven Ameel Jason Finch

Contents

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The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing the Field Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch

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The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul Eric Prieto

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Part I 3

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Possible Cities

Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction Lieven Ameel

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From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity Chen Bar-Itzhak

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Donald Barthelme’s Impossible Cities Markku Salmela

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‘Cartographic Ecstasy’: Mapping, Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov’s City Prose Anni Lappela

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CONTENTS

Part II 7

Possible Urban Lives

Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician Lena Mattheis

137 165

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Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility Hanna Henryson

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Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Children’s and Young Adult Literature Lydia Wistisen

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‘Double Vision’: Viennese Refugees in New York and Back Home Again Joshua Parker

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Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image and Experience Jason Finch Afterword: Urban Possibilities in Times of Crisis David Pinder

Index

231 255

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Notes on Contributors

Lieven Ameel is a University Lecturer in comparative literature and docent in urban studies and planning methods at Tampere University, Finland. He holds a Ph.D. in Finnish literature and comparative literature from the University of Helsinki and the JLU Giessen. He has published widely on literary experiences of the city, narrative planning, and urban futures. His books include Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) and The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning (2020) and the co-edited volumes Literature and the Peripheral City (2015); Literary Second Cities (2017), and The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (2020). Chen Bar-Itzhak is a Post-doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her forthcoming book explores the city of Haifa in the Israeli literary imagination and develops a new model for the study of literary cities. Her other published works address the complex relations between space, memory, language, and ideology in Israeli literature. She is currently working on a book-length project on Retrotopia in contemporary Israeli culture. Jason Finch is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University. From 2019 to 2022, he is Principal Investigator for Finland on the ERC HERA-funded project ‘Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting’ (PUTSPACE). He is the author of Deep Locational

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Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching (2016) as well as co-editor of seven books and special issues, most recently The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (Routledge 2020). Hanna Henryson holds a PhD in German literature from Uppsala University, Sweden. In her dissertation project, she investigated literary representations of social inequality and resistance related to gentrification processes in twenty-first-century Berlin. Her research interests also include other aspects of urban literature such as representations of housing and physical living conditions in cities, the role and function of literary discourses in social processes, and narrative structures connected to the representation of urban life. Anni Lappela is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Helsinki, in the Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Arts and Society. In her doctoral dissertation, she examines depictions of nonmetropolitan urban space in contemporary Russian prose and comics. Lappela is especially interested in Arctic urban spaces in contemporary fiction. Lena Mattheis is a Lecturer and Research Assistant at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2019, Lena completed her Ph.D. in the field of contemporary global writing and urban studies. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in French and Anglophone Literature, as well as Media Studies, from the University of Duisburg-Essen where she studied from 2010 to 2016, after completing a year of social service in the field of cultural education. She finished her studies with an M.A. thesis on urban narratives in Namibia, which she wrote during a research stay at the University of Namibia in Windhoek. Joshua Parker is an Associate Professor of English and American studies at the University of Salzburg, with interests in place and space in American literature, transatlantic relations, and narrative theory. He is co-editor of the volumes Austria and America: Cross-Cultural Encounters 1865–1933 and Austria and America: 20th-Century Cross-Cultural Encounters, and author of Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century and a volume of translated Austrian refugee poetry, Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugees in Manhattan. David Pinder is Professor of Urban Studies at Roskilde University in Denmark. His research focuses on utopianism and urban imaginations particularly in relation to modernist and avant-garde movements of the

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twentieth century, and to critical urban theory. He has also written widely on art, performance, and spatial politics with reference to practices of urban walking, radical cartographies, sound art, and psychogeography. He is the author of Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (2005) and recently co-edited ‘On Drifting’, a theme issue of Performance Research (2018). Eric Prieto is a Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches French and Comparative Literature. He has published widely on postcolonial literature, spatial studies, ecocriticism, and globalisation. His second book, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (Palgrave 2012) studied the development of innovative literary strategies designed to better represent emergent or paradoxical place types. His current book project pursues this exploration in relation to the rise of the postcolonial megacity and the prevalence of informal patterns of urbanisation in the developing world. Markku Salmela is University Lecturer in English literature at Tampere University, Finland. Most of his publications stem from his long-term interest in the spatial dimensions of textuality. He is the author of Paul Auster’s Spatial Imagination (2006) and co-editor of several volumes, including, most recently, Literature and the Peripheral City (2015), Topographies of Popular Culture (2016) and Literary Second Cities (2017). His current project focuses on forms of Arctic spatiality. Dr. Lydia Wistisen is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include YA, picture books, city literature, urbanity, and spatial studies. She is a member of the editorial board of Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6

Map of Edinburgh showing the routes through it of the Magistrate and Farai in the first two chapters of Huchu’s novel Streets and landmarks mapping in the Magistrate’s chapter Farai’s possible locations at the beginning of the novel. The green circle marks his actual location Lothian Buses map of the route of bus 22 with a large circle indicating all of Farai’s possible locations Location of Doctors indicates that Farai takes Forrest Road from Teviot/Lauriston Place Magistrate’s map of Edinburgh (Huchu 286)

146 148 153 154 155 158

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The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing the Field Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch

A long continuum of cities that envision what might be possible—for the cities themselves, on the one hand, and the people living in them, on the other—runs through literary history, connecting early-modern utopian texts to modernist visions of urbanism and contemporary speculative fiction. These literatures of urban possibility are one of the central ways in which imaginative literature expresses the concerns of urban history and urban studies, from the late Medieval adage that ‘city air makes free’ (Park 12) to the more broadly felt sense that the density, diversity, specialisation, anonymity, and scale of city life could provide newcomers with the means

M. Salmela (B) · L. Ameel Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] L. Ameel e-mail: [email protected] J. Finch Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_1

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for social or educational advancement, or at the very least a new identity and a possible fresh start. If the city appears on the individual scale as a site for personal or communal possibility, it has also become a symbol for possible societal change. From the time of Plato’s Republic, cities in writing have been the ‘symbol of conscious design in society’, with a vivid utopian and dystopian tradition of city writing as result (Frye 27). Literature of the city has been an important site where such engagements with possibility have been acted out. Some literary cities stage alternative futures conceivable at a specific moment in time, or stories that test the limits of egalitarian progress. Others depict individual discoveries and upward social trajectories made possible by the urban system. Yet others experiment directly with previously non-existent forms of urban community or the built environment, emphasising the capability of cities to foster powerful visions. All these patterns of city literature engage with the notion of the possible, and many of the narratives in which they manifest themselves indicate, specifically, how existing horizons of possibility might be expanded, either for individuals or for the city as blueprint of ordered society. In doing so, imaginative literature does not only document experiments with what is possible in the city, or envision speculative urban futures; it may provide the reader with an expanded ‘sense of the possible’ (Meretoja 90–97). It is this act of expansion of urban possibility through the literary imagination that Literatures of Urban Possibility seeks to address.

A Two-Pronged Approach Literatures of Urban Possibility examines literary texts that engage with urban possibility from two distinct but intermingled perspectives. The first of these focuses on the imagined possibilities for the city, especially for the city as an imagined community or as an imagined polity. In their most explicit form, these possibilities may be expressed in large-scale city visions that can be found in utopian literature (as in Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 [1888]) or science fiction (such as Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy [1951–53]). But engagements with the city that are more realistic—and more mundane—can also be approached from this perspective of the ‘possible city’. Perhaps this is particularly true in the case of literature that focuses on a clearly outlined city district and its social or ethnic makeup, often with some indication of what the urban environment could be at best: the ‘ecological city novel’, in the terms of

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Blanche Gelfant (11). More recent examples, which refer to urban social housing estates as zones of fragile urban possibility, include Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens (2013) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). Yet it only takes a change in perspective—from the city to the protagonist in city literature—to see these two texts not so much as expressing the city’s potential, but rather that of its inhabitants. Such an observation, of course, is in tune with an understanding of the city novel as a genre in which the city reveals, facilitates or thwarts the potential of the character, while simultaneously, the protagonist enables the city to reveal and fulfil part of its potential (see Ameel, ‘City Novel’ 234; Acke 245–46). This sense of reciprocity connects with a second, closely related, way of understanding urban possibility: the urban environment as a site of possibility for individuals and groups. Especially in literary fiction from the nineteenth century onwards (see Moretti), the city appears as a potential enabler and social elevator—but it is important also to bear in mind that many potent counter-narratives exist: many literary narratives with relevance for literary urban studies are ‘novels of disillusionment’ (Lukács 151). Especially from Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43) onwards, hardship is what shapes characters in many urban stories. Yet often before the adversity there is the initial sense of the possible, the incentive that takes characters to the city in the first place, and moments of adversity also enable new discoveries, new sites of the possible. This book aims to bring into focus literature’s affordances as a medium for questioning urban possibility in ways that communicate with mundane, everyday, highly personal experiences, as well as with highflown artistic visions of the possible city, and policy and planning of future cities. The ten chapters brought together here were selected to provide a diverse range of geographical and cultural contexts, and to enable an examination of literatures of urban possibility in their many aspects, from imagined urban lives to imagined alternative future cities and urban communities. The material includes different literary genres and periods, from young adult literature to climate fiction, autobiography and the postmodernist short story. Specific locations have an equally wide range from Helsinki to Haifa and Istanbul, from Russian provincial cities to imagined Edinburgh, from the UK council estate to gentrified Berlin, and more.

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Past, Present, Future Any viable examination of possibility, as a concept, must acknowledge that the idea of the possible is built upon the past as much as imagined with the future in mind. Any such analysis will also benefit from the basic realisation, strongly present in literary urban studies, that to study cities is also to study specific forms, and stages, of modernity. Richard Lehan, for example, structures his historical examination of city literature by following what he sees as the three main functional stages of capitalist urban modernity in the West: the commercial city, the industrial city, and the postindustrial city (289). Bart Keunen, meanwhile, has proposed four states of urbanity, respectively moving from solid, liquid and gas-like, to plasmatic. Whichever of these typologies one draws upon, consecutive historical urban types have been associated with specific textual paradigms, which have mediated, exposed and evaluated the inherent potentialities of these versions of urbanism. The Industrial Revolution commented upon by writers such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell set some fundamental parameters for nineteenth-century urban fantasies in England, whereas the spatial and economic futurism in cities of the digital age is largely defined by the sense of technological simultaneity that Manuel Castells’ influential concept of the ‘space of flows’ captures. Each age creates its own sense of the possible. Somewhat counter-intuitively, one good starting point for thinking about notions of possibility is to acknowledge their common indebtedness to the past. The concept of nostalgia helps illustrate how visions drawing on retrospection can also have potential for the future. Urban possibility is also a case of what could have been, of past subjunctives and competing possible worlds visible in the layered urban realm. Future possibilities are complemented by past aspirations, hopes and failures. Svetlana Boym has pointed out that nostalgia ‘is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the future’ (xvi). Nostalgia is a form of imagination that focuses on what is immaterial in the present, thus engaging directly with notions of possibility. Boym employs a basic division into two very different types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective, arguing that ‘[r]estorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time’ (41). The distinction is

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informative as we contemplate urban possibilities. Restorative nostalgia, of which Boym is suspicious, develops from an ultimately destructive insistence on traditions and origins which may or may not have ever existed. Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, employed by Chen Bar-Itzhak in this volume, builds upon such fantasies of the past and their relationship with utopian thinking. The imagined future counterpart for restorative nostalgia would be an ideological utopia (which to many might appear as dystopia) that ignores alternative viewpoints, cross-cultural realities and contradictory experiences. Such a closed view understands the past, which is transposable to a possible future, as a monolithic formation dominated by a single narrative (of the nation, the economy, or technology). Boym contends that these kinds of nostalgic narratives have an affinity with invented traditions and a simplistic, ‘conspiratorial worldview’ that entails ‘the inevitable scapegoating of the mythical enemy’ (43). In contrast, the notion of possibility when understood as a counterpart of reflective nostalgia allows ambivalence, silence and openness. It can embrace both playfulness and determination, both fragmentation and coherence, as well as ‘ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones’ (Boym xviii). Such conceived possibilities can be complex, organic and meditative, occasionally expressing themselves ‘in riddles and puzzles’ (Boym xvii). Similarly, in his meditation on the widespread twenty-first century longing for ruins, Andreas Huyssen has commented on the status of nostalgia as ‘utopia in reverse’ (7). Nostalgia informs the ways people look at the ‘shrinking cities’ of ‘industrial heartlands’, representing a disappearing form of modernity, ‘because they still seem to hold a promise that has vanished from our own age: the promise of an alternative future’ (Huyssen 8). Regaining that promise seems difficult if one observes cities merely through the lens of unquestioned continuous progress. City literature that concerns itself with drawing up possible urban forms tends to be associated with utopia, with all the associated ideological ballast which that term has acquired over the last half-century. But Boym’s and Huyssen’s reflections on nostalgia point in other directions, towards a complex literature of (unachieved) possibility informed by history’s weight. They serve to counteract utopian blind faith and visions of a clear-cut future, reminding us that literatures of urban possibility are never simplistic rhetorical exercises.

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The Possible in Literature While this is not the place to make far-reaching claims about what texts read as literary are able to do or not able to do, some reflections on the possibilities of literature, and on literature as site for the possible, may be helpful to contextualise the ideas on literature and urban possibility that run through this book, especially for readers interested in urban studies and positioned outside of literary studies. One starting point for thinking about the affordances of imaginative literature is provided by the Formalist school, in particular their concept of ‘estrangement’— the ability of poetic language to make the familiar appear strange, a notion with particular political undercurrents (see Shklovsky). For the Formalists, this ability of literature lies not in the thematics of narratives (in what is described), but is bound up with formal features and the poetical language typical of literature. By its very language and narrative structure, a literary text forces the reader to see the world anew, they argue. To a considerable extent, such a view still holds within contemporary paradigms in literary theory. In her recent book on form, for example, Caroline Levine argues that she does not understand ‘literary texts [.. .] as reflections or expressions of prior social forms, but rather as sites, like social situations, where multiple forms cross and collide, inviting us to think in new ways about power’ (122). Thinking about literature in terms of possibility entails seeing literature not merely as a reflection on but as an intervention into the world. Essential for how this intervention is acted out is literary form: genres, plot tropes, literary language. The notion of estrangement is particular to discussions of imaginative literature, but another important question for this volume is related to the affordances of literary texts as opposed to other texts within urban studies, such as historical documents and policy texts. This question is addressed at more length in another volume, The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (Ameel et al.). Among these affordances is the fact that literature (prose, poetry, drama, as well as types of nonfiction) tends to work on multiple urban planes, reflecting and re-enacting urban complexity in its scalar dimensions. Literature’s abilities to enact translocality, complex connectedness, and an imaginative intertwining of scales make it a particularly well-suited complement to non-fictional texts that imagine urban possibility, such as policy or planning texts. Second, literature tends to embrace a human and experiential scale, as exemplified by (but by no means limited to) first-person narrators and

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stream-of-consciousness techniques. And thirdly, literature is particularly concerned with counterfactuality (Dannenberg), often structuring plots around notions of what might be or could have been, which makes it an ideal ground to test possible worlds, from the individual to the communal to the planetary. In the context of the interaction between literary storyworlds and their impact on real-world spaces, Bertrand Westphal, in Geocriticism, considers literature as an ‘experimental field of alternative realities’, and a ‘laboratory of the possible’ (59, 63). Similar assertions have been made by some of the most prominent twentieth-century novelists, from the ruminations on a sense of the possible in chapter 4 of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1943) to Milan Kundera’s thoughts in The Art of the Novel (1986). In the most comprehensive recent study of literature and the possible, The Ethics of Storytelling, Hanna Meretoja examines literature as a site for the reflection of the possible and what this means for ethical questions and literature’s role within ethics, arguing ‘that the power of narratives to cultivate and expand our sense of the possible is ethically crucial’ (34–35). A key theoretical paradigm connecting literature and the possible is possible worlds theory, an approach rooted in the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Nelson Goodman that examines questions of modal logic, and the working of storyworlds, from the perspective that any given world (including the one we experience) is but one of a potentially infinite number of possible worlds. Possible worlds theory, as developed within narrative studies by Lubomír Doležel, Marie-Laure Ryan and others, provides a model with which to consider the key modalities: What is possible, impossible, or necessary? What is permitted, prohibited, or obligatory? What is good, bad, or indifferent? What is known, unknown, or believed? (Doležel 113–32, esp. 114). In this volume, some of the consequences of literary possible worlds are explored in Eric Prieto’s chapter, which argues that ‘the “indirect referentiality” of metaphor and fiction enables literature to explore hypothetical situations and “possible worlds” in ways that often generate more powerful insights into realworld phenomena than directly referential accounts of factual situations’ (23).

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Possible Cities Literature of urban possibility, in terms of the possibilities for a city as an imagined community and/or an imagined polity, brings this volume close to existing research within utopian studies and urban studies of future urban visions (see Ameel, ‘Cities Utopian’; Pinder, Visions ). Within urban and planning studies, recent research has repeatedly foregrounded the potential importance of fictional cities for envisioning city futures. In a recent article that echoes the Formalist concept of estrangement, for example, Amy Butt argues that architects should read science fiction, which is able to ‘make the familiar strange, to reveal fears about the future, to confront us with ourselves, and to shape the world we inhabit’ (151). Similarly, in a 2001 article, Rob Kitchin and James Kneale suggest that cyberfiction provides ‘planners with a cognitive space for the contemplation of future cities’ (25). Activating literary cities’ potential for use in urban planning or policy should not lead to neglect of literature’s formal characteristics—the language and narrative form that enables it to act as a ‘laboratory of the possible’, in the words of Westphal. It is important to frame these investigations in a way that takes into account the literariness as well as the citiness of the material at hand, an approach that is at the heart of the developing discipline of literary urban studies (see Finch et al.). To frame the topic of literary cities positively, as textually constructed horizons of possibility, is obviously to encroach into the rhetorical territory of visionaries, politicians, consultants and entrepreneurs, who have long employed the vocabulary of limitless possibility in describing the smart, green, and sustainable futures of their urban constituencies. The urban plans of today have as their inevitable precursors the utopian cities conceived in the previous centuries. The material (and often profoundly textual and symbolic) consequences of the rhetoric of optimistic urbanism today include made-from-scratch cities built to promote business investment as well as smart urban design, many of which have the status of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Two prominent examples among numerous recent projects can be mentioned. Dholera Industrial City, a work-in-progress in Gujarat, India, is a Special Investment Region of huge projected size and manifest utopian undertones. ‘The future is Dholera’, the development’s website declares, proceeding to claim that ‘there’s no better place to leap forward into the future’ (DholeraSIR), statements that neatly capture both the

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collective, futuristic significance of such large-scale envisioning and the potential empowering effect it may have, if realised, on aspiring individuals. At the same time, as Ayona Datta has demonstrated, the corporatedriven enterprise city created from scratch can hardly become a miracle cure for societal problems—if it ever fully materialises. Even while existing only as a rhetorical construct in consultants’ and politicians’ speeches, with no material counterpart on the ground, Dholera smart city has been ‘bifurcated by conflicting demands of economic growth and social justice’ (Datta 17). For a second example, New Songdo, a green seafront business city built on reclaimed land in South Korea, was constructed upon equally utopian promises. According to one observer, it aimed ‘to do nothing less than banish the problems created by modern urban life’ (McNeill). And yet it should be noted that all the unrealistically optimistic overtones in urban planning visions for future cities run counter to a predominantly pessimistic view of urban possibility in much of contemporary urban studies, a view which led Guy Baeten, as early as 2002, to declare that ‘[u]topian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or “Stadtschmerz”, is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society’ (143). This volume wants to go against the grain of such approaches to literary cities that have seen possible cities predominantly in terms of dystopia. The chapters brought together in this volume are sceptical of an imagined ‘end of utopia’ as a starting point for thinking of the (future) city (see e.g. Kumar). Instead, they are broadly aligned with David Harvey’s call for a renewed investigation of the city as a ‘space of hope’, a stance that still avoids translating the idea of urban possibility into an unequivocal panegyric to the city. The literary cities explored here are considered as evoking, questioning and critiquing urban possibility, and as negotiating, in their plot developments and spatial dynamics, between the possibility of renewal and redemption on the one hand, and failure and fall on the other. Several of this volume’s chapters have affinities with thinking in utopian studies and engage with the idea that the concept of utopia provides ways for urban researchers to ‘open up to the possible and what could be’ (Pinder, ‘Reconstituting’ 31). Yet we would like to emphasise that the outlook of this volume is not to present a book on literary utopias or on the urban geographies of science fiction, questions that have been examined extensively elsewhere (see, e.g., Frye; Jameson; Kitchin and Kneale, Lost; Pinder, Visions ). Rather, the aims of this book are more closely

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rooted in real-world material cities, including the everyday practices of living in them, even when the texts examined depart from realist conventions. The objectives are also explicitly interdisciplinary: the book aims to provide urban studies scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds with new insights into how literary cities can inform their practice and research.

Possible Urban Lives Literary accounts of lives led in cities contain a range of recurrent means of talking about the multiple possibilities such lives necessarily contain. One approach to this multiplicity of possibility is to see the city as a ‘user city’, in a well-established mode perhaps best-known to literary and cultural researchers through the prism of Certeau’s ‘Walking in the City’ but equally alive in urban planners’ contemporary efforts to put into practice user-centred design (see, e.g., Fors et al.; Laatikainen et al.). The literature of cities can evoke the full implications and potentialities of everyday urban routes, which as easily can turn out to be possible roads in life—morally or socially. Walking, in particular, involves a vast multiplicity of possibilities that are repeatedly considered, activated, ignored and passed over. The decision to take a particular route contains near-limitless numbers of occasions on which a change of plan could be effected, or the walker could improvise a route through areas partially known. In the ‘young man/woman from the provinces’ pattern familiar from numerous novels (see Chanda), the first and the most important route is the one that leads into the city, enabling (or suggesting the possibility of) social rise. Central in a range of city novels is the implied opportunity to remake oneself upon moving to the city, for example by changing one’s name. Urban lives develop in dialogue with specific urban locations and the possibilities these hold. Some of this urban possibility is site-specific, such as that embodied in cities which are built around particular forms of leisure, Las Vegas being a prime example (see, e.g., Salmela), or in cities which are massively culturally over-determined thanks to the recorded imagination of them by previous visitors (e.g. Venice and Rome). Thus the city space itself generates for the user the possibility to fulfil particular functions and take on certain roles within society. Often this involves acquiring intimate knowledge of particular urban locations and their codes—city novels tend to include the pairing of the protagonist with a guide—and the ability to cross meaningful distances (spatial, social, moral

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as well as metaphorical) during the negotiation of competing possible lives (Ameel, ‘City Novel’). At the heart of literary urban studies as a developing field is its inseparability from questions concerning the actual city and its inhabitants: questions of planning, mobility and social policy; questions of visions for the future and the ‘makeability’ and malleability of urban society. As a concept, possibility brings together the necessarily provisional and imagined quality of what happens in literature—the fact that anything can be made to happen in fiction, simply put—with the efforts of policy-makers, municipal governments, activists and others to shape the city in specific images. The subject of urban possibility emphasises the interdependency of the literary and material world in a move away from paradigms in literary studies that tended to see literary worlds as stuck in a prison-house of language, towards engaging more deeply with literature’s material entanglements (see also Ameel et al.). The toponymical referentiality in much city literature, combined with the position of several contemporary notable city authors as vocal public intellectuals (from Zadie Smith to Orhan Pamuk), lends further urgency to a reading of the literature of urban possibility in view of the referential world, and in conjunction with non-literary texts of the city, from historical and sociological sources to planning and policy documents.

Outline of Chapters Literatures of Urban Possibility showcases several methodological avenues of enquiry for literary urban studies conceived on this model of constant interaction with other disciplines and activities of the city. These include examinations which aim to explore specific urban phenomena such as gentrification, social housing, squatter settlements, the future visions proposed by urban planners, and the translocal lives of migrants. The volume is structured to reflect the two-pronged approach to possibility presented above, in which individuals’ possibilities in life exist in dialogue with possible futures for cities and their individual districts. The two sections of this book are preceded by the present introduction and a separate chapter intended to engage with both aspects of urban possibility outlined in this book: Eric Prieto’s ‘The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul’. Prieto approaches the phenomenon of urban informality in the developing world through the problematics of representation, rhetoric, and ideology. Organised around a comparative analysis of two well-known novels set in Istanbul’s

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‘gecekondu’ districts of informal housing—Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind and Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin—his essay emphasises the performative ability of literary texts to generate new ways of seeing. These are texts that suggest correctives to a number of established sociological and urban categories that have made it difficult to see informal settlements as more than symbols of economic injustice or symptoms of social dysfunction. Despite their differences, both novels approach informal urbanisation as a promising reservoir of possibilities, in the human and geographical senses foregrounded throughout this volume. As such, these texts are emblematic of literature’s ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the development of more adequate conceptions of city life, urban planning, and social justice. Possible Cities The book’s first section proper opens with Lieven Ameel’s chapter ‘Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction.’ As a site of the possible, this examines the Helsinki waterfront, an area onto which future visions of the city and the good society have been projected. Ameel starts out from the first Finnish novel to critique urban planning developments at the waterfront, Maila Talvio’s Niniven lapset (‘Children of Nineveh’, 1915). Several comparisons are drawn between the rhetorical features outlined in the defence of the high-rise described in the novel, and elements highlighted in the competition for a Guggenheim museum in the early decades of the twenty-first century. This introductory part sets the stage for an examination of competing visions for the Helsinki waterfront, within which utopian and apocalyptic visions in literature have participated from the early twentieth century onward. The most substantial part of this chapter focuses on the complex interaction between Antti Tuomainen’s dystopian novel The Healer (Parantaja, 2010) and various future visions of the Helsinki City Planning Department. What sets Tuomainen’s novel apart from the majority of other future-invested novels is that its future city provides a commentary on the Helsinki city planning department’s future visions at the time of publication. Chen Bar-Itzhak’s chapter ‘From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity’ focuses on the idea of the city as a cosmopolitan utopia and examines the changes it has undergone in the shift from Modernity to, on Zygmunt Bauman’s terms,

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Liquid Modernity. By examining a particularly revealing case study—the literary depictions of the Mediterranean city of Haifa—she argues that these changes in the imaginings of the cosmopolitan utopian city can be explained by the shift from utopia to what Bauman termed Retrotopia. This is a move from the ability to project an imagined ideal social order onto a possible future, to the possibility of locating such ideal social orders only in an unattainable, lost past. The examination of the hopes and longings put into the literary creation of possible and no-longer-possible cities, Bar-Itzhak argues, can shed new light on contemporary societies’ ability to reimagine themselves and their possible futures. Markku Salmela’s chapter ‘Donald Barthelme’s Impossible Cities’ investigates the improbable city visions of Barthelme’s short stories from the viewpoint of literary urban studies, taking into account the cultural moment of the stories’ composition. Barthelme’s cities are often constructed in ways reminiscent of architectural models, and they point towards several theories of postmodernity and urbanism formulated much later, including Edward Soja’s notion of ‘Simcities’ and Fredric Jameson’s ideas concerning postmodern disorientation. These prophetic but absurdist urban stories are thoroughly permeated by forms of media, principles of storytelling, and various manipulations of perception. Salmela argues, however, that an image of the city as a meaningful community is discernible in these texts. As such, showing some appreciation for the materiality and corporeality of everyday urbanism, Barthelme’s outlandish creations maintain their connections with the possible. In the final chapter of this section, ‘“Cartographic Ecstasy”: Mapping, Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov’s City Prose’, Anni Lappela examines the idea of creating the perfect city text, or an alternative map of urban Russia, in Dmitrii Danilov’s prose. Danilov has dedicated many of his works to smaller, non-metropolitan Russian cities, which are otherwise rarely depicted in literature. Theoretical frameworks are drawn from Jason Finch’s Deep Locational Criticism and Lyudmila Parts’ explorations on the image of Russian provinces in the cultural imagination. Lappela pays special attention to Danilov’s texts about the Arctic city of Norilsk, in which the influence of geographical location on the imagined urban space is particularly strong.

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Possible Urban Lives This second section, which is structured around possible urban lives, starts out with Lena Mattheis’s chapter ‘Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician.’ In her chapter, Mattheis employs a literal mapping of urban performance, movement and trajectories, in order to explore the different functions of translocal urban space in Huchu’s 2015 novel. This approach questions the metaphorical mapping lexicon used extensively in urban, postcolonial, gender and queer studies. The physical locations and trajectories referenced by a text—and thus, as it were, the text’s implied mental map—can provide further insight into how translocally perceived urban spaces and places are layered over memories and immediate walking experiences. Mattheis’s analysis is informed by Ayona Datta and Katherine Brickell’s use of the term ‘translocal’, Tania Rossetto’s thoughts on maps and literature and Franco Moretti’s approaches to abstraction. In ‘Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility’, Hanna Henryson discusses representations of gentrification in three Berlin novels published between 2009 and 2015: Fire Doesn’t Burn (Feuer brennt nicht ) by Ralf Rothmann, Kress by Aljoscha Brell and Der amerikanische Investor (‘The American investor’) by Jan Peter Bremer. Acknowledging that gentrification recasts social and spatial relations in fundamental ways, Henryson’s analysis targets questions about characters’ perceptions of their situation within that process, their views of their own possibilities, as well as imaginations of possible visions of an alternative Berlin. The sharp differences in characters’ experiences are coupled with the complexity of the depicted gentrification processes, and the result is an ambiguity reflected in the novels’ open endings. Equally strong tensions and ambiguities emerge in Lydia Wistisen’s chapter ‘Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Children’s and Young Adult Literature’, which examines representations of the high-rise suburb from the 1970s. With an emphasis on young-adult (YA) novels and children’s picture books set in the Swedish Million Programme, it investigates the potential of an urban society where inhabitants are becoming increasingly disenfranchised, especially regarding the control they have over city planning. Wistisen argues that images of the suburban environment are marked by a constant tension between dystopic and encouraging representations, despair and possibilities. Her chapter demonstrates how YA and picture books participate in the creation of the

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image of the high-rise suburb by reinforcing, as well as challenging and deconstructing, the representation provided by mass media. Joshua Parker’s ‘“Double Vision”: Viennese Refugees in New York and Back Home Again’, is another chapter focusing on the translocal imagination. With an emphasis on poetry, Parker examines several texts by Austrian authors who fled Europe before or during the Second World War, highlighting a sort of ‘double vision’, the combination of a ‘lost’ Vienna and a contemporary Manhattan, in these writers’ works. Stefan Zweig, Max Roden, Ernst Waldinger, and Greta Hartwig-Manschinger all embodied a lost generation for whom the prospects and possibilities offered by the bewildering American city were far from obvious. Yet, as these authors’ memories of Vienna are transposed onto Manhattan’s cityscape, they discover uncanny traces relevant to their own identities, and such discoveries allow them, in Parker’s words, ‘to project and concretise their notions of home, with all the unconscious cultural baggage the term carries’ (229). In the final chapter of this section, ‘Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image and Experience’, Jason Finch develops a new account of the UK mass housing zones known colloquially as ‘council estates’ in discourse from the mid-twentieth century onwards. As case studies, Finch examines representations of two peripheral estates built between 1960 and 1980 in the West Midlands, a multipolar English urban region with Birmingham as its largest city. One is Lynsey Hanley’s Estates, first published in 2007, a polemical literary memoir about ‘estate’ lives and the politics of class. The other is a set of photographs originally taken in 1991 on the Lion Farm estate just beyond the western edge of Birmingham in Oldbury, West Midlands. These visual images, by Rob Clayton, have in the 2010s been reassessed and given symbolic value as an encapsulation of the estate as itself as a representative site of the post-war era in British history. Combining David Pinder’s thinking with the author’s own methodology of Deep Locational Criticism, the chapter experiments with the interaction of techniques originating in cultural geography and literary studies in urban and post-urban considerations, assessing what each can learn from the other. Avoiding dystopian modes, the essay combines readings of Hanley, Clayton and a promotional film about Clayton’s book Estate narrated by Jonathan Meades, with an account of a walk Finch took from Lion Farm to Birmingham’s city centre in October 2018. In the twenty-first century, Finch argues, there are multitudinous possibilities

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for public housing to have a nurturing and equable function, beneficial to public health and democratic decision-making. The aim is to find out what the contributions of both artists and academic researchers should be to expand the boundaries of possibility towards such a goal. The volume ends with an afterword by David Pinder, which assesses the contribution of the preceding chapters in the light of previous discussions of urban possibility, in utopian contexts and beyond. One specific context that has forced cities and their inhabitants to reassess what is possible is the global COVID-19 pandemic, which (at the time of writing) maintains a powerful grip on the ways in which urban society operates and imagines itself. The afterword provides a final way to summarise literature’s contribution to our understanding of urban possibilities from an interdisciplinary viewpoint, taking into account both alternative cities and alternative urban lives.

Works Cited Acke, Daniel. ‘Romain urban realist et romain urbain poétique: éléments pour une typologie.’ Pour une cartographie du romain urbain du XIXème au XXIème siècles, edited by Christina Horvath and Helle Waahlberg, Paratexte, 2008, pp. 245–54. Ameel, Lieven. ‘Cities Utopian, Dystopic and Apocalyptic.’ The Palgrave Handbook to Literature and the City, edited by Jeremy Tambling, Palgrave, 2016, pp. 785–800. ———. ‘The City Novel: Measuring Referential, Spatial, Linguistic, and Temporal Distances.’ The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, edited by Robert T. Tally Jr., Routledge, 2017, pp. 233–41. Ameel, Lieven, et al., editors. The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History. Routledge, 2019. Baeten, Guy. ‘Western Utopianism/Dystopianism and the Political Mediocrity of Critical Urban Research.’ Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, vol. 84, no. 3–4, 2002, pp. 143–52. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000. ———. Retrotopia. Polity Press, 2017. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001. Butt, Amy. ‘“Endless forms, vistas and hues”: Why Architects Should Read Science Fiction.’ Architectural Research Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2, 2018, pp. 151–60.

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Castells, Manuel. ‘Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of Urbanism in the Information Age.’ The Cybercities Reader, edited by Stephen Graham, Routledge, 2004, pp. 82–93. Chanda, A.K. ‘The Young Man from the Provinces.’ Comparative Literature, vol. 33, no. 4, 1981, pp. 321–41. Dannenberg, Hilary P. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. U of Nebraska P, 2008. Datta, Ayona. ‘New Urban Utopias of Postcolonial India: “Entrepreneurial Urbanization” in Dholera Smart City, Gujarat.’ Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, pp. 3–22. DholeraSIR. Dholera Special Investment Region Development Authority, 2020, dholerasir.com. Accessed 15 Feb. 2020. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Finch, Jason, et al. Preface. Literary Second Cities, edited by Jason Finch et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. v–vii. Fors, Hanna, et al. ‘User Participation in Urban Green Spaces—For the People or the Parks?’ Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, vol 14, no. 3, 2015, pp. 722– 34. Gelfant, Blanche Housman. The American City Novel. U of Oklahoma P, 1954. Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. U of California P, 2000. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘Nostalgia for Ruins.’ Grey Room, no. 23, 2006, pp. 6–21. Keunen, Bart. ‘World Cities and Second Cities: Imagining Growth and Hybridity in Modern Literature.’ Literary Second Cities, edited by Jason Finch et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 21–44. Kitchin, Rob, and James Kneale. ‘Science Fiction or Future Fact? Exploring Imaginative Geographies of the New Millennium.’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 25, no. 1, 2001, pp. 19–35. Kitchin, Rob, and James Kneale, editors. Lost in Space. Geographies of Science Fiction. Continuum, 2002. Kumar, Krishan. ‘The Ends of Utopia.’ New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, pp. 549–69. Laatikainen, Tiina, et al. ‘Comparing Conventional and PPGIS Approaches in Measuring Equality of Access to Urban Aquatic Environments.’ Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 144, 2015, pp. 22–33. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. U of California P, 1998. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. 1920. Translated by Anna Bostock, Merlin Press, 1978.

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McNeill, David. ‘New Songdo City: Atlantis of the Far East.’ The Independent, 22 June 2009. Independent.co.uk, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/asia/new-songdo-city-atlantis-of-the-far-east-1712252.html. Accessed 19 Oct. 2019. Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling. Oxford UP, 2017. Moretti, Franco. ‘Homo Palpitans: Balzac’s Novels and Urban Personality.’ Translated by Susan Fischer. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, Verso, 2005, pp. 109–29. Park, Robert E. ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment.’ The City, edited by Robert E. Park et al., Chicago UP, 1967, pp. 1–46. Pinder, David. ‘Reconstituting the Possible: Lefebvre, Utopia, and the Urban Question.’ International Journal for Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 2015, pp. 28–45. ———. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism. Edinburgh UP, 2005. Salmela, Markku. ‘Still Learning from Las Vegas: Imagining America’s Urban Other.’ Literary Second Cities, edited by Jason Finch et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 109–30. Shklovsky, Viktor. ‘Art as Technique.’ Literary Theory: An Anthology, 3rd ed., edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 2017, pp. 8–14.

CHAPTER 2

The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul Eric Prieto

The centre of gravity of urban theory is shifting south. This is true in at least two senses. First, in terms of demographics: the cities of the South now account for over 90 per cent of urban growth worldwide (UNHabitat, Updated 3), a fact that has suggested to some that ‘the rise of the West is over’ (Brand 29). Second, in terms of shifting theoretical paradigms: the demographic, institutional, and infrastructural challenges facing the generally younger and poorer cities of the Global South are of a kind that makes them difficult to address using the strategies on which modern Western urban planning theory has been premised. There is, then, a strong need for new urban strategies better able to account for the specific kinds of challenges facing these cities, a need to, as Ananya Roy has emphasised, explore ‘policy approaches that learn from the Third World cities’ (147). All of this is happening, moreover, at a time when the world’s rapidly growing human population and energy consumption is putting increasing stress on the planet’s natural resources, leading to

E. Prieto (B) UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_2

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climate change, resource depletion, and polluted environments. Meanwhile, as East and West, North and South become ever more entwined through economic and informational globalisation, the risks are shared more widely too, as the effects of localised crises—whether military, economic, environmental, epidemiological, or other—tend to ripple out ever more widely and rapidly from their point of origin. (This notion of globally shared risk plays a central role in Ursula Heise’s seminal reconfiguration of environmental studies in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet.) One might even say that the recent resurgence of ethnic nationalism and religious fundamentalism is a kind of perverse recognition of this state of affairs: fear and resentment of the other as a populist manifestation of the sense that dangerously dwindling local resources must be protected from the forces of globalisation, even as prosperity and economic growth seem to depend ever more on maintaining strong global ties. This tension was already central to Benjamin Barber’s 1995 rebuttal of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis in Jihad vs. McWorld. From a Literary Urban Studies (LUS) perspective this dual shift, from North to South and local to global, implies several important things. First, it suggests the need for LUS scholars to pay more attention to cities in the developing world, whether directly, by devoting more attention to the urban literatures of the Global South, or less directly, by factoring in, implicitly or explicitly, the kinds of issues that come to the fore there and asking about the extent to which they call for shifts in one’s thematic and analytic priorities. The first, direct, approach is close to the kind of work already being done in postcolonial studies, but there are important questions specific to urban representation that would benefit from the attention of critics attuned specifically to the historical and scientific literature on cities. As for the second—indirect—approach, it involves a shift towards a more worldly perspective, where topics that have traditionally been discussed in the regional or national context are reframed in relation to global processes and transnational forces. This includes the kind of demographic and environmental changes already mentioned, as well as changes in how the city itself is defined, which might, for example, involve putting more emphasis on the informal economy, peripheral and underrepresented neighbourhoods, and, more generally, the interplay between the top-down logic of state planning and the bottom-up logic of individuals and local communities. It is, no doubt, this interplay that explains the necessity of the two-pronged approach to urban possibility adopted for

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this volume. It will also, I believe, involve important shifts in the ways we think about economic and political globalisation, requiring a revised sense of what constitutes a ‘global city’ (Sassen) and a better understanding of how events and decisions in the command-and-control centres of the global economic system shape (and are shaped by) those in the secondary and tertiary nodes.1

Towards a New Language of Urban Possibility: Representing Urban Informality One of the central challenges facing the cities of the South has been their explosive growth, which is moving at a speed unprecedented in human history. Fuelled largely by rural-to-urban migration—itself linked to population growth due to improved life expectancy and continued high birth rates—the populations of many cities in Latin America, Asia, and Africa have ballooned so quickly that the managerial capacities of their governments have been essentially unable to keep up. Consequently, according to UN estimates, fully half of the city dwellers in the Global South live in some type of extra-legal housing, typically in conditions of extreme poverty and precarity, often lacking such basic amenities as clean water, electricity, and sanitation facilities, and often on land deemed too dangerous or otherwise undesirable to be developed. (See UN-Habitat, Challenge and Updated. These figures, of course, are in constant evolution.) Left to their own devices by cities whose administrations are often completely overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and lack the financial resources and/or political will necessary to effectively integrate the new populations, these city dwellers must largely fend for themselves. (China in the post-Mao era of ‘state capitalism’ provides a major, albeit complicated, exception to this pattern of unmanaged growth.) Historically, of course, improvised housing solutions have always played a significant role in the growth of cities. They might even be thought of as ‘normal’, to the extent that they mark a transitional phase of urban development, part of the growing pains of cities as they struggle to absorb sudden migratory influxes, or find themselves dealing with unexpected 1 See, for example, the widely used textbook Geographies of Development, recent editions of which have argued for the need to update Sassen’s list of global cities in a way that foregrounds ‘an emerging network of world cities’ (Potter 155–59). See also Barber, If ; Glaeser; and Sassen et al. for updated prognostications on world citydom.

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economic and political shocks of various kinds. What is new in the current era, however, is the unprecedented size and apparent permanence of many such settlements. Many in the architectural and urban planning communities have understood that the scope and persistence of urban informality in the developing world has created something new and unprecedented, and that these changes represent a major challenge to their discipline. Thus, Tom Avermaete asserts that ‘It is time to rethink the list of “great” cities’ in terms of ‘the megalopoli of the global South’, and to use ‘the experiences with infrastructure in these cities [to] reconfigure the heartland of architectural and urban thinking’ (Avermaete 2016). Similarly, the Dutch ‘starchitect’ Rem Koolhaas emphasises the sense of disciplinary crisis provoked by this new set of realities. The result is a theoretical, critical, and operational impasse […] the entire discipline possesses no adequate terminology to discuss the most pertinent, most crucial phenomena within its domain nor any conceptual framework to describe, interpret, and understand exactly those forces that could redefine and revitalise it. (Koolhaas 27)

And the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, who was awarded a Pritzker Prize (architecture’s highest honour) for his work on innovative housing solutions for the poor, has challenged socially-conscious architects to rethink their discipline in more interdisciplinary terms. As architects, we are living at a time of shifting paradigms […] and this demands a new, more open approach. It’s why I’m so interested in how architects and urban planners engage with other fields – economics, security, the environment and so on. Our challenge must be to go beyond architecture and speak the languages of these other disciplines, before translating our discussions into formal design proposals.2

These are just three examples of a growing number of urban theorists— including AbdouMaliq Simone, Filip de Boeck, and Edgar Pieterse—who agree that there is a need for a new language of urban design, and that the most pertinent objects of study for the development of such a 2 Aravena, ‘It’s Time’. See also Aravena’s 2014 Ted Talk, ‘My architectural philosophy? Bring the community into the process’, which emphasises the importance of local consultation in urban planning.

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language are in the megalopoli of the Global South, although they do not necessarily agree on, or even claim to know, what those changes would be.

Literature, Transduction, and the Larger Discursive Field of Urban Informality As a humanist who comes at the subject of informal urbanism from a literary perspective, the enabling premise of my work has been that literary depictions of the informal city can play a valuable role in ‘reconfiguring’ (Avermaete) our ‘terminology and conceptual frameworks’ (Koolhaas) in order to adapt to the ‘shifting paradigms’ (Aravena) of contemporary urbanisation. My sense is that the kinds of perspectives brought into play by imaginative writing can help to bridge the gap between existing urban theory and changing urban realities. My point is not that literary representation or criticism can in some way supersede or supplant the work of professionals and experts—I don’t subscribe to the romantic notion of literature as having privileged access to reality—but it does have a number of comparative advantages that enable it to contribute meaningfully to the larger effort to understand informal urbanism and develop meaningful strategies for addressing the problems associated with it. Some of these advantages are fairly obvious and need no explanation. Literature enjoys more immediate access to the broader public of non-specialists than scientific discourse and has a greater ability to bring the implications of policy to life for readers by emphasising the subjective, experiential dimensions of its effects. Others are perhaps less obvious but equally important. For example, the ‘indirect referentiality’ of metaphor and fiction enables literature to explore hypothetical situations and ‘possible worlds’ in ways that often generate more powerful insights into real-world phenomena than directly referential accounts of factual situations (see Ricoeur, Pavel, and Westphal). And the poietic (i.e., creative or active) aspect of literary invention—as in the development of new concepts through catachresis, the revelatory potential of a good metaphor, the persuasive power of a well-constructed plot, or the empathetic insights that a well-delineated character evokes—makes it a valuable ally for theorists and planners, whether they are in search of a way to understand the phenomena before them, to think through the potential human consequences of their theories, or to generate support for their proposals.

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None of this should be taken to imply that planners, theorists, and policymakers are devoid of poetic insight, poietic creativity, or imaginative flights of fancy. Rather than treating literature as something that can be regarded in isolation from or opposition to scientific or theoretical modes of discourse, it is important to recognise its continuity with them, to understand the various logical, rhetorical, and symbolic functions that literary works share with non-literary works, and to emphasise their ability to work together within the larger discursive field of city writing. Interdisciplinarity does not here mean reading literary works ‘in the context of’ scientific and public policy approaches to the subject, but rather treating literature as a mode of discourse that can be situated on the same discursive plane with them and is constantly engaged in a kind of performative exchange with them. Henri Lefebvre has discussed the creative work that brings about spatial innovation in terms of ‘transduction’ and ‘lived space’, terms which are meant to designate the process through which new conceptions of space come into being (see ‘Le droit à la ville’ and Production). Lefebvre emphasises the dialectical nature of this process, which he sees as an ongoing interaction between the top-down, abstract conceptions of theoretical knowledge (a.k.a. ‘conceived space’) and the bottom-up concreteness of phenomenological experience (‘perceived space’) that is facilitated by the imaginative work he associates with the term ‘lived space’ (Lefebvre, Production). As for the term ‘transduction’, it expresses the same dialectical conception of innovation encoded in the term ‘lived space’, but frames it in terms of a logical trans fer between deductive and inductive logics. In both cases, the key is to break out of congealed thought patterns and revise outdated theories by constantly testing them against direct experience. This creative process should not then be understood as specific to literature, but Lefebvre acknowledges that it is an area in which literature and the other creative arts excel. In the following pages I will be seeking to build on the comparative advantages of literature by leveraging its transductive contributions to theoretical knowledge. I will be particularly concerned with its ability to expose the weaknesses of one-sided or overly abstract sociological and urbanistic categories that make it difficult to see informal settlements as more than emblems of economic injustice or symptoms of social dysfunction, as Mike Davis does in his highly influential polemic Planet of Slums (2006). Davis’s book is, to be sure, a powerful and valuable text that did much to bring the problems associated with informal urbanism into view

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for a large segment of the reading public. But it is also built around a deeply problematic argument, which promotes an apocalyptic vision of informal settlements, treating them essentially as undifferentiated places of absolute suffering and social death, while treating their inhabitants as dehumanised populations almost completely deprived of agency and hope. Space constraints preclude an extended critique of Davis’s book here.3 But LUS scholars should be aware that although Davis’s book continues to be cited favourably by a number of humanities scholars (see the Dawson, Gilligan, and Ty entries in the bibliography), it has a rather dismal reputation amongst social science researchers and activists, particularly those working in informal settlements and with their inhabitants, who find that it greatly misrepresents important aspects of life in the informal city.

Two Contrasting Visions of Istanbul’s gecekondu Neighbourhoods In what follows I’ll be discussing two Turkish texts: Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind and Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin. The latter deals with the foundational moments of a gecekondu settlement on the outskirts of an unnamed but clearly implied Istanbul, while the first is organised around what we might call the adolescence and maturity of an Istanbul gecekondu neighbourhood. The word gecekondu, it should be noted, means literally ‘put up overnight’. It is commonly used to refer to extra-legal self-built homes (considered to have been built stealthily, under cover of night) and, by synecdochic extension, neighbourhoods that were originally composed of such homes. The choice of Istanbul here is not fortuitous. The city has an interesting intermediary status in the Global North/South divide. Straddling Europe and Asia geographically, the former capital of two world historical empires (Byzantine and Ottoman), it is one of the world’s great cities, full of architectural gems with a long and storied literary and cultural history. It has, moreover, remained the cultural and economic (if not political) capital of modern Turkey, a nation that fits no more comfortably under the ‘Global South’ or ‘postcolonial’ label than Istanbul does. (Turkey 3 For that see Brodwyn Fischer’s patient and measured critique, or that of Richard Pithouse, an activist who has worked closely with shack dweller organisations in South Africa, or that of Tom Angotti, a Marxist urban planning specialist.

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successfully fended off European colonisation in 1923 and is considered a ‘middle income’ country by the World Bank.) Nonetheless, the history of modern Istanbul has followed a path similar to that of many cities in the Global South. Its population has grown exponentially in the last 60 years, from less than a million in 1950 to around 15 million in 2017, making it one of the fifteen largest cities in the world. Moreover, the majority of this growth, fuelled primarily by rural-to-urban migration from Anatolia, was initially concentrated in the rapidly proliferating gecekondu bölgesi (squatter settlements) that grew up on the ever-expanding periphery of the city. However, it has, as Kemal Karpat has emphasised, gone a long way towards resolving the worst aspects of its urban crisis. ‘The gecekondu of Turkey’, Karpat writes, now have ‘very little in common with the enduring shantytowns of Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. How Turkey prevented the gecekondu from becoming a permanent blight on its urban landscape is a subject of vital interest’.4 Indeed, might Istanbul’s experience hold clues that could help other cities manage their growing pains, as Karpat seems to suggest here? Before launching into the heart of my analysis it will be useful to make a preliminary distinction between the two literary texts. Pamuk’s depiction of the informal city in A Strangeness in My Mind is predominantly a normalising vision, whereas Tekin’s approach in Berji Kristin involves a poetics of estrangement. Pamuk adopts a largely realist framework that would not be out of place in a Balzac, Dickens, or Tolstoy novel, whereas Tekin deploys a narrative apparatus that has been compared to magical realism. While Pamuk’s message about informal urbanism seems to be an optimistic one about social advancement, Tekin emphasises the dismal conditions and suffering of her gecekondu population. A number of questions arise. To what extent is the mode of representation determined by (or determinate of) the intended message? To what extent are the respective social messages of the two novels determined by the social ‘positionality’ of their authors? And how does all of this affect what we think about informal urbanisation in relation to questions of social justice and economic development? In attempting to answer these questions, it will be important to avoid forcing either of these authors into simplistic pro- or contra-stances with respect to informal urbanisation. Both of these 4 Karpat’s 1976 book, The Gecekondu, was an early and important entry into the academic field of informal urbanism, appearing in the same year as the inaugural volume of Habitat International, a flagship journal for research on informal settlements.

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authors have important things to say about both the hardships and the potentialities of gecekondu life. And, as I will try to show, their messages have in turn important implications for the general field of urban informality, conceived here as a promising reservoir of urban possibilities, in both the human and geographical senses of the term foregrounded by the editors of this volume.

A Strangeness in My Mind A Strangeness in my Mind has a Defoesque subtitle that, in a move reminiscent of many eighteenth-century novels, doubles as a plot summary. A Strangeness in My Mind Being the Adventures and Dreams of Mevlut Karata¸s, a Seller of Boza, and of His Friends, and Also a Portrait of Life in Istanbul Between 1969 and 2012 from Many Different Points of View. (2)

Pamuk’s use of this convention seems meant to establish a sense of bygone times, reflected in the mood of hüzün (nostalgia) that permeates the novel, and in his protagonist’s uncommon devotion to the past. It also establishes the polyphonic narrative strategy Pamuk will use to give the novel its panoramic feeling. But, most importantly, the novel’s subtitle juxtaposes the personal life of Mevlut with the public life of Istanbul in a way that suggests distinct allegorical possibilities. Indeed, Pamuk misses no opportunity to remind readers of the profound interdependence of personal identity and urban geography. Mevlut sensed that the light and darkness inside his mind looked like the nighttime landscape of the city […] Mevlut came to understand the truth that a part of him had known all along: walking around the city at night made him feel as if he were wandering around inside his own head. That was why whenever he spoke to the walls, advertisements, shadows, and strange and mysterious shapes he couldn’t see in the night, he always felt as if he were talking to himself. (579)

The physical act of exploring the changing face of the city is strictly equated with Mevlut’s mental act of exploring his own spiritual and psychological development. Urban development and personal development, in this novel, are related in a way that strongly emphasises

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the reciprocal relationship between the two kinds of urban possibility examined throughout the present volume. So what does the life path of Mevlut have to tell us about Istanbul— and vice versa? In order to answer that question we need to understand the relationship around which Mevlut’s personal life revolves: his marriage. Mevlut, we are constantly reminded, is famous in his circle of family and friends for being, ‘the man who wrote to the younger sister, but got married to the older one instead’ (536). Having fallen madly in love with Samiha, a girl he has only seen once, he tries to court her through an elaborate letter-writing campaign but is duped by a rival into eloping with her older, and decidedly plainer, sister Rayiha. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Mevlut and Rayiha do get married, and go on to lead a long and happy, if complicated, life together, forging a deeply loving marriage that is strong enough to survive a variety of setbacks, including their inability to definitively escape poverty. Indeed, years after Rayiha’s untimely death, Mevlut looks back on his life and affirms that ‘I have loved Rayiha more than anything in this world’ (584). These words, the last ten words of the novel, are addressed directly to the city: they are ‘what he wanted to tell Istanbul’, a turn of phrase that highlights their significance as urban allegory. Obeying this allegorical logic, Mevlut’s relationship to the city follows a path that is rigorously parallel to that of his relationship to Rayiha. The novel introduces us to Mevlut after he has left his impoverished rural village in central Anatolia in order to join his father and other emigrants from his village. Filled with dreams of making it big in the big city, he is disappointed to find himself living the life of a poor student, in a oneroom gecekondu shack with a pit toilet and dirt floor that his father built with his own hands. And yet, just as with Rayiha, Mevlut comes over time to love the place, in a complex but hopeful way. HOME WAS a gecekondu, a slum house. This was the word Mevlut’s father used to refer to this place whenever he got angry about its crudeness and poverty, but on those rare occasions when he wasn’t angry, he preferred to use the word ‘home,’ with a tenderness akin to what Mevlut felt toward the house. This tenderness fostered the illusion that the place might hold traces of the eternal home that would one day be theirs in this world, but it was difficult to truly believe this. (46)

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This sense of tenderness grows, despite the physical hardships, until, years later, after Mevlut has moved on and lived in a number of other neighbourhoods, he realises that this is the only one where he feels truly at home. So much so that after Rayiha’s death he decides to move back to his father’s old gecekondu home, where he will live with his new wife, the still beautiful although now ageing Samiha, in a gesture that sheds a new, more mature light on his dual quest for marital and urban contentment. Finally, at the very end of the novel, when his old neighbourhood Kültepe is slated to be redeveloped and the residents relocated to modern high-rise buildings, Mevlut and his neighbours come to watch the demolition of their old homes, and react with an unexpected burst of emotion. Mevlut saw people cry, laugh, look away, or start fights as their houses were knocked down. When the time came for his own one-room house, Mevlut felt his heart breaking. He observed his whole childhood, the food he’d eaten, the homework he’d done, the way things had smelled, the sound of his father grunting in his sleep, hundreds of thousands of memories all smashed to pieces in a single swipe of the bulldozer shovel. (559)

Just as with Rayiha, his home never met any ideal standard of beauty or prestige, but it is the place that enabled him to make a life for himself in the city he loves and is, therefore, the place he remains most attached to. What was once an underappreciated fixture in his life, the best he could manage, has become a cherished part of it. And something similar, apparently, is true of his former neighbours. One of the perhaps underappreciated accomplishments of this novel is the way in which it normalises life in the informal city. Rather than treating it as a place of marginalisation, exclusion, or dehumanisation, as critics in Davis’s mould tend to do, Pamuk’s novel emphasises the extent to which life goes on there much as it does anywhere else, with opportunities for joy as well as suffering, fulfilment as much as frustration, and social advancement as well as periods of sometimes grinding poverty. Indeed, to the extent that we judge the novel’s message about gecekondu life in terms of its larger narrative structure, it is clear that the overall trend of the novel is upward. This is clearly a novel of urban possibility. All of the members of Mevlut’s milieu, with one significant exception, progressively improve their financial and material situations, eventually moving on to live in more established neighbourhoods. There

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are some, like Mevlut’s best friend Ferhat, who become city employees and political operatives, some, like Mevlut’s daughter Fatma, who go to college and move away, and some, like the Vural and Akta¸s families, who go into construction and real estate and return to the old neighbourhood as landlords, developers, and/or speculators. And there is even, in the case of Hadji Hamit Vural, one who becomes a ‘construction magnate’ (588). As for the most significant exception to this narrative of economic progress, it is Mevlut himself, who seems, with his naïve and somewhat passive manner and his quixotic devotion to the folkloric pleasures of selling boza (a traditional, artisanally-produced fermented malt drink), to have made a conscious decision to remain out of the rat race of modernisation and economic advancement. He does so, not because he is oppressed or exploited (although he is at various points in the novel those things too) but out of a desire to devote himself to what he loves most, which is to walk the streets of Istanbul at night, communing with the city and himself before returning home to his wife. Before drawing any overly exuberant conclusions from these observations, however, there are several important questions to consider, beginning with the question of positionality raised earlier. There are good reasons to be suspicious of what Pamuk’s novel has to say about gecekondu life, especially given the gauzy ambiance of hüzün that pervades the novel and the somewhat rosy tint that it casts on urban poverty. A sceptic might point out that Pamuk’s own upbringing was a decidedly privileged one and that he might simply be romanticising the picturesque aspects of poverty, poverty that he never experienced from the inside. Pamuk himself admitted such a possibility in his autobiographical memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City, recognising that it is easy for someone who has not been directly subjected to its hardships to pine for an older simpler time that featured picturesque forms of urban informality like the cries of street vendors or fleetingly glimpsed images of gecekondu interiors (Pamuk 2004, 262–64). It makes sense then to seek out an opposing viewpoint against which to test Pamuk’s vision. Latife Tekin’s novel Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills will play that role here.

Berji Kristin First published in 1984, thirty years before Pamuk’s novel, Berji Kristin gives a rather hellish view of gecekondu life, presenting it in terms that appear, at least on a first reading, to be much closer to Mike Davis’s apocalyptic vision than to Pamuk’s normalising depiction of the lives of the

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urban poor. Moreover Tekin’s social position would appear to be almost diametrically opposed to that of Pamuk: she spent her early childhood in a village in the province of Kayseri before migrating with her family to Istanbul’s periphery. In representational strategy too, Tekin provides an interesting contrast to Pamuk, taking the idea of strangeness in a much more literal direction than Pamuk. Tekin has insisted on her effort to forge ‘a language of the deprived’ able to give expression ‘not only to their way of life but also to their outlook on life, perception of reality, sense of humour and dreams’.5 Her approach is designed to depict the extreme hardships that her characters must endure, and to present them as they would have been experienced by a group of largely illiterate peasants encountering the harsh realities of industrial modernity for the first time. To Pamuk’s straightforward allegory, which maps the inner life of its protagonist onto the history of the city of Istanbul, Tekin’s novel responds with characters who don’t even seem to have an inner life, or at least not one that is accessible to readers, and who seem to have no sense of history or world affairs. Theirs is a kind of pre-individual, almost infra-human reality, reinforced by the narrator, whose voice is that of the collectivity itself, not of a privileged spokesperson for that collectivity. John Berger, in his preface to the English translation of the novel, calls this the voice of rumour, emphasising its collective, mythical qualities. The novel, divided into 21 short chapters, is structured as a series of vignettes that recount the successive stages of development of a gecekondu settlement on the outskirts of the city. What they depict is in essence a series of battles between the squatters and their successive enemies. Thus the novel opens with an account of the arrival of the first settlers, and of their first battle, which turns out to be against the wind, which is to say, against nature itself. Given the unusual style and representational strategies of this novel, and their importance for the ways in which the novel makes meaning, it is worth examining an extended excerpt from this passage. The hill was engulfed in pitch darkness, but in the small hours a wind sneaked up, loosened the rooftops, and carried them away. And the babies too, asleep in the roof-cradles, flew off along with the roofs.

5 From Saliha Paker’s translator’s preface to Berji Kristin (Tekin 12).

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The hut people woke with snow falling on their lashes and faces still warm from deep sleep. They thought at first they were having a wonderful dream; the sky had turned to snow and filled their huts. Then their cries rent the night. Men and women, old and young, rushed out in their underwear; lanterns were lit; everyone turned out to search for roofs and babies […] One roof was found in the garden of the lightbulb factory […] The other roofs were lined up side by side on the level ground around the china factory and the babies were out of their cradles, crawling about in the snow and playing with broken shards. In the wind the clatter mingled with their shrill little cries. Fervently the women hugged their ice-cold babies and sheltered in a coal shed a little way off. The men dragged the roofs back, one or two at a time and, lifting them over the walls, tethered them with stout ropes and secured them with battens to prevent them flying off again. They wound the ropes round the legs of the long seats which lined their walls, and whenever the wind blew hard they hung on tight and pulled on the ropes and battens. While they were securing the roofs and praying they would not fly off, all the birds of the city flocked together to the Wood-and-Plastic Neighbourhood. (17–18)

The extreme fragility of these homes, the miraculous nature of the babies’ night-time flight, the improbable fact of their survival, and the undiminished determination of the settlers to stake their claim to the land combine to highlight the quasi-mythical mode of story-telling at work here. It is important to recognise the elemental nature of the struggle between the settlers and their environment. The settlers are presented to us not as individuals but as a kind of impersonal force of nature that, like the wind, cannot be reasoned with or placated. This becomes even clearer when the settlers face their second foe: the government and its demolition crews, who, obeying the contractual logic of property owners and regulatory agencies, see the settlers only as squatters, which is to say trespassers who must be evicted. But here again, the almost superhuman (or perhaps infra-human) tenacity of the settlers manifests itself, and they struggle grimly on in the face of the repeated destruction of their shacks, until there is nothing left of them but shattered remnants. Curiously, it is the sight of a little girl playing in the wreckage of her own house that is credited with defeating the wreckers, leaving us to wonder if their loss of resolve is due to a sense of pity for the girl and her plight or the realisation that nothing short of an outright massacre would drive the settlers away.

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Having won this second battle, the settlers must then face their third foe, which takes the form of pollution, specifically the various forms of toxic waste that are released by the factories around which their homes are clustered. And the novel continues in this vein for nineteen more chapters, battle after battle, all following the same basic pattern. As in the chapters discussed so far, each successive chapter puts the emphasis on the extremity of the hardships faced by the settlers, the complete disregard for their well-being exhibited by both the government and the factory owners, and the ferocious tenacity that enables the settlers to persevere, despite living in conditions that approach the animalistic level of bare life. Given all this, it seems that we should put Tekin’s novel on the side of Davis’s critique of urban informality as utterly dehumanising. But if we look now at a battle-by-battle summary of the novel, a new pattern emerges. (We have already examined the first three stages of this progression.)

The Successive Battles of the Squatter Settlement in Berji Kristin 1. Against nature (the wind) 2. Against the government (which seeks to evict them) and its demolition crews 3. Against industrial modernity (unscrupulous factory owners and their polluting factories) 4. Against capitalist exploitation (via labour strikes against poor pay and working conditions) 5. Against intruders (new arrivals, in particular gypsies, who are attracted by the relative economic success of the squatters as they gain a foothold in the modern economy) 6. Against themselves (as they face the temptations of the modern world, the progressive loss of their cultural traditions and the difficulty they have in devising new social practices better attuned to modern urban conditions). What this outline reveals, surprisingly perhaps, is that if we step back from the vivid depictions of suffering and violence found in it, Berji Kristin turns out to be very much like Pamuk’s novel in that it tells a story about the progressive advancement of the community. As the settlers

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implant themselves ever more firmly in their newfound home, they begin to earn money, to send their children to school, to appear well-off enough that others start to encroach on their territory, to develop more effective political organisation and greater awareness of the outside world, and to face the new kinds of problems that go along with economic advancement. Those problems include the temptations of consumerism and conspicuous consumption (e.g. status-conscious neighbours competing with each other by installing ever-more ornate front doors on their otherwise humble dwellings); a vapid entertainment industry that makes its presence felt when a cinema opens nearby; women’s demands for gender equality (and fierce patriarchal resistance to those demands); the loss of age-old folkloric traditions; and the stubborn persistence of superstitious and discriminatory ways of thinking. Like Pamuk’s, then, this is not a story of misery and suffering, although there is plenty of that, but a story of the progressive integration of a gecekondu neighbourhood into the social and economic fabric of the city. Indeed, if there is more emphasis on destitution in Tekin, it may simply be because she is depicting the very first stages of the foundation of the settlement, whereas Pamuk begins his account at a time when Mevlut’s neighbourhood was already fairly well established. Tekin, in a sense, tells the beginning of a story that Pamuk brings into the present day. (It is worth noting in this regard that subsequent Tekin novels, like Swords of Ice [Buzdan Kiliçlar, 1989] clearly push in the same chronological direction as Pamuk, following the progress of characters who live in more developed neighbourhoods and have less elemental problems.) In its own way, then, Tekin’s gecekondu neighbourhood follows a trajectory that is every bit as optimistic as that of Pamuk’s—which is to say moderately so. Certainly, the state of the gecekondu communities at the end of these two novels falls far short of any idealised conception of urban life or social justice, but it does suggest that they nonetheless offer a viable platform for survival and upward mobility. Interestingly, Mike Davis devotes a few lines to Tekin’s novel in Planet of Slums, but does not seem to have picked up on this aspect of her message, mentioning only the sensational violence of the settlers’ struggle against the government. He praises Tekin’s settlers as ‘heroic squatters’ when referencing this violence (Davis, Planet 38–39), even though elsewhere in his book he derides the ‘persistent heroic image of the squatter as self-builder and owner-occupier’ (44), ‘the enduring mythology of heroic squatters’ (82), and the ‘wishful thinking of bootstrap ideologies’ (181). The only form

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of heroism Davis is willing to recognise as legitimate, it seems, is headto-head violence. But when read alongside Pamuk’s novel, Berji Kristin seems to suggest that the real keys to urban possibility are linked to the qualities that Davis belittles, involving the grinding day-to-day struggle for incremental economic advancement and social recognition within an unjust economic and political system. My positive reading of Tekin’s novel appears to find further confirmation on its last page, which points out that an earlier prophecy made by the village elder, Güllü Baba, has now come true. What did this prophecy announce? Precisely that the settlement of Flower Hill will survive, and even thrive, but that its struggles and sacrifices will continue on in different forms. [Güllü Baba had] the ability to discover secrets known only to Him. Through this gift he could foresee the fate of the Flower Hill folk: on their foreheads were inscribed, in deep black letters, factories, wind and garbage. These would be the bringers of good luck and bad; factories would be opened on Flower Hill where the deformed men would work, and there would be so many more factories that the women and children would stop scavenging and would fill them: the community would prosper, but their sores would never heal. The factory waste would alter the colour of the earth, the howling wind would scatter, and murmurs would turn into screams. (46)

This is not, to be sure, a cosily comforting prophecy of urban bliss. The final sentence in particular is a troubling one. But taken together with the progression outlined above, it is clear that this is an account of the progressive integration of the community into the life of the city. The struggle to survive and get ahead continues with as much ferocity as ever, but this little community will grow, developing to the point that its members will be able to exit the informal economy and will even, as Güllü Baba predicts, ‘prosper’. It is significant in this regard that the screams with which this prophecy closes are a response to environmental threats—the howling wind and pollution—and not more direct forms of state repression and economic exploitation, as if to say that it is the environmental battle, and not the battle for social recognition, economic advancement, and security of tenure, that they will never be able to win definitively. In the light of Karpat’s observations about Istanbul’s successes in fighting urban

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poverty (mentioned above) and the ever-more pressing concerns of pollution, climate change, and resource depletion, these lines seem especially prescient. Of course environmental injustice is one of the forms that economic and political exclusion can take, a dynamic that is aptly captured by Rob Nixon’s term ‘slow violence’. So perhaps it is best after all to read this image of ‘murmurs [turning] into screams’ as a metaphor for political conflict, as the settlers’ private murmurs begin to be forcefully projected into the public realm. But this too is a form of progress. As the settler’s needs evolve, the tools used to satisfy those needs evolve accordingly, here taking place in the realm of verbal conflict (screams) rather than in the realm of physical violence that had dominated up to this point. In a sense, the logic of the novel is like that of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, where securing one’s immediate physiological security (food, water, shelter) must come before the struggle to ensure higher needs such as health and personal security (including environmental security), love and belonging, social status, and self-actualisation.

Representational Politics It is important to emphasise that Tekin arrives at this conclusion by means that do not just differ from Pamuk in terms of their representational values but also in terms of their social and political preoccupations. Whereas Pamuk recounts the lives of a highly entrepreneurial group of people struggling to enter the petite bourgeoisie, Tekin’s story is about class conflict from a resolutely proletarian perspective. The lives of Tekin’s characters revolve around the factory and their various labour disputes with the unscrupulous capitalists for whom they work, whereas all of Pamuk’s characters are involved in some form of commerce. Pamuk and Tekin, in other words, are addressing their audience from opposite sides of the class divide. Perhaps this opposition is linked to their choice of narrative strategies, although whether as cause or effect would be difficult to say. Clearly Pamuk’s realist aesthetic and his emphasis on the individuality of his characters, with each getting his or her own chance to speak in the first person, reflects an ethos of individual autonomy and rational choice typical of a liberal/bourgeois worldview. Tekin, on the other hand, in emphasising the collective voice of rumour, seems to subscribe to a more properly communal outlook. That said, Tekin’s characters show little interest in or

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even understanding of class-based collective action: they are just as mystified by the concept of communism as they are by that of NATO. And their attempts at labour action are decidedly amateurish: they often devolve into folkloric dance parties or end abruptly when some new distraction comes along. Rather than presenting their actions in conventional Marxist terms, then, Tekin suggests that their collective agency manifests itself according to a decentralised logic that might be thought of as Deleuzian or Certeauian. Like a Deleuzian war machine, or the ‘microbe-like […] swarming […] proliferating illegitimacy’ that de Certeau identifies with agency in a panoptic regime (96), Tekin’s settlers are able, without significant premeditation, to reterritorialise the urban order in ways that turn the situation to their (relative) advantage. This enables them to claim important victories over the state and the capitalist imperatives of the factory owners, often through the most unexpected means, as in the little girl’s victory over the demolition crews, discussed above. John Berger’s insistence on the importance of rumour in Berji Kristin can help to develop this point. As it turns out, the collective voice of rumour is a common feature in literary representations of the informal city—present in texts as different as Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road—and it is one that has great power as a mode of resistance to the centralised power structures of cities and states so often arrayed against squatter communities. As Xavier Garnier argues, the voice of rumour is opposed to ‘le mot d’ordre’, which is that of centralised government power. For Garnier, the mot d’ordre loses power as it spreads from the centre, whereas la rumeur gains power as it circulates. One is vertical, arborescent, the other horizontal, rhizomatic (Garnier 892). Thus, although diffuse and apparently weak, the kind of agency associated with la rumeur is disseminated throughout the population in a way that makes it better suited to the needs of those on the margins of the economic and political life of the city, especially those living under an autocratic regime. In a situation of institutional neglect or outright oppression it provides a crucial instrument for bottom-up organisation and struggle against the formal power structures of a state that views their very presence as illegitimate. It is no surprise, then, that this kind of discourse has been embraced by many urban theorists working on the informal city—including Pieterse, Simone, Nganang, and Roy, as well as the group of Latin American urbanists associated with Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner (see Brillembourg et al.).

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This, I would argue, is one of the central political lessons of Berji Kristin. It is a lesson in the formation of alternative power structures through alternative modes of discourse. The lessons of Pamuk’s novel, although congruent with those of Tekin, are enacted on a different plane. They speak more directly to issues of public policy. I will close with a few words on these.

From Pamuk to Protopia: Some Concluding Extrapolations on Urban Possibility The social progress that Pamuk’s novel chronicles suggests that squatter settlements can—when tolerated by the state, supported by a suitable regulatory framework, and provided with certain modest kinds of infrastructural and social support—have a valuable role to play in the integration of new arrivals into the social and economic life of the city. And the Turkish state’s historical approach to urbanisation seems to bear this out. As Robert Neuwirth explains, the Turkish state has been uncommonly receptive to the demands of urban squatters, thanks in part to quirks in its legal and political traditions that, in principle at least, require it to recognise a squatter’s claim to previously unoccupied land almost literally overnight. (The term gecekondu, as mentioned above, means ‘built overnight’. For more specifics on this legal framework, see Neuwirth 8, 147, and 165.) This seems to be a model well worth emulating as it has made it possible for many gecekondu dwellers to attain that most precious of housing necessities, ‘security of tenure’, which UN-Habitat considers to be one of the five essential features of acceptable housing (along with durability of housing, sufficient space, access to clean water, and proper sanitation). It is worth noting that this approach puts Turkey, and Pamuk’s novel, in the tradition of John Turner, who championed the cause of self-built housing in the 1960s and promoted relatively modest forms of state intervention. In Turkey, this relatively laissez-faire approach to urbanisation enabled gecekondu dwellers to gradually improve their homes over time, often to the point where gecekondu neighbourhoods are now indistinguishable from more conventional neighbourhoods. Mevlut’s deepening relationship to his gecekondu home also suggests that incremental approaches to urban development, through such modest forms of state intervention as on-site slum upgrading and the ‘half a house’ solutions that Aravena has experimented with, might not only be more achievable (i.e., affordable for the state) but also preferable in

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humanitarian terms to the so-called ‘modernist’ approach to slum abatement, dominant in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, which advocated (often involuntary) relocation into large-scale state-subsidised housing projects. The larger lesson, though, involves a more nuanced understanding of the human experience of place and the need to focus on the humanitarian implications of urban policy. This puts Mevlut in the company of thinkers like Amartya Sen, who in Development as Freedom (2001), insisted on the need to think about development not just in terms of material well-being but also in terms of social and psychological well-being, for which he identified a set of five essential freedoms: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. Finally, Pamuk’s novel, and in particular the plot strand focusing on the Vural family and their urban renewal projects, suggests that private capital has an important role to play in providing housing and services to squatter citizens, especially when the state lacks the resources to provide those services on its own. This acceptance of the role that private capital plays in urban renewal, in combination with the previous points about incrementalism, implies a fundamental disagreement with Davis’s neo-Marxist analysis of informal urbanisation. Davis lays the blame for urban poverty at the feet of liberal economic institutions and rejects any solution, like those of Turner (who is explicitly taken to task by Davis) and Sen, which are more open to market economies and individual entrepreneurial efforts to combat it. But even urbanists strongly sympathetic with the radical left outlook of Davis, like Justin McGuirk, make a point of distancing themselves from his position, with McGuirk arguing that ‘cities of the developing world need to explore’ new relations with capital, including public-private and formal-informal hybrid solutions, ‘if they are to start imagining a future that is different from the present’ (McGuirk 22). To be clear, the problem with Davis’s book, as I see it, is not its Marxism or its critique of neoliberalism. Indeed, his account of the damage wrought by the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the World Bank and IMF in the 1980s is one of the most compelling parts of the book. The real problem is with his all-or-nothing attitude towards social justice. For Davis, the neoliberal world order is so fundamentally unjust as to be irredeemable: nothing short of a global revolutionary overhaul of the entire capitalist system will enable the poor of the developing world to improve their lot, and in Davis’s view those poor lack the historical agency necessary to bring about that kind of change. (See, on this

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point, the last section of Davis’s 2004 New Left Review article, which equates the rise of fundamentalist religious groups in poor communities with a loss of class solidarity and historical agency.) But what Pamuk’s and Tekin’s books demonstrate quite convincingly is that an incremental model of advancement premised on public-private cooperation and the sweat equity of shanty dwellers can work. To be sure, the kind of strategies they envisage are disappointing, in the sense that they are partial, localised, and make no bold claims about achieving anything resembling social justice or economic equality on a global scale. But the shanty dwellers of their novels do not have the luxury of being able to wait that unspecified amount of time that would be necessary for the utopian aspirations of totalising thinkers to have their effect. And the history of Turkish urbanisation since 1950, as documented by Karpat and Neuwirth, seems to bear out the viability of this kind of incrementalism. Or to put all of this a different way: Davis’s dystopian view of urban informality seems to be a direct consequence of his utopian politics. He is wedded to a vision of social justice that is tantalising but always projected into a distant future/elsewhere, leaving him stranded in a present that seems unbearable by comparison. What the two novels studied here attempt to do is reorient the debate over social justice and development away from the utopian/dystopian binary of Davis (and other neo-Marxists like Fredric Jameson, Alain Badiou, and Slavoz Žižek) and back towards the middle ground of life’s more mundane, day-to-day struggles. This is a zone that Kevin Kelly, of Wired magazine and Whole Earth fame, has called ‘protopia’, a term meant to split the difference between utopia and dystopia by recognising the inherently slow, fitful, and uncertain nature of progress.

Works Cited Angotti, Tom. ‘Apocalyptic Anti-Urbanism: Mike Davis and His Planet of Slums.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 30, no. 4, 2006, pp. 961–67. Aravena, Alejandro. ‘It’s Time to Rethink the Entire Role and Language of Architecture.’ The Guardian 20 Nov 2015, www.theguardian.com/cit ies/2015/nov/20/ rethink-role-language-architecture-alejandro-aravena. Accessed 2 July 2017. ———. ‘My Architectural Philosophy? Bring the Community into the Process.’ Online video clip. Ted.com, 2014, www.ted.com/talks/alejandro_ara

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vena_my_architectural_philosophy_bring_the_community_into_the_process. Accessed 12 Jan 2020. Avermaete, Tom. ‘The Infrastructure of Bare Life: Architectural Perspectives for and from the Global South.’ Course description. Architectural Association Graduate School, 2016, projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk/aapc-guest-sem inar-tom-avermaete/. Accessed 24 Nov 2018. Barber, Benjamin. If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities. Yale UP, 2013. ———. Jihad vs. McWorld. Ballantine Books, 2001. Boeck, Filip de, and Sammy Baloji. Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds. Autograph, 2016. Brand, Stewart. Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Viking, 2009. Brillembourg, Alfredo, et al. Informal City: Caracas Case. Prestel, 2005. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Gallimard, 1992. Davis, Mike. ‘Planet of Slums.’ New Left Review, no. 26, 2004, pp. 5–34. ———. Planet of Slums. Verso, 2006. Dawson, Ashley. ‘Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City.’ Social Text, vol. 22, no. 4, 2004, pp. 17–34. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. U of California P, 1984. Fischer, Brodwyn. ‘A Century in the Present Tense.’ Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America, edited by Brodwyn Fischer et al., Duke UP, 2014, pp. 9–67. Garnier, Xavier. ‘Poétique de la rumeur: l’exemple de Tierno Monénembo.’ Cahiers d’études africaines, vol. 35, no. 140, 1995, pp. 889–95. Gilligan, Melanie. ‘Slumsploitation: The Favela on Film and TV.’ Mute, vol 2. no. 3, pp. 50–61. Glaeser, Edward. ‘A World of Cities: The Causes and Consequences of Urbanization in Poorer Countries.’ NBER Working Paper No. 19745, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008. Karpat, Kemal H. ‘The Genesis of The Gecekondu: Rural Migration and Urbanization (1976).’ European Journal of Turkish Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2004, ejts. revues.org/54. Accessed on 22 May 2017. Koolhaas, Rem. Introduction. Great Leap Forward, edited by Chuihua J Chung and Bernard Chang, Taschen, 2001, pp. 24–29. Lefebvre, Henri. ‘Le droit à la ville.’ L’Homme et la société, no. 6, 1967, pp. 29– 35. ———. The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell, 1992. McGuirk, Justin. Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture. Verso, 2014.

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Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. Routledge, 2005. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. Nganang, Patrice. 2006. ‘Le roman des detritus.’ Matatu, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 241–56. Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. Jonathan Cape, 1991. Pamuk, Orhan. A Strangeness in My Mind: A Novel. Vintage, 2015. ———. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Vintage, 2004. Pavel, Thomas G. Fictional Worlds. Harvard UP, 1986. Perlman, Janice E. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio De Janeiro. U of California P, 1979. Pieterse, E A, and A M. Simone. Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities. Jacana Media, 2013. Pithouse, Richard. ‘Mike Davis, Planet of Slums.’ Journal of Asian and African Studies, vol. 43, no. 5, 2008, pp. 567–73. Potter, Robert B. Geographies of Development: An Introduction to Development Studies. 3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 2008. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. U of Chicago P, 1993. Roy, Ananya. ‘Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning.’ Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 71, no. 2, 2005, pp. 147–58. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton UP, 2013. Sassen, Saskia, et.al. The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda. Routledge, 2018. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Oxford UP, 2001. Simone, AbdouMaliq. ‘People as Infrastructure.’ Public Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, 2004, pp. 407–29. Tekdemir, Hande. ‘Magical Realism in the Peripheries of the Metropolis: A Comparative Approach to Tropic of Orange and Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills.’ The Comparatist, vol. 35, no. 1, 2011, pp. 40–54. Tekin, Latife. Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills. Translated by Ruth Christie and Saliha Paker, Marion Boyars, 2014. ———. Swords of Ice. Translated by Saliha Paker and Mel Kenne, Marion Boyars, 2007. Turner, John F. C. Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Pantheon Books, 1977. Ty, Michelle. ‘Trash and the Ends of Infrastructure.’ MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 4, 2015, pp. 606–30. UN-Habitat. The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. Earthscan, 2003. ———. Updated Communications Strategy. Earthscan, 2016. Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

PART I

Possible Cities

CHAPTER 3

Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction Lieven Ameel

This chapter examines the Helsinki waterfront as a site of the possible, a space onto which possible futures of the city are projected and where competing visions of future urban possibility interact. It sets out with an examination of the first Finnish novel to critique urban planning development at the waterfront, the largely forgotten Maila Talvio’s Niniven lapset (‘Children of Nineveh’, 1915). The key themes of the novel will be connected to the characteristics of the waterfront in twentieth-century Helsinki literature and planning, and to more recent developments at the waterfront, such as the plans for a Helsinki Guggenheim. This is followed by an examination of visions for the Helsinki waterfront in literature of the twenty-first century, including novels such as Anders Vacklin and Aki Parhamaa’s Beta: Sensored Reality (2018), Annika Luther’s De hemlösas stad (‘City of the Homeless’, 2011), Esa Mäkinen’s Totuuskuutio (‘Truth Square’, 2015) and Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer (Parantaja, 2010).

L. Ameel (B) Tampere University, Tampere, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_3

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In this second part, the focus is on the interaction between the distinctly pessimistic vision of a possible future Helsinki in fictional texts, on the one hand, and the optimistic visions as presented by the Helsinki City Planning Department, on the other hand, for the city and for urban community. One of the questions this article engages with is how literary fiction can add to our understanding of possible urban futures: What are the specific affordances of fiction for envisioning possible or future cities? I have elsewhere (Ameel, ‘Future Fair City’) presented a tentative outline of some of these affordances, which can be summarised as follows: (1) the ability to provide a sense of (infra)structural possibility, material, social or political (from descriptions of flying cars to particular forms of societal organisation); (2) qualia, or the ‘how it feels’ to inhabit a particular future city; (3) situated choice, or the embodied and embedded ways in which particular moral, political, or environmental turning points, individually or collectively are contextualised by situating a literary character at a moral crossroads; (4) emplotted identification, and the ways in which the reader is drawn to identify with the embodied perspectives of particular character or focaliser; (5) suggestive framing, or the development of narrative frames, tropes, and modes of emplotment used to suggest the natural causality or rationality of particular turning points or courses of action. A brief consideration of these affordances, in the light of the examined literary texts, is given in each subchapter. The urban waterfront appears in the analysis below as a site where future possibilities for individuals as well as for urban society are at stake. The rich symbolic meanings associated with the Helsinki waterfront in the corpus discussed below are no coincidence. From the literature of Antiquity, shores have appeared in literature as profoundly transformative spaces. According to Margaret Doody in her seminal The True Story of the Novel, ‘the place between water and land functions most obviously and overtly as a threshold’; it is ‘a site of restlessness, just as it is a place of promise for the future’ (Doody 321, 324). Doody approaches the shores as a liminal space, but in her use of the word, ‘liminal’ does not only refer to the Latin root limen (threshold). For her, the ‘muddy margins’ of literary worlds are liminal also in other ways, drawing for its meaning on the Greek words limne and limen—swamp and harbour, respectively (320). ‘Liminal’, for Doody, means a space of indeterminacy and change, of arrival and departure. While there has been some interest recently in what has been tentatively called ‘littoral studies’—the study of shores in

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literary and cultural representations (see Kluwick and Richter), the particularities of the urban waterfront have remained largely underdeveloped. Recent decades have brought an added urgency to experiences of the urban waterfront, with global cities at the water facing a range of challenges, from the demands of post-industrial waterfront redevelopment to increasingly disruptive and dislocating process of globalisation (see, e.g., Sassen), and the spectre of radical climate change and sea-level rise.

Children of Nineveh: Speculation and End-Times at the Waterfront Helsinki is one of the few European capitals located at the open sea, and it is equipped with a shoreline of some 120 kilometres and 300 islands. It has several active harbours; the passenger harbour is currently Europe’s busiest. The history of Helsinki’s shoreline runs parallel with waterfront development in harbour cities around the globe, with parts of the waterfront going through a period of increasing industrialisation, followed by a state of relative dereliction and abandonment, and from the end of the twentieth century onward, reinvention of the urban waterfront as upscale urban housing and services. Helsinki has a rich literature of its shores and archipelago, which remains curiously understudied (see, however, Ameel, ‘Mahdollisuuksien maisema’; Ameel and Kankkunen). The first novel that stands out for how it imagines the Helsinki waterfront, also in terms of possible urban development, is Maila Talvio’s Niniven lapset (‘Children of Nineveh’, 1915), a novel which covers the volatile years running up to the First World War.1 Maila Talvio is now a relatively marginal figure in the canon of Finnish literary history, but at the time of writing she was a wellrecognised author, the first female writer in Finnish able to live off her pen, and the publication of the novel was widely anticipated. As the title of 1 The name used for Helsinki in this novel is ‘Metropolis’ (in Finnish, ‘Suur-Kaupunki,’ literally, ‘grand city’), a reference which must be understood ironically, since the city is also described repeatedly as a peripheral and small-scale city. The novel appeared at a time of intense interest in the development of Helsinki: the year of publication also saw the publication of Eliel Saarinen’s famous MunkkiniemiHaaga plan, the most ambitious urban plan of a Helsinki area of its time, and part of the influential Pro Helsingfors plan published in 1918 by Saarinen and Bertel Jung. Some of the analysis of Niniven lapset and its links to the Helsinki Guggenheim appeared earlier in a short article written for the general public and published in the Finnish journal Kritiikin uutiset (Ameel, ‘Kerrassaan’).

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the novel indicates, Niniven lapset is a literary text which draws strongly on the pessimistic discourse in turn-of-the-century Decadent literature, which saw the city as a diseased and degenerating centre: Helsinki is read as a present-day version of the Biblical city of pride Nineveh, a city that awaits its imminent destruction. Against the background of cultural decay, there is a sense of a coming Biblical reckoning, made tangible in the vision of threatening clouds on the horizon at the end of the novel, taking the ominous shape of coffins—signs of the war to come (Talvio 303). The novel tells a tale of speculation and fraud set in the worlds of publishing, finance, industry and urban development, structured around the fates of the various members of a parvenu family. One of the protagonists caught up in the web of deceit and corruption is Leo Teräs, the degenerating eldest son of the family. At the end of Niniven lapset, Leo is financially ruined and becomes drawn into one last scheme, a project in which the fates of all the different characters become intertwined, sealing the fate of the city as well as that of the novel’s protagonists. Together with some of the city’s most prominent speculators, Leo plans the construction of a gigantic cultural temple close to the city’s harbour. The building is intended to transform the city and to make the developers rich, but in its tower-of-Babel-like properties, it also gestures towards narratives of impending doom and pride before the fall. While the Biblical undercurrents are evident, the development of this cultural temple is also a tale of modernisation and dislocation. Several wooden houses have to make way to allow for the construction of this new and massive building. The obsolete houses and their inhabitants become the symbol for a world that is overtaken by the Faustian energies that transform the city (see Ameel, Moved 164–65). The narrator of the novel is not sympathetic to the plans of Teräs and his associates: it is clear from the start that the main reasons for the grand scheme are the promises of personal gain, and the view offered by the narrator is clearly ironic. This is especially evident in how the narrator presents the arguments of the developers for why the city needs this new, grand development—arguments that, taken together, provide a set that is still relevant to persuasive storytelling in urban planning and development. The plan is to construct a giant ‘Palace of Light’ in the historical centre of the city; a building which will become a decisive part of the Helsinki skyline as seen by an imagined future traveller approaching the city from the sea. In the following quote, Leo defends the plans in his thoughts to imaginary adversaries:

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An absolutely grand scheme! Well, it meant that Metropolis, by putting this plan into practice, would rise to the level of European million-cities. After all, what had Metropolis been until now but a shoddy burrow? But if they could carry out this plan, then Metropolis would at once become a real metropolis. And when a boat would approach Metropolis, then every foreigner would be compelled to ask, with eyes wide open: ‘What castle is glimmering there?’ None of the earlier buildings of Metropolis was anything in comparison. During autumn evenings, the palace could in fact be used as a lighthouse, in exactly the same way as back there in America, with the Statue of Liberty. Because it would be lighted by absolutely special lamps. The lighting in the city would actually become unnecessary because of this ‘Palace of Light.’ (Talvio 330–31)2

In the quote above, a number of reasons are given for why this plan is necessary for the development of the city. Reference is made to a prestigious architectural landmark which has become famous across the ocean, in New York, and which could be transferred in a modified form to Helsinki. There is the argument that the planned scheme will benefit the general public: city lighting will supposedly become unnecessary. This beneficial aspect turns out to be no more than a façade hiding considerable personal and corporate profit. The planned building, which carries at first the working title of ‘Civilisation Palace’ (Talvio 331), is renamed into ‘Crystal Palace’ (333), and eventually its name is decided to be ‘Nineveh’, and its function will not be to serve the general benefit, but to be a ‘concert and entertainment palace’ (333). Summarising Leo’s soliloquy, four arguments stand out in the case made for grandiose construction at the waterfront. First, there is the argument of an example abroad, and the implication that the city has to follow standards set by what are purportedly true international metropoles in order to reach a sense of maturity that is as yet out of reach (drawing on an image of Helsinki as perpetually under-age; see Ameel, Moved 12–15). Second, there is the argument that the development will bring communal good to offset inevitable suspicions of personal gain as a driver of development. Third, there is a lack of interest in how local tropes, stories and histories could inform the search for meaningful futures at the waterfront. Fourth, and concomitant

2 All translations are by the author unless stated otherwise.

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with this lack of local perspective, there is a strong focus on the visual perspective of an imaginary visitor from abroad. All of these elements have remained relevant in planning at the Helsinki waterfront. One recent case bears a particular resemblance to the development project described so ironically in Niniven lapset: the proposals for a Helsinki Guggenheim Museum, a building which was planned in the immediate surroundings of the ‘Palace of Light’ in Niniven lapset, the Kruununhaka district and the Helsinki South Harbour. To give a full overview of the various planning phases and controversies surrounding this project, which surfaced intermittently in the course of the 2010s, would be outside of the scope of this article (see, for more information, Ruoppila and Lehtovuori). But a brief look at the museum’s feasibility study, which summarised many of the arguments made elsewhere by the proponents of a Helsinki Guggenheim, will go some way in establishing links.3 The first argument—that of an international architectural example that one is urged to follow—permeates the Guggenheim proposal: the idea that something that has worked successfully abroad, in New York (and also, in a waterfront development context, in Bilbao), will also function in Helsinki (Drury et al. 22, 35). Second, there is a strong argument that this project will be beneficial: in the case of Guggenheim Helsinki, this will be achieved by generating new tourist streams, but also by virtue of making some of the existing city museum activities redundant, saving money and pooling resources. Conspicuous absences are also one of the features of the argumentation: the feasibility study does not offer justifications that reside in local narratives, local needs or local exigencies (these would have pointed in quite different directions than the development of a Guggenheim franchise). Instead, the argument is grounded in a perceived underperformance by Helsinki in comparison with other metropoles of a perceived more mature status. Helsinki is presented as a city defined by a measure of lack (the feasibility study argues, among others, that ‘Helsinki’s art scene lacks a center of gravity’ [Drury et al. 6]), as a city that is smaller and of less consequence than its near-neighbors in terms of existing museums and in terms of international visitors (105). One of the most striking points—from a local perspective—is how the study presents Helsinki’s cultural landscape as ‘a natural extension’ for a

3 The study cost two million Euros, paid by the Helsinki taxpayer.

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‘burgeoning audience’ constituted of Russian art lovers in St Petersburg (70), with the viability of a Helsinki Guggenheim largely dependent on future visitors from St Petersburg thronging this new museum (68–71). Similar to the rhetoric found in Niniven lapset, it is the appreciative gaze of the tourist coming from outside Finland which will give the decisive verdict on the new building rising up in the South Harbour skyline, not that of the local resident walking by on everyday errands. Even the symbolic imagery of Maila Talvio’s ‘Palace of Light’, the amusement temple dressed up as a lighthouse, makes an appearance in the Guggenheim museum design competition. The outline of the first round of the design competition explicitly conceptualised the new building as ‘a lighthouse of art’, emphasising the view it would offer to visitors arriving from outside the city: ‘When you are landing from the seaside, you will see first this sign’ (Guggenheim Helsinki 1). Several of the competition entries had ‘lighthouse’ or the Finnish equivalent (majakka) in their title. One proposal, called ‘Lighthouse of Helsinki’, proposed a tower that was argued to enable ‘lengthening the daytime’ by the ‘reflection of natural light’ (Lighthouse 1). Another competing entry, ‘Museo Majakka’ (‘Museum Lighthouse’) was similarly structured around the concept of a lighthouse, arguing that ‘Guggenheim Helsinki becomes the 21st century cultural symbol of Helsinki at Eteläsatama entry point much the same way as the traditional Majakat (lighthouses)’ (Majakka 4). These entries did not make it through the first round, but the winning entry, designed by Moreau Kusunoki architects, included a ‘lighthouse’.4 The plans for a Helsinki Guggenheim were eventually shelved. But several of the arguments for high-rise development at the waterfront that were used to frame urban possibility in Niniven lapset can be found in other contemporary plans, most recently in the Kalasatama (East Harbour) development, a former container harbour being redeveloped into a waterfront district which has become structured around an outsized shopping mall and eight unusually tall tower blocks. The rhetoric used in the development emphasised the image of Helsinki as catching up with other international cities. And again, the symbol of the lighthouse dominates: Kalasatama’s highest tower, which is also the highest residential tower in Finland, is called Majakka (‘lighthouse’); a second tower is called Loiste (‘beacon’). 4 Intriguingly, in the winning entry, the imagined perspective was reversed, the tower offering ‘a new perspective over the city’ (Winner).

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Maila Talvio’s Niniven lapset exemplifies some of the affordances of literary fiction—as outlined in the introduction to this chapter—for imagining urban possibility. In its most basic properties, it gives a suggestion of (infra)structural possibility—in this case, the vision of a possible, lighthouse-like high-rise near the Helsinki waterfront. It also provides the reader with a context of situated choice, with some of the motivations, as well as the societal, personal and economic contexts that make it possible for the plan to take shape. Some of that context is found in the form of the soliloquy of young Leo Teräs quoted above. The text also gives insights into the ‘qualia’ of what it feels like to live in a city that is being transformed to make such a vision true: one perspective (including embodied sensations) the reader gets privileged access to is that of ‘old man Säfstrand’, whose house is one of the buildings dispossessed to make way for the new construction (Talvio 334–38). In such instances, the reader is invited to take part in emplotted identification, and to adopt a particular point of view within the conflicting plot dynamics. In Niniven lapset, the point of view is one profoundly suspicious of urbanisation and modernisation.5 Finally, and especially when set against later storylines of development at the water in Helsinki, the novel shows how literary fiction engages in developing narrative frames, tropes and modes of emplotment vis-a-vis visions of urban possibility. The symbol of the lighthouse and the perspective of the outsider arriving at the harbour stand out as imaginative frames of meaning that have continued to be used in thinking of urban possibility at the waterfront.

The Helsinki Waterfront as Symbolic Landscape In the century between the publication of Niniven lapset and the final rejection of the Guggenheim Helsinki plan by the Helsinki city council in 2016, a rich literature of the Helsinki waterfront has come into being, often interacting closely with contemporary visions of urban possibility (Ameel ‘Narrative Mapping’, ‘Mahdollisuuksien maisema’; Ameel and Kankkunen). The key characteristics of this tradition can be summarised

5 The prose novel is, of course, a dialogic literary form, which tends to incorporate a range of different perspectives—in Niniven lapset, the reader also gains access to views more sympathetic to modernisation and urbanisation, in particular those of the young women of the family.

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as follows. First, the urban waterfront features often as a site for imagining and enacting personal possible lives, especially with respect to roles that move across social or gendered conventions.6 In such instances, the urban shores appear as the site of ‘utopian moments’ (Edwards 19), in which a sense of community or transcendence becomes possible outside of the everyday social and moral structures. Second, the waterfront repeatedly appears as the site of a vision or evocation of an alternative form of society; the place where the possibility of redemption or re-enchantment is suggested, or where hallucinatory visions of urban end-times are conjectured, often with considerable overlap between personal distress and socio-political anxiety.7 Occasionally, the waterfront is the site where it becomes possible not only to imagine, but also to realise radically different urban communities. This happens in Anja Kauranen’s Pelon maantiede (‘The Geography of Fear’, 1995), in which the Helsinki island Lammassaari acts as the site for the headquarters of a radical feminist movement. The actual island of Lammassaari had been developed in the course of the twentieth century as a recreational site for working-class families, with one specific building, the ‘house of the tired women’, specifically for working-class women. In the novel, this building becomes the headquarters from which vengeful women set out to bring violent retribution to the sex shops and degenerate men of Helsinki (Kauranen 395; see Ameel and Kankkunen). In sum, the twentieth-century literature of the Helsinki waterfront describes this symbolic environment as a space set apart from the normal order and urban fabric. From this liminal position, it also draws its transformative potential. At the waterfront, visions for a possible society can be imagined, and new perspectives proposed for possible urban lives as well as for possible cities and alternatives societal forms. These properties and associations of the Helsinki waterfront in literature are closely associated with the historical development of the Helsinki shores and islands, considerable parts of which were formerly cut off from the public by industrial or military use, or which otherwise constituted the unclear and unkempt margin of the Finnish capital (see also Lehtovuori 24). 6 See, e.g., Iris Uurto’s 1935 novel Kypsyminen (‘Maturing’) and Pentti Holappa’s 1954 novel Yksinäiset (‘The Lonely Ones’). 7 From Arvid Järnefelt’s Veneh’ojalaiset (‘The Family Veneh’oja,’ 1909) to Joel Lehtonen’s Henkien taistelu (‘Battle of the Spirits,’ 1933) to Pirkko Saisio’s Betoniyö (‘Concrete Night,’ 1981).

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Near-Future Helsinki in Contemporary Dystopias In Finnish literature, the thinking of possible cities and possible urban lives gains a further impetus around the turn of the twenty-first century, when a range of novels appear that engage explicitly with possible futures for the city of Helsinki, with a remarkable number of texts set in the near future of the country’s capital. Such novels include, among many others, the following: Teemu Kaskinen’s Sinulle, yö (‘To You, Night’, 2008; see Laakso) in which Helsinki is on the front line of a future war between Finnish and NATO troops; Elina Hirvonen’s When Time Runs Out (Kun aika loppuu, 2015), in which the capital becomes the scene for a far-right terror attack; and Piia Leino’s Taivas (‘Heaven’, 2018), set in 2058, when social cohesion and material infrastructure have collapsed. The novels are part of a dystopian boom in Finnish literature (see Isomaa and Lahtinen), extrapolating adverse societal and environmental developments into the near future, and considering personal and communal possibilities for agency within the constraints of distinctly gloomy environmental and societal developments. In these novels, literature is quite explicitly foregrounded as an arena of the possible, where different trajectories towards possible futures can be tried out by interfering with the modalities of the actual world (see Dolezel). In these novels, the potentialities of the Finnish capital are examined from a range of perspectives: urban possibilities in terms of environmental and ecological developments; in terms of the urban material environment, energy and transportation; in terms of socio-economic changes; in terms of class, gender and race relationships, among others. To a degree, all of these novels also contemplate the role of literature and language in envisioning and critiquing the city’s possible futures, in the very least in how they utilise earlier literary genres, tropes and conventions, or in how they project a possible future language. Perhaps unsurprisingly, risen sea levels provide an important factor in how the future Helsinki is envisioned in early twenty-first-century dystopian literature.8 Young adult novels set in a near-future Helsinki, such as Anders Vacklin and Aki Parhamaa’s Beta: Sensored Reality (2018)

8 Helsinki is less at an acute risk, however, of rising sea levels, when compared to cities such as London, New York or Mumbai. The ground is slightly rising, as elsewhere in Northern Europe; Helsinki is not located on a tidal estuary; and a larger part of the population lives on relatively high ground.

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and Annika Luther’s De hemlösas stad (2011) give detailed descriptions of a partly submerged city in the wake of sea level rise. In both novels, environmental change and the need for an energy shift have also had their effect on forms of energy production and transportation: in De hemlösas stad, ‘Algoil, oil made from algae’ is produced at the seashore on the basis of a new technological process, and exported to nearby farms (72–73). In Beta, the protagonist, sitting on the pier of her home, is struck by the ‘strong waft of green fuel’ blowing in from the centre (21). Transportation by boat has become more common, with the Helsinki Regional Transportation (the actual HSL) transformed into the Helsinki Region Water Transportation (HSLV) in Beta (20). In Esa Mäkinen’s Totuuskuutio (‘Truth Square’, 2015), carbon credit is an integral part of all transactions in the city. But the gruesome rituals of radical societal and political change are also carried out at the water. In Taivas, one of the protagonists, Akseli, feels repulsed by the thicket at the Tokoinranta bay, where ‘migrants and lefties were lynched during the Purge’ (71). The oblique reference to a past pogrom in this future present is a typical example of the extent to which many of these novels are interested in the possibilities of societal breakdown. Often—and as is characteristic for dystopia as genre—a general sense of breakdown of the moral order in society is tangible from the first pages onward. The opening pages of Totuuskuutio, for example, describe the aftermath of a traffic accident and the lack of intervention from citizens. In the same novel, societal collapse is vividly present in the omnipresent gates and fences that structure the everyday commute of the protagonist, in descriptions of stark segregation and electronic control of movement through public space. While most of these near-future novels draw predominantly on dystopian or post-apocalyptic conventions in the way they depict a possible urban future, there are also signs of hopefulness and unexpectedly vibrant communities. In Beta, in a hyperbolic projection of the development of the current state of the Finnish gaming industry, future Helsinki has become the ‘mecca of the gaming industry’ and the seat of a gaming academy of global status, located in the old fortress island Suomenlinna (47). In De hemlösas stad, the Finnish population has for the most part deserted the submerged city, but a lively community from the Indian subcontinent thrives along the water and has built a temple to Ganesh right on the shorelines, on the site of the observatory that was originally constructed during the time of Finland’s autonomy within the Russian

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Empire, and overlooking the plot that had been reserved in real-life, early twenty-first-century Helsinki for a possible Guggenheim. New festivities and communal practices flourish: in Beta, the yearly Celebration of the Great Flood (76–79), in De Hemlösas stad, the Hindu Holi Festival (164). In the latter novel, the city is also defined by new linguistic realities, and is no longer called Helsinki but Halsingih. For the Finnish (but Swedishspeaking) protagonist, learning to use this name is part of her process of acculturation. The manner in which these novels foreground future possibilities is conducted in part through description of external features of the landscape and people’s habits. But there are also, as one would expect in literary accounts of possible futures, insights into how the changes that have led up to these futures have their impact on the qualia, the whatit-feels-like of being within a particular moment. The smell of green fuel experienced by the protagonist in Beta is one concrete example of such experientiality (20–21; see above). In all of these novels, the meanings attached to urban possibility are largely structured along powerful genre patterns. The experiences of the protagonist in De hemlösas stad are structured around a coming-of-age plot, in which the protagonist moves out in the world to learn about herself, to be eventually reunited with her family in the final scene. In Beta, a similar coming-of-age-plot is combined with a narrative framework from computer games, in which different levels have to be completed, before advancement to a further stage is possible. In several novels, there are features of the whodunit, with a search for missing information that will shed light on the personal life of the protagonist, but also on the moral condition of the city’s population, and, by extension, that of a future mankind. In De hemlösas stad, the quest takes the form of a search for the lost mother; in Totuuskuutio, it is the search for the culprits behind misinformation that has led to the death of the protagonist’s loved one. While several of the features of society in these novels are not specific to real-world Helsinki (sea level rise; societal breakdown), some novels go to considerable lengths in how they draw on the characteristics of the real-life Finnish capital. Using a term from future studies, the authors of these texts have in effect identified ‘weak signals’ of possible future development—‘current oddities, strange issues that are thought to be in key position in anticipating future changes’ (Hiltunen 247)—and have extrapolated these into visions of possible futures. The role of the gaming industry in Beta is one example; early twenty-first-century ‘weak signals’

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of rising inequality and of increasing social segregation have become full future reality in novels such as Taivas. In some novels, actual urban development at the turn of the twenty-first century functions as a reference point for the future city: in Totuuskuutio, far from favourable visions of the development of Pasila and of the Olympic Stadium (13, 42ff.) invite comparison with actual early twenty-first-century plans to change these areas into glossy urban hubs. The novel ends with an oblique reference to one of the most megalomaniacal infrastructure plans for Helsinki: the idea for a tunnel connecting Helsinki and Tallinn, across the Gulf of Finland. In the novel, the tunnel has been constructed, but its function within the plot, significantly, is not to contribute to the socio-economic vitality of the capital, but to enable the escape of the protagonist from Helsinki (221). The imaginative use of urban planning visions at the time of publication is taken furthest in Parantaja, and the subject of the next and final section of this chapter.

Future Urban Possibility and the Healer Of the range of near-future novels that have appeared in recent decades, one stands out for how it builds its storyworld of a near-future Helsinki in close dialogue with the planning visions of the Helsinki city planning department: Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer (Parantaja, 2010). The novel is set in a near-future Helsinki disrupted by radical climate change, with catastrophic flooding and incessant rain, and against a backdrop of largescale climate migration, global pandemics and water wars (see Ameel, ‘Antti Tuomainen’). Amidst these upheavals, a serial killer, the eponymous ‘Healer’, is killing people he holds accountable for catastrophic climate change. The plot revolves around the endeavours of the protagonist, the Finnish poet Tapani Lehtinen, to find his lost wife Johanna, who is a journalist investigating the murders. In his journey through flooded Helsinki, Tapani guides the reader on a tour of how different areas in the city, as well as different affected citizens, are coping with the dramatic changes. One of the most fascinating features of The Healer is how the future city it imagines is in dialogue not with the city at the moment of writing, but rather with the possible future city as envisioned in the planning of the turn of the twenty-first century. The conventional ontological dialectic, in utopian, dystopian and speculative fiction, is arguably the relationship between the narrated world on the one hand, and the actual world at the time of writing on the other hand. Edward Bellamy’s classical

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utopia Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), for example, spells out this dialectic relationship in its very title, drawing the attention to how a vision of 2000 Boston will have repercussions for how the actual Boston of 1887 can be critically approached. The storyworld in Tuomainen’s The Healer similarly draws on a dialogue between a possible future Helsinki in the 2030s and the actual Helsinki at the time of writing, in the early twenty-first century. But even more productive is the relationship, forged in the novel, between the narrated storyworld and the future visions of the Helsinki city planning department at the time of publication. Several of the city districts (Jätkäsaari, Kalasatama) described in the novel were only in a planning phase at the time of publication. In the time depicted in The Healer they have already become obsolete. The opening paragraphs of the novel alert the reader to this particular relationship between two possible futures. The protagonist finds himself on a bus going into the city centre because the metro does not run: the metro tunnels are flooded all the way to Keilaniemi. At the time of writing, the western extension of the metro network (to Keilaniemi and beyond) was not yet finished, although it was widely anticipated. One of the consequences of this particular kind of ontological dialectic in the novel is that the anticipatory effect wears off as time progresses onward from the year of publication. The extent to which the novel is built around experiences of the ruins of not-yet existing infrastructure at the time of publication becomes gradually lost to readers as the century progresses and more of the plans become reality. In 2010, the idea of the western metro extension was a future development whose consequences for everyday life for inhabitants of the greater Helsinki area were hotly debated, but which was located essentially still in the realm of the possible, the not-yet. As the century progresses, this effect is rapidly lost. And for the many readers who read the novel in translation—in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, among others—this dissonance remained largely missing from the start.9 The Helsinki waterfront, which was under radical redevelopment in the decade running up to the publication of the novel (see Ameel, ‘Narrative

9 Covers of The Healer in translation more often than not miss the point about Helsinki’s urban environment and its function in the novel, either showing a generic urban wasteland, or a view incorporating iconic elements of Helsinki’s landscape (such as the Uspensky cathedral or the St. Nicolas Church) with a generic added touch of gloom or rain.

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Mapping’), has a particular role in The Healer. The very first descriptions of the city in the novel’s opening paragraphs describe a world in which the glossy waterfront developments have succumbed to the forces of nature: I turned my gaze back to the rain that had been falling for months, a continuous flow of water that had started in September and paused only momentarily since. At least five seaside neighborhoods—Jätkäsaari, Kalasatama, Ruoholahti, Herttoniemenranta, and Marjaniemi—had been continuously flooded, and many residents had finally given up and abandoned their homes. (10)10

Ruoholahti, Herttoniemenranta and Marjaniemi were areas that had already been largely constructed in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst century, and areas that would have been known to contemporary readers. But Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari did not yet exist as fully developed neighborhoods, since construction of these areas had only begun a year prior to publication. Kalasatama is the first setting the reader gains first-hand access to in the novel, as the protagonist, shivering in his raindrenched coat, looks out of the window at a car-crash in which no-one comes to the assistance of the victims.11 Jätkäsaari takes on a particular place of importance in the novel, since it is described as being located at the crossroads of a ‘murder map’ in the form of a cross with all the locations of the ‘Healer’ attacks. When disaster strikes, the novel argues, the fancy waterfront developments planned by the Helsinki city planning department in the early twenty-first century will be the first to go under. Several of the other central locations in the novel are of considerable symbolic importance, settings of various historical stages in how Helsinki has imagined its future development. One such place is ‘Baana’,12 which is obliquely referred to in the novel as the location of a temporary settlement for climate refugees, an area that has informally ‘grown into its very own city district’ (103). ‘Baana’ is Helsinki’s ‘Low Line’ (as compared to New York’s iconic ‘High Line’); a 1.3-kilometre-long bicycle and pedestrian road constructed in a chasm, along what used to be railway lines tracks connecting the Helsinki West Harbour (in Jätkäsaari) with the 10 Page numbers refer to the Finnish original; the translation is by Lola Rogers (Vintage, 2014). 11 The similarity with the opening of Totuuskuutio is striking. 12 The word is Helsinki slang, with etymology in Swedish bana.

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central railway station. Like the Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari development projects, it was a centrepiece of Helsinki’s vision for reimagining its postindustrial spaces along a new urbanist agenda, and was not yet constructed at the time of The Healer’s publication. ‘Baana’ was inaugurated in 2012, an icon of Helsinki’s World Design Capital year, and it remains in reallife Helsinki one of the few material reminders of the successful Design Capital bid. In Tuomainen’s near future, such design-led, orderly urban transformation, catering to international urban tastes, has run its course, with the site instead acting as the ground for temporary and informal settlements of refugees. A second site with a particular symbolical resonance within broader visions of Helsinki’s future is Kivinokka, a land area jutting out into the Old Town Bay which, in the novel, is the site of the eco-village where the protagonist’s wife Johanna lived with the man who would become the Healer. The reader learns of the area through a newspaper article that was published thirteen years before the events described in the novel. The article describes the first occupants moving into ‘environmentally efficient Lilliput houses’ (82–83), Johanna and the future ‘Healer’ among them. The location’s role within the plot is one rich with suggestions for life’s potential and the possibilities of forking paths towards different futures. It invites meditations on how a romantic tale of a young couple living happily together in a near-utopian community could turn into distinctly grimmer futures. The mention of ‘Lilliput houses’ draws the reader’s attention to the novel’s literary antecedents, with the reference to Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) establishing a link between The Healer and early modern satirical utopia. For the protagonist, Tapani, the story of the eco-village questions his own recollections of the relationship to his wife, and his hopes for a possible future with her, since he realises that he has been largely kept in the dark about this aspect of the past life of his wife. For readers aware of the history of Helsinki or of urban planning projects underway at the time of publication, the location of Kivinokka resonates with a number of broader visions of the possible city. The real-world area, located due east from the city centre and close to Herttoniemi, has been the site of several idealistic re-fashionings of urban society in the course of more than a century. Kivinokka was in the early twentieth-century a traditional working-class recreational area, and the setting for one of the oldest Helsinki allotment gardens. Around the time of publication of The Healer, the area was up for radical redevelopment (see, e.g., Helsinki City 122), although

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the highly controversial plans to develop the area were eventually shelved. But for one vote going the other way, the future past in The Healer could have existed in actual present-day (2021) Helsinki: ‘A former allotment garden had been converted to housing in the same miniature spirit as garden cottages, with the goal of demonstrating the housing construction of the future’ (Tuomainen 82). The remnants of the deserted eco-village are visible from the house of the protagonist, located high up on the rocky hills of the Helsinki suburb Herttoniemi. The novel ends with a view from the city from this location on the morning of Good Friday, with a sense of optimism against all odds. Tapani is reunited with his wife; they have decided to stay in Helsinki, rather than flee the city as some of their friends have done, although it remains profoundly unclear how they will sustain life as journalist and poet in the utterly run-down society depicted in the novel. In the final pages of the novel, spring announces itself after a rainy and desperate winter. Bearing in mind how the novel envisions the possible fate of a range of urban projects in Helsinki, from Baana to Jätkäsaari and the Pasila towers, this ending of the novel in a 1950s concrete suburb provides a sense of closure that also reflects on the possible resilience of particular city models. Herttoniemi is one of the many concrete suburbs constructed in forest surroundings in the decades after the Second World War. Defined by modest high-rise blocks and by closeness to nature, inhabited by relatively self-contained communities some distance from the centre, suburbs such as these were designed to be modern and appealing environments for the aspiring (lower) middle-class. These environments provide one important storyline of where urbanity in Helsinki (and, more broadly, in the Nordic countries) had been heading at some point in the twentieth century. In The Healer, the new fashionable waterfront districts have become uninhabitable; in the dire circumstances caused by radical climate change, automated lights and electric key cards cease to function, making life in the most modern housing blocks the most difficult to sustain. The 1950s concrete suburb flat, by contrast, continues to provide shelter. The Healer provides some insights into the affordances of literature— including that of genre literature such as crime fiction—to think of urban possibility. The most immediately striking feature of the novel, especially for someone acquainted with Helsinki’s built environment, is how the novel provides a tangible sense of possible infrastructure and imagines vivid downward trajectories for the most prestigious development

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projects of the city. Insights in the ‘qualia’, in how it feels to inhabit a city subject to unrelenting rainfall, are provided in the numerous descriptions of bodily experiences (the protagonist’s face wet with rain; numb fingers; Tuomainen 9). Situated choice and emplotted identification can be found on the very first page, with the protagonist one of the people passing by the scene of a traffic accident without stopping to help, thus setting a scene of helplessness and gradual societal collapse. Finally, the way the novel is structured around an almost liturgic progression from Christmas to Easter provides one example of how it draws on long-existing frames of references to develop its general plotlines, setting the fate of the nuclear family within an almost allegoric framework of the hope for mankind’s redemption. The ending of The Healer ties in with the broader and highly complex sense of nostalgia found in a range of climate novels. It has been argued that one of the dominant temporal dispositions of twenty-first-century environmentally themed literature is the future perfect (or future anterior), the ‘what-will-have-happened’ (Currie 76), moving the reader into anticipation of causal events leading up to particular futures. At the same time, however, contemporary future-oriented literature tends to be also permeated with nostalgic past-future subjunctives: the futures that could have been. Zygmunt Bauman describes such nostalgic modes in terms of retrotopia, ‘visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past’ (Bauman 5; see Bar-Itzhak in this volume). In the twenty-firstcentury literature of Helsinki, possible urban lives as well as possibilities for the city take shape in a way that oscillates between glimpses of nostalgic retrotopia and proleptic visions of gloomy futures. While the strong dystopian undercurrent in many of the contemporary novels set in a near-future Helsinki are particular to the present century, the way in which literature enables imaginative renderings of urban possibility are grounded in a much longer history. The oscillation between urban past and future possibility at the waterfront is part and parcel of the literary imagination of the Finnish capital, in which the waterfront appears as the privileged setting where personal and communal possibilities are weighed, and where it also becomes possible to take stock of urban planning projects of the actual city of Helsinki, from the imagined ‘Palace of Light’ of Niniven lapset to the railroad tunnel to Tallinn in Totuuskuutio, to the flooded post-industrial waterfront districts of Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari in The Healer.

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Works Cited Ameel, Lieven. ‘Antti Tuomainen: The Healer.’ Cli-Fi: A Companion, edited by Adeline Johns-Putra and Axel Goodbody, Peter Lang, 2018, pp. 165–70. ———. ‘Kerrassaan suurenmoinen suunnitelma.’ Kritiikin uutiset, vol. 3, 2012, pp. 11–12. ———. ‘Mahdollisuuksien maisema: Helsingin rantaviiva liminaalitilana.’ Veteen kirjoitettu — Veden merkitykset kirjallisuudessa, edited by Arja Rosenholm et al., SKS, 2018, pp. 73–92. ———. Moved by the City: Experiences of Helsinki in Finnish Prose Fiction 1889– 1941. Unigrafia, 2013. ———. ‘Narrative Mapping and Polyphony in Urban Planning.’ Finnish Journal for Urban Studies, vol. 54, no. 2, 2016, pp. 20–40. ———. ‘Peopling the Future Fair City: Affordances of Literary Fiction, Planning and Policy.’ (Un)Fair Cities Conference, 12 December 2019, University of Limerick, Ireland. Conference Presentation. ———. ‘Towards a Narrative Typology of Urban Planning Narratives for, in and of Planning in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki.’ URBAN DESIGN International, vol. 22, no. 4, 2016, pp. 318–30. Ameel, Lieven, and Sarianna Kankkunen. ‘Saaristo kaupungissa. Helsingin saaret kirjallisuudessa.’ Lintukodon rannoilta. Saarikertomukset suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa, edited by Maria Laakso et al., SKS, 2017, pp. 357–74. Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia. Polity Press, 2017. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward 2000–1887 . 1888. Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Currie, Mark. The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise. Edinburgh UP, 2013. Dolezel, Lubomir. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. Fontana Press, 1998. Drury, Tom, Hannah Byers, Lauren Law Kingsley, and Ari Wiseman, editors. Concept and Development Study for a Guggenheim Helsinki. Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2011. designguggenheimhelsinki.org/stageonegallery/ pdfs/GH-2234271498-partB.pdf. Accessed 15 January 2020. Edwards, Caroline. Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel. Cambridge UP, 2019. Hiltunen, Elina. ‘The Future Sign and Its Three Dimensions.’ Futures, vol. 40, no. 3, 2008, pp. 247–60. Isomaa, Saija, and Toni Lahtinen. ‘Kotimaisen nykydystopian monet muodot.’ Pakkovaltiosta ekodystopiaan: Kotimainen nykydystopia, edited by Saija Isomaa and Toni Lahtinen. Joutsen/Svanen Special Studies, no. 2, 2017, pp. 7–16. Helsinki City. ‘Helsingin Yleiskaava 2002, ehdotus.’ Helsingin kaupunkisuunnitteluvirasto, 2002. Holappa, Pentti. Yksinäiset. WSOY, 1954.

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Kauranen Anja. Pelon maantiede. WSOY, 1995. Kluwick, Ursula, and Virginia Richter, editors. The Beach in Anglophone Literature and Cultures: Reading Littoral Space. Ashgate, 2015. Laakso, Maria. ‘Suomen tulevat sodat. Dystopia suomalaisen sotakirjallisuuden uutena muotona Mikko-Pekka Heikkisen ja Teemu Kaskisen sotaromaaneissa.’ Pakkovaltiosta ekodystopiaan: Kotimainen nykydystopia, edited by Saija Isomaa and Toni Lahtinen. Joutsen/ Svanen, Special Studies no. 2, 2017, pp. 106–24. Lehtovuori, Panu. ‘Rannat Helsingin seudun dynamoina.’ Rantaviivoja. Asuinalueita veden äärellä, edited by Juhana Lahti et al., Suomen arkkitehtuurimuseo, 2012, pp. 20–31. Leino, Piia. Taivas. S&S, 2018. The Lighthouse. DesignGuggenheimHelsinki, 2015. designguggenheimhelsinki. org/stageonegallery/pdfs/GH-5760237713-partB.pdf. Accessed 4 March 2020. Luther, Annika. De hemlösas stad. Söderstroms, 2011. Mäkinen, Esa. Totuuskuutio. Otava, 2015. Museo Majakka. DesignGuggenheimHelsinki, 2015. designguggenheimhelsinki. org/stageonegallery/pdfs/GH-3350346100-partB.pdf. Accessed 4 March 2020. Ruoppila, Sampo, and Panu Lehtovuori. ‘Guggenheim Helsinki: Landing-Site for Franchised Culture.’ Domusweb, 7 March 2012. www.domusweb.it/en/ op-ed/guggenheim-helsinki-landing-site-for-franchised-culture/. Accessed 4 March 2020. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Belknap Press, 2014. Talvio, Maila. Niniven Lapset. 1915. Kootut teokset, vol. 6, Werner Söderström, 1953, pp. 145–340. Tuomainen, Antti. Parantaja. 2010. Like, 2011. Uurto, Iris. Kypsyminen. Otava, 1935. Vacklin, Anders, and Aki Parhamaa. BETA: Sensored Reality. Tammi, 2018. Winner. DesignGuggenheimHelsinki, 2015. designguggenheimhelsinki.org/en/ finalists/winner. Accessed 4 March 2020.

CHAPTER 4

From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity Chen Bar-Itzhak

In the cultural imagination, cities are often connected to the cosmopolitan—as entities drawing individuals from a variety of cultural, linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, thus creating a cosmopolitan space of interaction. But cities are also connected to the concept of utopia: throughout history, cities have stimulated utopian thought and writing, serving as laboratories for experiments in utopianism. What happens when these two ideas linked to cities—utopia and cosmopolitanism—intersect? This article will focus on the idea of the city as a cosmopolitan utopia and examine the changes it has undergone in the shift from modernity to ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman). I will demonstrate this through a specific case study—the literary depictions of the Mediterranean city of Haifa as a cosmopolitan utopia, and the changes they have undergone in the course of a century. While these changes in the perception of the cosmopolitan utopian city correlate with specific changes in the

C. Bar-Itzhak (B) Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_4

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‘urban imaginary’ (Huyssen) following local cultural processes that stem from a specific complex political reality, I will argue that they are also tied to broader, more global social processes that affect our relationship with the utopian mode of thinking: the shift, identified by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his last book (Retrotopia), published posthumously, from Utopia to Retrotopia: from a projection of an imagined ideal society onto a possible future, to its projection onto an unattainable, lost past. While Bauman presents different examples for this phenomenon, it can also be identified in our cultural imagination of cities. The literary city, as a textually constructed horizon of possibility, makes visible the changes that occur over time in a society’s ability to reimagine itself. The term utopia, coined by Thomas More in his 1516 novel of the same name, is derived from the Greek topos —place, and a prefix that could stem from either ou (no) or eu (good). It therefore signifies a ‘no place’ which is also the ‘good place’: a place that does not exist, in which we can find an ideal social existence. And indeed, More’s novel started a literary tradition of imagining places that enable an ideal human existence (of course, the political orders that make this existence possible, as well as the outlooks on what way of life may be considered ‘ideal,’ vary greatly throughout the history of the genre). One of the purposes of utopian writing has been to provide its readers with a model to be aspired to and achieved in reality. Therefore, utopian literary writing is closely tied to the two other ‘faces of utopia’ (Sargent)—utopian social theory and utopian practice. Throughout history, literary utopias have often been set in cities, and cities have likewise been spaces for the development of utopian thinking and utopian practice (see Ameel; Frye; Pinder). Like utopia, cosmopolitanism too is a somewhat contested term, to which there is no single agreed-upon definition. Here, the term cosmopolitanism will indicate two interrelated meanings: the first is the philosophical sense of the term, and the second refers to a form of sociality. The roots of this term can be found in the philosophy of Diogenes the Cynic who, when asked where he was from, replied that he was a kosmopolit¯es —a citizen of the world. Throughout history the concept has been developed by a variety of philosophers, and while understandings of this concept vary (see, e.g., contemporary discussions in Appiah; Breckenbridge et al.; Nussbaum et al.; Robbins), it is generally understood as an ‘allegiance to the worldwide community of human beings’ (Nussbaum)—a sense of obligation towards others that stretches beyond the

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immediate locality or the nation (Appiah 2). This sentiment and its philosophical developments throughout history may be referred to as moral cosmopolitanism, while political cosmopolitanism has suggested political solutions that will follow this moral perception. As a term used to describe a form of sociality, cosmopolitanism refers to a social condition in which communities or individuals from a variety of cultural backgrounds share a space or a larger community which is characterised by cultural encounters, cultural exchange and openness to difference (Werbner, ‘Dialectics’ 3). These types of cosmopolitan social environments tend to thrive in urban spaces, and have historically developed in large cities (Werbner, ‘Cosmopolitanism,’ ‘Dialectics’). The complex relations between cosmopolitanism, utopia and urban space manifest themselves in two literary works that depict the city of Haifa: Old New Land (Altneuland), written by Jewish Austrian intellectual Theodor Herzl in 1902, and ‘Railway to Damascus’ (Mesila Le-Damesek), written by Israeli playwright Hillel Mittelpunkt in 2010, over a century later. During this century, the idea of the urban cosmopolitan utopia changes from hopeful modernism, imagining this city in a bright, possible future, to a post-modern view that, after realising the impossibility of this cosmopolitan utopia in the present or future, recreates it in a pre-national past. This shift merits discussion comparing it to both the specific cultural context of the Israeli political reality, and the broader, more global shift from modernity to liquid modernity, and the emergence of Retrotopia. * Haifa is a multicultural port city located in today’s northern Israel. It is home to Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze and Bahais, and is often perceived in contemporary Israeli culture as a model of coexistence. The diversity of Haifa is embodied in its urban space, which is a mix of various building styles produced under different historical powers and sociospatial ideologies: run-down Ottoman architecture and grand British Colonial architecture, German Templer houses and Vernacular Arab stone houses, modernist Bauhaus buildings and Le-Corbusier-style housing projects, and different local architectural fusions that stem from the city’s

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unique history of architectural collaboration.1 But this, of course, is the present city, not the one that existed in 1902, when Theodor Herzl wrote his novel Old New Land. The city found in Herzl’s novel is not based on his contemporary city of Haifa, either: it is a completely imagined city of the future. Old New Land (Altneuland) has been a highly influential novel in Jewish cultural life and history. Herzl was one of the founding fathers of Zionism, the Jewish national movement that emerged in Europe in the end of the nineteenth century, as a response to rising anti-Semitism and the difficulties of Jewish life in Europe, and as part of a broader wave of national awakenings. The Zionist movement promoted the idea of the return of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland, known in Jewish culture as ‘Eretz Israel’ (the Land of Israel)—in order to create a modern nation state there. Researchers have noted the ties between Zionist ideology and utopianism,2 and therefore it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most influential literary texts created in the period of this Jewish national awakening is a utopian novel. This utopian novel, written in 1902, imagines an ideal Land of Israel of the future (1923), after the return of the Jewish people, and the creation of ‘The New Society’: a utopian society that succeeded not only in creating a national home for the Jews, but also in creating a technologically advanced, just, egalitarian, tolerant and cosmopolitan society. One of the novel’s five chapters, the one that describes in most details the attributes of this utopian ‘New Society,’ is set in the city of Haifa—a futuristic utopian urban space, which is described as the ultimate embodiment of all the virtues of this ideal new national entity. Haifa is contrasted in the novel with another city, in which the first chapter takes place—Vienna. Vienna, which the protagonists had decided to leave before reaching the shores of Haifa by ship, is portrayed as a decadent city, with no hope for the future of its Jewish inhabitants; a symbol for all the difficulties of Jewish life in Europe at the time. The imagined Haifa is constructed in the novel as its antithesis, and serves to present a completely different, utopian option for a Jewish existence. 1 The exhibition Haifa Encounters at the Munio Gitai Weinraub Museum of Architecture in 2013 highlighted this. The exhibition catalogue discusses a unique architectural style created in Haifa under the British Mandate thanks to Jewish-Arab architectural collaboration, fusing together architectural elements stemming from Central European and Middle Eastern cultural traditions. 2 See, for example, Elboim-Dror, Ha-mahar, Gorni, Harris.

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Surprisingly, although this novel has been widely researched, the idea of the utopian cosmopolitan city, which is so central to it, has received little scholarly attention. The reason for this is twofold: first, because it was written by Herzl, a founding father of Zionism, the novel was mostly examined through the perspective of nationalism.3 The cosmopolitan factor of the utopian society described in it has therefore remained in the shadow of the national focus of scholarly discussions. Second, due to the same focus on the national aspect, which usually translates into discussions around a national entity, the novel has almost never been examined through the perspective of literary urban studies, and the idea of the city in it has received little attention.4 This is very surprising since, as is common in utopias, the utopian society depicted in this novel is exemplified most notably through the descriptions of its central city—Haifa. The perspective presented here, which focuses on the urban as well as the cosmopolitan as central aspects in this utopian novel, is therefore new to scholarly discussions of this novel. The utopian cosmopolitan nature of Haifa is evident in the descriptions of its urban space in the novel. This, for example, is the description of the protagonists’ first encounter with Haifa, after their ship enters the city’s port, and they discover, to their astonishment, that ‘the Return of the Jews to Palestine has taken place’ (65): A magnificent city has been built beside the sapphire-blue Mediterranean. The magnificent stone dams showed the harbor for what it was: the safest and most convenient port in the eastern Mediterranean. Craft of every shape and size, flying the flags of all nations, lay sheltered there […] Before them lay an immense square bordered by the high-arched arcades of stately buildings. In the middle of the square was a fenced-in garden of palm trees. Both sides of the streets running into the square were also bordered with palms, which seemed to be common in this region […] The great edifices that surrounded the square […] housed colonial banks and the branch offices of European shipping companies. It was for that reason that the square was called ‘The Place of the Nations.’ The name was apt not only because the buildings were devoted to international commerce, but

3 See, for example, Schwartz, 61–85; Bar-Yosef; Elboim-Dror, ‘Ha-mahar,’ 70–80; Gluzman, ‘Ha-kmiha.’ 4 With the exception of Bar-Yosef, who critically examines the novel’s perception of the Jew, while also discussing Haifa’s urban space.

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because ‘The Place of the Nations’ was thronged with people from all parts of the world. (58–61)

Here, as throughout the chapter, detailed descriptions of the built space and Haifa’s architecture are provided, and spatially mark the cosmopolitan nature of the city. Bustling streets, impressive edifices, aesthetic gardens and technologically advanced means of public transportation constitute the urban space of Haifa, and give it its unique character as an ideal space, well-tailored for the progressive utopian society that it serves. But this description also emphasises that Haifa’s urban space is a cosmopolitan mixture of East and West: European squares and colonial buildings exist alongside the high arches typical of Middle Eastern architecture and the vast Mediterranean urban vegetation in the shape of palm trees. Although this paragraph focuses on the physical space of the city, it also creates a link between the physical urban space and the attributes of the society that dwells in it: the port of Haifa is said to be a safe place, and even a shelter, for ships carrying passengers from ‘all nations,’ and Haifa’s streets are bustling with ‘people from all parts of the world,’ elsewhere described as the ‘cosmopolitan traffic in the streets’ (59). The cosmopolitan diversity of this urban space is highlighted elsewhere through descriptions of the ‘fascinatingly varied’ architecture (67), which includes Central-European, Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern styles. As mentioned, this diversity of the physical space of the city serves to identify the society that dwells in it, and so, the architectural diversity is linked to the cosmopolitan nature of Haifa’s society: Brilliant Oriental robes mingled with the sober costumes of the Occident […] There were many Chinese, Persians and Arabs in the streets, but the city itself seemed thoroughly European […] One might easily imagine himself in some Italian port. The brilliant blue of the sky and sea was reminiscent of the Riviera, but the buildings were much cleaner and more modern. The traffic, though lively, was far less noisy. The quiet was due partly to the dignified behavior of the many Orientals. (61–62)

Here, descriptions of the city’s built space and its society are intertwined. Herzl’s Haifa, with its harbour and railway connections, is an important crossroad between Europe, Asia and Africa, and as such, it is a distinctly cosmopolitan city. Thus, although it is the exemplary city of Herzl’s vision

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for a national Jewish entity, it is also, as we see, cosmopolitan in nature— as is evident in the descriptions of both its built space and its social life. This emphasis on the utopian cosmopolitan nature of the city continues: the religious tolerance of the city is emphasised through descriptions of prayer houses of different religions (Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Brahmins) existing side by side (67). The tolerance of the utopian cosmopolitan city is further emphasised when the city is described as offering its inhabitants religious, ethnic and gender equality. As a leader in the ‘New Society’ explains to the protagonists: ‘my associates and I make no distinction between one man and another. We do not ask to what race or religion a man belongs. If he is a man, that is enough for us’ (66). This cosmopolitanism is explained by one of the characters as a natural attribute of a Jewish national existence: because cosmopolitanism has always been an inherent part of the identity of the Jewish people, it is only natural that the city (and the society that dwells in it) assumes such identity (82).5 The utopian cosmopolitan nature of the city is also demonstrated in the novel through the character of Reschid Bey, a Muslim resident of the city, and a representative of a non-Jewish minority. His descriptions in the novel are meant to demonstrate the cosmopolitan tolerance of the New Society: although being a non-Jew in a society where the majority is Jewish, he is treated with appreciation and respect, and has an important political role in the New Society. Moreover, it is surprising to see the highly positive terms in which he is described in the novel, considering

5 This novel is, of course, a product of the time and place in which it was created, and therefore responds to existing trends and ideas in early twentieth-century Viennese society in which Herzl lived and wrote. As a result, certain aspects of the ideal new society, which may have seemed groundbreaking at the time, would seem to us now quite the contrary. For example, the gender equality which is stated in the novel to be an important attribute of the New Society will seem to us, as contemporary readers, unequal: the married women depicted in the novel have given up their careers after marriage, of their own free will, and it is the unmarried women who have careers. Similarly, the depiction of non-Westernised Arab villagers in other chapters of the novel is orientalist, and European colonialism is addressed without any critique. Overall, it should also be noted that the cosmopolitan nature of Haifa is still dominated by European values. For critical discussions of different aspects of the novel, see Bar-Yosef (a critical view of the novel’s perception of the Jew); Elboim-Dror, ‘Ha-mahar,’ 70–80 (a review of the criticism Herzl received upon the publication of the novel); Elboim-Dror, ‘Gvarim’ (a critical view of gender-related issues in the novel); and Gluzman (a critical view of the novel’s treatment of the Jewish body, gender relations and the portrayal of Arab characters).

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the vast stereotypes associated with non-Europeans in early twentiethcentury European culture: Reschid Bey is described as an educated, polite, well dressed and handsome man with an impeccable character, liked and respected by others. In this, Herzl is dismissing common stereotypes of his time, and signalling to his readers something about the approach they should have towards stereotypes in general. A similar signal can be found in the previously cited paragraph, stating that Haifa is reminiscent of the European Riviera, but it is cleaner and less noisy—not due to its being more Western, but due to the ‘dignified behavior’—not of its European residents, but of ‘the many Orientals’ that roam its streets. Reschid Bey exemplifies Herzl’s attempt to promote a different approach towards minorities and the stereotypes associated with them in majority societies: the Jews, who were a minority in Europe, are described in the novel as those who succeeded in creating a society which treats minorities differently, as equal and respected partners in the creation of the emerging new society.6 As the president of the New Society says of non-Jews: ‘the stranger must be made to feel at home in our midst’ (111). The cosmopolitan nature of Haifa’s society, marked in the city’s physical space and tied to descriptions of its cosmopolitan inhabitants, is apparent not only in the descriptions of public space, but also in the descriptions of private space in the novel: the readers are given access to one house in Haifa, and its interior design, too, serves to portray the cosmopolitan nature of Haifa’s society: the house has a German name, Friedrichsheim; its design is described as a ‘Moorish style’; its furniture is English, while the door is French; the interior is decorated with Oriental silk; and the inhabitants are Jewish (71). This cosmopolitan mix embodied in space—this time in private rather than public space— suggests that cosmopolitanism is a central attribute not only of the New Society in Haifa, but also of the identity of its individual citizens, thus further emphasising its vital role in the utopian society created in this novel.

6 Despite what is explicitly stated in the text, this equality is not full, and we can find

contradictions in the novel: Reschid Bey’s wife, for example, who is also described as ‘well bred and well educated’ (97), does not participate in the New Society’s public life and does not leave the house, because ‘Reschid adheres strictly to the Moslem customs, and that makes it difficult for her to come to us’ (97). In another chapter, Arab villagers are described in less positive terms—see previous footnote.

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Zooming out, if we try to define the utopian cosmopolitan city found in Old New Land, it is, quite clearly, one subjected to the ethos of modernity: modernisation, technological advancement, progress and efficiency, and the rising idea of the nation and self-determination. The values of enlightenment are the lines along which the New Society is constructed, and its cosmopolitanism is shaped according to Western, Central-European cultural values. This is not the classical version of cosmopolitanism formulated by Diogenes the Cynic in the fourth century BCE as ‘being a citizen of the world’ (kosmopolitês). This classical formulation of cosmopolitanism signifies identifying oneself as belonging to a group greater than a people or a nation. The Stoic development of this idea entails a perception of the cosmos as a polis to which one belongs. Herzl’s cosmopolitanism presents an interesting take on these classical definitions: in his novel, cosmopolitanism is presented as an attribute of a certain type of national existence. Thus, rather than seeing oneself as a citizen of the world, worldliness becomes an attribute of national existence; rather than seeing the cosmos as a polis, it is the polis that is seen as containing the cosmos within its borders. In this manner, Herzl’s utopian vision for a Jewish national entity regards cosmopolitanism as a crucial attribute of the envisioned utopian society, and presents cosmopolitanism as a way of diversifying a national existence. This is all exemplified through the portrayal of Haifa, the utopian cosmopolitan city, which demonstrates the utopian organisation of the nation. It is also apparent from the novel that this utopian idea, manifested in the literary depiction of Haifa, was perceived by the author as a real possibility, and not as a mere imaginary experiment for literary purposes alone. Herzl goes to great lengths to persuade his readers that not only is the imagined city of Haifa a possible city, but that the utopian option portrayed in this novel is feasible. This is apparent in the explicit negotiation this novel creates with the literary genre of utopia. In the beginning of the novel, after the chapter that describes the difficulties and decadence of Jewish life in Vienna, the two protagonists leave Vienna by ship, in search of a better life. After some time at sea (including a brief stop at the shores of Jaffa), they reach a secluded, uninhabited island, where they live a relaxed and joyous life for twenty years. It is only after spending twenty years on the island, when they decide to set sail again, that they reach the shores of Haifa. This narrative breaks the conventions of the utopian genre: as readers familiar with literary utopias, we expect the deserted island to be the ‘no-place’ (ou-topia) where the ideal existence of the

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‘good place’ (eu-topia) will be possible. However, this island is only a brief, insignificant episode in the plot (its only significance is that it allows for the passage of time), whereas the real utopian existence is described only afterwards, when the protagonists reach the shores of the ‘old new land.’ This break with conventions signifies Herzl’s attempt to distance the political vision he creates in this novel from the popular perception of utopia as something that can only exist in the realm of the imagination, as a literary narrative that cannot come true in reality. The narrative thus leaves the role of the ‘imaginary’ utopia to the deserted island, opening up a possibility for sceptic readers to perceive the following encounter with the New Society in different terms, as a feasible political vision. This attempt is made even clearer in another chapter of the novel, when one of the characters, a prominent leader in the New Society, delivers a speech in front of an audience about literary utopias and various utopianist movements throughout history, explaining why they have failed or could never have succeeded in the first place, and clarifying the ways in which the vision of the ‘New Society’ differs from those utopian narratives and movements. This is another clear attempt by the author to distinguish his utopian novel and the vision presented in it from other utopias, or rather, from the popular perception of utopian novels as mere fiction, as impossible realities saved for the realm of imagination alone. The vision presented in this novel, the author tries to persuade us, can indeed become a reality. The cosmopolitan city of Haifa that the protagonists encounter is a possible city; the ideal society that dwells in it is something to aspire to in reality. In this, Herzl, a central political figure in the Zionist movement, signals to his readers that the society he describes is not confined to the realm of utopian literary writing, but that it can also be a guide to utopian practice. * A century later, in 2010, the Israeli play Mesila Le-Damesek (‘Railway to Damascus’), also set in the city of Haifa, moves away from Old New Land’s modernist, progressivist, forward-looking idea of the urban cosmopolitan utopia, and looks back to the past, recreating Haifa’s cosmopolitan utopia in the 1940s, under the British Mandate. I have elsewhere suggested that this shift, from a utopian vision to a nostalgic one, is rooted in the changing conditions in Israeli society, in its changing social and political reality and the resulting changes in its collective selfperception (Bar-Itzhak). Here I would like to suggest that this changing vision of the cosmopolitan city is not only a local phenomenon, the

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consequence of a specific political context; but rather, that it is a manifestation of a global cultural phenomenon that sociologist Zygmunt Bauman identified in our contemporary world, which he calls ‘Retrotopia’: a shift, characterising liquid modernity, from the forward-looking gaze that perceives history as progress to a backward-looking gaze that perceives history as a process of decline; a shift in the cultural perceptions of time, closely linked to cultural perceptions of the possible and the impossible. If once the future was regarded as a space of open possibilities, it is now seen as a space containing terrifying options of decline, while the past has become the nostalgic territory of still-pervading hopes, an enclave of nolonger-existent possibilities that, while impossible in the present or future, mark for us the roads not taken, the possible worlds abandoned for this present world of decline. The contemporary city of Haifa, which inspired the play, is, of course, quite different from that imagined by Herzl in 1902. But nevertheless, it is a unique enclave within the Israeli space: an industrial port city and the third largest city in Israel, Haifa has a strong left-wing history of workers’ movements, a mixed population of Jews and Arabs, and smaller communities of Druze, Armenians and Bahais (with holy sites and prayer houses for all of its five religions). This multicultural city has a strong history of Jewish-Arab political, economic and cultural cooperation, and is often regarded in Israel as a model of coexistence, although it exists within the broader framework of a complex political present.7 There is a special place reserved in the cultural memory of Haifa to the time of the British Mandate (1918–48),8 before the foundation of the Jewish nation state, as a time of Jewish-Arab coexistence and equality. The plot of the play Mesila Le-Damesek stems from this cultural memory, and places the urban cosmopolitan utopia of Haifa not in the future, but in the Mandatory past, thus creating a shift from utopia to retrotopia: from the cosmopolitan city as a vision for a possible future to an unrealised option from the past, an object for longing in an insecure present. Mesila Le-Damesek was written in 2010 by Hillel Mittelpunkt, a well-established Israeli playwright, who, throughout his career, has dealt extensively and critically with social and political issues in the Israeli 7 On the history and geography of Haifa, see, for example, Ben-Artzi; Yazbak & Weiss. For a critical view of coexistence in the city, see Nathansohn. 8 Haifa was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire from 1761, and under British rule from 1918, until the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948.

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society (see Netanel 161–270). The plot takes place in Haifa in 1942, under the British Mandate. The moment in history in which this play was written is one of despair and disillusionment in the Israeli society: the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the sense of moral responsibility for the fate of the Palestinians, as well as a general sense of decline in various spheres within the state of Israel, have led to harsh political criticism among the country’s cultural elites, and to a gradual process of disillusionment, among certain groups in Israeli society, with the Zionist ideology on which the state was based—an ideology that failed to deliver its utopian promises. But as we will see, the utopian impulse (Bloch) has not disappeared; Haifa as a cosmopolitan utopian possibility still exists in the Israeli cultural imagination, but its location in time has changed; it has travelled from the future to the past. As Bauman tells us about the growing insecurities in liquid modernity (which are intensified in the Israeli society due to a highly complex political reality), these have transformed the modes of the utopian imagination, and have given birth to retrotopia. In retrotopia, the possibility of an ideal society, which no longer seems feasible, is not entirely neglected; rather, it is located in the past, as a nostalgic option. And indeed, instead of giving up the idea of a cosmopolitan utopia in Haifa altogether, Mittelpunkt takes this trope, which is so central to Herzl’s influential utopian novel, and locates it in the past, before the realisation of the utopian Zionist dream: in Haifa under the British Mandate. There he creates a cosmopolitan utopia that is impossible in the present of the Jewish nation state. Because it is a play and not a novel, there are no detailed textual descriptions of the urban space of Haifa. Instead, the cosmopolitan nature of the city is demonstrated through the play’s unique use of language, and more specifically—through multilingualism. The characters of the play are Jewish, Arab and British, and although its major language is Hebrew, since it is intended for a Hebrew-speaking audience, the dialogues in the play are in fact conducted in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian. The main character in the play is Sara, an educated, independent Jewish woman who holds a deep belief in cosmopolitanism as the ultimate solution for the tensions between the residents of the region and their rival political claims. As a political activist, Sara works to promote her cosmopolitan ideology among fellow city dwellers, by spreading pamphlets supporting cosmopolitanism throughout Haifa. Sara works as a secretary and translator for her close friend Fathi, a respected Arab

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lawyer, who shares her belief in cosmopolitanism as the only viable political option for the region. Sara and Fathi, who favour cosmopolitanism over the growing nationalist tendencies in the region, are contrasted in the play with characters holding nationalist ideologies, both Jewish and Arab, thus framing cosmopolitanism and nationalism as two conflicting political options. The opening 1942 scene is located in Sara’s living room, where Jewish, Arab and British characters are engaging in conversation, playing the piano and singing together. Their conversation, which illustrates close personal relations between the Jewish and Arab characters, is conducted in three languages—Hebrew, Arabic and English. Thus, the multilingual space of the living room, in which characters from three cultures act freely, engage in dialogue and feel at home, is constructed as a miniature model of Haifa under the Mandate, a cosmopolitan space of interaction. This representation of the city as a cosmopolitan space is done not only through multilingual dialogues between the characters, but also through the identity of Sara, the main character in the play and the representative of the cosmopolitan ideology in it, as a translator. Being a translator, Sara not only speaks different languages, but is also able to transfer thoughts and ideas across linguistic borders. Her identity as a translator frames her as a mediator between languages and cultures, and thus also a possible mediator between characters holding different worldviews, as is evident throughout the play. Sara’s role as a translator thus frames her as the ideal cosmopolitan, and creates an analogy between her and the city, highlighting the unique intercultural potential that lies in it. Sherry Simon, in her book on ‘dual cities’—cities in which there are two major linguistic communities, each with its own ties to the territory and cultural memory—writes about the role of translators in such cities: To speak of the multilingual city is to call up an image of simultaneous parallel conversations taking place across urban terrain. To invoke the translational city is to look for areas of incorporation and convergence, the channeling of parallel streams of language into a generalised discussion. Translators are agents of this process, carrying ideas across urban space into a single public arena and initiating new forms of dialogue. (Simon 2)

That is, unlike a merely multilingual city, in which the different communities exist side by side, constructing the city as a translational space means emphasising its function as a space of mediation, where there

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is a constant flow of ideas between its different linguistic and cultural communities. Translators, says Simon, have a key role in this process. In Mesila Le-Damesek, the different languages spoken in Haifa are not presented through separate monolingual dialogues, but also through dialogues in which multiple languages are present.9 As the representative of the cosmopolitan ideology embodied in British Mandate Haifa, Sara’s role as a translator is significant in more than one way for understanding the image of the utopian cosmopolitan city created in it. This becomes clear when we reflect on what the role of the translator entails: The translator is first and foremost a mediator between two parties for whom mutual communication might otherwise be problematic […] translators mediate between cultures (including ideologies, moral systems, and socio-political structures), seeking to overcome those incompatibilities which stand in the way of transfer of meaning. (Hatim and Mason 223)

The phrase ‘two parties for whom mutual communication might otherwise be problematic’ resonates with the political reality in the historical moment in which the play was written: the relations between Jews and Arabs in the reality of the audience are very far from the open discussion in Sara’s living room, where even harsh ideological differences can

9 See, for example, a fragment from the living room dialogue (12):

Sara: John: Nini: John: Nini: Sara: Nini: Sara: Nini: Sara: Fathi: Sara: Fathi: Sara : Jallal:

Nini auditioned for singing with Mr. Rosenfeld a few days ago. Who is that? The band manager at the Roxy club. Roxy… Haven’t we danced there once? Yes. Rosenfeld had agreed that she sing with them next month. ‫…שרה‬ ‫ לא‬,‫?הוא הבטיח‬ ‫ אבל שום דבר עוד לא בטוח‬,‫כן‬. (Enter Fathi with a box of cookies) ‫!مساء الخیر‬ ‫!مساء النور‬ (Enter Jallal) ‫!جالل‬ ‫الولد رجع إلی البیت‬. ‫ לא הייתי מזהה אותך‬,‫אם הייתי רואה אותך במקרה ברחוב‬... ‫הילד‬. (hugs Jallal) ‫ נעשית רק צעירה בשלוש שנים‬.‫ שרה‬,‫את לא השתנית‬.

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be discussed in a friendly manner. In contrast to this external political reality, the play thematises the mediating role of the translator through Sara’s character, and uses it to represent the cosmopolitan Haifa under the Mandate as a translational space—a space not of hierarchies and domination, as in the external reality of 2010, but of cultural flow between its different communities. This point, to which we shall return, is crucial for understanding the cultural motives behind the creation of this specific retrotopia. The central urban landmark described in the play is the railway to Damascus—a branch of the Hijaz railway built by the Ottomans, connecting different cities in the Middle East, with one station in downtown Haifa. The railway functions as a key symbol in the play— embodying the connection between Haifa and the rest of the Middle East, but also the possible connection between the Jews and the Arab space that surrounds them. As the plot progresses, we learn that the events are taking place during the period locally known as ‘the 200 days of dread’: from spring 1942 to the beginning of November 1942 (when the Second Battle of El Alamein took place in North Africa). During that period, the Nazi forces led by General Rommel (the Deutsches Afrika Korps) were progressing steadily through North Africa, and getting closer to Mandatory Palestine. News of the actions of the Nazi regime in Europe and its treatment of Jews had already reached the Jews in Mandatory Palestine by then. At the time it was not at all clear if the British forces would be able to stop Rommel’s army before it reaches the region, and the Jews of the region, including those of Haifa, feared for their lives.10 With these events in the background, the railway to Damascus has a central role in the play: it is the means through which the Arab lawyer Fathi plans to save his Jewish friend and employee Sara from the Nazis, by sending her off to Damascus, where his cousin can offer her a job. The importance of this dramatic moment, and its effect on a contemporary Israeli audience, cannot be overestimated: a scene in which an Arab, usually constructed by the dominant political forces in contemporary Israel as ‘the enemy’ and as a threat, is portrayed as a potential saviour for Jews, offering to save the main Jewish character from the ultimate threat to the Jewish people—the Nazis. In this manner, the railway to Damascus acts as a symbol embodying the connection between Haifa and the Middle East, 10 For an account of the reactions of the Jewish community in the region during the 200 days of dread, see Brenner; Cnaan.

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and between the Jews and the Arabs space that surrounds them, offering an extension of Haifa’s cosmopolitan space of Jews, Arabs and others. This connection, embodied in the symbol of the railway, is shown to hold a redeeming potential for the Jews. Needless to say, this spatial connection does not exist in the present reality known to the audience: the railway to Damascus was destroyed in 1948, with the foundation of the nation state. The borders between Israel and the rest of the Middle Eastern space, the lack of which is constructed in the play as holding such a redeeming potential for the Jews, have since been closed. The dramatic potential of this urban landmark is further intensified when Nini, a Jewish girl which Sara took under her wing after her parents were murdered by Arab nationalists in Jaffa, is executed by Jewish nationalist militants, for having had an affair with a British soldier. In a tragic irony, her execution takes place, of all possible locations in the city, on the railway to Damascus. Before her execution, the naïve Nini says to the two militants who point their guns at her: ‘This is the railway, right? … to Damascus… Sara says that one day everyone, Jews and Arabs and Brits, will be able to travel from here to visit any place in the world’. (79)11

This moment before her execution on the railway tracks introduces a new tragic irony into the play. The moment echoes the biblical ‘road to Damascus,’ but in an ironic reversal: instead of Paul’s revelation, which is constructed in the biblical narrative as a moment leading to positive change, this moment of murder on the railway to Damascus creates a different kind of revelation: a disillusionment from the possible utopian option introduced earlier in the play; a moment in which Haifa as a cosmopolitan, translational space, where members of different cultures interact, and which is an integral part of the Middle East, ceases to exist. Thus, as the play progresses, Haifa’s potential as a cosmopolitan utopia is brought to an end, due to the actions of nationalist characters, both Jewish and Arab, which lead to two tragic murders and to the end of the cosmopolitan dream. In this manner, the very idea of nationhood is shaped as the factor leading to the bleak reality of our times. Unlike the utopian Haifa of Old New Land, in which cosmopolitanism is portrayed as an attribute of the new national entity, in Mesila Le-Damesek nationalism 11 All translations from the play are mine.

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and cosmopolitanism are shaped as two opposites that cannot coexist. The time in which the play was written had seen the shortcomings and dangers of nationalism, and the play explores cosmopolitanism as the (utopian) road not taken, one that could have led to a better reality in the present. The actions of Jewish and Arab nationalists in the play trigger its other tragic climax: Sara is blackmailed, and is forced to choose: whose life would she save? Her younger brother, whom she raised since she was 16, or her close friend Fathi? Through Sara’s moral dilemma, the play examines the feasibility of cosmopolitan ethics: if, according to the classical formulation by Diogenes, a cosmopolitan is a citizen of the world, then the ethical implication, formulated by both stoicism and contemporary moral cosmopolitanism (see, e.g., Nussbaum et al.; Appiah), is that one has an equal moral responsibility for every other citizen of the world. As a cosmopolitan, you will not prefer to help someone from your nation over someone outside it; you have an equal responsibility towards all human beings. The play demonstrates the problematic aspect of cosmopolitan ethics once put to reality’s test: in the complex political reality of the play, Sara must choose. Eventually, her choice is to save her brother. Consequently, Fathi is murdered. Towards the end of the play, in a drunken moment, Sara, a true believer in cosmopolitanism, says: If I am miserable today, it is because of what I have discovered about myself. I too, just like you, have those sectorial preferences, between blood and blood, life and life… At the end of the day, I too am ‘one of us’, a member of the tribe, of the nation… I am what my whole life I believed I am not.

The cosmopolitan ethics promoted by Sara at the beginning of the play, representing the utopian possibility of a cosmopolitan Haifa under the Mandate, have been proven impossible in the complex political reality of the region. The idea of the nation, constructed in the play as antithetical to cosmopolitanism, has won, obliterating the possibility of a cosmopolitan utopia in Haifa. This utopia is invoked only as a nostalgic option, located in the past. At the time in which the play was written, a utopian imagination oriented towards the future is no longer possible, since in the present condition the future is perceived to be heading towards decline. This collective feeling towards the future is voiced in the play by a future Sara, disillusioned after the failure of cosmopolitanism

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and the foundation of the nation state: ‘we will all fight over this land until the end of all days’ (9). * If we return to the broader issue of the utopian cosmopolitan city in our cultural imagination, we can ask: What happened to the image of utopian cosmopolitan Haifa in the century that passed between the publication of Herzl’s utopian novel and the staging of Mittelpunkt’s tragic play? Although the image of Haifa as a utopian cosmopolitan city has persisted in the Jewish-Israeli cultural imagination, it has undergone a major transformation, from representing a possible future to representing an impossible potential, lost in the past. What, then, are the cultural factors that brought about this change? Do they stem only from culturespecific determinants? Or can we also spot the traces of broader global processes behind the changing cultural imaginings of this specific city? Zygmunt Bauman begins his book Retrotopia by discussing Walter Benjamin’s famous passage about Paul Klee’s ‘Angel of History.’ If we were to look at the angel in our times, writes Bauman, we would see it changing direction: his face turning from the past to the future, his wings being pushed backwards by the storm blowing this time from the imagined, anticipated and feared in advance Hell of the future towards the Paradise of the past (as, probably, it is retrospectively imagined after it has been lost and fallen into ruins). (2)

He continues: Past and future, one may conclude, are in that drawing captured in the course of exchanging their respective virtues and vices […] it is now the future, whose time to be pillorized seems to have arrived after being first decried for its untrustworthiness and unmanageability, that is booked on the debit side. And it is now the past’s turn to be booked on the side of credit – a credit deserved (whether genuinely or putatively) by a site of still-free choice and investment of still-undiscredited hope. (2)

In liquid modernity, in which hopes have been privatised, and the idea of progress has been made an individual affair rather than a collective one, collective imaginings of a better future for society (such as utopianism, defined by Sargent as ‘social dreaming’ and a ‘philosophy of hope’) are

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no longer a dominant cultural form. This process led to a U-turn in the public imagination: from investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and evertoo-obviously untrustworthy future, to re-investing them in the vaguely remembered past […] With such a U-turn happening, the future is transformed from the natural habitat of hopes and rightful expectations into the site of nightmares […] the road to future turns looks uncannily as a trail of corruption and degeneration. Perhaps the road back, to the past, won’t miss the chance of turning into a trail of cleansing from the damages committed by futures, whenever they turned into a present? (6)

This is exactly the process evident in cultural imaginings of Haifa as a cosmopolitan utopia. We have seen two different literary imaginings of this city as a cosmopolitan utopia, and the difference between them is, no doubt, rooted in a changing local political context, and the resulting disillusionment with the utopian promises of early Zionism. But the changing political context is not comprised of local factors only, but of a global turn from modernity, with its forward-looking gaze and conception of history as progress, to liquid modernity, in which history is perceived, as Bauman has shown, in terms of decline rather than progress. This change in the cultural perceptions of time and history entails an accompanying shift with relation to utopian thinking: if, in modernity, utopian cultural creations were a manifestation of collective hopes for possible futures, the conditions of liquid modernity, described by Bauman, lead to an inability to think of the future in terms of collective progress, and to the resulting tendency towards retrotopias—locating our collective hopes in a no-longer-accessible past. And indeed, Mittelpunkt’s play demonstrates Bauman’s insights in more than one way: not only does it locate the utopian option, in the shape of a cosmopolitan Haifa, in the past, as a retrotopia; but it also engages with utopian thinking on a broader scale, demonstrating this present cultural inability to believe in utopian futures. Together with questioning the feasibility of cosmopolitanism as a viable political option (by illustrating Sara’s need to choose, thus questioning cosmopolitan ethics when confronted with political praxis), the play brings forth another utopia that has failed: that of communism. The play mentions Sara’s husband, who abandoned her in order to found a utopian

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commune in Russia. When explaining his reasons for leaving her, Sara says: It’s those utopias, his utopian ideas about the world started shattering here. Well, he was meant to heal the world… They established a commune there – Viva Nova, new life… then the commune became a Kolkhoz, then Stalin… and that’s it. My beloved world healer died there, in the freezing wilderness of Siberia, all alone. (46)

This failure of the utopian attempt at a ‘new life’ demonstrates the break with utopian thinking that lies at the heart of the play, shaped by the conditions of the present that Bauman identifies. This is also a foreshadowing of the failure of the utopian cosmopolitan option due to the triumph of nationalism at the end of the play, leading to the bleak reality of our times. In the context of contemporary Israeli literature, this inability to imagine the future as a site of collective hopes has been recently discussed by Vered K. Shemtov and Elana Gomel (see Gomel & Shemtov, ‘Limbotopia’; ‘A Sense of No Ending’; Shemtov, ‘Etgar Keret’). They identify a trend of refusal to engage with the future in Israeli literature, stemming from a collective sense of ‘no way out.’ Gomel and Shemtov argue that this tendency in the Israeli literary imagination, resulting from a specific political context but not limited to Israeli culture alone,12 has given rise to a literary genre they call ‘limbotopia’—which creates a sense of being stuck in a continuous present. But utopian longings have not disappeared altogether from our cultural imaginations, and another result of the cultural moment identified by Shemtov and Gomel, as well as of the broader global trends discussed by Bauman, is the rise of retrotopia— the imagination of a utopian past. Although it is no longer possible for us to think of the future in terms of progress (a phenomenon that sometimes leads to a refusal to engage with the future altogether), the utopian impulse (Bloch) does not allow us to give up utopia entirely, and we therefore locate the object of our longings in an unattainable past. Going back to these two literary imaginings of Haifa as an urban cosmopolitan utopia, it is evident that the difference between the two is

12 Shemtov and Gomel have identified limbotopias in different cultural contexts, including Post-Soviet fiction (‘Limbotopia’), contemporary American fiction (‘A Sense of No Ending’), and young adult fantasy fiction (Gomel, ‘Never Grow Up’).

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closely tied to their different positions regarding modernity, as evident in their conceptions of time, progress, and the (modern) idea of the nation, affecting their orientation towards the utopian mode. In Herzl’s 1902 novel, cosmopolitanism is embedded in nationhood, without contradiction; time is perceived in terms of progress, and the progressive cosmopolitan utopia exists in the future. Haifa as a cosmopolitan utopia is, therefore, a possible city, imagined through a hopeful perception, in which time marks the open possibilities the future holds. By contrast, Mittelpunkt’s 2010 play stems from a perception of time that is influenced by the disillusionment with the modern idea of progress, and the growing insecurities of liquid modernity, intensified in the complex political reality of modern day Israel, in which the invisibility of immediate solutions to the reality of conflict, domination and social inequality creates an atmosphere of general public despair. In this play, nation and cosmopolitanism are antithetical and cannot exist together, as proven by the political reality of the present, and cosmopolitan ethics are deemed infeasible. Time marks not progress, but decline, and the cosmopolitan city of Haifa, as a utopian idea, can therefore exist only in the past—as a retrotopia. Thus, the image of the literary city as a cosmopolitan utopia captures the drastic changes in humans’ relations with the utopian mode of thinking and in the cultural capacity to imagine hopeful collective futures during the century that passed between these two literary works.

Works Cited Ameel, Lieven. ‘Cities Utopian, Dystopian and Apocalyptic.’ The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, edited by Jeremy Tambling, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 785–800. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Penguin, 2006. Bar-Itzhak, Chen. ‘The Dissolution of Utopia: Literary Representations of the City of Haifa, between Herzl’s Altneuland and Later Israeli Works.’ Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 14, no. 2, 2016, pp. 323–42. Bar-Yosef, Eitan. ‘New Cities for New Jews: Haifa as Futuristic Urban Fantasy in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland and Violet Guttenberg’s A Modern Exodus.’ Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 2013, pp. 162–83. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000. ———. Retrotopia. Polity Press, 2017. Ben-Artzi, Yossi, editor. Haifa: Historia mekomit. U of Haifa P, 1996.

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Bloch, Ernst. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. MIT Press, 1988. Breckenbridge, Carol, et al., editors. Cosmopolitanism. Duke UP, 2000. Brenner, Uri. Nokhah iyum ha-plisha ha-germanit le-eretz yisrael bishnot 1940– 1942. Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1981. Cnaan, Haviv. Matayim yemey harada: Eretz Yisrael mul tzva Rommel. Mol Art, 1974. Elboim-Dror, Rachel. Ha-mahar shel ha-etmol: ha-utopia ha-tzionit. Yad Ben Zvi, 1993. ———. ‘Gvarim shel ha-mahar ve-nashim min he-’avar: migdar be-Altneuland.’ Herzl az ve-hayom: yehudi yashan, o adam hadash? edited by Avi Sagi and Yedidia Stern, Hartman Institute, 2008, pp. 11–26. Frye, Northrop. ‘Varieties of Literary Utopias.’ Daedalus, vol. 94, No. 2, 1965, pp. 323–47. Gluzman, Michael. ‘Ha-kmiha le-heterosexualiut: tzionut ve-miniut beAltneuland.’ Teoria u-vikoret, vol. 11, 1997, pp. 145–62. ———. Ha-guf ha-tzioni: leumiut, migdar u-miniut ba-sifrut ha-’ivrit hahadasha. Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2007. Gomel, Elana. ‘A Sense of No Ending, Part 1: ‘Never Grow Up: Narrative Formlessness and Ideological Stasis in YA Fantastic Fiction.’ Dibur Literary Journal, vol. 6, 2018, pp. 47–56. Gomel, Elana, and Vered Shemtov. ‘Limbotopia: The “New Present” and the Literary Imagination.’ Comparative Literature, vol. 70, no. 1, 2018, pp. 60– 71. ———. ‘A Sense of No Ending: Contemporary Literature and the Refusal to Write the Future—Introduction.’ Dibur Literary Journal, vol. 6, 2018, pp. 43–46. Gorni, Yosef. ‘Utopian Elements in Zionist Thought.’ Studies in Zionism, vol. 5, no. 1, 1984, pp. 19–27. Haifa Encounters: Arab-Jewish Architectural Collaboration during the British Mandate. Curated by Adi Roitenberg and Walid Karkabi. 10 May–10 Sept. 2013. Munio Gitai Weinraub Architecture Museum, Haifa. Harris, Michael. ‘The Kibbutz: Uncovering the Utopian Dimension.’ Utopian Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 1999, pp. 115–27. Hatim, Basil, and Ian Mason. Discourse and the Translator. Routledge, 1990. Herzl, Theodor. Old New Land (Altneuland). Translated by Lotta Levensohn. Bloch Publishing and Herzl Press, 1960. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘World Cultures, World Cities.’ Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Global Age, edited by Andreas Huyssen, Duke UP, 2008, pp. 1–26. Mittelpunkt, Hillel. Mesila Le-Damesek. Gvanim, 2010.

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Nathansohn, Regev. Living in a Mixing Neighborhood: Reflexive Coexistence and the Discourse of Separation. 2017. University of Michigan, PhD dissertation. Netanel, Nurit. Mar’ot nishbarot: yitzug ha-yisreeliyut ve-itzuva be-mahazoteihem shel Yehoshua Sobol ve-Hillel Mittelpunkt. Hakibutz Hameuchad, 2012. Nussbaum, Martha, et al. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Joshua Cohen. Beacon Press, 1996. Pinder, David. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth Century Urbanism. Edinburgh UP, 2005. Robbins, Bruce, and Paolo Horta, editors. Cosmopolitanisms. NYU Press, 2017. Sargent, Lyman Tower. ‘The Three Faces of Utopia Revisited.’ Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–37. Schwartz, Yigal. The Zionist Paradox: Hebrew Literature and Israeli Identity. Brandeis UP, 2014. Shemtov, Vered. ‘A Sense of No Ending, Part 2: Etgar Keret and the Changing Concept of Time in Contemporary Hebrew Literature.’ Dibur Literary Journal, vol. 6, 2018, pp. 57–64. Simon, Sherry. Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. Routledge, 2012. Werbner, Pnina. ‘Cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitan Cities and the Dialectics of Living Together with Difference.’ A Companion to Urban Anthropology, edited by Donald Nonini, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 306–26. ———. ‘The Dialectics of Urban Cosmopolitanism: Between Tolerance and Intolerance in Cities of Strangers.’ Identities, vol. 22, no. 5, 2015, pp. 569– 87. Yazbak, Mahmoud, and Yifaat Weiss, editors. Haifa Before and After 1948: Narratives of a Mixed City. Republic of Letters, 2011.

CHAPTER 5

Donald Barthelme’s Impossible Cities Markku Salmela

The ironic postmodernist textuality of Donald Barthelme’s short stories may easily conceal the fact that many of the stories are also thoughtexperiments into cities. In an oft-quoted phrase uttered by a character in the eponymous story of Barthelme’s 1970 collection City Life, the chaotic but creative metropolis becomes a ‘most exquisite mysterious muck [that] heaves and palpitates’ (152). Barthelme (1931–1989), who rose to prominence in the late 1960s as part of the new generation of experimental American writers, dwells on this absurdist image in other stories as well. In the allegorical story ‘The Indian Uprising’ (1965), the narrator notes that ‘[t]here was a sort of muck running in the gutters, yellowish, filthy stream suggesting excrement, or nervousness, a city that does not know what it has done to deserve baldness, errors, infidelity’ (104). This phrasing suggests a site where moral problems, aesthetic flaws and functional shortcomings come together as the fundamental, perhaps unresolvable quandary of city life. Buried in the same string of phrases, and resounding in many other Barthelme stories, is a kind of urban disorientation, an uncertainty about how everything connects.

M. Salmela (B) Tampere University, Tampere, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_5

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The muck metaphor serves as a backdrop for the more fantastical urban conceptions in some of the author’s best-known stories, such as ‘The Balloon’ (1966) and ‘The Glass Mountain’ (1970), both of which place an enormous, mysterious object within or above Manhattan’s street grid. Yet the author’s urban visions are far from limited to such superimpositions and interpolations. Several stories play with more directly political or societal scenarios. Notions of the resilient city, a regular topic in urban studies that arguably gained new traction after the turn of the millennium, are examined ironically in ‘The Indian Uprising’. The text represents a twentieth-century city much like New York under a Comanche siege, in a clash between the pre-modern and the post-industrial. Arguably, urban resilience functions as a rooted framework for understanding ‘our ultimate faith in the human project’ (Vale and Campanella 353). This idea that protecting or rebuilding a city is a form of reassurance about the significance of place, and perhaps a way of reaffirming the importance of human community, echoes in oblique ways throughout much of the story. Such a sentiment may seem as obvious in New York City in 2020 as it did in 1975 or 2001. There are other comparable examples of Barthelme’s urban visions. For example, ‘I Bought a Little City’ (1974) engages humorously but directly with problems of urban governance and planning, again foregrounding the complexity and conflicting interests characteristic of cities. This chapter investigates the improbable city visions of Barthelme’s short stories from the viewpoint of literary urban studies, taking into account the debates concerning the commitments, both poetical and societal, of postmodernist fiction. The stories analysed in this chapter were all selected from the retrospective volume Sixty Stories (1981). The ones that play the most important roles are ‘City Life’, ‘The Indian Uprising’, ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’ (1971) and ‘The Balloon’. Yet a number of other narratives are mentioned briefly, and in fact, most of the short story texts are here treated less as individual works built upon unique circumstances than as manifestations of larger principles at work in Barthelme—patterns that also emerge in intertextual connections between story details. My main argument, accepting certain caveats, is that despite the numerous obstacles to individual and communal fulfilment in Barthelme’s textual worlds, his stories repeatedly succeed in suggesting emancipatory possibilities stemming from the urban environment.

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It is worth noting that postmodernism as a literary category was largely an urban phenomenon to begin with, dependent on the intense pace, energy and mediated stimuli characteristic of life in the late twentiethcentury city. Allen Scott and Michael Storper point out that, from the viewpoint of urban studies, it makes sense ‘to insist on the distinction between issues that are to be found in cities but that are not intrinsically urban in character and issues of cities in the strict sense’ (9). The strategies of representation employed by writers like Barthelme are of the latter kind. His texts become sites for citiness to manifest itself—a concept that has recently emerged in literary urban studies (Finch et al.). Part of my argument in this chapter, then, boils down to the idea that the politics and poetics of Barthelme’s stories are ‘of cities in the strict sense’: they are informed by, and potentially inform, understandings of what is possible for urban inhabitants, or for cities themselves. The author’s penchant for envisioning the city as a system—or even the text as a kind of diverse complexity that displays figurative affinities to a city—was noted early on. In a brief 1972 article exploring this idea without much theoretical engagement, Francis Gillen concludes that ‘Barthelme’s metropolis’ is ultimately ‘a city of unrelated surface meanings’ that provides the artist, or any inhabitant, with virtually insurmountable challenges (37, 43). The core of the problem is the disconnect between everyday life and its multiple representations in various abstract, fleeting, unrealistic or confusingly fragmentary forms (Gillen 44). This is an established and well-founded starting point in studies of Barthelme, but equally justifiable alternatives exist. To counterbalance the emphasis on surfaces, catalogues and quick sensations, stories such as ‘The Indian Uprising’ were often interpreted in the light of contemporary events such as the Vietnam War (e.g. McHale and Ron 54; Shaw 173–75), if also with reference to mythical frontier histories, whose sites had now been rhetorically transposed to the city. This transposition has been long acknowledged in urban studies: numerous scholars have examined, for example, the free-for-all frontiers of gentrification, with all their elements of emancipation, struggle, ‘progress’, violence, displacement and profitmaking (e.g. Smith 186–205; Lees et al. 195–236). Most of those historical contexts are left aside in what follows, as are most specific geographical locations, with the occasional exception of New York City, where the Philadelphia-born Houston native Barthelme more or less explicitly set many of his best-known stories. At the end of this chapter, I

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will return briefly to the topic of Barthelme’s politics, or the ways his texts attach themselves to issues in the material world, particularly questions of urbanism.

Conceptualising Barthelme’s City Four already classic accounts of different facets of postmodernism help us form a working idea of how Donald Barthelme’s short stories approach the city. Three of these approaches were first conceived by American scholars during the 1980s and one represents French postmodern theory. These accounts are Brian McHale’s definition of literary postmodernism in his 1987 book Postmodernist Fiction; Fredric Jameson’s analysis of ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ in a 1984 article which later developed into the book Postmodernism (1991); Edward Soja’s interpretation of the city in the postmodern geographical imagination, first comprehensively presented in Postmodern Geographies (1989); and Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of postmodern knowledge, originally published in 1979. The idea here is not to rehearse the well-known schemes once more from the viewpoint of their contribution to postmodern theory but to expose very selectively how they all shed light on Barthelme’s specific city visions. To begin with McHale, his much-quoted characterisation of postmodernist fiction centres on it having an ontological dominant and thus foregrounding questions of being (10). In other words, rather than asking questions about knowledge and its limits (as modernist texts do, according to McHale), postmodernist texts inquire, for example: ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? […] What is a world? […] What kinds of world are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?’ (McHale 10). One conclusion from such questioning—and an effect familiar to readers of Barthelme’s texts—is that both characters and readers are faced with fundamental levels of uncertainty. From an urban studies perspective, however, such problems may be unusually productive, as they can be seen as analogous to many complications of urban life and development. If the ‘postmodernist poetics of ontology’ involves the ‘unconstrained projection of worlds in the plural’ (McHale 25), can we not think of cities as such projectable entities, as worlds imagined and recreated by characters, dependent on perspectives and discourses? The concepts of world and city are not always far apart in the thinking of urban dwellers even in the material world: the bigger the city, the more it encourages its inhabitants to mistake it for the world. In approaching

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Barthelme’s city images, we may well consider modifying McHale’s exemplary questions slightly by substituting city for world: What is to be done in this city? What is a city? What kinds of city are there? How are they constituted? The ‘exquisite mysterious muck’ experienced by characters in ‘City Life’ is a catalyst for precisely such questions. Within the scope of the present chapter, it makes sense to bypass most of the myriad complexities of definition that any student of postmodernism is bound to face. To begin widening the topic from the realm of literature only, the modified questions above point to the way that postmodernist writing is often considered to treat the city much as it treats language, foregrounding its fragmentariness and discontinuity, its dependence on mediated discourses and manipulable codes, and its status as a problematic conglomeration of artefacts. Barthelme’s case illustrates how such a project can manifest itself at various levels of city experience, including politics and administration, the phenomenology of the built environment, or everyday human relations. As Paul March-Russell writes in a study of the short story genre, ‘the postmodern city works against an absolute or totalising political structure, in which power is experienced everywhere but emanates from nowhere’ (159). In this view, the city (like language) is a decentralised system in which power (like meaning) operates through a complicated set of relations rather than stemming from any identifiable source. On a more general level this disorientation typical of the postmodern city relates to the unmappability of the social and spatial environment as famously demonstrated by Fredric Jameson, whose account of postmodern culture and environments complements McHale’s analysis of fiction. Jameson argues that postmodern spatiality, or what he names ‘hyperspace’ in the passage in question, has ‘transcend[ed] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world’ (44). As Jameson’s formulations also reveal, this set of obstacles for perception and understanding is not to be anchored to local identities, nor is it limited to spatial observation. Instead, it should be understood as a more universal cultural condition, ‘the incapacity of our minds […] to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects’ (44). Characters in Barthelme’s stories, the earliest of which were published in the first half of the 1960s, are beginning to grapple with this dilemma

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at the everyday level. Many of his stories show an ‘individual who is so bombarded by canned happenings, sensations, reactions, and general noise that he can no longer distinguish the self from the surroundings’ (Gillen 37). As the two female characters in ‘City Life’ exclaim about the story’s eponymous theme, ‘It goes faster and faster! […] It’s so difficult!’ (145). In other words, as in ‘The Balloon’, the inhabitants of the city suffer from a feeling of ‘bewildered inadequacy’ (58). One might call this postmodern urban condition a caricature of those fundamental shocks of metropolitan life which, in Georg Simmel’s classic account, are caused by ‘rapidly shifting stimulations of the nerves […] thrown together in all their contrasts’ (14). But the characters in Barthelme’s stories who react strongly to such overwhelming stimuli seem oddly deprived of the psychological protections Simmel identified in his metropolitan type. Alternatively, one could see the postmodern characters, in their open artificiality, as consisting primarily of these immediate responses to their environment. Although they may lack the psychological verisimilitude of nineteenth-century characters, they emphatically express the problem of navigating the enormously complex ‘ensemble of society’s structures as a whole’ (Jameson 51). Barthelme’s cities, which are consistently seen through the eyes of a first-person narrator, also conform to Edward Soja’s vision of postmodern cities to the limited extent that this vision is rooted in individual experience. A significant portion of Soja’s overall project was about familiarising English-speaking audiences with the work of Henri Lefebvre, the seminal urban theorist who also plays a visible role in one of Barthelme’s stories. The concept of Soja’s most relevant here is that of Simcities, one of the six ‘discourses of the postmetropolis’ he outlined in Postmetropolis (2000). This applies to Barthelme’s cities, which are thoroughly permeated by forms of media, principles of storytelling, various manipulations of perception, and the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the imagined. The notion of Simcities, influenced by the (almost) eponymous computer game, essentially denotes a new ‘restructuring of the urban imaginary’ (Soja 339), which largely translates into the postmodern urban condition. Soja’s vocabulary echoes Jameson to an extent: at issue are ‘mental or cognitive mappings of urban reality and the interpretive grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in the places, spaces, and communities in which we live’ (324). The foundations for such mappings and actions are changed, if not undermined, by elements of fantasy and hyperreality. Predictably, Soja here draws on Jean

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Baudrillard, who postulated that a specific condition of knowledge, with the simulacrum as its metaphor, emerged in the late twentieth century, and it ‘threatens the very existence of a difference […] between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary, the signifier and the signified (Soja 329). This stage of the simulacrum is the third in Baudrillard’s outline of how images and representations proceed to replace the real world in successive periods of modernity (Baudrillard 173), and, as Soja hopes (330), the last one discernible in twentieth-century experience. Finally, Lyotard’s focus on postmodernism’s scepticism towards metanarratives, or grand narratives, finds apposite counterparts in Barthelme’s fictions, which subvert narrative and linguistic conventions in multiple ways. According to Lyotard’s central statements in The Postmodern Condition, in the postmodern era ‘the question of the legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms’ because metanarratives (such as that of human emancipation) are no longer tenable (37). In the absence of these larger frameworks that order and legitimise knowledge, one is left with separate ‘language games’ whose rules can be expanded and modified in a discursive process Lyotard terms paralogy. This is the realm of postmodern knowledge that reaches for the unknown and the undecidable (Lyotard 60). Paralogy, simply put, is the continuous practice of disturbing the existing order, of issuing correctives to the rules of the ‘heteromorphous’ language games (66). In the aesthetic realm, as Lyotard states in conclusion, this postmodern procedure ‘puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself [and] denies itself the solace of good forms’ (81). How do these four theoretical viewpoints connect with each other, with Barthelme’s fiction, and with the notion of urban possibility? All four presume a certain disconnection with reality, which in the case of McHale and postmodernist fiction is less a problem than a distinctive feature of a rich paradigm. Jameson and Soja both conceptualise the disconnection primarily as an obstacle to understanding that may be overcome by the right strategies. Both also suggest what this resistance might consist of: for Jameson, its key element is the practice of cognitive mapping that aims to equip the self against spatial and societal disorientation (51–54); for Soja, part of the solution is his grand concept of Thirdspace, a cultural politics that seeks to avoid dichotomies and builds upon ‘inclusive foundations of solidarity, collective consciousness, and coalition building’ (279; for a more inclusive description, see his book Thirdspace). Somewhat similarly, Lyotard also presents paralogy as a remedy to problems of reliability in the

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collective production of knowledge, a practice that reveals the evolving role of narrative as a mediator of legitimate information. With respect to Soja’s notion of Simcities, Barthelme’s 1960s and 1970s mediations of city life are obviously not influenced by online media or widespread computer-generated experience. Yet they powerfully reflect an older, distinctly televisual obsession with the image and mediated realities, with seeing and being seen. David Foster Wallace encapsulated this condition in his seminal retrospective essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’ (1993): How people […] understand themselves changes, becomes spectatorial, self-conscious. Because the practice of watching is expansive. Exponential. We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. We start to ‘feel’ ourselves feeling, yearn to experience ‘experiences.’ (160)

This condition of selfhood under the influence of mediated images is familiar to Barthelme’s characters. In the middle of the siege, the narrator in ‘The Indian Uprising’ meditates on cinematic desire and an actor’s experience of being visually framed by both a movie camera and the crew’s gazes, ‘when they shot the scene in the bed’ (109). The spectatorial mood also prevails in ‘City Life’, where ‘[e]verybody in the city was watching’ the same movie (158), and in many other stories by Barthelme and his fellow postmodernists such as Robert Coover. Barthelme’s urban stories are early examples of what Wallace goes on to call image-fiction (‘E Unibus Pluram’ 172). This kind of fiction is self-referential and experimental in insisting, unlike earlier more realist paradigms, that stories need to remain explicitly aware of different layers of representation, textual caveats and questions of positionality. Thus image-fiction aims not to call it ‘like it saw it’ but to call it ‘as it saw itself seeing itself see it’ (‘E Unibus Pluram’ 161). In a 1979 assessment of Barthelme’s fiction, Larry McCaffery sought to illustrate the complex experience behind the author’s literary aesthetics in specifically urban terms, imagining Barthelme’s own perspective ‘in his Manhattan apartment’ (76). As this imaginary author prepares to write, he is surrounded by words and (as we might add) images ‘from his radio and television, both of which drone on tirelessly; […] in the newspapers which cover his floor, along with all sorts of popular magazines and obscure, scholarly journals; […] in books lining his walls’, while he also keeps overhearing ‘banalities and gossip’ from the street and reliving ‘the incredibly boring,

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pretentious party he went to the night before’ (76). This demonstrates well one aspect of the experience captured in stories like ‘City Life’, which begins with the significant line, ‘Elsa and Ramona entered the complicated city’ (136). Much of that complexity stems from the sheer volume of linguistic and sensory stimuli. The remaining sections of this chapter set out to discover in Barthelme’s short fiction positive suggestions of an improved urban condition, or routes around the impasses of postmodernist textuality that manifest themselves in his text-infused city. In this body of work, the writer develops two overlapping responses to the unrepresentable whole of the social system from the vantage point of the city, both of which are often simultaneously present in the short stories. In either option, the starting point is the basic observation outlined so far: the fact that the postmodern city makes causes and origins difficult to grasp, relations impossible to map out and consequences of actions hard to pin down. First, the noise and fantasies of the SimCity can itself become a source for an emancipatory experience from city inhabitants’ viewpoint. In other words, some of the stories take advantage of the unpredictable combinations of fragmentary representations that comprise the disorienting complexity of the city, turning them into positively intense experiences. Second, Barthelme’s fiction directly evokes practical and theoretical models that suggest possibilities for an improved urbanism. The other response, then, is the tendency to imagine an alternative, more comprehensible or unified urban reality through some element that seems capable of neutralising disorienting incongruities.

Possibilities in the Fragmentary City Despite the pervasive ironies and comic showmanship that Barthelme’s texts habitually demonstrate, his characters are not immune to feelings of melancholy resulting from postmodern disorientation. Barthelme can be seen to contribute to a ‘fundamental, aesthetic relationship between the short story and the fragment, in which the city is grasped as an incalculable loss’ (March-Russell 164). Barthelme’s city is fragmented as a matter of course, in persistent denial of a narrative that would provide a comprehensive explanation for the urban experience. Yet his characters are generally not resigned to the unattainability of tangible reality—a stance Soja tantalisingly calls ‘the bovine immobility of extreme baudrillardism’ (339)—but are instead often stimulated, even energised by this difficulty.

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As the author himself opined in an interview with McCaffery, the melancholy or resigned spirit occasionally discernible in stories such as ‘City Life’ is not an example of ‘any personal passivity; it’s more a sociological observation’ (qtd in Gates 11). As such, it can be seen in the context of the cultural condition diagnosed by sociologist David Riesman in the 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, particularly that of the ‘other-directed’ character who depends on approval from peer groups and whose weakness is therefore a certain ‘contagious, highly diffuse anxiety’ (Riesman et al. 42). Riesman described the defining (especially negative) aspects of this mentality in much the same terms as critics have used to read the cultural environment of postmodernist fiction, with emphasis on the need or ability to ‘shop’ for suitable images ‘in the mass circulation media’ (Riesman et al. 42). As a historically rooted societal condition, the postmodernist disorientation described by Jameson and others is at least partly built upon such a lack of inner direction. The impulse against readability—regarding both the city and the text— is expressed twice by the narrator of the story ‘See the Moon?’ with the line, ‘Fragments are the only forms I trust’ (91, 100). In ‘The Indian Uprising’, the character Miss R. makes a similar statement, expressing a preference not for individual fragments but for a quantity of them: ‘The only form of discourse of which I approve […] is the litany’ (106). The story includes several examples of such litanies, lists consisting of sets of words from loose semantic categories. The suggestion is that the litany is an utterance that ‘can safely be said’ (106), is free of the bias and the sensitive information possibly contained in a sentence, thus perhaps providing a measure of reliability and comfort in a beleaguered city. In the context of postmodernist writing Barthelme’s litanies, including Miss R.’s ‘pewter, snake, tea, Fad #6 sherry, serviette, fenestration, crown, blue’ (106), must also be seen, as McHale does, as more purely poetic devices serving ‘to disengage words from the syntax that controls the projection of worlds’ (153). In a more recent and largely parallel argument, Jan Alber suggests that one of the main functions of postmodernist literary lists is to ‘radically challenge […] quests for order’ (348). While Barthelme’s litanies are far from meaningless, they do spell out a linguistic resistance against readable totalities, emphatically denying ‘the solace of good forms’ (Lyotard 81). The list, catalogue or litany becomes, in his stories, a collection of fragments that plausibly provides material for art. The narrator of ‘See the Moon?’ keeps mentioning his artistic aspirations, and in ‘The Indian Uprising’ Miss R. concludes her rant by saying: ‘I might point out that

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there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool’ (106). This notion of aesthetic pleasure stemming from fragmentary urban experience is, in Barthelme, a central method of evading the negative effects of disorientation. Another method is more cerebral, even directly theoretical. Barthelme, like many of his contemporaries and other fellow postmodernists, engages with academic theory in explicit ways. In doing so, he participates in the performance of postmodernism as later characterised by David Foster Wallace, as a representative of ‘the first generation of writers who’d actually read a lot of criticism’ (Interview 00:43:58). Probably the most prominent aspect of writing in dialogue with theory was—for the generation of Barthelme, Barth, Coover and Pynchon—the deliberate and consistently ironic manipulation of metafictional narrative conventions. Barthelme, however, also touches upon urban and architectural theory, branches of continental philosophy and, as mentioned, sociological perspectives, from multiple angles. This allusive tendency makes some of his city stories readable as hypothetical treatises about urban possibility. It also allows his fictions to be analysed in true parallel with contemporary theoretical texts—or more recent ones—in a reading that may blur the academic boundary between primary and secondary sources. Occasionally, the stories engage in self-theorisation, claiming their identity as sources of theoretical insight rather than merely artistic expressions in need of scholarly explication. One case in point is the story ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’, which relates the past failure of the narrator and his former wife’s marriage, a private collapse caused by the tedium of everyday life and aided by alcoholism. Yet the downcast narrative points towards a much more general condition. As a kind of academic footnote to the title (itself containing a parenthetical note of clarification), the last paragraph reads as a post-divorce note set in the present: Wanda is happier now, I think. She has taken herself off to Nanterre, where she is studying Marxist sociology with Lefebvre (not impertinently, the author of the Critique de la Vie Quotidienne). The child is being cared for in an experimental nursery school for the children of graduate students run, I understand, in accord with the best Piagetian principles. (184)

Approaching this from the viewpoint of literary urban studies, we can choose to pass over the allusion to the well-known developmental

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psychologist Jean Piaget and focus on the Henri Lefebvre link. The first volume of the book Critique of Everyday Life includes a section titled ‘What is Possible?’, which Lefebvre composed in 1945. It is a profoundly literary chapter that uses allusions to multiple writers and canonical texts to explore the notion of the possible in human experience. In the same chapter, Lefebvre ranks French literature below American in one specific aspect: the writers’ ability to stage ‘the trial of so-called “modern” life, the analysis of its contradictory aspects, poverty and wealth, weakness and power, blindness and lucidity, individuality and massiveness’ (235). One purpose of the allusion, then, seems to be to draw further attention to Barthelme’s own expression of those contradictions. ‘Just as this decline [of everyday life] proceeds to its ultimate consequences’, Lefebvre writes, ‘possibilities become more apparent, more immediately perceptible, in this sphere than elsewhere’ (228). This sentence effectively summarises Barthelme’s story, at least from Wanda’s point of view. The fictional version of the scholar comes to the aid of the narrator’s wife and makes it possible for her to be ‘happier now’. But what is that improvement, that sense of possibility, premised upon? In ‘What Is Possible?’ Lefebvre draws on the horrors of the concentration camps and post-war disillusionment for a satisfactory explication of the modern urban experience, ‘the social mystery […] around us, in our most “modern” towns’ (243). He locates a number of tragic ‘unresolved contradictions’ in city life, the most detrimental of these being ‘that between absurdity and Reason, both equally inhuman, both indivisibly united’ (244). In Barthelme’s city, as in Lefebvre’s view of everyday life, it seems demonstrably difficult to reconcile ‘the painful or ridiculous situation’ of individual lives with the ‘absurdly externalized forms’ of power (Lefebvre 232). Barthelme depicts this problem through the alienated, alcoholic narrator who initially persists ‘in a truce with [his] circumstances’ (186), brooding in his living room with ‘nine drinks’ and ‘false insight’ for solace (184). Lefebvre does express some hope for reconciliation, albeit in a vague, meditative form: ‘the gigantic, shapeless movement […] that we have called “human alienation,” must eventually come to an end’ (249). This may seem insufficient as a consolation, but the specific vocabulary employed by Lefebvre is worth noting. If the predicament is ‘gigantic, shapeless’, so is human reality itself: a ‘confrontation […] with the possible’ happens against the crucial background of the ‘enormous, shapeless, ill-defined mass’ of everyday life (251, 252). Even though no

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ultimate relief is available for the narrator of ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’, the more important point here is that this language of shapelessness resonates in Barthelme’s stories overall, often providing a tangible sense of positive resolution. ‘City Life’ is one example of the pleasure of formlessness, as intertwined with ontological concerns about the city, the disorientation associated with the urban environment, and evaporating distinctions between the real and the imaginary. After Elsa and Ramona, the characters, enter ‘the complicated city’ (which, like many of Barthelme’s settings, remains anonymous but resembles New York), the notion of overwhelming urban complexity in multiple forms continues to mark the text to the very end. At the core of the problematic, as mentioned, is the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between private lives and the totality of the city’s social and political system. The highly disjointed narrative follows the fragmentary events in the two women’s lives, with several satellite characters laying claim to their minds and bodies. Little conventional narrative structure or connecting textual tissue is there to integrate the scenes into a unified plot. Anchored in the urban environment through its very title, the story immediately facilitates the reader’s—and communicates the characters’— disorientation. A number of deliberately one-dimensional male characters play a role in the two women’s lives, including one named Jacques, who is involved in a vague ‘struggle’ against the privileged class. Another one called Charles moves to Cleveland, where his ‘devoted heart lift[s] him to the highest levels’ (141), only for him to be kidnapped (apparently by Ramona’s men) and brought to the women’s place. A singer named Moonbelly, ‘Vercingetorix, leader of the firemen’ and ‘Hector Guimard, the former trombone player’, also make brief appearances (146, 151). To add to the absurdity, the fantastic emerges through events such as Ramona’s ‘ordinary virgin’ pregnancy (148). Problems of urban governance and social inequalities are quickly alluded to: Jacques’s cause antagonises ‘[l]aughing aristocrats mov[ing] up and down the corridors of the city’, and Moonbelly performs a song called ‘The System Cannot Withstand Close Scrutiny’ while benefitting enormously from that very system. He earns a gold record for celebrating the virgin birth with, paradoxically, another song titled ‘Cities Are Centers of Copulation’. In all their chaotic quality the moments depicted constitute a vivid urban collage. ‘Well, Ramona’, Elsa concludes at one stage, ‘I am glad we came to the city. In spite of everything’ (143). Indeed the overall assessment

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of city life seems to lean towards the positive, and it is so not despite but because of the disorienting combination of cultural and interpersonal incidents. The strange events culminate in Ramona’s conclusive statement about the ‘exquisite mysterious muck’: This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor. To describe it takes many hundreds of thousands of words. Our muck is only a part of a much greater muck – the nation-state – which is itself the creation of that muck of mucks, human consciousness. (152)

Here we have the city in full context: not as a self-sufficient entity but as a piece in a much greater puzzle that consists of humanity itself. Ultimately, it is from human consciousness that both the possibilities inherent in cities and the impossibility of city life emerge. The ‘muck of mucks’ seems to share a great deal of its meaning with the equally human ‘illdefined mass’ in which Lefebvre located the main potentialities of urban life. The Chinese-box model of mucks of different sizes is also readable as a Lyotardian set of questionable metanarratives. Is the individual’s absurd experience legitimised by some greater good such as the city’s, the nation’s or humanity’s success?

Alternative Possibilities Many of the stories Barthelme wrote in the 1960s and 1970s reveal links with more recently established discussions of urban possibility, as well as with wider notions of urban planning and development. As we have seen, ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’ addresses in a subdued way the Marxist emphasis upon inevitable societal change, perhaps approaching the idea of the ‘right to the city’ suggested by Lefebvre in 1968, a few years before the story’s publication (see Writings 63–181). As stated above, ‘The Indian Uprising’, for all its ironic disconnections, can be read as a depiction of a city’s resilience in the face of crises and decisive societal changes. Such ideas of ongoing adversity were voiced in New York City during the time Barthelme composed the story. For example, in 1967 the mayor’s task force produced a report titled The Threatened City, which detailed the city’s trouble and suggested some solutions (Paley et al.; see also Ameel 906).

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Another story, ‘A City of Churches’ (1972), introduces what the title promises, a town called Prester whose every building is a church and which represents a rather bizarre variant of the specialised (or ‘specialisedfunction’) city—a notion employed in examinations of urbanism to account for the dominance of a particular function or sector in many cities’ reputations or economic strategies (e.g. Harris and Ullman; see also Salmela). Specialisation is what often facilitates the thriving of cities in a globalised economy, as economic studies of ‘clusters’, for example, have suggested (Porter). Simply put, ‘[t]rade enables cities to specialize and sell their outputs in exchange for the specialized outputs of other places’ (Scott and Storper 7). These concepts of participation, resilience and specialisation are, in short, often central to the success of both cities and the people living in them. Barthelme’s absurdist angle on these issues suggests that urban development is indeed one of his master themes. Despite multiple caricatures of idiosyncratic urban experiences such as those depicted in ‘City Life’, Barthelme’s engagement with the city emerges primarily through his commentary on the built environment and, quite directly, city planning. His stories abound in details readable as mockeries of grand, utopian city plans. One of the stories in which this arguably manifests itself quite directly is ‘Paraguay’ (1969), which Nicole Sierra has read as ‘a tale of Le Corbusier’s Utopian vision of a “radiant city” gone awkwardly fantastical’ (88). The country referred to in the title is expressly not the same Paraguay that appears on the map of South America but an imaginary realm that functions, among other things, as a lab for the construction and governance of ‘silver cities’, a thinly veiled referential notion accompanied by a lengthy quotation from Le Corbusier’s The Modulor (misspelled in the footnote as The Modular; 125). Barthelme’s ridicule seems directed, broadly speaking, at the utopian notion that projects of construction and regulation could miraculously convert reality into something more functional. For example, the story describes a curious industrial procedure for producing art where ‘[e]ach citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate’ (124); ‘sand is sifted twice daily to remove impurities and maintain whiteness’ (123); and parks have been partly replaced by a system of undifferentiated ‘white space’ (126). This Paraguay’s principles of planning and construction, while far from realist, seem in complete disregard of the well-being of natural life, some projects having been ‘swung upon small collections of rare animals spaced (on the lost-horse principle) on a lack of grid’ (126). The fiction is consistent with the author’s own statements: he saw ‘a not

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insignificant totalitarian bent’ in grand master plans—particularly those representing modernist architectural vision—claiming to improve people’s lives dramatically (qtd in Sierra 88). In Lyotard’s terms, Barthelme’s position seems to be that the language game of architecture should amend its rules and cease to seek legitimation from such a pompous narrative of progress. According to Sierra, the architectural field becomes an alternative site in which Barthelme, the son of a successful modernist architect also called Donald, asserts his relationship with the past. However, Barthelme’s way of modifying past artistic principles is by no means a simple case of patricide but rather a complicated mixture of continuation, qualification and subversion. Within literary theory, this complex paradigm shift plays a relatively central role, since prominent theories of postmodernism, such as McHale’s or Ihab Hassan’s, are largely premised upon the distinction between modernism and postmodernism. Literary postmodernism’s resistance to modernist poetics and politics is in many ways analogous to urban theorists’ critique of grand modernist city plans. Jameson raises this issue at the very beginning of Postmodernism, noting that architecture is where recent ‘modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and [where] their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated’ (2). A biographical fact of some significance is that from the early 1960s onwards Barthelme lived mostly in Greenwich Village, like Jane Jacobs, who famously represented that neighbourhood as a model urban community. In its organic complexity and ‘exuberant diversity’, Jacobs argued, the Village is able to realise its ‘city potentialities’ in the present (150), which makes it preferable (and antithetical) to the rationalist utopias of large-scale urban renewal projects. Yet it would be misleading to draw direct equations between Jacobs and Barthelme. As Sierra aptly observes, Barthelme’s playful literary project is one that favours ‘dispersive imagery to “wholeness”’ and perhaps finds a more useful comparison in Robert Venturi, author of the postmodernist milestone Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (83). In the writer’s urban postmodernism, cultural pluralism and creative contradiction must coexist. The story that best represents an antidote to grand diagonal designs, as well as exemplifying the liberating characteristics of indistinct formlessness, is ‘The Balloon’. Set in Manhattan and narrated by the characteristic first-person voice, the story opens with the description of a colossal balloon’s expansion over the street grid:

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The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all one night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park. There, I stopped it; at dawn the northernmost edges lay over the Plaza; the free-hanging motion was frivolous and gentle. But experiencing a faint irritation at stopping, even to protect the trees, and seeing no reason the balloon should not be allowed to expand upward, over the parts of the city it was already covering, into the ‘air space’ to be found there, I asked the engineers to see to it. (46)

The balloon—evidently the narrator’s own work—grows faster than any real-world construction, and the narrator perhaps has more absolute control over his creation than architects in our world have over theirs. Yet the emphasis on engineering teamwork and the need to set specific boundaries to the development are reminiscent of real projects in urban regeneration, and the ‘frivolous and gentle’ traits could well describe postmodernist architecture in the fashion of Venturi. The narrator’s practical capacity for creating such a material wonder is, of course, never explained. Although the materiality of the balloon is emphatic—it is a ‘great, vari-shaped mass’ (46) with a ‘structured’ and bouncy surface (47)—the creation is fundamentally also a gesture of textual self-reflexiveness. The story suggests as much with its multiple references to different ways of reading, interpreting and evaluating the balloon on aesthetic grounds and its quick, ironic dismissal of all those attempts at the end to make way for a simplistic autobiographical explanation (Barthelme also employs balloons as apparent textual metaphors in ‘The Great Hug’ [1976]). Until, or perhaps despite, the deliberate anti-climax, the amorphous creation is fully open to interpretation, with assessments divided. In a key section of the five-page story, a selection from ‘critical opinion’ is spread in typographical fragments around the page, including ‘harp’, ‘conservative eclecticism that has so far governed modern balloon design’, ‘Quelle catastrophe!’ and ‘munching’ (49–50). As suggested previously, Barthelme’s litanies tend to imply resistance to ordered entities and foreground the aesthetic possibilities of fragments. Here that tendency is amplified by the fact that many of the quotations, all supposedly originating in highly ordered pieces of critical writing, are simply too short to suggest any kind of argumentative context. The incompleteness of these fragments contrasts the massive wholeness of the object they critique, and the contradictions among them seem to ridicule what might be termed the metanarrative of art criticism.

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The central practical advantage of the balloon is, perhaps predictably, the fun it makes possible: ‘That all these varied motions [of bouncing and falling], as well as others, were within one’s possibilities, in experiencing the “up” side of the balloon, was extremely exciting for children, accustomed to the city’s flat, hard skin’ (47). The pop-up adventure park of the balloon, unlike the regular city, is covered with a flexible, safe surface. For Daan Wesselman, who examines the similarities between New York’s High Line park and Barthelme’s imaginary balloon in Foucauldian terms, the latter is ‘a perfect literary instance of heterotopia’ (25). The rectangular street grid, often seen as the ultimate representation of the kind of linear rationality that tends to block out pluralism (Sennett 270), becomes the balloon’s significant counterpoint, the city’s ‘flat, hard skin’. The cool, neutral efficiency of the grid is compromised when the soft balloon’s top replaces it as the city inhabitants’ space of leisure. This new ‘landscape’ superimposes a semblance of natural terrain on the city, with ‘small valleys as well as slight knolls, or mounds […] There was pleasure in being able to run down an incline, then up the opposing slope, both gently graded’ (47). One way of conceptualising this opposition between the balloon and the grid is through Deleuze and Guattari’s terms of smoothness and striation. These modalities generally indicate opposing tendencies: smooth space is associated with nomad thought, with affective ‘events’ rather than propertied ‘things’, while the regularity of striated space stems from sedentary organisation, typically state-sanctioned (Deleuze and Guattari 474, 479). Smoothness, which here obviously characterises Barthelme’s balloon, is not ‘homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal space prefiguring op art’ (477). Nevertheless, the two forces can be understood as equally necessary, even co-dependent. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise that they ‘exist only in mixture’ and are constantly being converted into one another (474). In principle, built environments are characterised by striation: ‘the city is the striated space par excellence’ (481); yet ‘[e]ven the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces’ allowing at least moments of nomadic existence (500). In Elizabeth Grosz’s interpretation, striation generally emerges after the ‘event’ of smoothness, rendering it ‘predictable, or at least to some extent, controllable’ (Grosz 83). ‘The Balloon’ manipulates this temporal order in that the ‘event’ of the balloon, appearing at night, intrudes upon the relatively permanent, regulated network of urban form. Arguably, the nocturnal appearance and the ‘frustration […] evidenced by those city officers into

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whose province such manifestations normally fell’ suggest a degree of political potentiality in the balloon (48). In comparison with the grid’s rational economy, the gigantic mass is ‘an anomaly that just hangs there’ (Wesselman 20), and the story explicitly proposes that the balloon’s essential quality is simply that ‘it was not limited, or defined’ (50). The lack of a regular order in the entity itself becomes, for some of the story’s passing New Yorkers, the spatial equivalent of political liberation, even social justice: This ability of the balloon to shift its shape, to change, was very pleasing, especially to people whose lives were rather rigidly patterned, persons to whom change, although desired, was not available. The balloon, for the twenty-two days of its existence, offered the possibility, in its randomness, of mislocation of the self, in contradistinction to the grid of precise, rectangular pathways under our feet. (50)

Here, city inhabitants are allowed an opportunity to subvert the negative consequences of postmodern disorientation and identify instead a method of positive ‘mislocation’. If we repeat one of the questions posed by McHale in its modified form—What is to be done in this city?—the answer, for twenty-two days, is that one is to re-create oneself by playing with a gargantuan balloon. That the balloon may be a floating signifier without referent, an image manifestly detached from the real and therefore an element of Simcity, makes no great difference. It still represents a horizon of urban possibility, ‘a prototype, or “rough draft”’ pointing the way towards yet unimaginable ‘solutions’ (51). To use Deleuze and Guattari’s wording on the potentialities of smooth space, the balloon may not be ‘liberatory’ as of itself, but the very conditions of possibility seem ‘changed or displaced’ under its influence (500).

Conclusion ‘The Balloon’ may represent the clearest sense of positive urban promise in Barthelme. However, his playful but theoretically informed city visions are perhaps equally well captured by the impulsive narrator of ‘I Bought a Little City’, who purchases for personal experimentation the city of Galveston, Texas, the town that in the extratextual world happens to be the birthplace of Donald Barthelme Sr., the architect (H. Barthelme 7). After testing the limits of his city-managing powers, much like the narrator of

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‘The Balloon’ tries his creative faculties in balloon design, the man draws conclusions in somewhat unlyrical verse: I own a little city Awful pretty Can’t help people Can hurt them though Shoot their dogs Mess’em up Be imaginative Plant trees Best to leave’em alone? Who decides? Sam’s wife is Sam’s wife and coveting Is not nice. (295)

In addition to effectively summarising the whole, characteristically absurdist, story, these lines move through very basic ideas of city development and modification from aesthetic improvement and creative destruction to cleaning up and laissez-faire policies. Two seemingly inconsequential things also draw the attention: the notion of imaginativeness, which suggests at least an ostensible presence of the writer’s faculties in the otherwise rather pedestrian mind of the narrator, and the fact that all the possible abstractions of urban structure, in the end, boil down to their effect on interpersonal relationships (here the narrator’s desire for another man’s wife). This insistence on the momentousness of private emotion— just like, perhaps, the simplistic language—reiterates Barthelme’s consistent scepticism towards grand utopian scenarios. The deliberately banal allusion to the Biblical ‘thou shalt not covet’ commandment, with its merging of greed and lust, also points towards the unique combination of Puritanism and capitalism that has greatly influenced American city life (though analysing those ideological formations is much beyond the scope of this chapter). I have cautiously identified some emancipatory urban possibilities in Barthelme’s work. Roughly the same characteristics can be named more assertively from a different perspective: we may be able to locate in some of the texts examined in this chapter ‘an endeavor to liberate consciousness from entrapment within the dominant language forms of late capitalism’ (Maltby 187). Such a conclusion shares its basic form with my argument, and it is consistent with the previously outlined theoretical

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perspectives associated with postmodernism. Whatever the full extent of that engagement, Barthelme’s texts project, or simulate, cities of words that also contain images of community. It is a specific kind of heterogeneous, mobile, disjointed and contradictory community that often seems disengaged from conventional social structure in much the same way as the author’s litanies detach themselves from syntax. To go back to the ‘muck’ image we started with, it makes sense to place the main emphasis on the words modifying the noun in ‘City Life’: ‘exquisite’, ‘mysterious’ and ‘multidirectional’ (152). These adjectives aptly describe Barthelme’s texts as well as the imagined cities mediated by them. Despite the impossibility of his fictional cities, Barthelme’s metafictional and often absurdist stories succeed in showing appreciation for the possibilities and materialities of everyday urbanism.

Works Cited Alber, Jan. ‘Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction.’ Style, vol. 50, no. 3, 2016, pp. 342–58. Ameel, Lieven. ‘The “Valley of Ashes” and the “Fresh Green Breast”: Metaphors from The Great Gatsby in Planning New York.’ Planning Perspectives, vol. 34, no. 5, 2019, pp. 903–10. Barthelme, Donald. Sixty Stories. Penguin, 2003. Barthelme, Helen Moore. Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound. Texas A & M UP, 2001. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘Simulacra and Simulations.’ Selected Writings, 2nd ed., edited by Mark Poster, Stanford UP, 2001, pp. 169–87. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987. Finch, Jason, et al. Preface. Literary Second Cities, edited by Jason Finch et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. v–vii. Gates, David. ‘Explanatory Notes to Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories.’ Penguinclassics.com, 2003, https://www.penguin.com/static/pdf/classics/six tystories.pdf. Accessed 11 February 2020. Gillen, Francis. ‘Donald Barthelme’s City: A Guide.’ Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 18, no. 1, 1972, pp. 37–44. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Deleuze, Theory, and Space.’ Log, no. 1, 2003, pp. 77–86. Harris, Chauncy D., and Edward L. Ullman. ‘The Nature of Cities.’ 1945. A Geography of Urban Places: Selected Readings, edited by Robert G. Putnam et al., Routledge, 2007, pp. 91–100. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1961.

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Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991. Lees, Loretta, et al. Gentrification. Routledge, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1: Introduction. Translated by John Moore, Verso, 1991. ———. Writings on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, Blackwell, 1996. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. U of Minnesota P, 1984. Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. U of Pennsylvania P, 1991. March-Russell, Paul. The Short Story: An Introduction. Edinburgh UP, 2009. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen, 1987. McHale, Brian, and Moshe Ron. ‘On Not-Knowing How to Read Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising”.’ Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 11, no. 2, 1991, pp. 50–68. Paley, William S., et al. The Threatened City: A Report on the Design of the City of New York. New York, 1967. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/threatenedcityre00newy. Accessed 20 June 2020. Porter, Michael. ‘Clusters and the New Economics of Competition.’ Harvard Business Review, vol. 76, no. 6, 1998, pp. 77–90, hbr.org/1998/11/clustersand-the-new-economics-of-competition. Accessed 29 May 2020. Riesman, David, et al. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Abridged and revised ed., Yale UP, 2020. Salmela, Markku. ‘Still Learning from Las Vegas: Imagining America’s Urban Other.’ Literary Second Cities, edited by Jason Finch et al., Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 109–30. Scott, Allen J., and Michael Storper. ‘The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–15. Sennett, Richard. ‘American Cities: The Grid Plan and the Protestant Ethic.’ International Social Science Journal, vol. 42, no. 3, 1990, pp. 269–85. Shaw, Jonathan Imber. ‘Unnatural Acts, Exceptional States.’ Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 60, no. 2, 2014, pp. 169–96. Sierra, Nicole. ‘Landscapes of Postmodernity: Donald Barthelme’s Architecture.’ Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 47, 2012, pp. 75–92. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life.’ The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 11–19. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Routledge, 1996. Soja, Edward. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Blackwell, 2000.

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Wallace, David Foster. ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.’ Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 2, 1993, pp. 151–94. ———. Interview by Charlie Rose. PBS, 27 March 1997. CharlieRose.com, charlierose.com/videos/23253. Accessed 12 April 2020. Wesselman, Daan. ‘The High Line, “The Balloon,” and Heterotopia.’ Space and Culture, vol. 16, no. 1, 2013, pp. 16–27. Vale, Lawrence J., and Thomas J. Campanella. ‘Conclusion: Axioms of Resilience.’ The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, edited by Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella, Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 335–53.

CHAPTER 6

‘Cartographic Ecstasy’: Mapping, Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov’s City Prose Anni Lappela

Introduction This chapter examines how Dmitrii Danilov’s twenty-first-century writings map non-metropolitan Russian urban space. Danilov, I argue, problematises the possibility of creating a perfect city text by involving readers in the construction of different possible city texts and spaces. He simultaneously challenges and reproduces stereotypes associated with Russian provinciality and what one might call a ‘provincial myth’ (Parts; Zaionts, ‘Russkii provintsial’nyi ‘mif’’). Secondly, cartographic elements of Danilov’s prose and his use of maps and mapping deconstruct and construct provincial city text and the real-and-imagined1 post-Soviet 1 Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace and his term ‘real-and-imagined’ space are widely used in exploring imaginary cities. Soja (10–11) bases his definitions of Firstspace and Secondspace perspectives on Lefebvre’s ideas about perceived and conceived spaces: from a Firstspace perspective, cityspace is seen as ‘a set of materialized “spatial practices,”’ as ‘physically and empirically perceived as form and process,’ and from a Secondspace

A. Lappela (B) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_6

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urban space. Maps and text as two different modes of representation combine in his work to mediate the possibilities of depicting an urban experience, while the use of maps in his texts reflects the postmodern understanding of possible spatial experiences. Thirdly, Danilov’s city texts contain the potential to be read from the point of view of ecocriticism. The theoretical framework is drawn from Jason Finch’s Deep Locational Criticism (2016) and Lyudmila Parts’s explorations of the image of the Russian provinces in the cultural imagination. Danilov has dedicated many of his works to nonmetropolitan Russian cities, rarely depicted in fiction. The two-sided wish to create a realistic image of Russian provincial cities and, at the same time, to question the possibilities of the city texts to reflect the ‘real’ is at the very centre of Danilov’s narration. Altogether, he describes over twenty cities in the two books, Opisanie goroda (‘Description of a City,’ 2012; hereafter OG) and Dvadtsat’ gorodov. Popytka al’ternativnogo kraevdeniia (‘Twenty Cities. An Attempt at Alternative Local History,’ 2016; hereafter DG), analysed in this chapter.

Background Dmitrii Danilov was born in 1969 in Moscow, where he still lives. He has published several novellas, novels, collections of essays and short stories, four collections of poems, and has written plays. He also works as a journalist. His novels have been short-listed for significant Russian literary prizes. In the novel Opisanie goroda, the narrator visits the same unnamed provincial city once a month for one year and tries to depict the city as comprehensively and perfectly as possible. The chapters of the novel are named after the months when he visits the city. The city remains unnamed throughout the whole novel, though Danilov has revealed elsewhere2 that the city is Bryansk. In the book Dvadtsat’ gorodov, Danilov published his perspective, it becomes ‘conceptualized in imagery,’ one example of which is ‘“the mental map” we all carry within us as an active part of how we experience a city’ (10–11). Thirdspace, then, incorporates these perspectives, and from this perspective, urbanism is explored as ‘fully lived place, a simultaneously real-and-imagined’ space, a place of both individual and collective experience (11). 2 See, for example, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 23 July 2013 (https://rg.ru/2013/07/23/ kniga-site.html). He also writes briefly about the writing process of Opisanie goroda and his visits to Bryansk in 2011 in his novel Est’ veshchi povazhnee futbola (50).

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essays (ocherk), many of which had previously been published in the magazine Russkaia zhizn’ . In this collection, he describes his visits to thirteen different provincial Russian cities, a visit to Minsk (Belarus) and to four cities in Ukraine, and to some areas in both Saint Petersburg and Moscow. In the foreword to Dvadtsat’ gorodov, Danilov explains that he purposefully chose ‘strange’ cities to describe in his essays, and that, in depicting well-known cities, he had tried to pay attention to ‘strange’ objects in them (DG 8).3 Otto Boele problematises Danilov’s point of view and position in Dvadtsat’ gorodov. According to Boele, since Danilov was born a Muscovite and lives in Moscow, the underlying viewpoint of the book is ‘that of the capital, not of the provinces,’ and Danilov describes cities as an outsider (7). In this way, Danilov seems to follow the older tradition of Soviet/Russian travel writing, in which ‘decentering journeys were usually written from a metropolitan viewpoint and, thus, they in fact not so much deconstructed as reconstructed a hierarchy of an imperial space’ (Turoma 246). Boele is right to problematise Danilov’s relationship with provincial Russian cities: reproducing the idea of the province as the capital’s eternal Other remains one central aspect of his spatial poetics. Of course, the outsider perspective is a near-universal feature of travel literature. But, in Danilov’s texts, the possibilities of an outsider to explore and create the text of a city are problematised and brought into the foreground. In the essay ‘Neob’iatnyi malen’kii Briansk’ (‘A huge little Bryansk’) in Dvadtsat’ gorodov, the author describes the city of Bryansk in a parallel fashion to that found in the novel Opisanie goroda. Sergei Lebedev has also read these texts in parallel in his article about intertextuality and the city in Opisanie goroda, and he calls the essay about Bryansk an abstract or synopsis (konspekt in Russian) for the novel (167). When reading these texts in parallel, the presentation of one as fiction and the other as non-fiction needs keeping in mind.

Danilov’s Provincial City and the ‘Provincial Myth’ in Russian Literature In Russia, the provinces and provincial cities have had, and still have, a very special, and often metaphorical, meaning in the (popular) cultural imagination and in the literature. The dynamics of centre and periphery

3 All translations from Danilov’s quoted texts into English are mine.

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have played a significant role in the Russian cultural imagination. After the provincial reform of 1775, the term ‘province’ lost its administrative meaning in imperial Russia, and the country was divided into guberniia and uezd instead of provintsiia (Klubkova and Klubkov 21).4 After this reform, provintsiia started to lose its geographical meaning and to acquire a metaphorical one (Zaionts, ‘Provintsiia kak termin’ 19). Lyudmila Parts agrees and proposes that the concept of ‘province’ emerged in Russian literature ‘as a mythologeme within the realm of symbolic geography rather than in the administrative or scientifically geographical sense’ (7). In the collection Dvadtsat’ gorodov, the author visits different provincial cities and describes them in detail. Words which translate into English as ‘province’ or ‘provincial’ have specific meanings and connotations in the collection. Danilov uses these words 12 times in the book. Seven of these have negative connotations, four are neutral and one is clearly positive. In the negative mentions, ‘province’ gets such epithets as: ‘horribly provincial,’ ‘sad,’ ‘poor,’ ‘quiet’ and ‘small’; the city of Bryansk is depicted as ‘partly horribly provincial, a slightly sad city’ (DG 40); one of the central streets of the city of Cherepovets is said to be ‘quiet and provincial’ (DG 49); the village of Susanino is, for instance, ‘a small, quiet and ultra-provincial regional centre’ (DG 128); and a young man (actually in Kiev) is described as looking ‘impossibly provincial’ (DG 100). It is questionable if we can consider ‘ultra-provincial’ as a negative characterisation of a place. Danilov seems to use it to describe something as quintessentially provincial, the most provincial of all. About the city of Petushki, Danilov writes that ‘No exaggeration, the city looks ugly’ (DG 161). In addition, the unnamed city/Bryansk is depicted as ‘not the most happy and beautiful city in the world’ (OG 253). Thus, even the ugliness is one characterisation of provincial space. Parts discusses the two-sidedness of the ‘provincial myth’ in the Russian cultural imagination: on the one hand, the provinces have been imagined as ‘unstructured space outside the capital’ and as ‘backward and devoid of hope’; on the other hand, they have been seen as an ‘abode 4 According to Klubkova and Klubkov, the change in meaning of the word ‘city,’ gorod, happened at the same time, during and after the provincial reform (23). Earlier, in ancient Rus’ and in the eighteenth century, ‘city,’ gorod, signified not only the settlement, but also the fortress (krepost’ and kreml’ ) (Klubkova and Klubkov 23). The word gorod acquired its meaning of ‘a city’ during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when cities begin to have not only military significance (as fortresses), but also significance as administrative centres (23–24).

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[…] of the national spirit’ (7–8, see also 4–6; cf. Zaionts, ‘Russkii provintsial’nyi ‘mif’). The adjective ‘provincial’ carries associations with lower quality, the opposite of first class (Spivak 506). Thus, with some of his depictions of noncapital urbanity, Danilov partly continues to reproduce the idea of the provincial space as ‘Other’ in relation to the capital. Danilov points out that in Dvadtsat’gorodov he aims to write an ‘alternative’ local history (kraevedenie; DG 8). Otto Boele suggests that the question of viewpoint makes the whole idea of ‘alternative regional studies’ problematic: in Russian cultural history and literature, the provinces have been seen as inferior and in opposition to the capitals. In regional studies (kraevedenie), this ‘superior gaze appears to be […] absent’ (1). Thus, in fiction written by (metropolitan) outsiders like Danilov, there is often an air of superiority which in regional studies is absent. However, in his foreword, Danilov implicitly pays attention to this problem when he states that his attempt at alternative local history ‘does not have any relation with normal, professional local history’ (DG 8). Still, Danilov expresses his ambivalence when he confesses that he loves the Russian province but could not imagine living there: I love the Russian province. I love the charming obliqueness of small Russian towns. I even love the five-storey houses. They are indeed horrible places to live in, but they look somehow humble and beautiful in an ascetic way. I am not fond of order and regularity […]. (DG 160)

The capital city is located in the space of ‘order and regularity,’ while the provincial ‘small Russian towns’ form unstructured spaces, out of order, in opposition to the capital. Here, the question about the beauty of the provinces, central in Danilov’s depictions, occurs again. The beauty and the disorder, a kind of decadence, seem to go together in the urban experience. Interestingly, this is opposite to the admiration of the perfect beauty of the city on the map or the city as seen from the air, as discussed below. Danilov’s narrators’ urban experience seems to include contrasting possible interpretations of the urban aesthetics and to be based on the idea that the urban aesthetics is always contradictory. Parts summarises her discussion of the topic of the provinces in contemporary Russian literature

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by saying that the writers she analyses5 offer neither a demonisation nor an idealisation of the provinces (102–3). In my interpretation, Danilov seems to join this group of writers with his texts on the provinces.

Literary Cartography: Place Names The geographical location and vastness of Russia have (had) a great impact on its history, economics and politics, and on its (geopolitical) problems.6 This vastness of Russia has always occupied an important aspect in its self-imagination. Cartography and cartographic metaphors have always underpinned the cultural imagination of Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and the new Russia. This is one context for mapping in Danilov’s works, but in his texts actual maps have more intimate and individual meanings, too, which are related to the postmodern poetics of his works. The maps are one central tool for Danilov to show the city as real-and-imagined, to emphasise the different possible urban experiences, depending on the scale and the media that the reader is using. In Opisanie goroda, Danilov refers to concrete maps, but first and foremost he creates his literary cartography by using place names in an elliptic way, which is the most outstanding stylistic element of his narration. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator chooses a city, the name of which ‘begins with another letter,’ as an object of his depiction. He makes the decision after thinking about the City of S., the City of P. and so forth, and the city remains unnamed throughout the whole novel—the narrator does not reveal even the first letter of the city’s name. It is called only the ‘city being described,’ opisyvaemyi gorod. In this way, Danilov makes an ironic reference to the tradition of the unnamed ‘City of N.’ in Russian literature. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, provincial cities are often seen as almost identical to each other and lacking personality. As Belousov states, the generic toponym ‘City of N.’ underlines the mythologisation of the provincial cities (457). This truncation has been used for creating ‘an illusion of a geographical reality’ in the text and, on the other hand, it has been used for imagined cities not at 5 In her study, Parts analyses provincial discourse in journalism, literature and the cinema. In the chapter on literature, she analyses books by such authors as Mark Kharitonov, Aleksei Ivanov, Natalia Zemskova, Zakhar Prilepin and Dmitri Bykov. 6 See a concise overview of these topics on the extension and geopolitical history of Russia (in Finnish) in Helanterä and Tynkkynen (especially 10–52).

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all related to actual reality (Belousov 458). For example, Nikolai Gogol, Leonid Dobychin and Anton Chekhov famously use this feature, calling noncapital towns ‘Cities of N.’ in their works. Leonid Dobychin and his novel Gorod En (‘The City of N.,’ 1935) is an important subtext both in Opisanie goroda and in Dvadtsat’ gorodov (see Lebedev 166–76). The stereotype of interchangeable provincial towns persisted throughout the Soviet era because of the actual Soviet urban planning standards which ‘ensured that cities of different types looked remarkably alike’ (Becker et al. 52) and which ‘has homogenized parts of all Soviet cities’ (Bater 86, italics mine). But it is important to keep in mind, as James H. Bater argues, that ‘despite popular images to the contrary, there still are regional variations in the urban milieu […]’ (86). Thus, the popular images of the cities are of course different than their urban reality. Instead of giving any referential place names, the narrator gives the reader an opportunity to fill in place names in the text: a city name ‘grad,’ for example, could be completed as ‘Kaliningrad.’ There are many other examples too: The main street (actually, avenue) of the city being described is named after one very famous man, who accomplished a great number of unthinkable, almost unimaginable atrocities. (OG 16) […] a street name, consisting of four letters, two of which are consonants and two vowels, it is really strange, that name, it is completely incomprehensible what it means, perhaps it is somebody’s name, or the name of an animal, or a bird, or a name of an inanimate thing or substance, or a celestial body – altogether, hard to say. (OG 19)

Danilov also comments on place names in his essay in Dvatsat’ gorodov: for example, thinking about whether Kalinin Street is named after Mikhail Kalinin because he used to ‘do something’ there or just accidentally, because Kalinin was an important Bolshevik leader and had many streets named after him (DG 29). Furthermore, Danilov observes some elliptic place names in the real city space in Dvadtsat’ gorodov. In Norilsk, he finds a sign saying ‘Welcome to Norilsk Industrial Region’ (DG 61), where ‘region,’ in Russian raion, has lost its last two letters, leaving only rai, which in Russian means ‘paradise.’ In consequence, the sign ironically welcomes visitors to the ‘industrial paradise’ of badly polluted Norilsk. In Petushki, Danilov finds two dilapidated little houses with street-name

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signs: in both names, one letter is missing, one sign reading ‘ul. Len n’ and the other ‘l. Le in’ (DG 160). Then he finds a new, beautiful cottage with a full street name: ‘Ulitsa Lenina.’ These moments contain multiple meanings. In them, Danilov shows how the concrete textual urban space, street signs and other texts on the walls reflect the simultaneous degeneration and renewal of the Soviet past in the city space. A new Lenin Street sign in a new cottage next to small, old houses with old Lenin Street signs manifests this. Within Danilov’s postmodern textual strategy, the elliptic street names in the ‘real’ space and the elliptic place names in the text are comparable to each other. There are no real names at all in Opisanie goroda. Many critics refer to the defamiliarising effect (ostranenie) of Danilov’s language and style (e.g. Lebedev 168; Hayden). In this way, as Lebedev and Lisa Hayden show in their reviews, Danilov (ironically)7 draws the reader’s attention: (1) to the Russian literary tradition of depicting provincial cities; (2) to questions about language, referentiality and the possibilities of documentary realism; (3) to the reader’s active role in constructing the imagined city space; and (4) to the Soviet history of cities. Hayden, a translator of Russian literature, states that, besides deconstructing the city space with this manner of writing, Danilov makes a reader build the city, drawing from the Soviet myths. She summarises the elements of Danilov’s language convincingly: Most of all, though, I appreciate how Danilov uses language to deconstruct urban naming and describe a city that readers can build—one generic, clichéd name or building at a time—into imagined cities that draw on memories of real places and Soviet myths his readers already know. (Hayden)

Hayden’s observation is a central one when one thinks of the multiple possible urban spaces in Danilov’s texts: the reader has an active role to play in realising different possibilities. This possibility to create one’s own version of the urban space during the reading process one can interpret as a reflection of postmodern understanding of ‘reality.’ Still, Danilov turns the hierarchy between toponym and its real-world referent upside down: the reader is free to choose the referent from many 7 Lebedev pays attention to the possibility of reading Danilov’s novel as a ‘satire of the poverty of provincial everyday life (byit’ )’ (169).

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options when filling in the place names. When he does not name the streets—but leaves them open for different proposals—is it possible to interpret this fact, besides referring to the Soviet past, as also a question of whether the Soviet past can be ‘overwritten’ in the textual space?8 ‘A street named after one month’ is possible to fill in not necessarily as October Street, referring to the October Revolution, but as something else. Streets named after Bolshevik leaders are impossible to construct in an alternative way, and with these examples in his text, Danilov seems to answer my question in the negative: the Soviet past is such an elementary part of the city text, as well as part of the ‘real’ city space, that it is hard to overwrite. On the other hand, Danilov depicts multiple empty places in his texts, as discussed below. We could see the elliptic place names in relation to this, an emptiness in the textual space, as parallel to the emptiness in the urban space. There seems to be empty space for new names and new buildings, but people seem not to fill them. A blurred distinction between real and represented (textual, fictional) space characterises postmodernity (see Westphal 84); additionally, however much Danilov prefers to label himself a ‘hyperrealist’ and not a postmodernist (see Panov), his language-play with the place names is a postmodern technique that questions the borders between the ‘real’ and imagined and individualised identity in general.

Literary Cartography: Maps Before travelling to the city of Bryansk, Danilov wants to take a look at the city on the map, because ‘[i]n general it is important how the city looks from above, that is, from the sky. That is more important than the look of its streets and lanes’ (DG 25). Seeing the city on the map and seeing it from above are different kinds of acts, but here Danilov blurs the distinction between them. Danilov calls Moscow on the maps the ‘creation of the Invisible Artist’ (DG 25). The Invisible Artist, written in capital letters, leads one to associate city planners with gods. Danilov describes them as creators for whom city planning is more about art than about politics. Danilov also speaks of ‘beautiful cartographic details’ (DG 26). In so doing, he underlines the 8 This term is introduced (in a slightly different form) by Sara Upstone, who actually uses the term ‘overwriting’ to explain the colonialist mechanism of replacing the originally ‘written’ (place) with a new, colonialist representation (6).

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aesthetic values of the maps and distances them from the reality of urban planning policies and their role as the tools of rulership. After buying a map of Bryansk, Danilov describes the outline of the city on it: A little net of white streets, energetic streams of orange highways. The yellow spots of blocks of flats. The greyness of industrial areas. The greenness of green areas. The whiteness of empty places. Beauty. Cartographic ecstasy. (DG 28)

Seeing a city from above is a common trope in the literature. It is associated with the planner’s perspective and with positions of power.9 Moreover, it is seen as ‘privileging the demands of a generalised urbanism over the lives and needs of the city’s inhabitants’ (Highmore 3). Finally, it is seen to place the narrator (and the reader) ‘in an attitude of contemplation rather than involvement,’ removed from the everyday life of a city (Pike 34). And yet, to see a city from above is an attempt ‘to see it in a way that is comprehensible and allows […] it to be apprehended as a whole, as a single thing’ (Finch 23; cf. de Certeau 92). Danilov thus associates seeing the city on the map with a willingness to see the city as one whole, as perfect and as beautiful as possible. Still, I would like to suggest that, in both books, seeing the city on the map provides us with tools to problematise the post-Soviet urban space and the relationship between the ‘real’ and representation. In this context, the ending of Opisanie goroda is interesting, because here the narrator is on an aeroplane travelling to another city when he sees the city depicted in the book through the plane’s window; he immediately recognises it, its rivers, street to the station and its railway lines (OG 252). Reading maps has made the city more familiar to him also from this perspective, like walking on the street has made it familiar from that street-level perspective (he has always arrived in the city by train, thus this perspective is new to him). Still, maps continue to serve an immediate practical purpose, too: before buying a map, the writer and his companions are a bit lost in the city (DG 27).

9 Finch (23) refers to Michel de Certeau’s critical views on this viewing from above. De Certeau writes about ‘looking down like a god’ (92) in his discussion of this positioning. Furthermore, de Certeau writes about the ‘ecstasy of reading’ (92), which is exactly the way Danilov reads maps (but not literary texts) in his essay about Bryansk.

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Analysing fictional worlds and creating a typology of them in postmodern fiction, Brian McHale pays attention to the way in which Raymond Roussel uses maps in his book Impressions of Africa (1910) and Walter Abish in his Alphabetical Africa (1974). According to McHale, these maps ‘are constructions en abyme: that is, they reflect on a miniature scale the structure of the texts in which they appear’ (53). Still, he suggests that in Abish’s text, ‘the real space does not determine the map but the other way around, the map determines the real space’ (McHale 53). In his view, Africa appears as a free ‘playground for ontological improvisation’ in these texts by Roussel and Abish (54). In Danilov’s texts, the maps reflect the structure of the text en abyme and dominate the real space in the way described by McHale. Glancing at the not-verydetailed schema of Bryansk in an atlas of Russia before his trip, Danilov writes: […] anyway, one could see that Bryansk reaches over a vast territory and consists of four separately located parts, between which are multiple railway lines and the river Desna. It is hard to say if Bryansk looks beautiful from this kind of little schema. (DG 26)

However, he states that—even on that rough little map—the city looks ‘intriguing’ (DG 26). That is, the cartographic representation of the city dominates Danilov’s expectations and even stimulates his travel: as Phillip Muehrcke and Juliana Muehrcke note, ‘[a] person with imagination can be inspired by a map to do more than look at it, to enter into the reality it depicts’ (Muehrcke & Muehrcke 324). After buying a more detailed map of the city, Danilov answers positively his question of whether Bryansk looks beautiful on the map: On the map Bryansk was beautiful. Indeed, four big areas totally separate from each other – Sovetskii (centre), Bezhitskii, Volodarskii and Fokinskii. Strict, black railway lines, intricately wriggling and precipitously carrying away into the distances. Winding light blue of the Desna river. (DG 28)

In all three quotations, the writers pay attention to the beauty of the city on the map, even using words such as ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful’ in all these depictions. Muehrcke and Muehrcke propose that to read a map a person needs imagination, and the maps’ symbols in themselves are meaningless ‘except possibly for their aesthetic appeal’ (319). Here, the

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aesthetic appeal seems to be one stimulation for travelling. Furthermore, Muehrcke and Muehrcke argue that ‘[p]eople are drawn to maps because each person sees what he wants to see in them’ (331). Thus, it is possible that the narrator wants to see a beautiful provincial city and that desire is reflected on the map. He seems to be looking for a perfect beauty on the map as well as trying to create a perfect city text, but the imperfect reality and the imperfect language sometimes interfere with these intentions. Furthermore, if Danilov’s maps are thought through from the point of view of a post-representational cartography, the importance of the aesthetics of maps for the narrator acquires an even more central role. Such a perspective entails one from which ‘maps are viewed and researched as contingent, relational, embodied, fluid entities that are performed and manipulated by users in their meanings’ (Rossetto 514). One might interpret that the maps are a tool for him to aestheticise provincial space, to see its geometrical beauty from the viewpoint of city planners, hidden from an everyday experience. Tania Rossetto (523) writes about ‘interaction between the virtual and the material always experienced by maps users’ as one aspect emerging from the literary treatment of a maps’ use in Muehrcke and Muehrcke’s seminal article. This interaction is one central aspect of the map use of Danilov’s narrators and one feature of the postmodern and post-representational understanding of the urban possibilities: the virtual and material experiences affect one another all the time. Jason Finch discusses the possibilities of Deep Locational Criticism in analysing literary places in parallel with ‘real’ locations. According to Finch, Deep Locational Criticism allows ‘the same location to be viewed at different levels of scale: from close-up; from far away,’ and it ‘could thus be labelled a poetics of scale’ (40). In his understanding of the poetics of scale, a ‘scale relates pairings […] rather than dichotomizing them’ (214). Scaling could also be understood in terms of zooming out from ‘the details of texts and individual places at particular times’ to ‘the very large-scale: political programmes and conceptions of history’ (189). This is where Finch’s Deep Locational Criticism resembles Franco Moretti’s distant reading project and his ideas of mapping fictional worlds.10 But where they differ from each other is that Moretti does not pay 10 Finch (151) discusses the possibilities that GIS techniques provide for a literary scholar and suggests that they resemble the ideas of Franco Moretti’s distant reading project.

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much attention to the movement from one level of mapping scale to another and back. Moretti suggests that creating maps of the fictional locations could reveal new relations between them and bring up new features of the text (Moretti, Graphs 53–54). Barbara Piatti with her co-writers have developed Moretti’s ideas about mapping the fictional worlds and propose that by mapping fiction we can explore, for example, the following questions: ‘Are there still any geographic areas entirely undocumented in literature? How densely settled by fictional works is a particular space? How occupied is it internationally? Or is the space inscribed almost exclusively by native authors?’ (Piatti et al. 191). These questions are interesting indeed, when we try to explore the noncapital cities in contemporary Russian prose. Danilov’s work participates in that mapping with its noncapital literary cartography of urban Russia. For Danilov, maps seem to be a tool for creating a scaled vision of the city. From a big picture of the Soviet past, he zooms in on the cartographical vision of a city on the map. From the maps, he zooms in on the everyday experience of city life, its actual streets and buildings, and from this experience, he still zooms in on the small details of urban space. Most of the texts end by zooming out again and travelling away by plane, bus or train. These endings tend to be fairly laconic accounts of train journeys back to Moscow, or of heading out to the railway station, or taking a plane (as in the essay about Norilsk). Many chapters in Opisanie goroda take up such a theme, and the essay on Bryansk in Dvadtsat gorodov ends like this. This scales the depiction of the city, connecting a city with other parts of Russia and its capital via depictions of trains or other modes of transportation. At the end of the last chapter of Opisanie goroda, the narrator looks out from the window of a train to watch how the city ends, and at the same time, ‘the depiction of the depicted city’ ends (OG 250). Here, the narrator leaves the physical space of the city in parallel leaving the fictional space on the level of the text. The fictional representation of a space ‘may correspond to what Piatti calls the geo space (or map space) directly, only loosely, or not at all,’ as Peta Michell and Jane Stadler summarise it (58; see also Piatti et al. 182). In Danilov’s fiction, this correspondence is mainly quite direct, but with some exceptions, which participate in the meaning-making of the post-Soviet space, as argued below. Moretti, Finch and Piatti with her co-writers propose models for how we could map fictional representations of a location and what we can do

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with these mappings. They do not discuss how to explore maps textualised in the fiction, but I still see their viewpoints as useful for reading the tension between reality, text and maps. In both of the books by Danilov under consideration here, there are several moments when the city or a part of it seems to look beautiful or interesting on the map, but the reality appears to contradict this. In the narrator’s experience, the representation seems to come first, and the reality of the place fails to sustain this impression. This very much resembles Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernist viewpoint, according to which ‘it is the map that precedes the territory’ (166). These are moments when maps dominate reality, not the other way around, as McHale formulates it (see above), and convey a postmodern point of view on the place. The narrator thinks: ‘On the map this area looks beautiful’ and ‘On the map that area looks like a place where one immediately would like to go’ (OG 105, 106) but the narrator is forced to realise that sometimes representations present a more aestheticised impression of places than they actually are. Soviet urban planning included the task to build extensive green zones, parks and other recreational areas in cities (see Bater 29), and their main function was to protect the population from industrial pollution (Bolotova 55, 68–69). In Opisanie goroda, the narrator is forced to realise the degeneration of these recreational areas: a parkway (alley) is not parkway-like at all, just a few trees, and there is just an empty area again around the alley (OG 106). Especially in Opisanie goroda, there are several other moments when the narrator observes empty or unstructured spaces in urban space. In May, the narrator makes a trip to the far edge of the city (OG 97). During his bus ride, he describes how the bus drives ‘past something, hell only knows what it is’ (OG 99). The narrator depicts the area as ‘not a living area with buildings, not an industrial zone with factories, […] and not a village. But something difficult to define’ (OG 99). Earlier, in February, the narrator observes ‘a strange place’ along the riverside, an empty place where an ‘incomprehensible’ building stands (OG 39). Tatiana Shehovtsova proposes that the topos of emptiness becomes one of the most important elements of the urban space in Opisanie goroda; in her view, it is ‘an ontological emptiness,’ which could not be filled. I propose that this emptiness could also be interpreted in relation to the question about the ‘abstract space’ of post-Soviet urbanity evident also in the city of Norilsk (see below).

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In passages such as this, the narrator is implicitly observing post-Soviet urbanisation, which has failed to modernise the city. This technique points to a question of language and representation: How can we create text only about places we do not recognise and understand? And how can we understand a place we do not have words for? The question arises once more of whether the territory precedes its representation or the other way around. Ultimately, it becomes a question about the possibilities of the real-and-imagined spaces as a process, where a reader as well as a writer has an active role to play. Later, walking on the ‘street named after a certain visible Bolshevik,’ the narrator thinks that in the distancing from the centre, the street ‘disposes of the markers of urban civilisation’ (OG 136) and, further, ‘the urban civilisation is as absent as before’ (OG 137). These thoughts seem to refer not only to the modernisation problems of Russian (provincial) cities, but also to the stereotypical ‘backwardness’ of the provinces, the idea of it being the ‘unstructured space’ outside the capitals (Parts 7–8).

Omnipresent Soviet Space Mikhail Bakhtin writes about several different variants of chronotopes of a provincial town (247). He sees the idyllic provincial town as ‘the locus for cyclic everyday time’ (247) and finds examples of this kind of provincial time-space in Gogol, Turgenev, Gleb Uspensky, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Chekhov (Bakhtin 248). Comparably, Tintti Klapuri explores the provincial chronotope in Chekhov and sees its ‘connotations of meaningless repetition’ associated with ‘non-autonomous subjectivity’ (156). According to her, this ‘negative representation of repetition separates the provincial and idyllic chronotopes from each other,’ because the idyllic chronotope represents the cyclicity in positive terms (156). Lebedev sees the repeating movement by train as one central motif in Danilov’s Opisanie goroda, and according to him, it brings ‘monotony’ and ‘cyclicity’ to the novel (170). Thus, the cyclic temporality of the novel is related to the space of travelling more than to the provincial space itself. Zaionts writes about the ‘special chronotope’ of the provinces (‘Russkii provintsial’nyi ‘mif’’ 428). While the capital chronotope is characterised by the time-space ‘today and here,’ the noncapital/provincial one is characterised by ‘yesterday and there’ (Zaionts, ‘Russkii provintsial’nyi ‘mif’’ 428), that is, by nostalgia. According to Zaionts, in Russian culture, the journey to the provinces often means travelling back in time, too (‘Russkii

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provintsial’nyi ‘mif’’ 428). But, as Boele asserts, Danilov ‘nowhere […] indulge[s] in nostalgia’ in his texts (2). The Soviet past still forms the most important time layer in Danilov’s textual urban space, and not all the references to it are negative. While the chronotope is not in focus here, Klapuri and Zaiont offer useful tools for understanding provincial chronotopes. Danilov’s writings bring together two different chronotopes of the province, the idyllic one and the negatively associated one. Danilov uses the word Soviet (sovetskii) over 40 times in his essay collection, sometimes referring to place names such as ‘Soviet Street’ and, naturally, the Soviet Union. But about half of these references relate more or less directly to city space more generally. The brief depiction of the city centre of Bryansk effectively summarises how Danilov sees the touch of post-Soviet modernisation in the space of this particular city as very superficial: ‘Lenin Avenue. Stalinist houses. Everything is very Soviet, with a modern commercial patina’ (DG 27). Still, in some places, the attribute ‘Soviet’ carries positive meanings in Danilov’s texts, and he explicitly pays attention to this positivity, too: ‘sympathetic houses, among them very small ones, not ‘private sector’ but normal city houses, stylish in a Soviet way’ (DG 22), moreover: The city looks totally Soviet, even with a significant number of objects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Soviet city with insertion from old times. Besides, in this case ‘Soviet’ is not a pejorative characteristic at all. A good, here and there very beautiful, city. (DG 35)

An ‘ordinary Soviet hotel’ (DG 19), an ‘ordinary Soviet building of the regional comity of the CPSU’ (DG 27) and ‘an ordinary Soviet buffet’ (DG 114) are examples in which ‘Soviet’ is related to the idea of something being typical for the Russian urban space because it is from Soviet times. On the other hand, in the city of Ulyanovsk, in the Lenin museum full of the history of Lenin, Danilov feels ‘a physical sickness’ and as if ‘on an excursion in hell’ (DG 122). Furthermore, Danilov explicitly proposes to overwrite the Soviet past here, suggesting that the city name Ulyanovsk could be replaced by its former name, Simbirsk (DG 126). The city of Ulyanovsk carried the name Simbirsk until 1924, when it was renamed Ulyanovsk in honour of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose original surname was Ulyanov.

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The essays about the Arctic cities of Murmansk and Norilsk, the two biggest cities in the world above the Arctic Circle, illustrate especially well some of the author’s views about the continued existence of the Soviet past in present-day urban space. Danilov has also identified both these Arctic cities as places every Russian citizen should visit (Parker). The way that Murmansk reflects the history of the Soviet conquest of the North (osvoenie severa) in Danilov’s essay is something I have touched on elsewhere (see Lappela). The following analysis instead focuses on his depictions of Norilsk. Norilsk is an industrial city in which Nornickel’s mining-metallurgic complex is located. The city is known for its serious pollution. At the end of his essay, Danilov comments on this pollution of the city directly: he basically says that of course there are ecological problems in Norilsk and that, in comparison with Moscow, Norilsk is a far more polluted city. Through the whole essay about Norilsk, the author pays attention to two things typical of the city: the bad condition of the old, Sovietera buildings and the environment, heavily modified and polluted by the mining industry. The title of his essay about Norilsk, ‘Vozmozhno obrushenie fazada’ (‘Collapse of the façade is possible’), alludes to signs displaying this warning, which Danilov observes ‘on almost every house in the city centre’ (DG 64). Danilov states that the ‘industrial landscape is an inseparable part of the modern urban environment’ (DG 63) and then describes that part of the urban environment of Norilsk. He contemplates how, in Norilsk, there is ‘another kind of industrialism, unbelievable, beyond everything, Mars-like. Mars, on which apple trees do not flower […]’ (DG 63). Later, in any case, he gets used to the city enough that the previous feeling of being on Mars disappears (DG 66). The landscape loses its apocalyptic connotations for him, too (DG 71). Describing the industrial landscape as Mars-like, apocalyptic and as a place where trees cannot grow, makes for quite strong-sounding statements about pollution in Norilsk. Modernisation, the conquest of new territories and industrialisation produced ‘abstract space’: as Mika Perkiömäki states, where Soviet modernity conquered space and transformed places into abstract space (324). Drawing on Lawrence Buell, Perkiömäki argues that this was caused by capitalist modernisation as well as by socialist modernisation (Perkiömäki 324; Buell, 58). According to Lefebvre, ‘abstract space’ is instrumental, ‘manipulated by all kinds of authorities’ (51), and Norilsk’s industrial landscape forms an ‘abstract space’ produced by Soviet modernisation.

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Nevertheless, even though its urban nature is polluted, Danilov finds the city beautiful: ‘In general, a beautiful city. Somehow noble. Standing straight. Strong. Respectable’ (DG 65). Still, Danilov describes Norilsk as an ‘Arctic wonder city,’ ‘chudo-gorod,’ and states that ‘that fact itself, that there is such a big city in that kind of place, not suitable for living at all […] should be considered a miracle and a victory’ (DG 73). Danilov explicitly proposes that building and maintaining a city in the Arctic is ‘a miracle,’ that is, something which seems to be impossible but became possible. This, especially together with the word ‘victory,’ echoes Soviet rhetoric from the 1930s, the high period of conquering the North (osvoenie severa), when Soviet people founded new settlements in the Far North. The literature and other forms of (popular) culture had a significant role to play in distributing ‘the ideas of man’s superiority over nature’ (Bolotova 46). Thus, the Norilsk essay reflects an ambiguous attitude towards the ecological discussion. On the one hand, the writer pays much attention to the ecological problems of the area. But on the other, he becomes used to the polluted environment, seeming to accept it as something inescapable, that is, without further problematising it. Finally, he even makes reference to the city understood as a victory over nature.

Conclusions Textual strategies, games with language, subtexts and Danilov’s ways of deconstructing the city text and city space have already been discussed to some extent. This chapter has introduced some new perspectives on Danilov’s urban space, in particular demonstrating how he constructs and deconstructs the literary and referential provincial city space by mapping and scaling the perspective on the city from far away to close-up. Maps are central in Danilov’s construction of the postmodern poetics of his prose. In Danilov’s works, questions concerning urban possibilities are tightly related to both the language and representation. These concern, for instance, the possibilities of the different representations (verbally depicted maps in the texts, textual depictions of different scale) that affect the narrator’s and reader’s urban experience. Conversely, Danilov asks how a reader can affect the textual space. Furthermore, the question of whether it is possible to renew the city space textually could be understood as common to many cities and city texts, not specifically associated with the post-Soviet space. Finally, Danilov’s Norilsk essay enables an ecocritical reading of post-Soviet Arctic urban space and how some

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of his essays could provide a starting point for more detailed ecocritical analysis. In sum, Danilov’s ambiguous relationship to provinciality and the Soviet past in city space represents a conscious attempt to bring together juxtaposing views of this provinciality. Danilov’s obvious sympathy towards provincial space is not based on idealising it, but based on exploring its multi-layered space and aesthetics. The question concerning urban aesthetics occurs in many places in Danilov’s works and brings up the different possible understandings of a beautiful provincial city. The beautiful city is indeed possible, but mainly when mixed in with a little bit of imagination.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, U of Texas P, 2002. Bater, James H. The Soviet City. Explorations in Urban Analysis. Edward Arnold, 1980. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘Simulacra and Simulations.’ Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, Stanford UP, 1988, pp. 166–84. Becker, Charles, et al. Russian Urbanization in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras. Urbanization and Emerging Population Issues Working Paper 9, IIED Human Settlement Group, 2012. Belousov, A.F. ‘Simvolika zakholustia (oboznachenie rossiiskogo provintsialnogo goroda).’ Geopanorama russkoi literatury. Provintsiia i ee lokalnye teksty, edited by L.O. Zaionts, Moskva, Jazyki slavianskoi kultury, 2004, pp. 457–81. Boele, Otto. ‘On the Edge of the Center: Spiritual Inbetweenness and Urban Landscape in Modern Russian Prose.’ ICCEES 2010, 31 July 2010, Stockholm. Conference presentation. Bolotova, Alla. Conquering Nature and Engaging with the Environment in the Russian Industrialised North. Acta Universitatis Lappoensis 291, U of Lapland, 2014. Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2001. Danilov, Dmitrii. Dvadtsat’ gorodov. Popytka alternativnogo kraevedeniia. IlMusic, 2016. ———. Est’ veshchi povazhnee futbola. RIPOL klassik, 2015. ———. Opisanie goroda. Astrel’, 2012. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1988.

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Finch, Jason. Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching. John Benjamins, 2016. Hayden, Lisa. ‘Dmitrii Danilov’s Description of a City.’ Lizok’s Bookshelf: Reading Ideas from Russian Classic and Contemporary Fiction, 23 November 2012, http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2012/11/dmitriidanilovs-description-of-city.html. Accessed 15 March 2020. Helanterä, Antti, and Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen. Maantieteelle Venäjä ei voi mitään. Ajatus kirjat, 2002. Highmore, Ben. Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Klapuri, Tintti. Chronotopes of Modernity in Chekhov. Academic Dissertation. U of Turku, 2015. Klubkova T.V. & Klubkov P.A. ‘Russkii provintsial’nyi gorod i stereotipy provintsial’nosty.’ Russkaia provintsiia: mif-tekst-real’nost, edited by V.N. Sazhin, Izdatel’stvo ‘Tema’, 2000, pp. 20–30. Lappela, Anni. ‘(Literary) Capital of the Russian Arctic: Murmansk in Russian Literature.’ Poljarnyj vestnik, vol. 21, no. 2, 2018, pp. 31–55. Lebedev, Sergei. ‘Portret khudozhnika v topose. Brianskaia ‘odisseia’ L. Dobychina glazami D.Danilova.’ Novyi mir, no. 11, 2014, pp. 166–76. Lefebvre, Henry. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald NicholsonSmith, Blackwell, 1991. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Methuen, 1987. Michell, Peta and Jane Stadler. ‘Redrawing the Map. An Interdisciplinary Geocritical Approach to Australian Cultural Narratives.’ Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert T. Tally Jr., Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 47–62. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013. ———. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2005. Panov, Igor. ‘Giperrealizm vmesto postmodernizma.’ Literaturnaia gazeta, no 31, 2012, litresp.com/chitat/ru/%D0%9B/literaturnaya-gazeta-literaturkagazeta/literaturnaya-gazeta-6379—31-2012/7. Accessed 31 March 2020. Parker, Jeff. ‘Brief Interviews w/ Pyccki Men: Dmitry Danilov.’ Tin House Online, 19 August 2009, tinhouse.com/brief-interviews-w-poccini-mendmitry-danilov. Accessed 30 October 2019. Parts, Lyudmila. In Search of the True Russia: The Provinces in Contemporary Nationalist Discourse. U of Wisconsin P, 2018. Perkiömäki, Mika. ‘Matka hukutetulla joella. Ympäristöoikeudenmukaisuus Valentin Rasputinin 1970-luvun jokiproosassa.’ Veteen kirjoitettu: Veden merkitykset kirjallisuudessa, edited by Markku Lehtimäki, Hanna Meretoja and Arja Rosenholm, SKS, 2018, pp. 305–332.

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Piatti, Barbara, et al. ‘Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction.’ Cartography and Art, edited by William Cartwright et al., Springer, 2009, pp. 177–92. Pike, Burton. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton UP, 1981. Rossetto, Tania. ‘Theorizing Maps with Literature.’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 38, no. 4, 2014, pp. 513–30. Shehovtsova, Tatiana. ‘Vechnoe vozvrashchenie.’ Soiuz pisatelei, vol. 14, 2012, magazines.russ.ru/sp/2012/14/sh33.html. Accessed 15 March 2020. Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Blackwell, 2000. Spivak, M.L. ‘“Provintsiia idet v regiony”: O nekotorykh osobennostiakh sovremennogo upotrebleniia slova provintsiia.’ Geopanorama russkoi literatury: Provintsiia i ee lokalnye teksty, edited by L.O. Zaionts, Jazyki slavianskoi kultury, 2004, pp. 503–15. Turoma, Sanna. ‘Imperiia Re/Constructed: Narratives of Space and Nation in 1960s Soviet Russian Culture.’ Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Sanna Turoma and Maxim Waldstein, Ashgate, 2013, pp. 239–56. Upstone, Sara. Spatial Politics of the Postcolonial Novel. Routledge, 2016. Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr., Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Zaionts, L.O. ‘Provintsiia kak termin.’ Russkaia provintsiia: mif-tekst-real’nost,’ edited by V.N. Sazhin, Izdatel’stvo ‘Tema’, 2000, pp. 12–20. ———. ‘Russkii provintsial’nyi ‘mif’ (k problem kul’turnoi tipologii).’ Geopanorama russkoi literatury: Provintsiia i ee lokalnye teksty, edited by L.O. Zaionts, Jazyki slavianskoi kultury, 2004, pp. 427–56.

PART II

Possible Urban Lives

CHAPTER 7

Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician Lena Mattheis

The way in which a space is mapped discloses possibilities for its usage. In the mapping process, information is selected and coded, but in order to make the map readable even more information is excluded or only implicitly present. The map therefore presents a specific set of possibilities, which may cause the map user to overlook, or consider impossible, other ways of interacting with the mapped space. The same is true for a literary text. Through character constellations, plot lines or foreshadowed actions, the reader is provided with a selected set of pieces of information, which project possibilities for the space in which they take place. In this chapter, I will closely examine this intersection between map, literary text and possibility, while paying particular attention to the (seeming) impossibilities translocality—a layering of two or more distinct local places—negotiates in narratives and maps.

L. Mattheis (B) University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_7

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In an insightful evaluation of the ongoing trend in literary studies to turn to geography in order to discover new possibilities, Tania Rossetto rightly points out that ‘the interchange between literature and cartography has been accused of being too superficial. The main target of this critique is the metaphorical (vague, ambiguous and vacuous) use of the term “mapping”’ (513). This critique (presented among others by Andrew Thacker, David Cooper and Maria Ramos) is not universally applicable, but neither is it incorrect. In order to show where and how geography and mapping can be used more efficiently, Rossetto surveys ways in which commonalities between geography, map-making and literature are already being explored and ‘suggest[s] that literary texts can productively be approached as sites of encounter with, as well as sources for, the observation of emergent cartographies’ (515). More specifically, her approach stresses that a fertile exchange is possible between scholars of literature and researchers in geography on the basis of tools and strategies they use to approach, process, select and apply their data. The way of thinking with which a mapmaker goes to work can be adapted and adopted with regard to the study of literature and vice versa. Such an approach can make new possibilities visible, both with regard to a particular reading and for the analysis of literary spaces in general. In order to explore how a more literal mapping of literary texts can reveal new possibilities (and impossibilities), the first part of this chapter will provide some theoretical background on the topic while the second part will consist of a practical application of these ideas to a reading of Tendai Huchu’s novel The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician (2015).

Maps, Literature and Possibility Despite the numerous solely metaphorical uses of geography, a transfer of methods from geography to literary studies is of course not without precedent. In his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, Franco Moretti maps out a large corpus of novels and shows what we can learn in moving away from a close reading to what he later terms distant reading, an approach that relies much more on abstraction and the extraction of data. In another insightful work, Graphs, Maps, Trees : Abstract Models for a Literary History, Moretti explains in more detail why we can learn from abstraction, most notably from the abstraction provided by the methodology of mapping:

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What do literary maps do… First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit – walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever – find its occurrences, place them in space… or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object like the maps that I have been discussing. And with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level. Everybody, from the first reader onwards, had noticed the country walks of Our Village [1824–32, by Mary Russell Mitford]; but no one had ever reflected on the circular pattern they project on the English countryside, because no one – in the absence of a map of the book – had ever managed to actually see it. (53)

Moretti uses maps not as illustrations or visualisations; he productively engages with the process of mapping to add to the analysis, find new angles for an analysis and/or, ideally, assess something that until then remained hidden within the text. His strategy, to reduce data in order to reveal patterns, resonates with what Muehrcke and Muehrcke note in their influential article on maps in literature, meaning here actual images of maps being inserted alongside the text or physical maps described in literary texts: ‘Maps cannot be both revealing and complete. Thus, the mapping process is one of evaluation, selection, and emphasis, which leads to simplification of the detail and intricacy of the real world’ (319). This observation has more recently been echoed by Wood et al. (2010) and shows why Moretti’s approach is so important: since maps are both produced and used for specific means, the information contained in them must be selected carefully. We can only sensibly transfer the tools of mapping to the study of texts once we have selected certain elements that we want to map—my mapping of Huchu’s novel will focus on its translocal features—while necessarily leaving out others. As pointed out above, this is one of the analogies between story and map. Both choose one story that is told—possibly hinting at others—and the reader of stories and maps, consciously or unconsciously, accepts that this selection process has taken place despite the fact that countless other stories could have been told, innumerable maps made of the same place. A specific constellation of possibilities for future action is thereby foregrounded while others are obscured; or, as Hanna Meretoja points out: ‘narratives both expand and diminish our sense of the possible’ (2). Another similarity between texts and maps is that they require readers in order to produce possibilities. Without readers to decode their surfaces,

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they neither contain nor convey any information. Readers of both texts and maps need not only the skill to read, but in doing so have to complete the information extracted from abstract signs, indexes and symbols by adding their own knowledge and experience of the world. While this forces each reader to engage with the text or map in a unique interpretative activity before they can use them, it also means that every text or map is potentially readable to every reader. Commenting on the uniqueness of readings and their connection to spatial experience, Laura Bieger explains that ‘familiarity with the scenery is not essential to becoming immersed in [a given] story world; it creates a particular spatiotemporal assemblage of associations and memories with which the narrative word is completed’ (18). Depending on the particular ‘associations and memories’ (18) certain possibilities for movement and action within the narrative or mapped space are opened up or reduced. Making reference to Bertrand Westphal’s, Marie-Laure Ryan’s and David Herman’s work in the same area, Lieven Ameel comments on how city novels in particular leave ‘it to the reader to fill in the rest of the scenery to the best of his/her capabilities’ (‘City Novel’ 235). In her conception of possibility and narrative hermeneutics, Hanna Meretoja describes how ‘many kinds of narratives can stimulate our capacity to think beyond’ (5) and points out the important role literary fiction plays here: it reveals possibilities beyond the obvious. Novels can encourage their readers to think about entirely unfamiliar places and how they or the characters could potentially interact with these places. The possible interactions are not restricted by the reader’s spatial knowledge but instead enriched by it, since the narrativised space allows them to project possibilities beyond what is presented and beyond what they know. A text about Madrid, for example, could be layered with memories the reader has of a different city in Spain, a summer day that resembles the narrated one or a smell that is described in the text, thereby allowing readers to create their own mental ‘Madrid.’ Similarly, a regular tourist map of Madrid can be read by anyone who has map-reading skills. While the street that this reader imagines in lieu of the Paseo del Prado might resemble instead a boulevard in New York City, the map does not lose any of its functions, but triggers a different imaginary with additional possibilities.

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Analogous to a novel, the gaps and blanks1 left by the selection process are filled by the reader and thereby also allow for the insertion of translocal images and experiences that are of particular interest to the analysis of Huchu’s novel. The novel is translocal because it layers, connects and intertwines several distinct local spaces. Without necessarily moving through spatialities or scales of the global, the national or the border, translocal narratives create direct connections between local spheres. As Eric Kit-wai Ma puts it in a study on underground Hong Kong music scenes and the possibilities translocality opens up for sites of cultural production, ‘translocality refers to the dynamic between localized lifeworlds in faraway sites’ (Ma 133). The term ‘translocal’ describes both Huchu’s novel and my mapping approach best since unlike terms such as globalisation, transculturality, or ‘transnationalism which focused largely on social networks and economic exchanges, translocality takes an “agency oriented” approach to transnational migrant experiences…[and] assert[s] the importance of local-local connections’ (Brickell and Datta 3). While this does not mean that research conducted, to similar means and ends, under the umbrella of other terms is irrelevant for translocality, the specific spatial and scalar focus is crucial. Ayona Datta, in my opinion, provides the best definition of translocality with regard to urban spaces (see also Hall and Datta 2010) since she takes into account the agency of the various agents who construct translocal spaces. Although Brickell and Datta do not touch on this explicitly in their introduction to Translocal Geographies (2011), several chapters in their collection also acknowledge that the heightened translocality of the twenty-first century is a result of a long historical process and not exclusively tied to globalisation. Translocal spaces, defined in this manner, reflect not only a co-presence of local spaces, histories and cultures, but also, consequently, a co-presence of different sets and types of possibilities associated with the distinct local spheres. Translocal texts then present at least two local spaces as simultaneously present—an endeavour which is difficult to reproduce in a linear text, but more common in urban literature (cf. Gurr, ‘Representations’). This

1 These gaps and blanks exist in literary reader-response theory in the tradition of Wolfgang Iser, as well as in the study of maps: ‘clearly, a map invites interaction. The lack of completeness of a map inspires one to annotate it with his own experience’ (Muehrcke and Muehrcke 331).

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is where an essential difference between maps and texts becomes relevant: unlike texts, maps are visual, non-linear and operate on pre-defined scales, rendering everything on their surface simultaneous. Muehrcke and Muehrcke identify exactly these differences as the reason writers tend to be intrigued by maps: Written language is linear. It has a beginning and an end and between the two flows predictably, according to the rules of grammar. The subject of discourse is rarely as well ordered; rather, it is characterized by the simultaneous interaction of many factors. Maps, on the other hand, involve far less transcription from reality and less formatting than idioms do, primarily because the position of maps on the gradient between reality and abstraction is closer to reality. (318–19)

Several valuable points are made here, but maps are not necessarily closer to reality than novels are. Rather, I would suggest, they have a more clearly defined and rigorously regulated relationship with the real world than literary texts do. Transferring the data extracted from a novel to a map therefore offers a fresh angle from which to analyse the text as maps offer different ways of telling the same story, of looking at its reality. Additionally, maps put a renewed emphasis on the relationship between a narrativised place and its real-world counterpart—a relationship that is at times diminished or even ignored in literary studies. Since heightened translocality is both caused by and anchored in actual places, taking into account the physically existing cities the literary ones are based on becomes essential in the study of translocal novels in particular. In considering three distinct translocal mappings in the following section, I aim to point out two basic presuppositions of this analysis. Firstly, the study illustrates how maps and datasets can be highly revealing as analytical tools. Secondly, it provides an example of ‘the map’s propositional character’ identified by Denis Wood, John Fels and John Krygier in Rethinking the Power of Maps (2010), a more comprehensive reworking of Wood and Fels’ first study on maps (4).2 The map offers, or proposes, one way of looking at reality. It is neither a reality in and of itself, nor is it ever the only way of looking at something, of evaluating the data. It is 2 Cited in its entirety, the quotation is also a comment on resistance, truth and counternarratives: ‘Once a map has been published, it is pretty much taken for a description of the way things actually are. And if this is the way things are, what is the point of resistance? The map’s propositional character becomes… hard to see’ (Wood et al. 4).

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one of many possibilities. In addition to this commentary on how maps are read, Wood, Fels and Krygier also write about how and why maps are made: People make maps to discover their minds and to connect themselves. These are also the reasons people talk, so where talk serves maps are rare. But when talk becomes inadequate, either because the discourse gets too complicated, or there are too many people, or they are separated by too great distances or too much time – as invariably happens with the emergence of modern states – people develop alternative forms of communication. (19)

We find here a surprising confluence of reasons why maps are made and why translocal texts are written. Both a novel and a map pick and tell a specific story to be able to ‘talk about’ an incalculable and incomprehensible whole. Where communication and explanation fail, it seems that we can choose one of the two routes: the extreme abstraction of mapped data, aiming to imply a whole reality, or the extreme detail of a single story, attempting to imaginatively merge or evoke many realities. If, however, either the resulting story or map is read as absolutes, we encounter what Adichie, in one of her influential TED talks, terms ‘the danger of a single story’: the risk of viewing the world reductively and only with regard to a specific experience or group of people. Such a view or reading deals mainly in impossibilities while translocal texts and readings instead have a tendency to open up more and more possibilities. Despite the fact that translocal novels then generally imply a multitude of untold, or only partly told, stories, a large and varied corpus is needed to draw conclusions about the phenomenon in general. While I only present one example of translocal mappings in this chapter, I have created a number of maps and datasets of different translocal novels to identify typical strategies and features of translocal writing. Drawing on Bertrand Westphal’s seminal work in the area, Eric Prieto comments on the ways in which geocriticism demands exactly such a wide-ranging approach: Westphal and I agree that the geocentered study of authors or works should lead away from the individual author and work and toward a more general kind of knowledge, one that breaks through the aesthetic frame that sets works of literature off from the world and seeks to use the study of literature as a way to better think about the world around us. (25)

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Prieto here also asks for a reconnection of the world of literature and the world as it is experienced. While both worlds are too complex to be contained in a single story, general observations and knowledge can be drawn from a large enough dataset. Although Prieto’s argument is largely sound, I do not believe it necessary to break ‘through the aesthetic frame’ in order to find that knowledge. Instead, my focus is on finding out which strategies are widely used in the aesthetic frame to narrativise ‘real’ localities.

Possible Mappings in The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician In order to explore—in practice—how a translocal mapping can be used as an analytical method with regard to the relationship of space, text and possibility, I have mapped out the first two chapters of Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician. The novel is set in the mid-2000s and follows the very loosely entangled lives of four Zimbabweans in Edinburgh. For the sake of this analysis, only two characters will be introduced: the Magistrate and Farai, the Mathematician.3 The Magistrate used to be a judge in Zimbabwe and now finds himself an unemployed middle-aged man, who struggles to convey his nostalgia for Shona culture to his teenage daughter. Farai, on the other hand, is a young PhD student who enjoys going to parties with his Scottish girlfriend Stacey. The novel’s main settings are Bindura in Zimbabwe and Edinburgh in Scotland, the latter of which is narrated in so much topographical detail that it is—even in the context of geographically oriented writing—surprisingly mappable. The first two chapters, narrated by two different characters, provide a particularly comprehensive amount of information on the setting: they set the scene for the entire novel. As Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu point out, ‘since the reader’s imagination needs a mental model of space to simulate the narrative action, it is important to achieve a holistic representation of the storyworld as quickly as possible’ (99). Mappings of opening chapters are therefore particularly productive (on the relevance of opening chapters, see also Ameel, ‘Framing’). In Huchu’s narrative

3 For more background on the novel and the author, please see my article for The Literary Encyclopedia (Mattheis, ‘Tendai Huchu’).

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setting and opening, the information about the characters is not only interwoven with the city, the city becomes protagonist-like4 —as Huchu himself pointed out during a reading in Essen in 2016. I have therefore mapped the two chapters with an approach that takes into account the level of detail in the spatial narrative and the centrality of Edinburgh to both the characters and the novel. In addition to being an analytical tool, the following images of my map therefore visualise a mapping process that the text itself performs. The map therefore provides new possibilities for the researcher, reveals possibilities and impossibilities of a character’s movement and can also help us understand how readers may project possibilities and impossibilities onto the setting on the basis of their own spatial experiences. Three types of mappings emerge in the novel: streets and landmarks mapping, local knowledge mapping and authorial pictorial maps (Fig. 7.1). In this interactive map, a click on each pushpin reveals the quotation from the novel that indicates a location and the path the character takes to or from that location (see Mattheis, Interactive map). The red path represents the Magistrate’s daily walk around Arthur’s Seat—a hill in the middle of Edinburgh—while the blue path shows Farai’s route to the café The Elephant House. Both men are originally from Zimbabwe, but where Farai acts and feels like a global citizen, the Magistrate still struggles with his life in Edinburgh, even after having lived there for many years. Their different attitudes toward the city already become visible in this screenshot of the interactive map: the Magistrate walks in long straight lines whereas Farai zigzags, the Magistrate’s chapter provides fewer but more detailed indications to his surroundings whereas Farai’s chapter scatters very brief spatial references in every paragraph, suggesting that he moves through the city with an ease the Magistrate lacks.

4 As Lieven Ameel points out in an insightful article on the city novel, the description of the city as a protagonist is in most cases highly metaphorical and therefore not always useful as a distinctive feature of urban fiction. He touches on definitions by Burton Pike and Daniel Acke of the city setting as an active presence in such novels and comes to the conclusion that ‘in the city novel, the city reveals and facilitates the potential of the character, while simultaneously, the character enables the city to reveal and fulfill its potential’ (‘City Novel’ 234).

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Fig. 7.1 Map of Edinburgh showing the routes through it of the Magistrate and Farai in the first two chapters of Huchu’s novel

Streets and Landmarks Mapping As a result of his relationship with the city space, the Magistrate’s path leaves long stretches without any indication as to where he is moving— although the next reference point then always shows that he has not diverged from the red line, a fact I was able to confirm during a walk through Edinburgh with the author in May 2016 and thanks to the novel’s contemporary setting and strictly realist depiction of space. The ‘empty’ stretches leave gaps on the map of Edinburgh that are filled with impressions from Bindura, which is where the mapping becomes a translocal palimpsest and opens possibilities for translocal reflection. Before that, however, the mapping is grounded in local space, a process for which the Magistrate’s chapter uses a technique I refer to as a

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streets and landmarks mapping. Instead of pointing out ‘his’ street, he uses its proper name: ‘Craigmillar Castle Road’ (Huchu 3). Instead of mentioning his favourite bakery or bar, as more personal place markers, he indicates well-known landmarks such as the Scottish Parliament building. Even when he describes the atmosphere of a neighbourhood, the wording and type of information—‘quaint Georgian cottages’ (Huchu 13)—is somewhat reminiscent of that of a tourist map. The mapping thereby underlines the lack of an emotional connection the Magistrate feels with Edinburgh, which is also expressed by him describing ‘the absence of space he felt’ (Huchu 84) when comparing the sky in Edinburgh to that in Bindura or by the fact that he constantly has to ‘remind […] himself that things were different here’ (Huchu 66). This nostalgia for Bindura and especially the thought of how his daughter could have been raised differently with a closer connection to Shona culture is exceedingly prominent in the first half of the novel. This translocal connection thereby shows how possibilities in the form of ‘unrealized histories […] are relevant context’ (Beatty 32) in every narrative of possibility. John Beatty explicates this with branching diagrams that work particularly well with regret narratives, such as the Magistrate’s constant reflections on how his daughter would behave today had she only been raised ‘back home.’ While the Magistrate therefore appears to only think of Bindura and reject Edinburgh to an extent, the streets and landmarks mapping provides very exact information and correct names of locations, implying that the Magistrate in fact knows every junction of his Scottish neighbourhood, although he prefers to call them ‘robots,’ a term that is much more common in Southern Africa. Another indication of this lack of familiarity is the fact that locational references occur mainly at decision points. In Fig. 7.2, for example, a long stretch of the road from Craigmillar has no pushpins, but when the Magistrate turns left into Duddingston Village, several orientation points are provided, suggesting that the Magistrate does not move through his own neighbourhood with ease but still has to consciously locate himself to find his way. He even observes and contrasts his own spatial behaviour with that of Edinburgh locals: ‘The natives gave directions using street names as if they were reading off maps, but how does one orient oneself without reference to a landmark in the environment?’ (Huchu 55). Put simply, a streets and landmarks mapping produces the type of map one would draw to give directions to a stranger: turn left onto Old Church

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Fig. 7.2 Streets and landmarks mapping in the Magistrate’s chapter

Lane, which is a cobbled road, and there will be cottages to your right and a kirk to your left. Additional, easily verifiable, reference points are given to provide a sense of security, as the stranger can now ensure that they have taken the right path with the aid of several indicators. Providing a poignant explanation for the need for several points of reference, Kevin Lynch explains that a map is safe and readable only when it contains ‘a surplus of clues so that alternative actions are possible and the risk of failure is not too high. If a blinking light is the only sign for a critical turn, a power failure may cause disaster’ (9). Despite the fact that Lynch’s influential 1960 monograph The Image of the City is concerned with modes of orientation that, in the digital age, have drastically changed, Lynch’s description of the formation of mental maps is not only the basis for countless updated approaches to mapping, but also more or less resembles how the Magistrate orients himself in the city. The Magistrate’s beloved walkman, which will become relevant in the context of the authorial pictorial mapping, points to a generational rupture with the younger digital natives that is also reflected in the way he manoeuvres urban space: ‘he needed to contemplate the city in order to be part of it, the young were immersed in its spirit, going about their business without a thought’ (Huchu 112). This already points to the different possibilities urban space provides for different users: the Magistrate might be tethered to orientation points and landmarks whereas ‘the

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young’ move more freely, but his close scrutiny of the space surrounding him allows for a different level of immersion into local and translocal space. The locations the Magistrate knows and describes in detail therefore gain significance, not only because the passages used to describe them are fairly long—especially when compared to Farai’s chapter—but also because they function as what in cognitive research is called an ‘anchor.’ In their study on ‘Properties of Cognitive Maps Constructed from Texts,’ Erika Ferguson and Mary Hegarty explain how ‘in a cognitive map constructed by traveling in an environment, an anchor is a personal, familiar landmark that serves as a reference point for a region of space. That is, a person represents the locations of a number of landmarks in a region in relation to a single anchor’ (455). Their study is based on the hypothesis that cognitive maps constructed from the reading of texts, not physical movement through space, use anchors as well. In addition to being able to verify this hypothesis, Ferguson and Hegarty also find that ‘subjects who read a route text tended to construct more accurate representations than did subjects who read a survey text’ (470; Ryan, Foote and Azaryahu conduct a similar experiment that is described in chapter four of Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative). This confirms my impression of The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician as a highly mappable text, as the novel consists mainly of route-oriented city descriptions. In the reading process, the novel is therefore likely to induce the construction of an unusually detailed cognitive map consisting of different types of routes and anchors, depending on the character from whose perspective the cityscape is described. Although the mapping is so precise, each reading activates a different version of the map and especially of the translocally layered spaces between anchors and around routes. On his routes, the Magistrate uses several easily mappable anchors, which are determined by the part of the city he walks in but also depend on the type of movement, as slow walking, fast walking or going by bus all require different routes and orientation points. Since he uses, describes and contrasts all three types of movement regularly, the reader is invited to imagine the range of possibilities a different type of movement could open up on the same path using the same anchor, although walking is clearly what the Magistrate prefers. The main anchor for his walks, standing out, literally, among all others, is Arthur’s Seat. Due to the hill’s centrality, visibility and popularity, this will hardly surprise anyone who has visited the city. Here, however, is also where the Magistrate’s mapping diverts from

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its strict streets and landmarks route to add a palimpsestuous translocal layer over the meticulously constructed Edinburgh streets. As he arrives on his path around Arthur’s Seat, which is a calmer road with fewer potential decision points, he no longer needs to think about where to walk. Routine takes over as he walks himself into an almost meditative state of mind: He found he could clear his mind when walking. It was as though the act of perambulation was complemented by a mental wandering, so he could be in two, or more, places at the same time. His physical side being tied to geography and the rules of physics, his mental side free to wander far and wide, to traverse though the past, present and future, free from limits, except the scope of his own imagination. (Huchu 13)

In other words, taking such a familiar route—one he walks every day— so close to the main anchor of his cognitive map of Edinburgh, does two things. It produces impossibilities since the Magistrate clearly has no wish to diverge from his regular route. His routine, however, also produces possibilities since it allows the Magistrate to switch to a different mode of perception that reveals translocal connections and, thereby, various options of looking at the present space. As Mike Crang observes, repetition and routines are central not only to urban life in general but also to deviations within the framework of typical urban behavioural patterns: ‘the sense of rhythm and repetition connects provocatively with ideas of routinisation – and the suggestion then of the relationship between societal pressures and individual life. Indeed Lefebvre suggests that “everyday life” only became visible as urbanization allowed the observation of uniform and repetitive aspects of social existence’ (193). What Crang here fails to mention is that in Everyday Life in the Modern World Lefebvre also points out that ‘readers were suddenly made aware of everyday life through the medium of literature’ (2), conceptualising the potent interplay of literature, urbanity and routines that Huchu also makes use of. The Magistrate’s routine outwardly resembles that of many locals and tourists alike. Something as commonplace as a walk around Arthur’s Seat on a common route implies a common relationship to the urban space that is navigated. It is the insight provided into the character’s mind that shows how, while performing a common routine, the Magistrate nonetheless creates a unique translocal space.

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What the Magistrate fills the marker-less stretches of his walk with are memories of Bindura that he projects onto Edinburgh after first pointing out the two cities’ topographical similarity—a hill in the middle—thereby effectively blending Bindura’s and Edinburgh’s spatial and cognitive anchors into one. After establishing this basic parallel, a more intricate picture of Bindura is painted: Right then the saudade hit him pretty bad and, for a moment, he could see Bindura, the low prospect, the giant mine chimneys in the distance, but the memory was like a flicker from an old videotape that had been dubbed over. He could only hold the image in his mind for a brief second before it vanished into the mist hovering over the Forth. (Huchu 18)

The image of the overwritten VHS tape—a modern palimpsest producing the ‘flickering effect’ (32) between literary worlds McHale describes in Postmodernist Fiction—visualises how ‘different cities are perceived to coexist and come together in one single location,’ as Maria Ridda puts it in her analysis of the literary trajectories between Bombay, London and New York (1). In the translocal urban palimpsest, the layered locations mingle not only in the dimension of space, but also combine and conflate different points in time. Present Edinburgh can be layered with an experienced past Bindura and an imagined present or future Bindura, all within the same narrative instant. As Ridda goes on to explain, such a dynamic interplay of time and space ‘dismantles the holistic constructions of the nation to signify a wider space that contains multiple layers of time and extends beyond national borders’ (28). Since all of these scales and time spheres are anchored to space by a meticulous mapping and the suggestion of a routine repeated countless times before and after the narrated day, the cognitive map created in the reading process is not disrupted but extended by the added layers of time and space. Depending on which spatial or temporal layer is foregrounded, different possibilities for interpretation, movement and projections of the future are activated. The Magistrate utilises the routine of the walk to look, not past, but beyond and through the, at times, overpowering possibilities of the urban space surrounding him.5

5 Looking through and beyond space is connected to simultaneity as well as to the palimpsest, as it requires a mode of perception described, somewhat vaguely, in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as superposition or ‘Überdeckungstransparenz’: ‘Thanks to

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Detail and Possibility in Local Knowledge Mapping Farai, on the other hand, looks right at the city. Compared to the Magistrate’s careful and ritualised movement through Edinburgh, Farai’s short cuts and fast pace seem almost careless. This is due to the fact that Farai’s mapping is one that is not rooted in streets and landmarks , but in local knowledge. The point is not simply that Farai, as is obvious, has local knowledge; in order to map out his movement through the city with exactitude, local knowledge is required of the reader or researcher as well. Due to the detailed level of local knowledge that is provided in the text, readers can more readily add their own knowledge or associations and understand the range of possibilities the storied space provides. As William Kirkwood explains, in the context of a rhetoric of possibility, a high level of detail in a story does not limit the possibilities it can reveal to the audience—or here: the readers. Instead, a detailed narrative makes it more likely that a presented possibility seems applicable under entirely different circumstances as well (Kirkwood 37). Unlike the Magistrate’s chapter, Farai’s chapter does not always provide locations and street names easily found on Google Maps, but is instead riddled with more and less obvious hints and clues as to where exactly the character is moving. At the beginning of the chapter, the reader is informed that Farai is ‘caught up in what passes for congestion in Edinburgh’ (Huchu 25), suggesting he is driving in the centre of Edinburgh. Farai is also heading ‘towards North Bridge’ (26), which still leaves the reader with several options as to where exactly his car is located. It is only when he mentions that ‘the 22 cruises by in the bus lane’ (25) that his exact location can be determined—with the added information that Farai is coming from his home in Leith and provided the reader or researcher has detailed knowledge of the route of bus 22. Detailed knowledge of a bus route has, of course, in recent years, become much more accessible as, in this case, Lothian Buses, Edinburgh’s main bus service, provides an interactive online map that functions much like my map of this phenomenon, everything potentially taking place in this one single room is perceived simultaneously. The space winks at the flaneur: What do you think may have gone on here?’ (Benjamin 418–19). The superposition of space enables a walker, in the right state of mind, to perceive as simultaneous a space’s present and its translucent layers of past actions (see Gurr, ‘Modernist Poetics’ 29–30, who also references Hassenpflug’s influential work on the topic).

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Huchu’s novel, while also providing arrows indicating the direction of the route at each bus stop. Utilising this map, I have reconstructed the process of moving from a general area of the city to a precise location (Fig. 7.3). The largest circle indicates the, at times congested, heart of Edinburgh around the main transport hub, Waverley Station, and between Arthur’s Seat and Castle Rock. The smaller circles indicate the four streets leading towards North Bridge that generally have the densest traffic. If we add to this map the direction of Leith and the bus plan of bus 22 (Fig. 7.4), we can deduce that Farai’s location is either within or in close vicinity of the small green circle on the first map. Farai’s local knowledge is further indicated by his fast pace, his tendency to use short cuts and the density of locational markers along his path, which, unlike the Magistrate’s, are spread along his entire route rather than being located primarily at decision points. As another contrast

Fig. 7.3 Farai’s possible locations at the beginning of the novel. The green circle marks his actual location

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Fig. 7.4 Lothian Buses map of the route of bus 22 with a large circle indicating all of Farai’s possible locations

to the Magistrate, the textual clues for spatial markers Farai uses are often extremely short, corresponding to the brief, text-message prose style of his chapters. In the next map (Fig. 7.5), for example, the fact that he takes Forrest Road, as opposed to Bristo Place, to reach The Elephant House at the end of his chapter, can be deduced from only one word: ‘Doctors’ (Huchu 26), which is a pub at the corner of Teviot Place (which continues, as visible on the map, as Lauriston Place) and Forrest Road. In Kevin Lynch’s terms, Edinburgh in its entirety seems to be highly ‘imageable’ for Farai, whereas for the Magistrate, at least in his early chapters, it is mainly the area surrounding Arthur’s Seat that is easy to memorise and/or navigate. As Lynch points out, questions of imageability also depend on the observer: ‘the perceptive and familiar observer could absorb new sensuous impacts without disruption of his basic image, and each new impact would touch upon many previous elements’ (10). Since Farai has both acumen and local knowledge, he can add a multitude of impressions to his mental map of Edinburgh while leaving it

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Fig. 7.5 Location of Doctors indicates that Farai takes Forrest Road from Teviot/Lauriston Place

intact, including those impressions that are very detailed and those that are translocal. This ability therefore allows him to perceive and use space in a multitude of ways, being aware of local and translocal possibilities of movement and transfer at the same time. Before Farai walks through the university complex, past Doctors and to The Elephant House, he parks his car behind the central mosque. He greets the car park attendant saying ‘Asalaam Alaykum’ (Huchu 26) and jokes that he will not convert unless he receives a free meal each day from The Mosque Kitchen, indicating the first of three restaurants of almost identical names (The Original Mosque Kitchen, Mosque Kitchen Restaurant), all located very close to each other. While this Mosque Kitchen is the most inconspicuous of the three, it is also the oldest and cheapest and therefore frequented mainly by locals who are ‘in the know.’ Farai then comments on how ‘the mosque, a gift from the Saudis, is a blocky solid building, fusing Islamic architecture with a baronial style that blends in with the stocky, gothic architecture of the rest of the city’ (Huchu 26). The mosque, completed in 1998, is described as a connecting point to

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distant places in the sense that it was financed mainly by funds from Saudi Arabia, but also in its very structure which ‘blends’ and ‘fuses’ its innovative architectural style with that of much older buildings. The translocal bonds of language, locatedness and architecture are so strong that it becomes hardly discernible where the local space is transfused with another place. From Farai’s perspective, the translocal is not simply a layer that is similar to but also distant from Edinburgh; it is deeply embedded in the cityscape itself, a part of its buildings, streets and people. This view of the city also becomes clear in Farai’s description of the National Monument of Scotland on Calton Hill as ‘Edinburgh’s Shame’ (Huchu 88) and ‘the city’s delusion of being the Athens of the North linger[ing] in hard stone’ (88). Farai then comments on the ‘Greek influence on Edinburgh’s architecture’ (88) and compares the city to Las Vegas with its replications of iconic buildings and styles. Farai nonetheless likes the monument and feels like his particular perspective allows him to see connections ‘with a little more clarity’ (88) than his Scottish girlfriend, for example, can. Describing the city, in this sense, as an ideal cosmopolitan observer on a continuous glocal scale, Farai’s local knowledge fulfils a task that, according to Denis Wood, is the essential ‘work’ of maps: ‘Maps convert energy to work by linking things in space. They achieve their linkages by bringing together onto a common presentational plane propositions about territory’ (Wood et al. 1–2). Farai describes a space in which representing and linking a variety of localities on an equal plane, no matter their perceived closeness or distance, is not the exception but the most natural perspective to take where the cityscape offers it. The level of detail in his local knowledge mapping therefore expands possibilities for translocal connections and perspectives.

Authorial Pictorial Mapping and Possible Translocal Futures A similar sense of linking places by presenting ideas about them on the same scale and in the same place is projected by the Magistrate’s last map of Edinburgh. Throughout the novel, the Magistrate has become more familiar with the cityscape by working in various parts of the city, which he accesses by bus. At first, this new mode of transportation disorients him and prompts him to miss the ‘tiredness in his muscles, the full topographical awareness of how he was oriented on a gradient, a connectedness not possible at the same level of consciousness on the bus’ (Huchu 55).

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Getting to know more people, rhythms, lifestyles and areas of the city, however, soon makes him feel more connected to it—a process which is reflected by a new appreciation of bus rides, for which the Magistrate starts to bring along a walkman and tapes filled with Zimbabwean music. As he is about to leave Edinburgh for London at the end of the novel, he buys a map of Edinburgh at the airport, studies it and then draws his own map: The Magistrate took a piece of paper and drew on it what he remembered of the city so that he could have some perspective on what he had seen and where he had been. This way he hoped that, when his memories abandoned him, they would return if only he played his cassettes. (Huchu 286)

Anticipating a Proustian moment triggered by a synaesthetic sense of place, the Magistrate constructs a very personal map of ‘his’ Edinburgh that is still, possibly even more deeply, suffused by Bindura and Zimbabwe. The map therefore also projects future translocal linkages he might find or create. Unlike the more general global network of translocal links Farai refers to, this set of possibilities is specific to the Magistrate’s treatment and mapping of space. As the map he draws is also inserted as an image alongside the text, now a map created by the author instead of the researcher (Fig. 7.6), I call this type of map authorial pictorial mapping. The map is composed of the Magistrate’s regular walks, indicated by footsteps, and bus routes, drawn as lines supplemented by the numbers of the buses and the names of the Zimbabwean musicians the Magistrate listens to en route. In addition to this mapped movement, the map puts an emphasis on his spatial ‘anchors,’ such as Arthur’s Seat. What is noteworthy about this map is, first of all, that Scottish space is no longer presented as separate from Zimbabwean space, as was the case with the image of the overwritten VHS tape. In that image, the frames of the film become spatial frames which exist in close proximity to each other but do not overlap entirely. The spaces have now merged into one plane instead of oscillating in the same location, suggesting a higher degree of place attachment (see Altman’s seminal collection on the topic or Manzo’s more recent updated collection). Thinking again about the power relations inherent in maps, it is also interesting that, at the beginning of the novel, the Magistrate uses a ritualised performance of Edinburgh space to conjure up images of Bindura, whereas now, he uses

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Fig. 7.6 Magistrate’s map of Edinburgh (Huchu 286)

Zimbabwean music to summon up Edinburgh. This inversion of north and south is also reflected in the orientation of the authorial pictorial map, which consequently flips east and west as well. The flipped map can be read as a progression, a story in a single image: read from bottom left to top right, we begin with the Magistrate’s walks around the city and Arthur’s Seat, continue on several bus routes and end at the airport where the distinctly African, aged stick figure is replaced by an airplane that literally takes the Magistrate off this map. This reflects the newly discovered possibilities that allow him to not only flip the power relations in a space he already knows but map entirely new spaces and suggest future spatial experiences.

Maps on Book Covers Although many additional types of mappings that open up the text for translocal possibilities could be identified, I will lastly look for maps in a more unconventional location in the context of literary studies: the book cover. In contemporary translocal writing, cover designs often play an

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interesting role in reflecting the spatial orientation of the writing. While the covers of a large number of translocal novels adhere to the colour schemes that publishers tend to prefer for the nationality of the author, a problematic tendency Ishaan Tharoor discusses in a 2014 article for the Washington Post,6 several texts that deal with similar translocal issues as Huchu’s novel does are printed with map-like images integrated into their cover designs. In most editions, Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) are printed with more or less stylised images of cityscapes and skylines, focusing on the novel’s setting rather than the author’s place of birth. John Lanchester’s Capital (2012), a novel that presents slightly less translocality but an intriguing take on the issue, is— again in most, but not all editions—adorned with variations on an image of small stylised houses that accumulate in the form of a globe, invoking Rushdie’s comment on how the map of a city can become the map of the world in the literature (cf. Ridda 9). In a popular edition of NW (2012) by Zadie Smith, bits of a simple black and white map can be made out in the large letters of her name and the title of the novel. The N and W are connected by an abstracted image of a bridge. The most interesting cover of The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician belongs to its UK edition. The map on its cover shows the central axis of the heart of Edinburgh, from Castle Hill to Arthur’s Seat, at a slightly angled bird’s view perspective with a group of masked figures, directly facing the onlooker and thereby conflicting with the map’s angle, in the foreground. While the contrasting style of the way the map and the masks are drawn obviously aims to invoke transculturality, the map image is also strangely reminiscent of the style of engraved copper and woodcut maps that, in Europe, were popular for the representation of cities around the sixteenth century. One such map is a copper engraving entitled Edenburg - Edenburgum, Scotiae Metropolis by German and Flemish mapmakers Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg that dates back to 1581. The figures in the foreground—not masked here—inform the map reader of the sartorial habits of the local nobility (cf. Keuning 42). The city’s history is 6 Tharoor bases his article on responses to a viral blog post on Africa is a Country and a subsequent interview with a book cover designer at Knopf (cf. Tharoor). The original post shows innumerable book cover designs (including an edition of Half of a Yellow Sun by Adichie) all consisting of a solitary acacia tree against the backdrop of a reddish golden sunset. Tharoor also comments on a subsequent tweet with a collage of extremely similar cover designs for South Asian writers that ironically reads ‘Danger of “Multiple” Book Covers:orientalism, racial & gender tropes’ (S.varatharajah, qtd in Tharoor).

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therefore drawn into the novel and layered with transculturation before the book is even opened. The image, and the historical map it evokes, opens up an entire range of possible expectations for potential readers, but discloses impossibilities as well: the novel could turn out to be set in a variety of locations and times in addition to present Edinburgh but it is clearly not marked (or marketed) as historical Edinburgh fiction. All in all, the cover designs should of course not be overrated as they are hardly ever the author’s choice and generally dictated by marketing practices. Nonetheless, it is possible to read the more complex cover images that use abstracted cities and maps as a new trend that may replace the focus on the nationality or ethnicity of the author. Additionally, the designs guide expectations for spatiotemporal settings and thereby have an impact on the possibilities the reader may recognise in the text.

Conclusion In conclusion, the function of maps in translocal texts is manifold. They can be a method of analysis, a strategy employed by authors, but also a part of the readerly reception of a character’s spatial experience. Streets and landmarks mappings help set the scene as they rely on spatial details that are easy to understand, locate or imagine. By providing a surplus of geographical and contextual information, they provide the reader with additional information while also reflecting the non-local perspective of the character through whom the mapping is focalised. Streets and landmarks mappings thereby also open up a number of possibilities for the character’s movement and translocal layerings, even when the character’s route is restricted by a lack of familiarity with a given urban space. By contrast, local knowledge mappings provide a narrower range of possibilities for movement and associations but make the possibilities much more likely and vivid. Local knowledge mappings therefore risk disorienting the reader but offer the advantage of making every piece of spatial information an interesting detail that reveals something about what the local character perceives, experiences and considers important—or possible. Authorial pictorial maps reflect more explicitly on the power of maps and often contest their apparent objectivity by mixing accuracy with blatantly subjective elements and possibilities. They can also point to possible spaces that lie beyond the mapped city. Maps created by scholars, authors or readers, descriptions of maps, maps as metaphors or digital maps have all been observed to borrow from

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the mapmaking processes of other scholarly disciplines. In contemporary translocal novels in particular, a more literal understanding of maps and mappings in literature is highly productive, as these texts generally have very close ties to geographical space and make extensive use of literary strategies that relate to localities. From mental maps to place attachment, translocal novels, for which Huchu’s novel is a highly representative example, rely on every aspect of spatial perception to make their settings narratable and draw readers into the places they write. Using maps in all their varieties and taking into account the mapmaking processes employed to create them can help us understand how these processes narrativise space, connect physical and literary locations and thereby produce spatial (im)possibilities.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. ‘The Danger of a Single Story.’ TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_ a_single_story. Accessed 1 June 2018. Altman, Irwin, editor. Place Attachment. Plenum Press, 1992. Ameel, Lieven. ‘The City Novel: Measuring Referential, Spatial, Linguistic, and Temporal Distances.’ The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, edited by Robert T. Tally, JR., Routledge, 2017, pp. 233–41. ———. “‘It’s Six a.m., Do You Know Where You Are?” Framing the Urban Experience in Literary Beginnings.’ Literature and the Peripheral City, edited by Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch and Markku Salmela, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 40–55. Beatty, John. ‘Narrative Possibility and Narrative Explanation.’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol. 62, 2017, pp. 31–41. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, 1999. Bieger, Laura. ‘Some Thoughts on the Spatial Forms and Practices of Storytelling.’ Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 64, no. 1, 2016, pp. 11–26. Brickell, Katherine, and Ayona Datta. ‘Introduction: Translocal Geographies.’ Translocal Geographies: Spaces, Places, Connections, edited by Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta, Routledge, 2011, pp. 3–22. Crang, Mike. ‘Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion.’ Timespace: Geographies of Temporality, edited by John May and Nigel Thrift, Routledge, 2001, pp. 187–207.

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Cooper, David. ‘Critical Literary Cartography: Text, Maps and a Coleridge Notebook.’ Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance, edited by Les Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 29–52. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, University of California Press, 1984. Ferguson, Erika L., and Mary Hegarty. ‘Properties of Cognitive Maps Constructed from Texts.’ Memory & Cognition, vol. 22, no. 4, 1994, pp. 455–73. Gurr, Jens Martin. ‘The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural Analogies between “City” and “Text”: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades Project.’ Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry, edited by Kornelia Freitag, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp. 21–38. ———. ‘The Representations of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inventory of Strategies.’ Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film, edited by Jens Martin Gurr and Wilfried Raussert, WVT, 2011, pp. 11–38. Hall, Suzanne, and Ayona Datta. ‘The Translocal Street: Shop Signs and Local Multi-Culture along the Walworth Road, South London.’ City, Culture and Society, vol. 1, no. 2, 2010, pp. 69–77. Huchu, Tendai. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician. Parthian, 2015. ———. ‘Tendai Huchu liest aus Maestro, Magistrat und Mathematiker.’ 20 April 2016, Buchhandlung Proust, Essen. Reading. Keuning, Johannes. ‘The “Civitates” of Braun and Hogenberg.’ Imago Mundi, vol. 17, 1968, pp. 41–44. Kirkwood, William. ‘Narrative and the Rhetoric of Possibility.’ Communication Monographs, vol. 59, 1992, pp. 30–47. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, Harper and Row, 1972. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. The Technology Press & Harvard University Press, 1960. Manzo, Lynne Catherine, editor. Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. Routledge, 2014. Mattheis. Lena. Interactive Map of Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician. Scribble Maps, 2016, www.scribblemaps.com/ maps/view/Interactive_Map_of_Tendai_Huchus_The_Maestro_the_Magist rate_and_the_Mathematician/Magistrate. Accessed 12 August 2018. ———. ‘Tendai Huchu.’ The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 Sept 2016, www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13763. Accessed 14 August 2018. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Routledge, 2004. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. Verso, 1998.

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———. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2005. Muehrcke, Phillip C., and Juliana O. Muehrcke. ‘Maps in Literature.’ Geographical Review, vol. 64, no. 3, 1974, pp. 317–38. Prieto, Eric. ‘Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond.’ Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert T. Tally, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 13–27. Ramos, Maria. ‘Global Positioning from Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Narratives of Travel.’ Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert T. Tally, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 177–94. Ridda, Maria. Imagining Bombay, London, New York and Beyond: South Asian Diasporic Writing from 1990 to the Present. Peter Lang, 2015. Rossetto, Tania. ‘Theorizing Maps with Literature.’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 38, no. 4, 2014, pp. 513–30. Ryan, Marie-Laure, Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu. Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative—Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet. Ohio State University Press, 2016. Thacker, Andrew. ‘The Idea of a Critical Literary Geography.’ New Formations, vol. 57, 2006, pp. 56–73. Tharoor, Ishaan. ‘Why Do All These Books About Africa Look the Same?’ The Washington Post, 16 May 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wor ldviews/wp/2014/05/16/why-do-all-the-covers-on-books-about-africalook-the-same/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3118a15ad489. Accessed 3 June 2018. Wood, Denis, et al. Rethinking the Power of Maps. Guilford Press, 2010.

CHAPTER 8

Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility Hanna Henryson

Introduction The study of discursive genres, including literary fiction, is instrumental in understanding the development of a society. As David Harvey points out, ‘the production of images and of discourses is an important facet of activity that has to be analysed as part and parcel of the reproduction and transformation of any symbolic order’ (‘Condition’ 355). Yet literary representations of gentrification—one of the most debated and visible societal developments during recent decades—remain understudied. The term gentrification, coined by the sociologist Ruth Glass in London during the 1960s, essentially designates a process of middleclass groups—an urban ‘gentry’—moving into and renovating their own housing in disused, low-status or working-class areas of a city (Glass xviii– xix). This initially leads to a relatively limited upgrading of the area in question, but a sufficient number of such small-scale investments will typically attract the attention of more affluent city dwellers, developers and investors (Friedrichs 61). Following that tipping point, the demographic

H. Henryson (B) Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_8

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and spatial dynamics of a certain urban area alters significantly, allowing for new constellations and processes to form and at the same time averting other possible courses of events. In other words, gentrification—as well as other restructuring urban processes—has a constructive as well as a destructive potential for individuals, social groups, cities and even societies as a whole (see, for example, Shaw and Hagemans). By studying literary representations of gentrification set in real-world cities, the dialectical relationship between representation and reality will reveal perceptions of the potentialities of the process from a subjective perspective and their implications on a structural level (cf. Peacock, ‘Those’ 132–33). This chapter will shed light on literary representations of gentrification set in Berlin, where gentrification has been at the very centre of the debates on the development of the city for almost three decades. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, an initial period of intense city (re)construction and (re)planning was followed by an accelerating process of gentrification. The poor financial state and the shrinking population of 1990s Berlin resulted in vacant housing and low rents, which in turn attracted many artists and writers, among others, and created an atmosphere of openness and freedom from social restraints. Since the turn of the millennium, however, Berlin has grown increasingly attractive also to the middle class, tourists, start-ups, creative workers, IT companies and investors, which has brought about large-scale modernisation and renovation of the housing stock as well as rent increases, displacement and significant changes in the commercial structures of the city. This rapid gentrification process has generated a vast number of new discourses and images in the shape of debates, media content, protest movements, artworks‚ and fiction. In the following sections, gentrification and its effects on urban possibility will be analysed as elements of literary representations of postmillennium Berlin. To this end, the three novels Fire Doesn’t Burn (Feuer brennt nicht, 2009) by Ralf Rothmann, Der amerikanische Investor (‘The American Investor,’ 2011) by Jan Peter Bremer and Kress (2015) by Aljoscha Brell have been selected, since they depict the post-Wall gentrification of Berlin with varying degrees of explicitness and thematic depth.1 There are similarities between the main characters of the novels in terms 1 Quotations from Fire Doesn’t Burn will be drawn from the translation by Mike Mitchell (2011). Quotations from Der amerikanische Investor and Kress are my translations.

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of background, profession and capital resources, but their positions and possibilities within the gentrification process differ. The point of departure will be the following question: What constructive or destructive possibilities, inherent to the process of gentrification, can be discerned in literary representations of the post-1989 gentrification of Berlin on a subjective as well as on a structural level?

Gentrification Research Through their amplification of spatial and social relations, cities are essentially sites of possibility (see the introduction to this volume). Processes such as gentrification that restructure the urban space consequently open up a spectrum of potential relations. According to an analysis by Christian Krajewski, gentrification affects four different dimensions of an urban area: the physical dimension (the built environment), the social dimension (demographics), the functional dimension (commercial, leisure and service structures) and the symbolic dimension (the image of the area as conveyed through various discourses) (82). Since Glass’s first observations, a large body of research has advanced a number of theories outlining the course of the gentrification process as well as possible explanations for it, mostly based on quantitative data of its physical and social consequences (e.g. residents’ mobility, property sales or renovations) (see Lees et al. and Shaw for comprehensive overviews of gentrification research). Explanatory models tend to focus either on the production of housing and structural conditions for gentrification such as planning policy or financial systems, or on the lifestyle- and taste-induced consumption of spaces for living and leisure. As many studies have shown, however, a strict supply-demand dichotomy is an oversimplification in most cases (Helbrecht, ‘Wiederkehr’ 3; Lees et al. xxii, 93). In an analogy with the explanations of the process, typologies of gentrification actors and stakeholders are often divided into supply- and demand-oriented groups. In their professional capacities or by means of financial capital, investors, real estate agents and urban planners, among others, are stakeholders in the production of urban space and housing. The consumer groups, for their part, may hold a substantial cultural capital (capital is here used in accordance with Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural, social and financial capital; see Bourdieu) but do generally not, or not significantly, hold financial capital. In the case of the

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different gentrification actors, it can be useful to make the productionconsumption distinction in order to elucidate the power relations between the different groups. The differing capital resources and positions of the actors within a process of gentrification determine their ability to influence the potential effects of the process on their individual situations. Attempts to construct models of the course of a gentrification process must also be regarded as simplifications, since local regulations as well as geographic and social conditions add complexity to an already complex process. Such models nevertheless provide an understanding of the lowest common denominators of the process, at least in a Western context. During the first phase of a gentrification process, a number of students, creative workers and others with a low income and no children move into a certain neighbourhood—typically ‘a working-class or vacant area of the central city’ (Lees et al. xv). This group has a higher level of education and social status than the average of the incumbent population as well as a high tolerance of risk (of being evicted, for example) and for low building standards. The newcomers are referred to as pioneers in large parts of the gentrification research, although the concept has been criticised for suggesting ‘a city not yet socially inhabited: like Native Americans, the urban working class is seen as less than social, a part of the physical environment’ (N. Smith, ‘New’ xiv). In its next phase, gentrification intensifies through an increasing inflow of a new group of professionals with a higher income and in some cases children (Friedrichs 59–60, Blasius et al. 58). These so-called gentrifiers —in some studies early gentrifiers (Blasius et al. 58)—are more risk-averse and willing to invest more in a good and stable living environment. These groups are attracted by the comparatively low rents and the social diversity of the neighbourhood in question. The social and cultural capital that they bring into the area may tip the scales by sparking the interest of other, even more affluent gentrifiers (see, for example, Bridge, ‘Taste,’ Butler and Robson, and Ley on the role of taste, cultural and social capital in gentrification processes)—sometimes called super-gentrifiers or financifiers (Lees, ‘Super-gentrification’ 2487)—and, usually in a late phase of the process, of investors, banks, real estate agents and venture capitalists (Friedrichs 61). A structural prerequisite for this late stage is the (legal) possibility to accumulate large amounts of financial capital that can be reinvested in real estate. Objects with the highest potential gain compared to the risk are naturally favoured (Lees et al. xv). These so-called rent gaps,

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first described by Neil Smith in 1979, especially occur in central locations in cities marked by post-industrialism where the housing stock has been subject to substantial disinvestment (see N. Smith, ‘Towards’). Since the 1980s, an increasing commodification of housing and financialisation of the housing market have paved the way for new forms of gentrification in most western countries, especially affecting the structures of home ownership and the right to housing (Rolnik 1059–60). Germany is no exception, despite the singular recent history of the country and national particularities such as a highly regulated rental housing market and a low share of private home ownership in comparison with other European countries (Helbrecht and Geilenkeuser 428). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the previously very high share of tenancies in German cities on both sides of the former border has dropped steadily as the housing market is now deregulated and large portions of state property have been privatised (Helbrecht and Geilenkeuser 426–29; Fields and Uffer 1488). In Berlin, these structural changes and the growing demand for inner-city housing have led to wide-spread gentrification that has transformed several inner-city districts such as Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg in former East Berlin and Kreuzberg and north Neukölln in former West Berlin very rapidly (see, for example, Bernt et al., Colomb and Helbrecht, ‘Gentrification’ for overviews in English of the post-Wall development and gentrification of Berlin, and Holm, ‘Restrukturierung’ [for East Berlin especially], Häußermann et al. and Häußermann and Kapphan in German). The potential effects of gentrification on a neighbourhood are diverse (see Lees et al. 196 for an overview). Investments in renovations improve the built environment and other elements of the physical dimension of the city. The improvements can also create large financial values for cities and production side actors. According to some studies of the social dimension of gentrification, the inflow of higher-income households can lead to social mixing with positive ‘trickle-down effects’ for low-income households (see Lees, ‘Gentrification’ 2449–452 for a resume and critique of these results). The demand for shops, cultural activities, restaurants and community services of the new and more affluent target groups also affects the functional dimension of the area by changing its commercial and administrative structures (see, for example, Zukin). In that process, the character of a neighbourhood and the ‘sense of place’ of its longterm inhabitants may be lost (Shaw and Hagemans 326–28). Physical displacement—or ‘involuntary residential dislocation’ (Marcuse 205)—of

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lower-income inhabitants and also of smaller businesses may take place at any stage of the gentrification process (Lees et al. xv). To what extent displacement occurs because of gentrification is a disputed matter, since extensive qualitative studies are needed to determine the reasons for demographic shifts (Shaw and Hagemans 323). However, the original definition of gentrification indicates an influx of groups with a higher financial capital than the current inhabitants of a specific district, which makes some degree of displacement inherent to the process (Lees et al. xxii; Helbrecht, ‘Gentrification’ 3; see also Marcuse). Whether the consequences and the possibilities that gentrification opens up are valued as constructive or destructive is thus highly contingent on the context and on the actors involved. While the ‘hard’ evidence of quantitative studies of gentrification has elucidated many aspects of the process, it clearly does not provide the whole picture. As Loretta Lees observes concerning gentrification in Brooklyn Heights, New York City, ‘[i]t is important to recognise [. . .] that whatever the statistical evidence to support residents’ concerns about their neighbourhood falling sway to super-rich “financifiers,” the very perception of such is a real social fact with the power to change the neighbourhood, irrespective of the “softness” of the evidence for its “reality”’ (‘Super-gentrification’ 2505; see also Marcuse 207–8). As a complement to the main focus of the existing research on gentrification, it is therefore of great importance to also consider the symbolic dimension of the process. Perceptions of gentrification as expressed in all sorts of discourses—for example, activist or academic discourse, media contexts, cinematic and not least literary fiction—may affect the understanding and thereby even the course of the process. As Stuart Hall puts it, representations—literary or otherwise—not only describe or reflect existing perceptions, but also produce new ones (xxi). Changes in the image of an urban area as conveyed through different discourses can contribute largely to the general interest for the area and play an important part in the build-up to the tipping point where gentrification will become prevalent. In spite of the significance of the symbolic dimension of the process, research into gentrification as an element of discourse is still limited. A small number of publications have considered gentrification in literary and cinematic representations of, for example, London (Brouillette; Davies, ‘Comics’; Finch), Ireland (Buchanan), New York (Dwyer; Godbey; Heise; Moiles; Peacock, ‘Brooklyn’; Peacock, ‘Those’; Sollazzo), San Francisco (Gano), New Orleans (Davies, ‘Graphic’), Sydney (Hamilton), Malaga

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(Téllez-Espiga), Hamburg and Berlin (Halle; Stehle). The following analysis of urban possibility in three literary representations of gentrification processes in Berlin is a contribution to this body of research.

Ralf Rothmann’s Fire Doesn ’t Burn (2009) Ralf Rothmann’s acclaimed novel Fire Doesn’t Burn is set in Berlin in the years after the turn of the millennium when gentrification was yet to reach beyond the innermost city districts (Holm, ‘Berlin’s’ 174). The novel examines the protagonist’s personal development and career as a writer against the backdrop of the gentrification of Berlin. The protagonist Wolf and his wife Alina belong to a large group of bohemians—artists, political visionaries, activists, students and people who wanted to pursue alternative lifestyles—that came from other parts of West Germany to West Berlin during the latter part of the Cold War (Gerstenberger 162). The multi-cultural working-class borough where many of them settled, Kreuzberg, was at that point close to the Wall in the periphery of West Berlin, but after 1989 it was suddenly located just south of the geographical city centre. The seclusion of West Berlin made alternative ways of life possible and generated many forms of creativity as well as a strong feeling of singularity. This all came to an abrupt end as the surrounding wall disappeared, which has led to many literary accounts of West Berlin lamenting the loss of that exceptional ‘island existence’ with a nostalgic undertone (Zitzlsperger 280–81). Since 1989, Kreuzberg’s status as a cult(ure) district has continuously attracted new and more affluent groups of residents, while many workers, migrants and members of what Rothmann calls Kreuzberg’s ‘motley bohemian crew’ (5, see quotation below) have been displaced by rent increases in the area. As Christian Krajewski points out, however, these developments can be seen as ‘neo-gentrification’ since Kreuzberg’s ‘pioneer phase’ took place already in the 1980s partly due to an extensive urban renewal programme (Krajewski 82; see also Rothmann 55). According to that view, Wolf and Alina could have contributed to the onset of gentrification in Kreuzberg when they settled there in the 1980s. Alina was a student and Wolf devoted most of his time to his writing. For seventeen years, they have had two apartments next to each other in an old Kreuzberg building to allow for some privacy and work focus: ‘A life together without the magic and attraction being worn away by too much closeness and familiarity – there it seemed possible’ (Rothmann 6). They

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value the freedom and flexibility it gives them, even if their financial situation, while stable, is far from luxurious. ‘If you were ever to do something just for money, I couldn’t love you anymore,’ Alina tells Wolf (55). At the outset of the novel, however, they have lost patience with their dirty and damp old Kreuzberg building and their noisy neighbours. Moreover, the restructuring of Berlin after 1989 has destabilised the dynamics of their neighbourhood, as the following passage demonstrates: After the Wall came down, the balance between the various districts shifted, almost imperceptibly at first, just as dentures change after new crowns or bridges and what was previously considered a smile is now an undisguised baring of the teeth. The motley bohemian crew which had occupied Kreuzberg along the canal bank fled from the new rents to Friedrichshain, gangs from Neukölln are prowling round Hasenheide, and the Südstern underground station has become a meeting place for drug-dealers and junkies. (Rothmann 5–6)

The post-Wall transformation of Berlin has left the Kreuzberg of the novel in a state of tense in-between. Rents have gone up and parts of the established population of Kreuzberg have turned eastward to Friedrichshain for affordable living, while new groups of people have started to move in around the parks and underground stations. The rising rent levels indicate incipient gentrification, but the tipping point of the process has evidently not yet occurred. For Wolf and Alina, the main consequence of the new situation is a feeling of unease following the incursion of the gangs from nearby Neukölln and they have therefore started to consider leaving Kreuzberg and moving to a quieter area of Berlin. The following two passages render a part of their discussion about where they can see themselves living and about the character of different neighbourhoods in the western as well as in the eastern parts of Berlin: So far, he’s lived in Steglitz and in various streets in Schöneberg, she spent her first years in Berlin in Wedding and naturally you don’t go back. The very thought of such a step seems to reverse his circulation and makes his heart beat on his back. To Friedenau or Charlottenburg then, where there are large apartments with high ceilings and parquet floors? Or even Dahlem? But the familiar Western districts, especially the middle-class ones, seem out of the way and faded since the dawn of the new age […]. (Rothmann 7)

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In the course of the restructuring of Berlin, the position of the western districts within the city has apparently shifted to seeming ‘out of the way and faded’ (Rothmann 7). This has to do with the fact that these districts remain ‘familiar’ and have not changed significantly after the fall of the Wall, neither physically nor socially as it seems. From Wolf’s and Alina’s perspective as former members of the creative scene of West Berlin in the 1980s, the middle-class western part of the city has lost its appeal due to this altered status. The couple instead turn their attention to the districts of former East Berlin: And in the new districts they might consider – Berlin Mitte, Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg – you can’t move for lifestyle and logos, youth has become a profession there, success a religion and they’re living on much too thin ice, they can hear it quietly creaking when they close their laptops. So move away from the city? There’s no question of that either. You can’t love it, certainly not, but it’s still the best place for someone who doesn’t really belong anywhere. (Rothmann 7–8)

The rapid gentrification of East Berlin since 1989 is here represented by an accumulation of certain characteristic concepts, such as ‘lifestyle’ and ‘logo,’ ‘youth,’ ‘success’ and ‘laptop.’ The districts in question have gone from having been average income areas in the GDR (Gerstenberger 155) to being dominated by a group of young professionals, whose ITcentred, self-employed, trend-oriented way of life fits the designation ‘creative precariat’ (de Peuter 265–67). The metaphor of the much too thin, creaking ice indicates that this way of life should be regarded as untenable. As the quote sardonically points out, youth and success have been elevated to absolute ideals and alternative lifestyles seem to play a marginal role. Interestingly, the quoted lines position the protagonist couple somewhere between the middle-class inhabitants of western Berlin and the gentrifiers of eastern Berlin, since they reject moving to a district that they associate with either of the groups. Despite the scarcity of suitable neighbourhoods, moving away from Berlin is evidently not an option for Wolf and Alina. Their ambivalent sense of belonging in Berlin makes them continue their discussions and they finally decide on the former East Berlin district of Friedrichshagen, where they—seemingly for the first time—encounter the reserve and suspicion of former GDR citizens at first hand. Up until this point, their lack of financial capital has not been a problem, but now they

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are facing the new rent levels of Kreuzberg as well as the high-priced housing of their new neighbourhood. They cannot afford two apartments in Friedrichshagen since housing in that area is ‘in demand from young, well-heeled families’ (Rothmann 54). This signals that gentrification has started to affect that area as well. Because of the rent levels of Friedrichshagen, Wolf and Alina’s living arrangement must become more conventional and their privacy and freedom limited. Wolf soon starts to feel trapped within the walls of their new shared home and finds an outlet in an affair with an old lover of his, Charlotte. Alina eventually puts two and two together, but surprisingly, after initially feeling dejected, she accepts the other relationship. The couple stays together until the end of the novel, but their relationship has irrevocably changed and one of the reasons is their limited influence over their living arrangements. Wolf’s personality and working habits demand a certain amount of freedom that they can no longer afford. Their move from Kreuzberg to Friedrichshagen is not a case of direct displacement since they had the legal right to stay in their two apartments, but ever since they started to feel alienated and uneasy in their neighbourhood, they recognised their limited possibilities to improve their situation in Kreuzberg. This can therefore be seen as a case of indirect displacement, which tends to occur when social and structural changes accelerate and the established population of a district as well as early gentrifiers feel obliged to move away (Friedrichs 60–61). The lengthy search for a new neighbourhood implies that Berlin lacks a space where the protagonist couple can live comfortably and free from middle-class conventions. The novel ends with the death of one of the protagonists, thus disentangling the couple’s life together from the progression of the gentrification of Berlin and leaving questions to the further effects of the process unanswered.

Jan Peter Bremer’s der Amerikanische Investor (2011) In contrast to Fire Doesn’t Burn, Der amerikanische Investor by Jan Peter Bremer has a distinct focus on gentrification as its main theme. The premise of the novel is the juxtaposition of a financially independent American venture capitalist and a creative worker on the edges of precarity. The story revolves entirely around the consequences of the American investor’s decision to buy and renovate a set of old multi-use

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buildings in an unnamed part of Berlin. It is narrated from the perspective of a nameless protagonist, a middle-aged writer, who lives with his wife and two children in one of the buildings. The American investor is most probably modelled on Nicolas Berggruen, a German-American billionaire who has invested substantial amounts of capital in real estate in Berlin since 2005 (e.g. in the former Sarotti chocolate factory in Kreuzberg where Bremer lives with his family [von Lovenberg]). The draughty, unmodernised top-floor apartment where the protagonist of the novel lives puts a strain on the well-being of its inhabitants, but thanks to the affordable rent (and the income from his wife’s nine-to-five desk job), the protagonist can afford to focus fully on his writing. During the five years that the family has lived in the building, the apartment below theirs has been empty. That could indicate that the protagonist and his wife once were low-income pioneers in a run-down neighbourhood that is starting to become increasingly attractive—the precondition of the formation of investment-enticing rent gaps. The novel begins shortly after a letter informs them of the building’s new ownership. Construction workers have started bustling around the premises and the protagonist soon discovers that all of the surfaces and inner walls of the apartment below have been ripped out. In their own apartment, cracks appear in the walls and the floors start to sink. A structural engineer deems the apartment unsafe, but the woman from the new property management organisation who pays them a visit shortly thereafter has a different message: Barely inside, she [the property manager] told them that the structural engineer had exaggerated the situation quite a bit and that their fear of suddenly falling through the floor was unfounded. […] In the long run, though, this was of course not an ideal situation, but they had to understand that repairing the damage would only pay off for the property management if the front part of the apartment could be renovated as well, which would – she couldn’t give them a more exact figure yet – just about double their rent. That price would even still be within the normal range. However, if they ended up deciding to seek out a new apartment, for financial reasons for example, she could certainly imagine the property management firm contributing to the moving expenses. (Bremer 15)

When it comes to the suggestion of moving out, the wife of the protagonist responds by flatly refusing to do this, whereas the protagonist feels weakened by the pressure from the property management company and

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the uncertainty of the situation (see Marcuse 196, 205, 207 on displacement pressure). He and his wife cannot afford either to pay twice their current rent or to rent another apartment in the same neighbourhood (Bremer 21). Apparently, a lot of the housing in that area has already been modernised and rents have gone up, suggesting that the neighbourhood in question is gentrifying considerably. The investment in an entire set of buildings would even indicate that the area has tipped over into an advanced stage of gentrification, where not only large investments but also rent increases and many cases of direct as well as indirect displacement occur. As depicted in the quote above, it seems that the property management company employed by the American investor is deliberately using the renovation and the resulting rent increases to displace—or even indirectly evict—the tenants, a strategy termed renoviction (see, for example, Baeten and Listerborn 259). Although the protagonist and his family are not yet displaced, the protagonist is nonetheless immensely unsettled by the mere risk of displacement. It is evident from his reactions that he is about to lose his strong sense of place (Bremer 22, 29; cf. Shaw and Hagemans 326–28). He tries to seek advice at the local tenant advisory service, but the contradictory opinions of two different lawyers there confuse him and make him doubt his possibilities even more. Not fully knowing their rights puts the protagonist’s family in a weak position. The protagonist and his wife have a falling-out when he gets exasperated and starts considering giving in and moving out. Their uncertain living situation triggers a depression that stifles the protagonist’s creativity completely, all of which ultimately leads to his wife leaving him. The protagonist contemplates a number of more or less realistic strategies to reduce the power that the American investor has over his life, for example by appealing to his empathy by expressing his agony in a wellwritten letter, or by starting a world-wide uprising against him together with all of the innumerable other tenants who he believes must be in the same position as he is. He also considers reaching out to an old friend in another letter to ask for support in dealing with the situation and imagines the friend responding: ‘An American investor, you say. And that worries you? We do live under the rule of law, you know’ (Bremer 150). The sarcastic undertone is unmistakable in all of these fantasies of possible and impossible courses of action and serves to highlight the perceived powerlessness of the protagonist. A frequent description of the American investor portrays him as a powerful figure reminiscent of a feudal

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lord, for example in that he barricades himself in his flying machine ‘as if in a fortress’ (Bremer 67). By implication, the displaced and soon-to-be displaced tenants of the apartment buildings that he owns are depicted as his subjects, waving ‘pitchforks and iron rods’ at him as soon as he lands somewhere (68). As exemplified in the following quotation, the American investor also appears as an ‘uninvited guest’ and a diffuse presence that has infiltrated the lives of his tenants in several passages of the novel: No one listened to him [the protagonist] anymore, soon no one would see him either and he was already unwanted here. His wife and children were also no longer wanted here and nor were the endearing neighbours who were already so old and frail. At some point a powerful hand would grab the whole street and beat it out like a rug, and somewhere in hiding, the uninvited guest alone would prevail. (Bremer 29–30)

The synecdochical ‘powerful hand’ of the American investor evokes associations with the metaphor of an ‘invisible hand’ directing the free market economy, associated with Adam Smith, and so with the rational choices of a completely detached homo oeconomicus. In contrast, the protagonist, his family and his neighbours are depicted as being nothing but obstructions in the process of renovating and upgrading the neighbourhood in which they live. The feeling of being unwanted is clearly very upsetting to the protagonist, who therein sees his way of life, his ideals and his contribution to society devalued. The rug metaphor underlines the protagonist’s—probably not groundless—concern that they could all easily be displaced. The city itself almost appears to be a toy town in relation to the powerful investor, who sometimes grows into a giant in the protagonist’s fantasies. Another recurrent spatial expression of the unequal power relations of the novel is the above-below dichotomy of the American investor looking down on his tenants during his constant flights around the world. The protagonist reads an online interview with the American investor, where his itinerant lifestyle is outlined as follows: A while ago he [the protagonist] had read online that the American investor loved chocolate the most and, being the ultimate citizen of the world, lived like a nomad in his private jet. He didn’t even have a permanent residence. All you need in life is a cell phone and a suit, he had read in an interview with the American investor. (Bremer 31–32)

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Ironically, the American investor has voluntarily displaced himself into a type of privileged homelessness. As a globally operating businessman with a great amount of financial capital and an interest in housing investments, he can be interpreted as a member of ‘a global elite of the superrich who might be called super-gentrifiers’ (Bridge, ‘Global’ 45). These supergentrifiers—or financifiers—belong to ‘a new generation flush with the exorbitant rewards of the global finance and corporate service industries’ (Lees, ‘Super-gentrification’ 2489). The ‘particular mix of economic and cultural capital’ that Gary Bridge sees as typical of this group (‘Global’ 45) is reflected in the decision of the American investor to invest his capital in Berlin. Not only expectations of financial returns, allegedly, but also the particular culture and history of the city contributed to this: Berlin, said the American investor in the interview more or less, is a beautiful city with great potential, rich in tradition and full of energy and progress. It was a matter truly close to his heart, the American investor had said, to seize the opportunity to contribute to the city regaining its former splendour. That would require a lot of patience though, since one of Berlin’s unsolved problems was that for a city of its size, it had much too small a population. (Bremer 32)

Although the words of the American investor, here filtered through the somewhat ironic narration of the protagonist, may be little more than a self-marketing strategy, it is still noteworthy that such a strategy mentions cultural and historical factors at all. The conclusion that Berlin has too small a population here refers to an imbalance in housing supply and demand that arose after the fall of the Wall when deindustrialisation and years of financial crises led to a mass exodus and many commercial and residential buildings therefore falling into disuse. The protagonist does not share this financialised view of the situation in Berlin; in his opinion, the economic rationality behind the American investor’s choices does not sanction the displacement of his tenants (Bremer 32). Although the novel ends before he is displaced, nothing indicates that the protagonist’s limited possibilities to influence his situation as a tenant of a disinvested, privately owned building in Berlin would not be effortlessly trumped by the almost mythical omnipotence of the American investor.

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Aljoscha Brell’s Kress (2015) A slightly different perspective on the gentrification of Berlin is conveyed by Aljoscha Brell’s debut novel Kress , set in 2008. The novel begins ominously with the protagonist, Kress, finding a letter from ‘Eureka/Rivers Property Management GmbH’ in his mailbox, reminding him that he is a month overdue with his rent. He lives in a scruffy flat in Neukölln that was uninhabited for quite some time before he moved in. Kress is a literature student who idolises Goethe as well as his professor, and perceives himself as intellectually superior to most other people. He rarely speaks to anyone, apart from with a pigeon that he has named Gieshübler (a reference to Alonzo Gieshübler, the only friend of the eponymous protagonist of Theodor Fontane’s famous 1896 novel Effi Briest ) who comes by every morning to eat breadcrumbs on his window ledge. When he falls in love with a girl in a seminar, Madeleine, his world turns upside down. The focus of the novel lies on the development of Kress’s character and the psychological crisis that he experiences after being rejected by Madeleine. However, the transformation of the commercial and social landscape of Neukölln is an important element of the narrative. Already as Kress’s living environment is described—from his own perspective—at the beginning of the novel, there is a mention of the emerging changes: Kress liked Hermann Street. To be sure, more and more young people had recently moved to his neighbourhood, but most of the inhabitants were, just like they had always been, unemployed and foreigners. His route home was lined with Turkish diners where gigantic kebabs sweated shimmering fat, with harshly lit Internet cafés and men speaking foreign languages, standing day and night at the entrances of the game halls. Through their open doors, you could see the multi-coloured lights of the gaming machines lead a flickering life of their own. (Brell 16)

Neukölln is here portrayed as a lower-class neighbourhood with a poor, multi-ethnic population. The gaming machine trope here seems to allude with irony to the (false) promise of a monetary quick fix to a severely precarious situation. The deindustrialisation of Berlin that followed German reunification affected the working-class residents of Neukölln considerably (Krajewski 84; Huning and Schuster 744). Due to renovations and rent increases in more centrally located districts, numerous low-income and migrant households were displaced and settled instead in

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the Neukölln area where rents and building standards were low. During the 2000s and 2010s, however, a large number of creative workers, students and young families changed the social structure of Neukölln, with substantial rent increases also documented (Krajewski 84; Huning and Schuster 739). This social development is reflected in the above-cited description of Neukölln from Kress’s perspective. Kress has not joined the established population of Neukölln since he moved there seven years earlier from north-western Germany. His education and substantial amount of cultural capital also set him apart from most other members of that group. Financially and socially, however, he has been left to himself after the death of his abusive mother. The choice to live in his low-standard one-room apartment in Neukölln is one he has made out of necessity, exemplifying the ‘taste of necessity’ postulated by Bourdieu (372–86), but as the quote above demonstrates, it is also a deliberate choice. At the same time, Kress does not count himself among the ‘young people’ who have started to move into Neukölln either—it is even implied in the quote that Kress likes his street despite the inflow of young people. It would be appropriate to categorise Kress as a rather prototypical pioneer, but it might also be justified to differentiate further between two different groups of ground-breaking gentrifiers. Since Kress has lived in Neukölln for quite some time already and probably has less financial and social capital than some of the newcomers, he could be designated an early pioneer with the existing terminology in contrast to the other young people who would then be proper pioneers. Since he is a student, the designation studentifier could also apply: ‘studentifiers are similar to artists and other creative workers, and may be viewed as ground-breakers for gentrification activity’ (D. Smith 76). Kress, however, does not reflect upon the fact that he is a part of or could even have been a catalyst for such a transformation of Neukölln. On the contrary, he seems to perceive himself as fundamentally different to other students and young people in that respect as well and sides with the residents of Neukölln instead: Naturally, he had no contact with the people here [in Neukölln]. But he would still rather have them than the prim and proper crowd of the refurbished districts, the students and the high-ranking teachers, who consumed vegetarian pasta in snug street cafés. At any rate, he felt more at home here than there. (Brell 16)

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In this quote, the Neukölln population is contrasted with the ‘prim and proper crowd’ of people who live in ‘refurbished districts,’ most likely in former East Berlin where gentrification has been the most comprehensive. The ‘students and high-ranking teachers’ who live there are gentrifiers, considering the fact that those districts had a mixed and economically rather weak population at the time of German Reunification (Gerstenberger 155). These gentrifiers practise a lifestyle that is very different compared to the way of life in Neukölln, represented here by consumption of ‘vegetarian pasta in snug street cafés.’ Kress feels at home in Neukölln, but as the above quote indicates, he neither identifies nor interacts with the other residents. His general antipathy towards other people increases as Neukölln undergoes the development depicted in the narrative. A few months after the start of the narrated events, the commercial landscape of Kress’s street suddenly starts to change and he reacts with hostility: To Kress’s great indignation, two galleries and a café had opened in his street within a short period of time. Full of hatred he stumbled past clusters of people sitting at round wooden tables sprawled across the sidewalk every evening, conversing feeblemindedly and laughing noisily, until the law allowed calling the police to report it as disturbance. (Brell 155)

As this quote demonstrates, the newest residents of Neukölln have a different consumption pattern and demand for spare-time activities compared to the established population. This is not necessarily due to high financial capital, but rather to a higher cultural capital and a certain taste that is typical for members of the middle class (Shaw 1698). The incomers in this quote can be interpreted as early gentrifiers in the second phase of an intensifying gentrification process. Another indication is the people sitting at tables across the sidewalk, as such elements of conspicuous cultural consumption in public places are a ‘defining feature’ of gentrification (Shaw 1698). The public space, in this case the street, is thereby occupied by gentrifiers and possibly also by people from other districts or tourists, which is another sign of accelerating gentrification (Friedrichs 61). This shuts out groups not able or willing to pay to use that public space and new galleries and cafés replace older businesses that have less appeal to the middle-class gentrifiers. At a later point in the narrated events, Kress spends a month living in a disused school from where he can spy on Madeleine, returning to his

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Neukölln home only to find that ‘[a] new café had opened in his street where the Turkish bakery used to be’ (Brell 316). This points to the ethnic aspect of gentrification; ethnic minorities are often more susceptible to displacement and other negative effects of gentrification, since they may already be socially disadvantaged through discrimination in the job and housing markets (Kadıo˘glu Polat 157–58). Upon returning to his apartment, Kress also learns that he faces eviction since he has still not been able to pay his rent. With resignation, Kress imagines the fate of his apartment following his eviction: The property management would probably seize the opportunity to renovate the flat, like they had renovated the front-house apartment of the old man who died last year. Surely that was a good investment, cafés and galleries sprouted quicker than zits on a teenager’s face in this area. He thought of the property management worker with whom he had first visited the flat seven years ago. What was his name again? Mittelwald? Mittelbeck? It didn’t matter, in two or three months some student would move in and rejoice in the freshly refinished floors and the freshly tiled bathroom, and of course that student wouldn’t have the slightest idea of what had happened here. (Brell 319)

Kress’s run-down apartment has now turned into an object of interest as a consequence of apparent disinvestment and of the social and functional developments in his neighbourhood. This is also the case for its real-life counterpart. Particularly after the financial crisis of 2008 when housing stock prices fell, acquisition and renovations of Neukölln tenement buildings came to be considered ‘safe’ investments (Huning and Schuster 745). As an early pioneer, Kress is at a high risk of being displaced from his neighbourhood that seems to be moving rapidly towards the tipping point of the gentrification process. His eviction is legally legitimate since he has not been able to pay his rent for several months and his lack of financial and social capital deprives him of many possibilities. At the end of the novel, however, Kress retakes a certain amount of control over his situation by reaching out to others for support.

Conclusion: Gentrification and Urban Possibility The neighbourhoods depicted in the three novels all display signs of incipient or advanced gentrification impacting on the lives of individual characters as well as being part of large-scale processes. The fall of the

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Berlin Wall gave rise to a multitude of new possibilities for artists, musicians, students and others, as well as for investors and venture capitalists. The novels paint a mixed picture of the constructive and destructive possibilities inherent to the gentrification process in the city. The developments depicted are materially constructive in terms of renovations of disinvested buildings and financial returns, most explicitly for the American investor. The cityscape of Neukölln in Kress changes visually and functionally through the new businesses and the new consumer groups, becoming more like Prenzlauer Berg, an area that has already gentrified into a trendy urban environment with ‘snug street cafés’ (Brell 16) where ‘you can’t move for lifestyle and logos’ (Rothmann 7). Due to the destabilised dynamics of the Kreuzberg area in Fire Doesn’t Burn, the possible outcomes of the emerging social and physical changes seem to be manifold. This situation is a contrast to the earlier ‘island existence’ in West Berlin that allowed for artistic freedom and alternative lifestyles to thrive in a secluded environment, influenced to a limited extent by market forces. The unnamed district where the protagonist in Der amerikanische Investor lives—most likely also Kreuzberg—represents a later phase beyond the tipping point of the process, when the built environment has become subject to major investments and renovations. The depicted developments are also generative of new social constellations, such as Wolf and Alina’s interactions with former GDR citizens following their relocation to Friedrichshagen in Fire Doesn’t Burn and Kress’s new relationships. Whether these aspects of a gentrification process are regarded as constructive or destructive can be connected to ‘a temporal dimension’ (Lees et al. 195). In the earlier stages, a neighbourhood may benefit from a socially mixed population and only a small number of residents and businesses, if any, will be displaced. However, this restructuring process also has a socially destructive potential that typically emerges after the tipping point, when direct displacement and speculation by production side actors increase. As the building stock standard improves, rent levels tend to rise and social groups with an insufficient financial capital can be indirectly or directly forced to leave their homes or business premises. This has been the case for the group of bohemians who used to live in Kreuzberg according to the narrator of Fire Doesn’t Burn and for the Turkish baker in Kress’s street. The many creative workers and gentrifiers in Prenzlauer Berg that are mentioned in the two novels most likely contribute economically and culturally to the area, but also possibly to

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the loss of the inhabitants’ sense of place (Shaw and Hagemans 326–28) and to a ‘creative destruction’ of the character and social structures of the district (see Fenster 38–40; Harvey 105–6). All three novels more or less explicitly depict a diminishing cultural and socio-economic diversity in the population and in the commercial landscape of inner-city Berlin to the advantage of the lifestyles and tastes of the middle class. More directly a gentrification novel, Der amerikanische Investor presents a more explicit critique of the prevailing political system where such insecurity and inequality exist, whereas the other two novels are more focused on the actual and potential consequences of gentrification processes for the characters. The representation of the protagonist’s neighbourhood as an anonymous backdrop for the financial impulses of the American investor implies that urban possibility, in this case, is subject to the dynamics of supply and demand more than to social policy, political vision or residents’ initiatives. At the end of the novel, the protagonist designates himself as ‘exemplary’ (Bremer 156), which can be interpreted as a reference to the ubiquity and generalisability of the gentrification process on a structural level. From a subjective point of view, the main characters are in a weak position when confronted with the changing city. With one exception, all of them are or are about to be subjected to some form of displacement, which has weighty emotional, financial and practical consequences for them. The exception is the American investor, who stands out from the rest of the characters due to his large amount of financial capital and his cosmopolitanism. As a result of the financialisation of the German housing market, Berlin offers him the possibility to obtain large financial and personal rewards. He is the only character in a position of power within the gentrification process to be depicted in these novels and the possibilities open to him seem unlimited, at least in the hyperbolic fantasies of the nameless protagonist, while the other characters experience a profound inability to influence their situations. Wolf and Alina, Kress, and Bremer’s nameless protagonist all have a low financial and a high cultural capital and are all professionally involved with some form of text work. This apparent homogeneity of the main characters is not limited to the three novels treated here; characters with similar profiles occur in numerous other literary representations of the gentrification of Berlin. A more wide-ranging study would be able to consider a larger number of representations to find out if the choice of main character biographies is in fact a bias of literature dealing more or less explicitly

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with gentrification processes in Berlin (or elsewhere). To the extent that they exist, literary representations written from the perspective of longterm working-class residents, second or third stage gentrifiers, property owners or super-gentrifiers would need to be studied to provide a more comprehensive insight into gentrification in literature. The contrast between the possibilities that financial capital and cultural capital open up is not as thickly underlined in Fire Doesn’t Burn and Kress as in Der amerikanische Investor, but it plays a decisive part in the former narratives as well. The post-materialist ethics and the lack of financial capital of the majority of the characters are more or less explicitly juxtaposed with the diffuse financialised powers at work behind the gentrification process. This reinforces the notion of the disputed production-consumption dichotomy and advances the image of the working-class population and the early incomers in a gentrifying neighbourhood as powerless victims of the process. Despite this critical tenor, the novels are all more or less open-ended when it comes to the potential long-term consequences of gentrification for individuals, the city and society as a whole, underscoring the ambiguity of the urban possibilities that are inherent to the gentrification process.

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Bridge, Gary. ‘It’s Not Just a Question of Taste: Gentrification, the Neighbourhood, and Cultural Capital.’ Environment and Planning A, vol. 38, no. 10, 2006, pp. 1965–978. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1068/a3853. Brouillette, Sarah. ‘Literature and Gentrification on Brick Lane.’ Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3, 2009, pp. 425–49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23131523. Buchanan, Jason. ‘Ruined Futures: Gentrification as Famine in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Literature.’ Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 63, no. 1, 2017, pp. 50–72. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2017.0004. Butler, Tim, and Garry Robson. ‘Negotiating Their Way in: The Middle Classes, Gentrification and the Deployment of Capital in a Globalising Metropolis.’ Urban Studies, vol. 40, no. 9, 2003, pp. 1791–809. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098032000106609. Colomb, Claire. Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989. Routledge, 2011. Davies, Dominic. ‘“Comics on the Main Street of Culture”: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999), Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011) and the Politics of Gentrification.’ Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2017, pp. 333–60. Intellect, https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs.4. 3.333_1. ———. ‘Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism, Tourism Gentrification and the Affect Economy in Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge (2009).’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 11, no. 3, 2020, pp. 325– 40. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2019.157 5256. de Peuter, Greig: ‘Beyond the Model Worker: Surveying a Creative Precariat.’ Culture Unbound, vol. 6, no. 1, 2014, pp. 263–84. Linköping U Electronic P, https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.1461. Dwyer, June. ‘Reimagining the Ethnic Enclave: Gentrification, Rooted Cosmopolitanism, and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Chango’s Fire.’ MELUS, vol. 34, no. 2, 2009, pp. 125–39. JSTOR, Stable URL: www.jstor.org/stable/205 32682. Fenster, Tovi. ‘Creative Destruction in Urban Planning Procedures: The Language of “Renewal” and “Exploitation.”’ Urban Geography, vol. 40, no. 1, 2019, pp. 37–57. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/027 23638.2018.1500244. Fields, Desiree, and Sabina Uffer. ‘The Financialisation of Rental Housing: A Comparative Analysis of New York City and Berlin.’ Urban Studies, vol. 53, no. 7, 2016, pp. 1486–502. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/004 2098014543704. Finch, Jason. ‘Grotland Explored: The Fleeting Urban Imaginaries of Post-War Inner West London.’ Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2015, pp. 275–95. Intellect, https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs.2.3.275_1.

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Rolnik, Raquel. ‘Late Neoliberalism: The Financialization of Homeownership and Housing Rights.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 37, no. 3, 2013, pp. 1058–66. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1468-2427.12062. Rothmann, Ralf. Fire Doesn’t Burn. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Seagull Books, 2011. Shaw, Kate. ‘Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is, and What Can Be Done about It.’ Geography Compass, vol. 2, no. 5, 2008, pp. 1697–728. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00156.x. Shaw, Kate, and Iris Hagemans. ‘“Gentrification without Displacement” and the Consequent Loss of Place: The Effects of Class Transition on Low-income Residents of Secure Housing in Gentrifying Areas.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 2, 2015, pp. 323–41. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12164323. Smith, Darren P. ‘“Studentification”: The Gentrification Factory?’ Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, edited by Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge, Routledge, 2005, pp. 72–89. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. Routledge, 1996. ———. ‘Toward a Theory of Gentrification: A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People.’ Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 45, no. 4, 1979, pp. 538–48. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10. 1080/01944367908977002. Sollazzo, Erica. ‘“The Dead City”: Corporate Anxiety and the Post-Apocalyptic Vision in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.’ Law & Literature, vol. 29, no. 3, 2017, pp. 457–83. Taylor & Francis Online, https://doi.org/10.1080/153 5685x.2017.1327696. Stehle, Maria. ‘Money, Mobility, and Commodified Bodies: The Politics of Gentrification in German City Films of the Late 1990s.’ German Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 1, 2012, pp. 40–54. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10. 1111/j.1756-1183.2012.00136.x. Téllez-Espiga, Enrique. ‘Realismo Social, Gentrificación y Renovaciones Urbanas En La Otra Ciudad De Pablo Aranda (2003).’ Neophilologus, vol. 102, no. 2, 2018, pp. 171–86. ProQuest Web, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-0189553-0. Zitzlsperger, Ulrike. ‘Städte in der Stadt: Berliner Erfahrungsräume.’ Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2004, pp. 277–92. U of Toronto P, https://doi.org/10.3138/sem.v40.3.277. Zukin, Sharon. ‘Urban Lifestyles: Diversity and Standardisation in Spaces of Consumption.’ Urban Studies, vol. 35, nos. 5–6, 1998, pp. 825–39. ProQuest Web, https://doi.org/10.1080/0042098984574.

CHAPTER 9

Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Children’s and Young Adult Literature Lydia Wistisen

He has discovered something fantastic. A small dandelion has pierced the hard armour of the asphalt. It shows that there’s still life and power beneath the surface, even if you wouldn’t think so. (5)1

The above quotation is from the Swedish young adult novel Snöret (1978) by Lars Peterson and describes everyday life in Jakobsberg, a newly built large-scale, high-rise suburb. The suburb is depicted as a grey commuter zone—in contemporary Swedish called a ‘sovstad’ (‘sleeping town’), whose grown-up male residents all work elsewhere. The protagonist discovering the small flower is one of the daytime people left in the area, a teenage boy named Snöret. Like many other publications for children of the time, the novel contains a leftist ideology and is set 1 My translation. All following translations from Swedish into English are mine.

L. Wistisen (B) Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_9

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in a new large-scale housing area. In Snöret, as well as in several other children’s and young adult (or YA) books, the representation of the suburb is twofold. It is partly a dystopic, alienating, and, for the teenager, highly problematic environment, partly a point of departure for hope, dreams and kinship. Moreover, contemporary Marxist thoughts on the city, spatial organisation and planning can be traced in the depiction. This chapter explores representations of places like Jakobsberg and their children in Swedish children’s and young adult literature from the late 1960 and 1970s. With an emphasis on 1970s children’s and young adult literature set in the Swedish Million Programme, it investigates the potential of an urban society where inhabitants are becoming increasingly disenfranchised, especially regarding the control they have over city planning and design. Several questions arise. What are the possibilities for the children of the new high-rise suburb? How is the urban environment employed to socialise and/or entertain young readers? Additionally, how is contemporary Marxist urban theory reflected and presented to young readers? The primary sources consist of a selection from a largely understudied corpus of literature, more precisely three young adult novels—Gun Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen (1973), Börje Isakson’s ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘ Vaddå?’ (1974) and Peterson’s Snöret —as well as three children’s picture books: Bobby Andström and Ingvar Björk’s Nu blommar det i Blomlunda (1970), Ulf Hultberg and Behnn Edvinsson’s Lotta och daghemmet (1975) and Gunilla Bergström’s Who’ll Save Alfie Atkins? (Vem räddar Alfons Åberg?; 1976). The books are all set in new 1970s high-rise suburbs and written from a more or less noticeable Marxist point of view. Peterson’s Snöret is the most obvious example as it was published by Gidlunds förlag. The publishing house was founded in 1968 in order to provide the Swedish market with a revolutionary alternative. In addition to children’s literature, they published leftist political literature, such as texts by V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and Alexandra Kollontaj (Gidlund). The three picture books, as well as Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen and Isakson’s ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘ Vaddå?’ are in turn part of a wider ongoing trend of socialist juvenile literature. The tendency is recognised by previous research but the spatial aspects of the development have so far been overlooked (Westin; Hedén; Kjersén Edman; Widhe). The underlying aim of this chapter is thus to shed new light on the radical and urban Swedish children’s and YA literature of the 1970s.

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The Million Programme The Million Programme was a large-scale housing project, initiated by the Swedish Social Democratic Party in the 1960s. 100,000 homes would be built each year for the following ten years, between 1965 and 1975. Housing was an important component in the construction of the Swedish Folkhem (the ‘people’s home’) and welfare state. Escalating urbanisation and rapid demographic growth after World War II led to an urgent need for housing in cities, especially for low-income families. Under the banner of ‘housing for all’, making use of the modern industrial technology of prefabrication, suburban districts, consisting of small houses or high-rise buildings, emerged on the outskirts of every larger Swedish city. In the early 1970s, the Folkhem programme of the Social Democrats had succeeded: the national housing shortage was eliminated, and decent housing conditions were achieved for the entire population of Sweden (Grundström and Molina). Although the Folkhem model was based on ideas of equality, as well as the idea of affordable social apartments rooted in utopian urbanism, it also initiated segregation (Ericsson et al. 26). The Million Programme was characterised by an architectural modernism that involved standardisation and large-scale construction; the areas were mostly laid out in largescale apartment blocks. Le Corbusier’s ideal of housing as freestanding sculpture worked as a point of reference for neighbourhoods that were often also distinctly separated from the existing urban environment by spatial markers such as a walk path, a tunnel, or a green space, creating distinct, detached and homogeneous neighbourhoods. Different social groups came to live in different areas, middle-class residents moved into row houses, detached houses and smaller apartment buildings, whereas working-class inhabitants ended up in the high-rise, multi-storey rental apartment buildings (Grundström and Molina 323). By the end of the 1960s, critical voices began to surface, especially from the New Left. The architecture and planning of the new urban areas conflicted with contemporary thoughts on public life, co-creation and community. For example, commons, like the suburban square or centre, were criticised for being commercialised and overtaken by market forces: instead of public spaces, shopping malls were being built; instead of parks, parking lots. In public debates, mass media and popular culture, the new

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suburban housing complexes became strongly associated with segregation, alienation and poverty, and were gradually stereotyped as dystopias (Hall and Vidén). Significantly, a big national debate flared up right after the opening ceremony of one of the first large-scale suburbs within the Million Programme, Skärholmen, in 1968 (Strömqvist 271ff.). The debate was started by journalist Lars-Olof Franzén in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter. Under the headline ‘Demolish Skärholmen!’, Franzén criticised the architecture, accusing it of being one of the most ‘misanthropic places’ in Sweden, harsh and boring. He argued that the only thing that Skärholmen centre was good for ‘was to roll empty bottles and listen to the sound echoing between the walls’. In the centre of this massive critique were the children. They had no cars, no money to spend, no jobs to go to and during evenings, weekends and summer holidays, no school either. In other words, the Million Programme suburb was not designed for them but paradoxically only for those who could easily get away from there. It is, however, important to bear in mind that a majority of the key actors in the debate did not themselves live in the suburbs they were criticising (Söderqvist 271–78).

A New Genre Ever since the birth of the modern city, children and adolescents have been thought of as a disturbing component of everyday urban life: they continuously evoke social concern, require special supervision and education (Forsell). As early as 1904, in one of the first great psychological studies of adolescence, G. Stanley Hall claimed that a modern urban lifestyle is directly linked to an extensive list of problems concerning young people. Hall pointed out a number of components of city life as explicitly dangerous for a young mind: the greed and multiple temptations, the sedentary lifestyle, the encouragements to precocity, the lack of social control and regularity (xv–xvi). The list could very well characterise representations of the city in everything from the classic bildungsroman or the twentieth-century urban young adult novel, to contemporary debates on city kids. There are, however, also thoughts on the street as school circulating in Europe during the twentieth century with educators presenting the city as an environment that provided new pedagogical possibilities to children’s play and learning (Forsell).

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The Swedish Million Programme and its youth is no exception. The new architecture posed new problems but also new possibilities. The large-scale, high buildings, the small tunnels and underground subway stations, as well as the temptations of the shopping malls and lack of natural meeting places, were all new to Sweden and a cause of great concern. The public was wondering what would happen to the young generation growing up in places such as Skärholmen and the concerns centred around topics such as drugs, violence and alienation. Consequently, many of the children’s and YA books of the time were set in the Million Programme, using its high-rise suburbs as starting points for city political discussions, partly aimed at young readers, partly at parents and teachers (Lundqvist 41). Antje Wischmann has argued that the lack of history and established meaning in the new large-scale housing areas made room for new narratives and identities (345). Her source material is exclusively taken from a corpus of novels for a grown-up audience, but the conclusion is adaptable to children’s and YA literature as well. The highrise suburb theme is so common that it is possible to talk about a new literary genre set in the Million Programme and depicting its everyday life (Wistisen). However, in several cases the large-scale housing areas were turned into powerful symbols of the failure of the welfare state, especially in literature written by left-wing authors. A growing awareness that everything is political tinged Swedish culture of the time. The Swedish New Left of the late 1960s believed society and the welfare system to be malfunctioning. Society was, in their view, preventing its people from questioning the prevailing capitalist order. Therefore, a liberation and counter-indoctrination of children in particular was regarded as necessary. Values and norms were to be reorganised so that children should perceive themselves as active and important co-creators of society. Consequently, Swedish YA and children’s literature was being radicalised and in the 1970s many authors and illustrators criticised the persisting social order and promoted progressive left-wing ideas through children’s and YA books (Hedén 161; Widhe). Left-wing publishing houses, such as Gidlunds förlag, started to include children’s and young adult literature in their work—one expressive example is the childcare book Handbok i barnindoktrinering (1969, ‘Manual of Child Indoctrination’) by Frances Vestin (Widhe). Other more mainstream publishers followed, modernising the content as well as the aesthetics of juvenile publications in order to satisfy demands (Kjersén Edman 89–191; Kåreland 63).

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When it comes to urban novels such as Snöret, Hela långa dagen, and ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘Vaddå?’, and picture books such as Lotta och daghemmet, Who’ll Save Alfie Atkins?, and Nu blommar det i Blomlunda, strategies recognisable from the works of contemporary Marxist theorists were promoted as means to rearrange the city and daily life. In contemporary spatial theory, the city is looked upon as ‘the site of contests of power between varied ideological forces with individual “users” occasionally developing the ability to subvert the system via creative and irrational practices of walking and art production’ (Finch 28). Previously ignored spheres of daily existence, the oppression of everyday life, as well as the discovery of its potential as a site of resistance, creativity and emancipation, are explored by thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord. It is evident that their critique of spatial power relations, modern urban planning and capitalist commodification of life permeates Swedish 1970s culture. The representation of the high-rise suburb in Swedish children’s and YA literature is marked by an awareness of urban hierarchies, restrictions and possibilities. The juvenile representations of the Million Programme may be divided into two main types with different approaches. In YA fiction, representations of suburban teenagers without ambitions—drugged, drunk and violent—became a new literary cliché. Alternatively, the contemporary picture book uses the high-rise suburb in a different way, for example to discuss environmental problems. In both cases, the image of the suburb and its children is dual, on the one hand discouraging, and on the other constructive. Let us start with the first category.

Concrete Dystopia In Swedish reception and literary history, the 1970s representation of Stockholm and the suburb is described as dark and pessimistic (Edström 176). For example, in a work on YA fiction from 1980, Vivi Edström argues that suburban milieus are principally employed to depict ‘a lack of positive possibilities, rootlessness, and the aridity in existence’ (148). Furthermore, she claims that the modern suburb appears to be without identity, a cultural void (148). That is a remark that requires clarification. The high-rise suburb of the 1960 and 1970s does not lack an identity, it rather encourages the formation of certain identities, of delinquent, angry and rebellious youth. In the YA novels Hela långa dagen by Jacobson,

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‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘ Vaddå?’ by Isakson and Snöret by Peterson the representation of the suburb is dystopian. Isakson’s and Peterson’s novels are set in two different suburbs from the Million Programme located in Stockholm: Skärholmen and Jakobsberg. The suburb in Hela långa dagen is unnamed, but Jacobson’s descriptions bear many similarities to Isakson’s representation of Skärholmen. When the novel was turned into a movie in 1979, it was however shot in Hallonbergen, a large-scale housing area west of Stockholm. In all three novels, as well as in several other examples from the period, the suburb is depicted as alienating and its teenagers as disregarded, here well illustrated by a quotation from ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘Vaddå?’: There wasn’t any place where they could dance or play or sew or just talk. There was just the Square where they stood and bawled and sputtered and frightened ordinary people. They belonged to the betrayed generation. They had been given a great freedom but were stopped from doing anything with it. (94)

The novel follows four boys, Kenta, Lelle, Snorre and Bengan, during a couple of summer days spent in Skärholmen. It is part of a new series of novels for teenagers called ‘Young Today’ published by Bonnier publishing house. In the initial chapter, they drift around the suburb’s centre, lacking things to do. They steal some beer from a local supermarket and after that, things take a turn for the worse. At the end of the story, the boys have beaten up an old lady in an underpass, and moreover, one of the boys has nearly raped a girl. The motif bears similarities to Anthony Burgess’ dystopia A Clockwork Orange (1962), and the message of the novel is clear: this generation has been deceived by society. In another passage, the mother of Snorre bursts out bitterly: ‘This damned, petrified suburban hell! […] Neither city, nor countryside. It doesn’t live. Here you’re supposed to sleep and shop, be an adult and have money. Shit!’ Unlike Burgess’s novel, which is set in 1995, Isaksson chooses to locate the violence in 1970s Stockholm, presenting the reader with a horrifying image of the downfall of the Folkhem. The living conditions in the new suburbs seem to be the underlying cause of the violence. There is a detectable connection between the image of the high-rise suburb and contemporary Marxist and related thoughts on space. For writers such as Foucault or Lefebvre, a space is not something that is pre-given by nature but more like a commodity, created and constrained

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by limits. The construction of a certain space has an impact on human subjects’ thinking, knowing and acting within that space. A suburban square, for instance, disciplines the person within it. The square pretends to know, and consequently creates, the activities people will perform in it (Tambling 3). The large-scale, high-rise suburb as space has, in Isaksson’s, Peterson’s and Jacobson’s works, forgotten to think of its teenage inhabitants, therefore, creating tension and hostility. Just as the prison in Foucault’s understanding ‘cannot fail to produce delinquents’, the high-rise suburb generates delinquents (Foucault 266). The young protagonists are constantly damaging the environment and/or hurting themselves. The same theme appears in Snöret , where the teenage protagonists—a group of young men—are left in an empty Jakobsberg without any parents or grown-up role models. Here, the brutality is instead directed towards the city. For instance, in one chapter the gang of boys goes into town to see the hard rock band Kiss perform. Peterson shows how the discrepancy between the excitement of the concert and the aridity of the boys’ everyday life is a source of great frustration. The glamour of the band is unachievable for them, and in consequence they take their disappointment out on the public space of the inner city in a very direct way. They start to destroy things on their way home. They scream at people, kick lamp posts and trash litter bins, and as a finale, they urinate on Slussplan, a square in front of the subway junction Slussen in the heart of Stockholm (42). The political potential of that kind of rebellious appropriation is highlighted in Lefebvre’s Le Droit á la ville (1968) and La Révolution urbaine (1970): ‘The right to the city legitimates the refusal to allow oneself to be removed from urban reality by a discriminatory and segregative organisation’ (Lefebvre Writings 195). The act of defiance in Peterson’s novel is symbolic, teenagers from Jakobsberg have no scope for other types of actions. Since neither the city nor the suburb were created for them, they can only appropriate space in the city by breaking its rules. Correspondingly, both violence and urine play important parts in Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen. The novel is about a semi-delinquent teenage boy named Pingo in a large-scale Stockholm high-rise suburb. In the first chapter, Pingo’s little brother is left unattended by their drunken mother in the suburb’s centre. He wets himself and Pingo helps him. The lack of public toilets free of charge in combination with large-scale housing areas is turned into a heart-breaking event.

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In another chapter, Pingo gets stuck in a lift together with a female subway guard—Alma—whom he usually harasses. The unexpected situation changes the power relation between them. The situation allows Pingo to be a child when the lady, who is usually afraid of Pingo, turns into a motherly figure, soothing and feeding the scared and hungry boy. Then— after hours of waiting—they help each other urinate in a plastic bag and an empty milk box. The scene demonstrates how both child and adult suffer from the malfunctioning urban environment represented by the broken subway lift. Isaksson, Peterson and Jacobson parallel the behaviour and state of mind of their young protagonists with the planning of the large-scale suburb. They depict a clear connection between the repetitive, brutal architecture and teenage delinquency. One illustrative example is found in Snöret . The main character—who discovers the small dandelion in the asphalt in the aforementioned quotation—sits by a parking lot, observing the grey concrete landscape. Peterson describes the environment in detail: ‘The houses are all the same and lie quite close to each other. It is at most twenty metres between them. In every gap there’s a paved alley along the long side of the house, going past all the entrances. The rest of the gaps consist of a slender strip of dry grass […]’ (7). The narrowness of the in-between space is accentuated, there is no room to sit on the grass, no possibility to play ball without breaking a window. The repetition of the buildings generates boredom and mirrors the feelings of the protagonist. Peterson continues with a description of the parking lot: There are only three, four cars left on the parking lot. Only housewives and small children are at home during the afternoons. The cars are mostly standing there at night and every morning the male inhabitants of the houses come out and drive off to work somewhere else. Maybe even on the other side of town. (7)

Here the text illuminates a problematic aspect of everyday life in a commuter suburb. When school’s out, the men are at work, and the women are taking care of the smaller children, teenage inhabitants are left unattended, with nowhere to go and nothing meaningful to do. Peterson’s image of Swedish suburban life may seem conservative but in the early 1970s only 10 per cent of children were enrolled in preschool. It was only in 1975 that new legislation significantly improved the availability of childcare services.

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The milieu in ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘Vaddå?’ is similarly hostile. For example, the many windows of the buildings in Skärholmen are described as ‘staring eyes’ (7) looking down at the lonely kids hanging out by the subway station. Moreover, the back cover of Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen tells us that Pingo is ‘well-adjusted to his home environment’. With that remark, two things are insinuated: firstly, Pingo is bad-mannered and violent, a budding delinquent; secondly, he is creative. On the back of the cover it says: ‘In the eyes of most grown-ups they are hooligans, but Pingo is a sensitive imaginative kid, created by his environment in the sleeper suburb’. In other words, creativity without proper guidance turns into hooliganism. The possibilities for young people are evidently limited by the large-scale suburban environment.

Everyday Resistance There is, however, a great opportunity for resistance in the young adult novels of the time. Jacobson is not the only author to describe hooliganism as somewhat creative: the same can be said of Isaksson, Peterson, as well as other authors of the time. The suggestion derives from another important piece of the Marxist perspective on space: the notion of appropriation and everyday resistance. The lost teenagers of the 1970s change the spaces they inhabit. By using the concrete landscape of the new suburbs every day, they insist on their co-ownership of the Million Programme and their right to the city. The notion of appropriation of space originates from Lefebvre. In Le Droit á la ville (1968), he imagines a new urban politics that questions the current structure of capitalism and liberal-democratic citizenship under the now widely spread slogan ‘the right to the city’. Lefebvre’s concern is that urban inhabitants are becoming increasingly disenfranchised, especially regarding the control they have over the geography of the city; in response, he accentuates the importance of play and creativity (Purcell). Furthermore, he stresses the emancipatory potential of the urban citizen. Because space is socially produced, actions and activities have the power to change the spaces in which they occur. While representations of space (planning, architecture) designate the use of it, representational space can resist or adapt those representations through appropriation by daily use (Lefebvre, Production 164–69). In representations of teenagers and the Million Programme, there is one space that stands out regarding appropriation: the subway station. As

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a space, the station is highly governed by rules. The intended use of it is visibly pointed out by signs and guarded by people and turnstiles. It is a space for transfer and quick movement. In 1970s YA literature, the station becomes a site of resistance and challenge of the system. Because the station is one of the few heated and shaded public spaces in largescale high-rise suburbs, it is a natural meeting place for people without any place to be. However, a person without anywhere to go is bound to clash with the designated use of the space. This dilemma is at the core of Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen, where Pingo and his friends are at war with the station guard Alma, with whom he subsequently gets stuck in a lift. Every day Alma sits behind the glass walls of the station’s ticket booth, and every day the children harass her. ‘This is no playground’ (29), she shouts at them when their ongoing snowball fight moves inside. The snow is interesting in this context. It is wintertime in Jacobson’s novel and the cold weather on the one hand accentuates the vulnerability of the teenagers, and on the other transforms the Million Programme landscape. The sharp lines and hard edges of the buildings are softened by snow and the grey tone of the area is turned into a light-reflecting white. Moreover, snow is malleable, it can be shaped into figures or, like in Hela långa dagen, firm weapons. In Jacobson’s novel, the snow serves as an extension of the teenage body, invading and occupying the public spaces of the suburb. Isaksson describes similar acts of conquest, but with alcohol instead of snow. Kenta, Lelle, Snorre and Bengan are drifting around the subway station square in Skärholmen: Two strong beers filled their heads with dreams of power and feelings of bravery. There were round, woolly thoughts that bounced easily against the walls of the brain. Light bumps that felt pleasant. […] They smoked, bounced towards each other, laughed and clowned around. They clattered like empty beer cans on stone stairs. (90)

The last sentence contains a possible reference to the Op-Ed ‘Demolish Skärholmen!’, where Franzén mentioned the rolling of beer bottles as a good activity for Skärholmen centre. Here the teenagers themselves are the bottles. Isaksson lets the intoxication move from the brain to the interaction between the boys. It then spreads to the description of the surrounding environment: ‘The evening light wrapped the granite and

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concrete landscape in soft veils, erasing hard edges and barren surfaces’ (90). The intoxication changes the spaces it inhabits. Adjectives such as ‘round’, ‘woolly’ and ‘soft’, as well as verbs such as ‘bounce’, create a contrast to the stone and concrete. The teenagers are depicted as the antithesis of the environment that surrounds them. There is a constant divergence in this quotation, and in Jacobson’s and Peterson’s novels, between the soft and adaptative teenage body and the static architecture of the Million Programme. In his drunken state of mind, Kenta tries to walk on his hands down the stairs but falls over and hurts himself. Still he feels strong and in control: ‘He looked around. He was the centrepiece. Even though he fell, people would talk about the time when Kenta tried to walk on his hands down the stairs. It felt good’ (91). Just like in the earlier mentioned example from Peterson’s Snöret , where the boys were peeing on a square in central Stockholm, the action carries Kenta from a position on the margins to the centre of attention. The stairs will in the future be associated with his act of courage. He has put himself on the map of Skärholmen, in the everyday history of the place. Not only does the contrast between the body and the concrete work as a powerful image, the uniform landscape in some ways make the children more impressive and authoritative: ‘They sang with shrill voices in the tunnel, where the echo strengthened their howls’ (116). The material of the tunnel amplifies the voices of the boys. The shortcomings of the design accentuate their virtues and provide them with new possibilities (cf. Wistisen 188–89). Not all appropriation of public space is, however, violent. The teenage gangs of the different novels are taking part in an ongoing appropriation of the Million Programme. Step by step, the identity of the teenagers and the high-rise environment are intertwined. Peterson’s Snöret ends at the same place where it started, by the parking lot at the edge of the neighbourhood. The protagonist is once again looking at Jakobsberg. The narrator explains: ‘Of course the milieu is not particularly stimulating and there’s not much to do. And it’s not beautiful either’ (158). Only one thing is pointed out as a positive: ‘But this is where Snöret grew up. This is his childhood home. And that’s not something to despise, that would be the same as rejecting oneself’ (158). The narrator seems ambivalent: on the one hand, the novel has given a dark and dystopic portrait of Jakobsberg that in many ways expresses contempt for the large-scale housing area as well as its teenage male inhabitants, and on the other hand, it is

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specifically there, in that space, that a willingness to believe in the future emerges. An alternative case of non-aggressive appropriation is to be found in Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen, where the public spaces of the suburb are depicted as more of a home than Pingo’s actual apartment, where his mother spends her days drinking. He and his friends have one favourite spot in the neighbourhood, a terrace wall: ‘They go there when danger threatens. The wall is part of the subway station and up there you have a perfect view over what’s going on and happening. The whole square is at your feet’ (27). The desire to rise above the ground-level topography is connected to power relations and a will to appropriate the top-down view of city planners. Moreover, the things that society is supposed to give Pingo are instead provided by the gang. Jacobson writes: The gang is assembled. There’s excitement and tension in the air, but also another feeling – security. They are together. They belong together. No danger can really threaten them as long as they stay together. With friends that you can trust, you can do anything. (26–27)

The gang feels that the square is their own ‘kingdom’ and they feel ‘proud’ (28). The quotation depicts a reanimation of the love, security and sense of belonging which the suburban environment is lacking. Later on in Hela långa dagen, the gang acts exceptionally wild in the subway station, screaming at strangers, throwing snowballs and fighting in front of Alma’s ticket booth. All of a sudden, in the middle of the chaotic situation, there is a moment of peace. Pingo gets something in his eye and his girlfriend Risslan consoles him, hugs him and puts her hand against his cheek. Interestingly, they are leaning against the glass window behind which the frustrated Alma is sitting (26). The rebellious appropriation turns into something else, into a manifestation of love. The act of kindness is intimate and private but also a scene of hope, as it points towards a possible future for young people like Pingo and Risslan. This kind of depiction of feelings of belonging and pride is likewise common in latter representations of the Million Programme, especially hip-hop lyrics from the turn of the new millennium. Even though the welfare state is failing its suburban youth, the young inhabitants try to build their own sense of community in 1970s YA fiction, as well as in 2000s hip-hop lyrics. The lack of established meaning that Wischmann

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means is essential for representations of the large-scale suburb is clearly being replaced by the establishment of an identity (345).

The Right to the City Compared with YA fiction, in Swedish children’s literature of the 1970s, the perception of the relationship between the Million Programme and its children is somehow different. Primarily, the possibilities of the new environment are strengthened, especially the right to be a part of the creation of the suburb. Demanding one’s right to the city—like the teenagers in the examples above—is a way of reclaiming the city as co-created space and a key feature in picture books such as Andström and Björk’s Nu blommar det i Blomlunda or a children’s comic book such as Hultberg and Edvinsson’s Lotta och daghemmet . Nu blommar det i Blomlunda is a typical 1970s children’s book with a flower power motif. The illustrations by Björk are colourful; warm tones of yellow, orange, green and red dominate the lively images. On the first spread, the reader is introduced to the setting and main character, a girl named Anna. She is standing in front of a parked car and a gas station, at the bottom of the illustration, holding her father’s hand. Behind the station, a cluster of high buildings bank up. There is no greenery in the picture, just concrete, stone, metal and asphalt. Andström’s text explains that the suburb is called ‘Gråtrista’, which translates ‘Greyboring’, because it is so uninteresting and gloomy (6). The depiction of the large-scale housing area bears several similarities to the ones in the YA novels discussed earlier, and, like the teenagers in those works, Anna does not like it there. This is mainly because of the lack of green areas: the narrator describes how she is longing to climb a tree. The theme undoubtedly relates to the contemporary public debate on largescale housing, as well as to contemporary environmental thoughts on car pollution and city planning. Andström and Björk continually contrast the child protagonists with the surrounding environment on the one hand and the grown-up inhabitants on the other. Anna and her father are, for example, leaning apart from one another in the first illustration, and the girl’s red dress stands in contrast to the man’s blue suit and tie. On the illustration of the second spread, this viewpoint is further developed. Here Anna and a boy—Kurt— are at the centre of the image. She is swinging a jump rope and the movement of the rope, together with her colourful clothes, creates a

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counter-image to the grey buildings behind her. The two children start talking and Anna presents an idea to Kurt: ‘We start planting flowers and grass and trees and such like so we have somewhere to play’ (7). They decide to go ahead with their plan and steal seeds from Anna’s grandfather, who has a garden of his own. The planting of the seeds is interesting in the context of literary representations of the Million Programme. On the following spread, the children fill a bucket with seeds and throw them off the balcony. The seeds spread out over the two pages, creating a movement analogous with that of the jump rope on the previous page. Once again the static architecture is juxtaposed with activities performed by or related to children. After a while flowers start to appear all over Gråtrista. The two children have thus created their own green playground through a kind of ‘guerilla gardening’, today a well-known form of urban activism with origins in 1970s urban theory (Wilson and Weinberg). The result of the environmental revolution in Anna’s suburb is not only affecting the physical, but also the psychological milieu of the neighbourhood: ‘Everybody looked so much happier and more spirited than they normally did. Several grown-ups that usually never talked to each other, were now talking gaily’ (18). Following the example of the children, parents but also city planners start to plant flowers and other plants everywhere, turning Gråstrista into ‘Blomlunda’, ‘Flowergrove’ in English. Andström and Björk depict a social process where self-organised activities influence urban policymaking. Lotta och daghemmet (‘Lotta and the Day Care Centre’) presents a different example of suburban self-government. The children’s comic is part of a series of four books set in a fictional Million Programme suburb called ‘Hallonby’, which has several similarities with the real place Hallonbergen, north-west of Stockholm. Instead of a park, main character Lotta needs a spot at a local day care centre. Both her parents are working full time and Lotta is therefore left unattended during the days. The theme is recognisable from Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen, where Pingo’s little brother is also left alone while his mother is at work. Authors Hultberg and illustrator Edvinsson describe a boring suburb, ill-adjusted to families with working mothers. In the illustrations the surroundings are painted in greyscale, and the only activities the inhabitants are offered are related to consumption. Lotta walks past several shops, with their display windows filled with special offers. Nothing in the setting of the images is aimed towards the children of the neighbourhood. The environment is even depicted as hostile: for instance, Lotta trips on the pavement, hurting her

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hand. However, after criticising the design of Hallonby, Hultberg and Edvinsson pose a solution to Lotta’s problem: an empty space that can be turned into a day care centre. The place is an old store that has been closed down due to the opening of the new shopping mall and, with the help of some neighbours, Lotta renovates it. The parents of the neighbourhood create a cooperative and run the centre until the municipality of Hallonby understands the situation, intervenes and turns the cooperative into a communal centre. In other words, Hultberg and Edvinsson’s story ends with a similar procedure as in Nu blommar det i Blomlunda. Unlike characters in YA novels, the child protagonist has the ability to transform and improve her everyday environment. As opposed to the teenagers in Hela långa dagen, ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘Vaddå?’, and Snöret, the inhabitants of Gråtrista are not completely disenfranchised, instead they have the ability to take action to shape the future of their community. Andström and Björk advocate a kind of direct democracy in which citizens do have a right to the city and its public spaces. The difference can partly be explained by the age of the intended reader: while the YA novel is utilised to discuss contemporary problems with its audience, the picture book instead provides the readers with utopian visions of a possible future.

The Power of the Imagination Another prominent characteristic of the high-rise suburb in children’s literature is related to the power of the imagination. In his writings, Guy Debord argues that capitalism has transformed the world into a spectacle. He critiques contemporary architecture and life under the rule of the market economy for destroying individualism and degrading people to mere consumers. Society made spectacle can, however, be confronted through various tactics and strategies that restore an intense awareness of the urban environment. Play and imagination are promoted as things that can lead people back to a life as a thrilling game (Introduction 60). In Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord argues that the control of representation is the spectacle’s mechanism of power. The idea is interesting in this context as Swedish authors of juvenile literature clearly change the image of the Million Programme through fantasy and play. For example, in a picture book like Bergström’s Who’ll Save Alfie Atkins?, the representation of the suburb is altered by fantastic ingredients. Bergström is a well-known Swedish author, who also worked as a journalist at the Social

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Democrat newspaper Aftonbladet, writing, among other topics, on the shortcomings of the Swedish welfare state. She has written nearly thirty picture books about the character Alfie Atkins (Alfons Åberg), a young boy living with his father in a typical high-rise suburb. The first book God natt, Alfons Åberg —published in English as Good Night, Alfie Atkins (2005)—came out in 1972 and was in many ways ground-breaking. Firstly, it was unusual with representations of single fathers; secondly, the aesthetics were innovative, as Bergström uses a montage technique, incorporating photographs and patterns in her illustrations (Westin 267). In the fifth book about Alfie, Who’ll Save Alfie Atkins?, the focal point is the ability of the child to dream and fantasise. Reminiscent of the flowers in Andström and Björk’s Nu blommar det i Blomlunda, the dreams of Alfie change the experience of the suburban environment. The first spread shows Alfie sitting in the window of a high-rise building. He looks bored and the text declares that Alfie is ‘lonely’ because he just moved to ‘a new place’ (6). In the background, way down beneath the building, tiny child silhouettes are engaged in play at a playground. However, Alfie does have one friend: ‘secret Malcolm’, an imaginary boy. On the next spread is an illustration of three identical high buildings, with Alfie sitting in one of the windows. The whole page is yellow except for an area in the upper left corner, where Malcolm is flying in the middle of a white sun. Unlike the real people in the illustrations, Malcolm is transparent and his contours are outlined with small black dots. Alfie’s daydream alters the surrounding environment: the warm colour that radiates from Malcolm paints everything yellow, the sky as well as the high-rises. When Alfie meets a real playmate, Malcolm disappears. They meet in the stairwell of Alfie’s house, the other boy has hurt his knee on the stairs, and is bleeding and crying. Alfie helps him and they become friends. The motif recalls Hultberg and Edvinsson’s Lotta och daghemmet , in which the children find themselves locked out and hurt themselves. There is, however, a change of perspective in Who’ll Save Alfie Atkins?: Bergström’s narrative invariably views things from the child’s perspective, while Lotta receives help from grown-ups. Bergström’s book does not involve any adults and it does not imply that children must include their parents in the appropriation and recreation of the Million Programme. Instead it bears more similarities to the depiction of the teenagers’ unsupervised relationship to the city of the YA novel.

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On the following spread, Alfie and his newfound friend Victor stand outside their house surrounded by big flowers. The illustration is a conversion of the one on the first spread: the children are at the centre of the image and a couple of tiny high-rises can be seen in the background. On the succeeding page, the sandbox that could be seen in the distance behind Alfie’s building is in the foreground with Alfie and Victor playing in it. They are playing with toy cars and have built roads and planted miniature trees in the sand. Together, the two images illustrate the power of play and the imagination; it is as though the children have created their own small-scale child-friendly world within the large-scale suburb. There is a strong correspondence to the description of smaller children in Jacobson’s Hela långa dagen, where Pingo’s younger brother is said to have an outstanding imagination: ‘He sees things that no one else sees and he can create an adventure out of anything, even a pair of paving-stones’ (85). In other words, co-creation of the city can also be accomplished through fantasy. As Lefebvre writes, the right to the city stipulates ‘the “need” for social life and a centre, the need and the function of play’ (Writings 195). Here play is depicted as a way of appropriating space and transforming the power relations of the Million Programme.

Dandelions In conclusion, the children’s and young adult literature of the 1970s examined in this chapter corresponds to public debates as well as to contemporary urban theory. It participates in the creation of the image of the Million Programme, on the one hand by reinforcing the representation provided by mass media, and on the other by challenging and deconstructing stereotypes. Jacobson, Isakson and Peterson, as well as Bergström, Andström and Björk, Hultberg and Edvinsson try in different ways to discuss and promote means by which the daily life of a suburb can be rearranged to better suit the needs of children. In addition, this is a setting in which writers experiment and develop new ways of addressing young readers. A similarity between most of the works discussed is that they are partly directed towards grown-ups, parents, teachers and politicians, encouraging them to start creating possible futures for the children of the Million Programme. Bergström’s Who’ll Save Alfie Atkins? is an exception, as Alfie is saved by his own power to imagine, and by another child, Victor. The critique directed towards the city planning of the capitalist

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society, is, however, shared, as is the will to present visions of a better future. As for the possibilities of the environment, there is a difference between the YA novels and picture books, in that the first selection is much more negative. YA novels set in the Million Programme seem to diverge from the traditional narrative of city literature in their negative perception of the possibilities for young people. Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, the city has been one of the most frequent settings in Swedish young adult literature and there is a strong bond between the development of a modern young adult literature and the urban setting (Svensson 30; Mählqvist 126–28). The city has been utilised to mediate dreams and evoke fears, it has inspired and fostered, amused and educated young readers, but most of all it has been depicted as a site of possibility (Wistisen 28). In early representations of the Million Programme, such as Hela långa dagen, ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘Vaddå?’ and Snöret, the outcome of a possible future in the new environment is highly unclear. Returning to the dandelion in the introductory quotation of this chapter, the representation of the suburb is double-edged. Children’s and young adult literature set in the Million Programme is marked by a constant tension between dystopic and encouraging representations, despair and hope, or, literally speaking, between concrete and flowers.

Works Cited Andström, Bobby, and Ingvar Björk. Nu blommar det i Blomlunda. Rabén & Sjögren, 1970. Bergström, Gunilla. Vem räddar Alfons Åberg. Rabén & Sjögren, 1976. Debord, Guy. ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.’ 1955. The Situationists and the City: A Reader, edited by Tom McDonough, Verso, 2009, pp. 77–85. ———. Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Translated by Ken Knabb, Rebel Press, 2005. Edström, Vivi. Barnbokens form. En studie i konsten att berätta. Stegelands, 1980. Ericsson, Urban, et al., editors. Miljonprogram och media. Föreställningar om människor och förorter. Riksantikvarieämbetet, 2002. Finch, Jason. ‘Modern Urban Theory and the Study of Literature.’ The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, edited by Jeremy Tambling, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 27–44. Forsell, Håkan. Urbana infantil. Stadsmiljö, pedagogik och kunskapssamhälle i metropolernas tidevarv, ca 1900–1930. Sekel, 2012.

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Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Penguin, 1977. Franzén, Lars-Olof. ‘Riv Skärholmen!’ Dagens Nyheter, 19 Sept. 1968. Grundström, Karin, and Irene Molina. ‘From Folkhem to Lifestyle Housing in Sweden: Segregation and Urban Form, 1930s–2010s.’ International Journal of Housing Policy, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 316–36. Hall, Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education II. 1904. D. Appleton and Company, 1931. Hall, Tomas, and Sonja Vidén. ‘The Million Homes Programme: A Review of the Great Swedish Planning Project.’ Planning Perspectives, vol. 20, no. 3, 2003, pp. 301–28. Hedén, Birger. ‘Det jämlika tilltalet: Ungdomsboken från 40-tal till 90-tal.’ Läs mig, sluka mig!, edited by Kristin Hallberg, Natur och Kultur, 1998, pp. 161– 80. Hultberg, Ulf, and Behnn Edvinsson. Lotta och daghemmet. Rabén & Sjögren, 1975. Jacobson, Gun. Hela långa dagen. Bonnier, 1973. Isakson, Börje. ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘Vaddå?’ Bonnier, 1974. Kjersén Edman, Lena. I ungdomsrevoltens tid: Svensk ungdomsbok och dess mottagande åren kring 1968. Umeå universitet, 1990. Kåreland, Lena. Inga gåbortsföremål: Lekfull litteratur och vidgad kulturdebatt i 1960- och 70-talens Sverige. Makadam, 2009. Lefebvre, Henri. Le Droit á la ville. Economica-Anthropos, 1968. ———. The Production of Space. 1974. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991. ———. Writings on Cities. Blackwell, 1996. Lundqvist, Ulla. Tradition och förnyelse. Svensk ungdomsbok från sextiotal till nittiotal. Rabén & Sjögren, 1994. Mählqvist, Stefan. Böcker för svenska barn 1870–1950. En kvantitativ analys av barn- och ungdomslitteratur i Sverige. Gidlund, 1977. Peterson, Lars. Snöret. Gidlund, 1978. Purcell, Mark. ‘Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant.’ Geo Journal, vol. 58, 2002, pp. 99–108. Svensson, Ulla. ‘Dödspolare, skuggmän och förlorade fäder. Idyllfobin i ungdomsboken.’ Förankring och förnyelse. Nordiska ungdomsromaner inemot år 2000, edited by Eli Flateval et al., Cappelen Akademisk Forlag, 1999, pp. 107–21. Söderqvist, Elisabeth. Att gestalta välfärd. Från idé till byggd miljö. Formas, 2008.

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Tambling, Jeremy. ‘Prologue: City-Theory and Writing, in Paris and Chicago: Space, Gender, Ethnicity.’ The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, edited by Jeremy Tambling, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 1–22. Vestin, Frances. Handbok i barnindoktrinering. Wahlström och Widstrand, 1969. Widhe, Olle. ‘Counter-Indoctrinations: Radical Childcare Books, Children’s Literature and Children’s Rights in Sweden around ‘68.’ Strenæ: Recherches sur les livres et objets culturels de l’enfance, special issue Le ’68 des enfants/The Children’s ’68, no. 13, 2018, pp. 1–18. Wilson, Peter Lamborn, and Bill Weinberg, editors. Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle in The City and The World. Autonomedia, 1999. Wischmann, Antje. Verdichtete Stadtwahrnehmung. Untersuchungen zum literarischen und urbanistischen Diskurs in Skandinavien 1955–1995. Berliner Wissenschafts-Vlg, 2003. Wistisen, Lydia. Gångtunneln. Urbana erfarenheter i svensk ungdomslitteratur 1890–2010. Ellerströms, 2017.

CHAPTER 10

‘Double Vision’: Viennese Refugees in New York and Back Home Again Joshua Parker

Cities may indeed show their pasts, as Italo Calvino wrote, ‘like the lines of a hand,’ open and waiting to be read by inhabitants, tourists, expatriates, exiles, or new arrivals of whatever kind or clan (11). But personal readings—or literary reinscriptions—of such pre-inscribed urban traces, clear marks though they may seem, are never quite ‘referential duplications,’ but rather, as Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan once suggested, ‘cultural practices of signification’ (5)—practices specific to the reader’s own background, aesthetic, cultural, or national. Such notions can, of course, become quite complex when dealing with a nation, and indeed a city, of immigrants, like the United States and New York City, where the urban past, the cultural baggage of newcomers, and the stereotypical hopes and dreams of new possibilities intersect in a cultural, but also very physical and personal cityscape, of which any literary transcription becomes a process of intersecting layers of the above.

J. Parker (B) University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_10

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The United States offered asylum to some 10,000 Austrians fleeing Europe between 1938 and the Second World War’s end or shortly thereafter, among them a sizeable selection of the 1,200 poets, writers, and journalists who fled through Vienna during those years. Almost all passed, on arrival, through the port of New York. Many remained in Manhattan throughout the war and for decades afterward, with feelings of longing for their home city, as well as mixed feelings of gratitude, amazement, and repulsion towards America’s largest metropolis, a bustling, frantic wartime, then post-war city. Many first experienced New York as the hallmark of modernity, bewildering as much for its armies of automobiles, frenzied pace, soaring towers, and masses of crowds as for its cultural differences from the (until recently) relatively quiet, familiar Vienna they had left behind. New York City’s own German-speaking population, an important part of the city’s urban fabric since the mid-nineteenth century, had largely dispersed by the mid-twentieth century, but of course had left its own cultural traces. Meanwhile, the new, smaller wave of German speakers from Austria found their own pockets of cultural familiarity among themselves. This essay examines several short texts by a few of these authors, highlighting a sort of ‘Double Vision,’ as VienneseAmerican author Walter Abish wrote of the cityscape of New York: a sort of superpositioning of a ‘lost’ Vienna with its traces onto a contemporary Manhattan. Stefan Zweig’s prose essay ‘The Rhythm of New York’ (‘Der Rhythmus von New York,’ 1911), Max Roden’s poems ‘First Days in the House-Mountains’ (‘Erste Tage im Häusergebirge,’ 1959) and ‘In Vienna 1956’ (‘In Wien 1956,’ 1959), Ernst Waldinger’s poems ‘The Skyscraper’ (‘Der Wolkenkratzer,’ 1958) and ‘A Horse in 47th Street’ (‘Ein Pferd in der 47. Straße,’ 1938), and Greta Hartwig-Manschinger’s poem ‘A Man is Homesick’ (‘Ein Mann hat Heimweh,’ 1964) all highlight the extreme and bewildering modernity which New York presented to these authors while at the same time outlining curious resonances with their ‘lost homeland’ of Vienna.1 Often, these works reveal invisible personal traces of their authors’ past physical topographies, brought to light in a new city seemingly by sheer force of will. These authors were, in a very clear sense, a lost generation. While grateful, as novelist Hermann Broch wrote, ‘for a new page’ in America (110), with their books banned in German-speaking lands and the 1 English titles here are all my own translated titles. The texts appear, in slightly different form, in Parker, Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan (2020).

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number of German-speaking Americans themselves dropping after the First World War, they were often left wondering, as Max Roden asked, ‘[a]m I the shepherd of a flock which can still be weighed in words?’ (16). The question was troubling. Though the careers and dreams of such displaced persons were not always, as Roden worried, ‘blossoms in snow’ (15), their work often remained, to quote the title of one of Erich Fried’s volumes of poetry, a body of ‘poetry with no homeland.’ The works discussed here focus on the uncanny links between modern New York City and Vienna, seeking and finding ‘traces’ of one’s own identity there in physical elements and images of the city—identity as Europeans, as refugees, and, finally, as Americans. The five texts discussed below are part of a translation project currently underway with a grant from the Botstiber Foundation, a planned volume bringing together voices previously uncollected and unavailable to English-speaking readers, from a world refugee crisis to which that of our own time can only claim second standing. These voices found a home, much as those of contemporary refugees today, temporary or permanent, in America, when they might otherwise have been extinguished. They often focus on a single city with its multiple spaces: mid-twentieth-century New York, yet focus on that American city as seen through a lens coloured by traces of a city left behind across the Atlantic. Many of the urban spaces they describe would be familiar to readers familiar with contemporary New York City, while the undertones and the ways in which they seek to describe them reveal typically contemporary culturally ‘Viennese’ or ‘Austrian’ ‘shadow stories’ (Lanser), ‘covert plot progression’ (Shen), or other ‘implied stories’ (Friedman, ‘Transnational’ 7) related to their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria. New York City quickly became not only a physical space to which they had quickly to adapt in order to find work and live (and, when they could, write), but also a psychogeography of their own recent experiences, which replayed themselves, sometimes playfully, sometimes traumatically, in new streets, parks, skyscrapers, and urban vistas. My own interest in the project, and in the two dramatically different lenses through which refugees, as both outsiders and insiders, view a new and eventually more familiar environment, began while I was completing a book manuscript on another ‘impossible city’—Berlin as imagined by American authors, often viewing it from America, across two centuries. I had more or less attained fluency in German through my own balancing

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act of living between Istanbul and Berlin for four years, then as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Salzburg while completing the manuscript on American authors’ reworkings of Berlin into their narratives of American identity. While reading British, Canadian, and US American texts on Germany, I had come across a good many interesting but less relevant (for my research) German-speaking authors writing on America, laying them aside. Finishing a final chapter on how the Holocaust resonates in American popular culture and literature today, I was frustrated not to be able to include these German-language narratives in my corpus, since most of the authors were neither US citizens nor writing in English, though they often wrote about their impressions of America and of its relations with Austria, and I wanted to focus on American heterostereotypes of Germany. Meanwhile, working with a colleague, Ralph J. Poole, I had organised a series of conferences in Salzburg and published two volumes on Austrian-American cultural relations from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Reading the final galleys of my manuscript on Americans in Berlin, I had turned back to reading Austrian poetry to clear my mind—poetry that was often short and poignant, which I had collected during the months when my research for the Berlin book was ending. It was poetry that had been filed away for ‘another time when my research on the Holocaust is finished and I can turn to something lighter.’ Because of its brevity, on the surface, it seems an easy place for a non-native speaker to begin reading in a foreign language. And as an undergraduate studying French, my first second language, we had often worked with poetry, so I knew how it can offer a seemingly easy template for understanding how language works, then telescope into the depths of meaning and resonances that expand on rereadings. I had been returning from a last summer of revising the final manuscript for the start of the autumn semester, taking the train into Salzburg in early September 2015. I arrived on the very day that thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, having marched across Hungary towards Vienna, then loaded onto trains and buses, began moving through the train station every day, camped in corridors and in the station’s underground parking garage on cots and blankets, in hopes of getting across the German border. The events had turned the small, staid, and conservative city of 150,000, normally ebbing in its flow of tourists by the end of summer, into a hub of international aid activity. The project literally began there, as I finished the first and moved towards the

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second, unplanned, unpremeditated, but automatic. Surprisingly, mornings, crouched over coffee and volumes in German from the university library, what began as curiosity became an idea for a project, and was also a pleasure, as I read aloud their lines, their rhythm unfolding over my tongue. As it formed in my imagination, the project had from its inception two goals, one direct and the other more tacit: first, to bring into English a body of poetry that might properly be imagined as ‘American literature’ but had for over sixty years been neglected as such (indeed, many of the authors had, by the time they were being published, taken US citizenship) and second, to encourage readers to imagine their own domestic cityscapes as they have been seen in the past by refugees, and how they might be seen by today’s refugees. History, as someone once said, does not repeat itself—but it rhymes. The work evolving, the corpus broadening, I was heartened, as the United States’ borders hardened with Donald Trump’s election as President, at the will and fortitude shown by officials and private citizens in New York City to keep the city true to its historical role of welcoming port for those seeking solace from persecution, those hoping to retain its ‘seawashed, sunset gates,’ and ‘air-bridged harbor’ as the world’s ‘mother of exiles’ (Lazarus). Yet I was also fascinated with the ‘double vision’ which is that of the refugee to any foreign city, in any time, a vision perhaps more extreme—more distorting? or perhaps more clear—than that of the expatriate or that of the tourist. I expect that areas such as narrative theory, psychology, sociology, and literary studies, on both sides of the Atlantic, will have much to show us in this area in the coming years, as several generations of new refugee migrants adapt memories, postmemories, and their own ‘double-visioned’ experiences of new and old homes. Refugees, wrote George Troller, find themselves in an intermediate space bearing refractions of both lands (12). This network of new memories associated with places, as Lore Segal, arriving in New York in 1951 after more than a decade in exile from her hometown of Vienna as a child refugee, imagined, is ‘the way our histories become charged thus upon the air, the streets, the very houses of New York, that makes the alien into a citizen,’ on an island of comforts ‘surrounded on all sides by calamity’ (311). While the authors treated below have often been referred to as ‘exiles,’ their work often underlines their own awareness of their status as political refugees, highlighting their continued emotional ties to Austria, which most still saw and described as ‘home,’ their disorientation in accepting and confronting their new status, and their impressions of

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their new environment. It was ‘especially for writers that exile had been particularly painful,’ Anthony Bushnell writes. Whereas musicians, scientists, architects, painters and many other categories of intellectuals were free – in theory at least – to continue to practise their professions when once established in their new world, writers with few exceptions could not. Their lifeblood was the German language and it was only within a German-speaking world that they, with few exceptions, could ply their trade. (Bushnell 198)

Stefan Zweig, in New York at the same time as his books were being banned (or burned) in occupied countries, described feeling like an actor playing to an empty theatre. But he remained, he told an interviewer for the New York Times Book Review in 1940, a patriot of a foreign land (Van Gelder). I enjoy the ambiguity of his phrase: Was he insisting on his patriotism towards an Austria he had lost, or presenting himself as the steadfast patriot of an America which had yet to extend him citizenship or permanent residency? Zweig arrived in New York City, fleeing England as bombs fell on London, but was already familiar with New York. An already welltravelled and well-known author, he had first visited the city in 1911 as a young man. Here, writing for an Austrian newspaper as a journalist, he described, in florid prose, the modern Manhattan in a short essay entitled ‘The Rhythm of New York.’ Zweig’s essay focuses, ironically, on the Brooklyn Bridge, completed some forty years earlier, thundering with traffic, and with sweeping views of the city. Zweig found Manhattan to be ‘inconceivable as a stable, fixed place, only as movement, as rhythm’ (135). It was also, he noted, a point of contact between modernity and the old-fashioned comforts of European life. Yet this very fact of being a point of contact drew unfathomable masses of humans together in an indistinguishable mass: ‘here the New World’s outermost edge reaches against the Old World; here the human flood faces each other most wildly. And this rhythm of New York is the first manifestation of the whole American attitude toward life’ (136). The city’s bridges themselves become both a metaphor and a real, concrete example of this ‘human flood’ facing each other so wildly: I first felt this rhythm on Brooklyn Bridge. This gigantic arc – from a distance, a delicate network – that in all its vast masses, startles some on the

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first day and after a week seems natural, binds two cities of a million people each, seeming like a symbol of solidity. One stands high on the bridge as if on a mountain peak and gauges a wide landscape with wonder. Both right and left is an immense mass of stones with spiky tips, the skyscrapers, sweeping with a murmur of varied noises on both sides. (136)

Even somewhat ‘outside’ the city, overlooking Manhattan, not a single moment of the crossing is silent: ‘ships constantly twitch from the docks, no second without call or answer in these incomprehensible sounds,’ a veritable language of mechanical ships’ calls, surely full of its own secret meanings, suggesting hints of the mechanised modernity of the city, but also of the experience of any foreigner surrounded by an unfamiliar human language, the background ‘noise’ of any migrant’s early days in a new land. The new arrival yearns, Zweig suggested, ‘to watch all this calmly: but the view is bewildering.’ On one side of the bridge, ‘a train roars by, a second going over it, an automobile whizzes by on the left, here in the middle of the bridge one stands as if between platforms of a train station.’ Meanwhile, crowds of people storm across the footpaths, making the bridge a ‘railroad, street, highway together,’ carrying fifty cars a minute, ringing with noise. ‘[A]rched over the river, one stands on an intersection of ten streets. And it isn’t for one second still: one after another, cars tear by as if hoping to smash into each other, while ever more people press back and forth’ (139). In a sense, New York City held the ambiance of mass, manic human movement that the world itself would feel in the coming decades. Zweig could have had no notion that his visit to the city would be followed, thirty years later, by another visit as a refugee, one of thousands fleeing catastrophe in Europe by any means possible. But his images of Manhattan in 1911 focus repeatedly on mass transit. ‘You want in the subway to ask if you’re in the right station,’ he wrote, but here the mass alone has its will and turns each bystander in two directions. There’s no one standing still, you’re pushed into some car, you don’t know by whom, a chain rattles, a partitioned area falls lower, and then the projectile roars with the hundred, two hundred people in the darkness of the tunnel. Sometimes it stops, people are swung out and pour in as if to and from a vessel, and still swirling in confusion, roars on. Finally on Broadway. You’re ringed with a tangle of men, into which you’re kneaded, and climb up the street. (140)

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Perhaps, if unconsciously, influenced by pre-First World War Futurism’s associations of modernism with violence, such imagery is common again thirty years later among Austrian authors faced with Manhattan’s wildly, often violent, beating rhythms. As in landscapes by painters of New York’s own Ashcan School of the period, human figures themselves become the objects of abstraction in vast cityscapes of machinery and movement. Or even, as in the time-lapse photography of contemporary New York artists like Alfred Stieglitz, human figures become erased or blurred under the camera film’s exposure, while elements of architecture or machinery remain in relative focus. Again in focus, for Zweig, is the seeming chaos of the city’s unending, round-the-clock noise and movement, inhuman, mechanistic. Yet often, unlike the writings of the more distanced temporary tourist or journalist abroad, poetry of the 1940s set here seeks to somehow reconcile one’s own personal identity to this bewildering frenzy—or even simply to maintain one’s own individual consciousness. Such efforts become all the more a struggle in a city where personal space is quite literally reduced, particularly for foreign migrants surviving on reduced or dwindling funds, living in the often cramped spaces available in wartime Manhattan. Max Roden, a theatre and art critic and editor of the Vienna Österreichischen Volkszeitung , born in Vienna in 1881, fled to New York in 1939, serving at the war’s end as a US correspondent for the Wiener Zeitung . Roden’s poem ‘First Days in the House-Mountains’ shows a lyric speaker first struck by the very fact that his refuge from a chaotic flight from Vienna is an apartment on a floor higher than any he had ever seen—in a ‘Häusergebirge’—a mountain range of houses. Yet the uncanny novelty of living in a ‘range of mountains’ of glass and steel holds echoes of the ‘natural’ mountain homeland of Austria itself. As he wrote in 1940, The city seemed very familiar to me. Titanic greed didn’t frighten me. She slung her thick arm over me, And I carried her song in my ear.

Vague, perhaps unwittingly made resonances, but pointed ones, for a poet coming from the land of mountains and music. In a city where ‘streetcanyons steamed heavily,’ the lyric I finds itself ‘tied to the nerves of the city,’ as if Manhattan itself were a great beast that had swallowed him:

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She screamed in me. I screamed in her. She terrified me that way.

An uneasy, breathless symbiosis shifts towards an uneasy merging of personal voice and city itself. It is ‘politically crucial,’ writes Homi Bhabba, to think ‘beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities,’ focusing instead on ‘moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences,’ on ‘“in-between” spaces’ offering a ‘terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity’ (1). This is the struggle laid out in many of these works by Austrian refugees of the period. Initially holding tight to their own ‘originary’ identities as Viennese—an identity easily set in contrast to a starkly different Manhattan yet complicated by their being former citizens of a now-enemy country—they seek confirmation of their identity as Viennese by othering New York. Or, alternately, by seeking, indeed imagining or creating through sheer imaginative willpower, familiar ‘Viennese’ elements in Manhattan through which they can come to terms with being New Yorkers, intimately tied, as Roden writes, ‘to the nerves of the city.’ Ernst Waldinger, born in Vienna in 1896, studied literature and art history, completing a doctoral degree in 1921, and worked for a newspaper, publishing his first poetry in 1924. A co-founder of the Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller [Socialist Writers’ Union], he fled Austria in 1938. In New York, he worked first in an emporium, then as a librarian, and finally as a professor of German literature at Skidmore University. A PEN member, he co-founded the Aurora-Verlag [Aurora Press], which published Austrian authors in exile in Vienna for a largely European readership. As Miguel Herz-Kestranek, Konstantin Kaiser, and Daniela Stringl have suggested, he and other authors published by the press held a curious place in literature for their European readers, who tended, even after the war, and perhaps even more so afterward, to see them as somewhat ‘foreign,’ both for being Jewish and for being expatriates. Waldinger remained in New York City after the war ended, dying there in 1970 (Kauf). His early horrified reactions to the chaos of New York are recorded in his poem ‘The Skyscraper,’ which, like Roden’s poem, describes a ‘house-mountain.’ Long, heavily imaged phrases give the sense of breathlessness of standing in one of Manhattan’s busy streets looking up at its bewildering skyline. Here, the speaker seems to strain at

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the limits of language in order to describe an architecture and the scenes outside it that seem to be in constant motion with a roar of sound, a cityscape rearing up without pause both within the building and without: When in the house-mountain, in the cliffs, Around which the turmoil’s maelstrom surges, From floor to floor the elevator roars and purges, When in the human hives, in the steel ribs With a thousand berths that concrete submerges, From the entrance to the highest copper tower, Round which the choirs of sirens roar, In quickly-filling corridors, The rushing run, the fevered sweep, Hounds itself—oh liberated Hell, Where the work overcooks, while swells Up the universe’s whole greed…

The architecture of the building is intimately linked here to evidence of mass consumerism and commercialism that so shocked many of Waldinger’s counterparts in New York. The image of this massive building is, the speaker suggests, ‘a dream, fantastic as a dream,’ its towering height made up of ‘a thousand dungeon cells […] Drowning in light, which the white gleam / From every pore shoots from the facades […] in twitching cascades’ of glittering-great glass, Laden with streams of greediness; Garishly made-up grandeur, raging light.

Waldinger’s own political views as a socialist seem reflected in his aversion, indeed his horror, towards the signs of American commercialism, so visibly concentrated in Manhattan’s scrolling electric texts, billboards, and neon messages: The scrolling text on the fifth floor burns With giant red letters, breathless Burn the sensations in darkness’ Lap, races and runs and turns With huge red letters, inward sucked And starts anew—a viaduct,

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Shooting its arc over ravines, Just beyond flash elevated trains’ marks, Their windows streaking past each other like sparks, And down from the roof-top restaurant rings The percussion from the chapel noise, lost In the noise of the thundering bus engines.

Waldinger’s verse, like the cityscape itself, scrolls on with hardly a pause in its attempts to suggest the continual movement and noise. One’s eyes, he writes, ‘stumble and, baffled, swim / through space roofs afloat in a stream,’ leaving the viewer dizzied as everything seems to stagger, grows to confusion, Turns and distorts itself, leads to delusion, And seems to extend ad infinitum.

Buildings’ facades ‘sway softly side to side,’ ‘lust rafting to the clouds’ brink.’ Similar imagery opens a poem Waldinger wrote around 1938 on first arriving in New York from Vienna, and published, again, after the war’s end, for a largely European audience in a Viennese press, ‘A Horse in 47th Street.’ Here, broken two-line stanzas almost mimic the sounds of hooves before the horse in question comes in sight: ‘It’s raining, and a river of umbrellas meet. / Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street.’ As in Zweig’s depiction of Manhattan crowds, individual figures melt (here literally liquefied) into mass movements and random, impressionistic bits and pieces of material objects: ‘doors throng, crowded with galoshes: / The sidewalk smells of mackintoshes.’ In a ‘motored chaos’ of traffic, the lone pedestrian focaliser watches ‘Rows of traffic honk from the thick stream’ of the street, responding to no human command, but only to timed electric traffic lights, which are also the only thing allowing human movement through the chaos. Waldinger’s speaker finds himself, much like T.S. Eliot’s speaker in the London of The Waste Land, ‘[s]wept along by waves of men so many –,’ hesitating, finding something ‘foreign’ in the ‘midst of the mechanical blessing-curse’: a familiar scent almost forgotten, the ‘good old smell of horse.’ Almost like a surreal vision in the otherwise mechanised environment, the passer-by comes upon a horse ‘mid the autos’ muddle, / With clumsy hooves, restless muzzle.’

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Did he not nod at me as I did at him likewise? Like me toward him he gazed with tired eyes, As if the question stood dully in his mind: Are you as lonely here as I?

In a New York seemingly populated by machines, cars, and restless, machine-like human traffic, the speaker finds an empathetic space of familiarity in an unexpected encounter with another living, breathing organic being more common in turn-of-the-century Vienna than in mid-century Manhattan, as out of place as the speaker feels himself here, and thus a vital point of contact. Both expatriated speaker and horse, it seems, are miserably out of place in this churning, modernised city and have a short moment to commiserate the fact together in a silent nod. Susan Stanford Friedman once observed that ‘[s]tories generated by intercultural encounters invite a strong shift in our reading strategies from a desire-centered, temporal paradigm that dominates much narrative theory to a more spatially oriented framework.’ Such ‘intercultural narratives’ tend to ‘foreground space and movement through space rather than time,’ as space ‘often functions as trope for cultural location’ of identity (Mappings 137). Friedman argues that intercultural relations cannot be narrativised as temporal developments, since any cultural encounter is a synchronic ‘event.’ With this in mind, spatial movement—here between cities—can serve as a trope for the passing of time and for cultural location of the self. The last two poems I want to touch on here involve not the exile’s discovery of uncannily familiar elements of the unfamiliar urban landscape, but of return to the city of one’s birth after the disorienting experience of living in New York. The speakers of the poems realise, only in returning ‘home’ that, while their identity as Viennese seemingly managed to remain stable by finding familiar elements in New York and fixating on them, they themselves have undergone an irreversible personal change while ‘abroad,’ a change in urban identity only visible in the presence of the ‘home’ city. While in New York, notions and memories of Vienna preserved them; faced with the physical city itself, they are freed from their identification with it and freed from their memories of it. Though Max Roden returned to Vienna after the war as a visitor, he was never again to call it home, dying in New York in 1968, having made a life there. His ‘In Vienna 1956’ describes the refugee’s return to the city of his birth, now as a tourist and no longer as a native:

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Now here I am, from where I’d sprung, as over me a black cloud hung.

Writing, again, for a primarily Austrian (or at least German-speaking European) audience, Roden (whose original family name had been Rosenzweig), makes no explicit references to his reasons for leaving Vienna here, but we can certainly imagine that the ‘black cloud’ he escaped in fleeing to New York in 1939 as a Jew was political. The poem, simple, with a seemingly happy, playful ending, points no judgemental finger at Nazism or the black uniforms that had marched into Vienna’s streets in 1938, but only comments on how this ‘cloud’ had lain ‘over / both man and house,’ allowing no light to escape it. Post-Second World War Vienna, only just de-occupied by US armed forces the previous year in 1955, is now again a space where he can move freely, as time has now, he writes, closed ‘the circle / round mourning and prayer.’ The release of the individual spared fascism’s machinery is a quiet urban victory, and certainly a space of regained possibility, yet Roden’s poem remains modest in describing these new possibilities of freedom here simply as the speaker’s no longer being ‘hemmed in’ by this cloud, ‘Set free, spared,’ to ‘roam from street to alley.’ Roden’s speaker here finds, in a Vienna clearly still bearing traces of the war a decade after its close, and tight with memories of his own travails there prior to his flight from the city, his own memories hanging like smoke above the contemporary cityscape. It is only with the prayer-like incantation ‘Time passed./Time flies,’ punctuated with definitive periods like the lines of a spell, that a circle closes with the passage of realised time, as he seems to adjust his own internal clock to the passage of years. This closing of the circle, like the hands of a clock passing the hour from one day to the next, frees the speaker from his traumatic memories of a city that once hemmed him in with its rustling black swastikas. This internal realisation of the passage of time, which necessitates a physical return to the ‘home’ city, affords him physical freedom of movement, as he becomes a flâneur, liberty and freedom here symbolised and illustrated by physical liberty in urban space. The recuperation of the cityscape is enacted by ‘free’ movement through its spaces, or from the public spaces of ‘streets’ into the smaller, perhaps more personal ‘alleys.’ In a sense,

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what Vienna had come to represent for him and for those of his generation, as a site of collective trauma, loses its hold on him as he puts himself in contact with its more intimate contemporary spaces. The last poem I want to discuss, Greta Hartwig-Manschinger’s humorous ‘A Man is Homesick,’ again describes the experience of a return to the ‘lost city’ of one’s youth as an older adult, and of the strange, almost hallucinatory sensation of seeing what is remembered of the urban fabric transformed by one’s own experience abroad during the intervening years. The poem was collected in a volume edited by another Austrian refugee poet, Mimi Grossberg, who had likewise settled and remained in New York, but published in Vienna. Like many of the other poems in Grossberg’s anthology, Hartwig-Manschinger’s had likely been previously published in one of the small, short-lived German-language immigrant newspapers or magazines in New York, or at least circulated privately among fellow poets and friends in Manhattan. But one can imagine its obvious interest for Austrian readers of the 1960s, with its references to elements of Vienna’s cityscape. Still, its primary intended narrative audience seems to be a reader familiar with both early postwar Vienna and New York City. Hartwig-Manschinger, born in Vienna in 1899, composed radio shows and cabaret texts, before fleeing to New York in 1940, where she went on to write novels and opera librettos. Though she visited Vienna in later life as a tourist, she made the United States her home, dying in Florida in 1971. Her poem’s narrator, a Viennese exile stranded in unfamiliar New York, opens with a stalwart lament and a pat notion of stereotypical American optimism: The homeland lost, the dreams depart; I’ve borne it, I think, like a man. I’ve begun my life again from the start; New York is the melting pot where you can.

The first stanza describes a personal strategy for coping with the unfamiliar city: by simply imagining all its unfamiliar elements and locations replaced or laid over by their familiar counterparts in Vienna, creating just the sort of ‘double vision’ described by Abish: When I’m homesick, I imagine I find my Coca-Cola’s a glass of wine, that Woolworth’s aisles are Herzmansky’s window shows

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that in the Hudson valley the Danube flows. Isn’t Hector’s a Ring café? and the East Side, Franz Josef Kai? And Times Square’s the Stefansplatz and the drug store counter girl my Schatz; at Grand Central Station, I’d put the Westbahn in at the Statue of Liberty, the Spinnerin, and the Bronx Zoo is my Schönbrunn, where the ape scratches himself in the afternoon. When I’m homesick, I imagine it so and then I don’t feel quite so alone.

‘Homesick’ for Vienna’s most famous Jewish-owned department store, the speaker finds comforts in a Manhattan Woolworth’s. Missing the Danube’s banks, he finds comfort in gazing at the Hudson River, and imagines a traditional New York Meatpacking District diner is a café on Vienna’s Ring. The bustling centre of Times Square might, in the right light, if one squints, offer a glimpse of Vienna’s central square, and perhaps the two cities’ train stations and zoos are interchangeable. The speaker compares the Statue of Liberty to a medieval Viennese monument, named for the wife of a crusader awaiting the return of her husband, which brings to mind the theme of war and the patience needed to wait for the return to normalcy afterward (and of return home from distant lands). The tactic of replacement becomes almost a personal language of the city’s features, which can be practised privately. And yet, the narrator finds, once learned and mastered, this tactic itself becomes more powerful than the actual urban elements in play, as the poem’s second stanza reverses this process of urban familiarisation through mirroring, bewilderingly transposing elements of New York onto Vienna. The speaker goes on to describe saving money for a return to Vienna for a brief holiday, only, on arriving, to find ‘everything is different’ in Vienna, as, having the longed-for familiar city finally before him again, he now ironically finds himself homesick instead for New York: But everything was different, city, people and stride, it was strange! New York ran through my thoughts in rotation. I’m homesick! And so I want mine to be a Coca-Cola, not wine; a Woolworth’s where Herzmansky stands, a Hudson where the Danube wends,

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a Hector’s, not a Ring café, and the East Side, not Franz Josef Kai; a Times Square instead of Stefansplatz and a drug store counter girl as my Schatz. Westbahnhof sits where Grand Central should have been! Lady Liberty instead of the Spinnerin! A Bronx Zoo instead of Schönbrunn, where they scratch themselves in the afternoon! This change—I just don’t get it. Oh— Vienna, why’d you let me go!

‘Let go’ by Vienna, the speaker realises perhaps this tactic or symbolic personal language of place, once mastered, has become not just a familiarising tactic, but an irreversible process affecting his own identity. In making the unfamiliar familiar, he has rendered the formerly familiar uncannily unfamiliar. If, in travelling abroad, one finds one’s own familiar urban spaces displaced, in staying abroad, Hartwig-Manschinger’s speaker finds himself unwittingly connected himself to his own ‘imagined model of connection with an Other—a model of the self whose outlines are clarified by othering parts of its own internal machinery’ (Lafon 195, my translation). For already established writers like Zweig and Waldinger, exile abroad was also an exile from the full use of their own native language, and certainly from their already established readerships. Yet for younger writers like Hartwig-Manschinger, Manhattan was a space of possibilities. While immigration broke their ties to families and friends and all that was familiar, displacement also offered, for many, a chance to explore their own identities as poets and presented a fascinating topography begging for poetic description. As Michel de Certeau surmised, detours ‘through distant places’ produce ‘precisely the body of legends [. . .] lacking in one’s own vicinity’ (107), and New York ironically allowed an exploration or projection of their own inner emotional topographies, whether it meant mapping elements of a distant ‘home town’ to a bewilderingly unfamiliar new cityscape, establishing points of connection in seemingly random urban elements, or instead reasserting one’s own identity by forcefully othering their new environments. It might be useful, in reading such poetry, to remember that Freud’s own first notion of the unconscious was developed during a stroll through a foreign city (Armstrong 112–13).

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Poems like these offer readers a glimpse at the experiences of refugees who found their way to Manhattan some eighty years ago during a refugee crisis not so very dissimilar to that the world is watching and experiencing today. They also show New York City itself in a light perhaps often unrecognised by the average US citizen: that of the exile or refugee, coming to terms in his or her own verbal language, with the visual language or semiotics of a city utterly unfamiliar and bewildering—yet somehow, if searched carefully enough, bearing traces of ‘home’—or rather, allowing them to project and concretise their notions of home, with all the unconscious cultural baggage the term carries. This essay has focused on Viennese writers transposed to Manhattan in the midtwentieth century. But such a dynamics is, even now, in our own age, taking place across the globe.

Works Cited Abish, Walter. Double Vision. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719– 1900. Columbia UP, 2006. Barnes, Trevor J., and James S. Duncan. ‘Introduction: Writing Worlds.’ Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, edited by Trevor J. Barnes, and James S. Duncan, Routledge, 1992, pp. 1–17. Broch, Hermann. ‘Dank für ein Leeres Blatt.’ 1942. Gedichte. Rhein-Verlag, 1953, p. 110. Bushell, Anthony. ‘Many Happy Returns? Attitudes to Exile in Austria’s Literary and Cultural Journals in the Early Post-War Years.’ ‘Immortal Austria?’ Austrians in Exile in Britain, edited by Charmian Brinson et al., Rodopi, 2007, pp. 197–209. Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984. Fried, Erich. 100 Gedichte ohne Vaterland. 1978. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993. Friedman, Susan S. Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton UP, 1998. ———. ‘Towards a Transnational Turn in Narrative Theory: Literary Narratives, Traveling Tropes, and the Case of Virginia Woolf and the Tagores.’ Narrative, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–32. Hartwig-Manschinger, Greta. ‘Ein Mann hat Heimweh.’ Kleinkunst aus Amerika, edited by Mimi Grossberg, Europäischer Verlag, 1964, p. 43.

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Herz-Kestranek, Miguel, et al. ‘Einleitung.’ In welcher Sprache träumen Sie? Österreichische Exillyrik. Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft, 2007. Kauf, Robert. ‘Ernst Waldinger.’ Deutschsprachige Exilliteratur seit 1933. Band 2, Teil 2: New York, edited by J.M. Spalek and J. Strelka, Francke Verlag, 1989, pp. 985–96. Lafon, Henri. Espaces romanesques du XVIIIe siècle 1670–1820: De Madame de Villedieu à Nodier. P Universitaires de France, 1997. Lanser, Susan. ‘“The Shadow Knows”: Negative Plotting and Feminist Thought.’ 2nd ENN Conference, 10–11 March 2011, University of Southern Denmark. Keynote Lecture. Lazarus, Emma. ‘The New Colossus.’ Handwritten sonnet, U.S. Library of Congress, 1883. Parker, Joshua. Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan, edited by Günter Bischof, U of New Orleans P, 2020. Roden, Max. ‘Erste Tage im Häusergebirge.’ Tod und Mond und Glas: Neue Gedichte. Bergland Verlag, 1959, p. 19. ———. ‘Hirt Ohne Herde.’ Tod und Mond und Glas: Neue Gedichte. Bergland Verlag, 1959, p. 16. ———. ‘In Wien 1956.’ Tod und Mond und Glas: Neue Gedichte. Bergland Verlag, 1959, p. 49. Segal, Lore. Other People’s Houses. 1958. The New Press, 1994. Shen, Dan. Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction: Covert Progressions behind Overt Plots. Routledge, 2013. Troller, Georg Stefan. Wohin und zurück: Die Axel-Corti-Trilogie. Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft, 2009. Van Gelder, Robert. ‘The Future of Writing in a World at War.’ New York Times Book Review, 28 July 1940, p. 2. Waldinger, Ernst. ‘Der Wolkenkratzer.’ Zwischen Hudson und Donau: Ausgewählte Gedichte. Bergland Verlag, 1958, pp. 6–8. ———. ‘Ein Pferd in der 47. Straße.’ 1938. Zwischen Hudson und Donau: Ausgewählte Gedichte. Bergland Verlag, 1958, pp. 9–10. Zweig, Stefan. ‘Der Rhythmus von New York.’ 1911. Stefan Zweig Auf Reisen: Feuilletons und Berichte, edited by Knut Beck, S. Fischer Verlag, 2004, pp. 135–43.

CHAPTER 11

Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image and Experience Jason Finch

Introduction The concept of utopia is often opposed to that of reality. The cultural geographer David Pinder, however, argues that utopian thinking can work practically by ‘extending and realising the possible through struggling for what seems impossible’ (abstract). Specifically, Pinder works with ‘utopian perspectives’ that emerge in the urban writing of Henri Lefebvre, developing the latter’s assertion that city residents in general have a ‘right to the city.’ This chapter applies such thinking to an urban zone conceptualised using Bart Keunen’s notion of ‘urban states of matter’: that which developed in the twentieth century era of automobility in earlyurbanised zones of western Europe. As Keunen points out, ‘late-modern “post-industrial” urbanity’ in post-war western Europe, particularly mass automobile ownership but also large-scale motorised public transport, led to a ‘gas-like state’ contrasting with earlier relationship between cities and

J. Finch (B) Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_11

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their surroundings, spawning urban areas ‘in which the division between the city and the countryside is not clearly visible’ (28). Pinder’s sense of utopia as expansion of possibility connects the critical act carried out by this chapter with the representation of the UK’s West Midlands region in the work centrally analysed here, Lynsey Hanley’s memoir and polemic Estates: An Intimate History. This book was first published in 2007 and then updated twice in the decade after its first publication to take political and other changes into account. In Estates, Hanley describes her own upbringing on the Chelmsley Wood estate east of Birmingham, the second biggest city in the UK by population and by far the largest urban centre in the West Midlands. Pinder argues that contemporary thinking about cities among planners and in the social sciences requires ‘greater openness to questions about imagination, desire and dreams alongside the more sober analysis with which urban studies has been more comfortable’ (‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 31). This requires ‘critical analysis itself to open up to the possible and what could be’ (31). Marxist thinkers such as David Harvey and Lefebvre’s student Manuel Castells regarded Lefebvre negatively as a proponent of ‘millenarist utopias’ who was, on Pinder’s summary, ‘too detached from empirical matters’ (Smith xvi–xvii; Castells qtd. in Pinder, ‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 31). Pinder aims to rescue Lefebvre from such a charge. He hopes, in the process, to enable critical geographers to appreciate the role of utopian thinking in progressive social change. Such an argument is rooted in the history of urban thinking, which has always involved a dialogue between ideals—or visions—and more earthly or material realities. As Balasopoulos shows, notions of the ideal city developed in the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Ancient Greek efforts to ‘think the ideal city’ (18). The latter consisted ‘of both an ontological and political investment in absolute unity and unchanging stability and a coming to terms with the impossibility of realizing this desire’ (18). Lefebvre’s post-1968 view of the ‘urban revolution’ and Pinder’s advocacy of it in the 2010s reveal the operation in urban modernity of the dialectic Balasopoulos outlines: between a necessarily desired perfection and its necessary impossibility. Crucially, this dialectic, which Pinder calls ‘the possible-impossible’ (‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 33), functions as a driver of actual change. Urban modernity, for Lefebvre, is marked by a reversal of the earlier relationship between the rural and the urban: in it, the urban, not the rural, has become the human norm, almost a universal (Urban Revolution 3–4, 13–15). Searching for ‘a humanising urbanism,’

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Pinder finds Lefebvre’s attitude of openness especially appealing. Lefebvre’s advocacy of openness in urban thinking, which he calls utopian, stands opposed to a view common after the heyday of modernism in architecture and planning in which utopian thinking was not only seen as unrealistic but also linked to ‘dangerous authoritarianism’ (‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 30, 32; see also Hall). Instead, Pinder argues, ‘utopias […] can embody desires for better futures through insistence that these futures are radically open, that different ways of organising urban space are imaginable and potentially realisable’ (ibid.). Ultimately, Pinder rejects the notion of utopia as ‘complete break and discontinuity’ (‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 43). This recalls Classical and medieval accounts of ideal cities, which kept them in dialogue with reality (Balasopoulos 18, 26–27). In relation to this stance of hopefulness, it would be right to confess a great deal of scepticism about any very optimistic view of the UK council estate. The term ‘council estate’ is still used in the UK to describe larger or smaller territories of social housing typically built between 1920 and 1975. Until the 1980s, the land and buildings of almost all were owned by the local authority or, municipality—colloquially, ‘the council.’ Many suffered from a long-term lack of maintenance and practices of concentrating the poorest or most anti-social tenants together. In 2020, it would seem near-impossible for residents of estates to gain ownership of the estate as a fuller environment: over the world beyond their own front doors and (if they have them) front gardens. The environment in this context means both the estate itself as bounded (and stigmatised) territory, and the national, transnational or even global economic and political systems in which the individual estate is embedded. It may seem impossible that the estate, both spatially and socially peripheral, could become central in notions of urbanity. Yet, in a sense, it must. After all, it is the excluded portion that threatens the areas, such as Birmingham’s city centre, resurgent and pedestrianised in the late 2010s, which cast themselves as more properly and fully urban. The estate is the ‘dangerous supplement’ of Derrida as reawakened in a literary urban context because of its continued exclusion from view while it remains home to concentrated deprivation (Derrida 141–64; Balasopoulos 22). Alongside Hanley, the chapter’s view of the West Midlands region as represented and experienced is enriched by the use of another cultural representation. This is a set of photographs taken in 1990–1991 by Robert Clayton of Lion Farm, an estate on the opposite periphery of

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the region from the one earlier inhabited by Hanley and written about by her.1 Clayton’s photographs were taken at a time when six of the ten tower blocks built as the most visible section of Lion Farm in the 1960s were about to be demolished. In the 2010s, Clayton self-published his photographs of Lion Farm as a book, entitled Estate. His images, which aestheticised Lion Farm as a chilly place against which the fiercely quotidian and colourful lives of starkly isolated residents, alone or in small groups, stood out, now gained a new quality as pristine relics of a lost age, that of 1980s council estate life. A further layer was provided by Clayton’s marketing of the book. On his website, Lion Farm Estate, Clayton presents a 2015 film by the English writer and filmmaker Jonathan Meades which reads Clayton’s photographs as a sort of elegy for the UK estate. Meades’s film would appear to be something between a documentary—such as the very personal televisual tours of architectural sites which made him famous in Britain from the early 1990s onwards—and a promotional film publicising Clayton’s photographs and book. In this chapter, Hanley’s writing and Clayton’s photographs are put alongside evidence I gained in a piece of fieldwork: an October 2018 solo walk from a railway station to the estate photographed by Clayton in 1990–1991 then to the city centre of Birmingham (about seven miles or 11.2 kilometres east of Lion Farm). Could walking the estate be a liberating act? Or is a suggestion like that merely patronising? In any case, academic methodologies now exist in the humanities with the capability to structure creative acts so that they become tools for investigating place, for example in the creative turn taken by some human geographers (Ward). A walk can be a deliberate and creative act. Executing pre-planned walks with particular objectives, artistic or academic, throws abstractions and structural aspects of the nation-state such as city regions into dialogue with the unexpected: the weather on a particular day; random encounters; affective dimensions of the places encountered. Pinder detects in the artistic walking projects of Francis Alÿs, for instance an ‘evocative engagement with the multiplicity of rhythms, trajectories, and narratives that constitute urban spaces, an engagement that works against these being smoothed over or dragooned into step through processes of capitalist urban transformation’ (‘Errant Paths’ 689). I do not want to make excessive claims for my own walk 1 The coordinates of Lion Farm are 52°29’33.1”N 2°02’00.0”W, and Chelmsley Wood, much bigger in area, centres approximately on 52°28’42.2”N 1°44’02.2”W.

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through the West Midlands. It was, after all, just a walk, on an English sunny autumn weekday, at a particular historical moment. Yet it adds a layer to the analysis. By placing oneself, as a researcher, in situ, possibilities are encountered and brought forth that would not appear otherwise. The method taken here combines materials and activities: reading Hanley as both literary text and political intervention; interpreting and historicising Clayton’s photographs; treating Meades’s account of them as a secondary source and a primary one; walking to Lion Farm, around it and then to the city centre of which it is a sort of satellite. Through it, Keunen’s mapping of the gas-like urbanity created in regions such as the West Midlands during the twentieth century becomes more meaningful. A multiple layering that is both physical and imaginative comes into view. In the terms of Deep Locational Criticism, the approach is thus ‘literary-archaeological’ (Finch, Deep Locational Criticism 93–118, 192 s.v. archaeology). Lion Farm and Chelmsley Wood, as indicated by the words ‘Farm’ and ‘Wood’ in the place names created for them by city planners, share a buried, non-urban past. They project rurality as much as they project urbanity. Both occupy land that until the mid-twentieth century was always rural rather than urban. The estates thus represent incredibly fresh urbanity compared to the inner portions of Birmingham, which was itself only a small market town until the late eighteenth century. Pinder may have emphasised ‘the possible-impossible’ with geographers not necessarily open to ‘imagination, desire and dreams’ in mind, but the concept is also promising in literary studies of urbanity, as modelled in this volume overall (‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 31, 33).

Historical and Regional Setting Keunen’s account of late modern urban states of matter was shaped to explain cities ‘not so big and great’ as the likes of Paris: ‘regional metropolises’ among them (21). This model applies particularly well to the UK’s West Midlands region and cultural representations of it. The West Midlands is a networked, multipolar region with nevertheless a clearly major city at its centre. This is an underrepresented region, not often figuring in the UK’s representations of itself and, when it does, often treated dismissively or as laughable (Finch, ‘Comic Novel, City Novel’). West Midlanders’ right to the city, on the terms of Lefebvre, includes the fact that their experiences deserve the same degree of interest and respect as do those of New Yorkers, Berliners or Global South city

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residents. Within the West Midlands and other UK regions, the same right needs extending to people living in the lowest status and most stigmatised sector of the region’s housing: large housing estates built on urban peripheries during the twentieth century. Perhaps more than in any other UK urban area during the twentieth century, municipal leaders applied utopian and modernist planning principles based on visions of ideal or dramatically improved cities to transform the city of Birmingham and its environs. The Greater Birmingham Act was passed by Parliament in May 1911 turning Birmingham overnight into the second-largest city in England as it surpassed Liverpool in population by annexing large areas of what had been rural Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Later in the century, as the City Engineer and Surveyor of the city between 1935 and 1965, Sir Herbert Manzoni used the Town and Country Planning Acts of 1944 and 1947 to implement ‘on a truly massive scale’ what he had proposed in his 1939 book The Production of Fifty Thousand Municipal Houses (Caulcott). Administratively, the area covered by the city of Birmingham trebled between 1891 and 1931, and the incorporated lands were largely filled with roads and houses between the 1920s and the 1960s (Stephens). What fuelled this massive and deliberate urban expansion was utopian thinking. In August 1905, a deputation from Birmingham City Council led by John Sutton Nettlefold went to Germany to see the application of the so-called ‘town extension plan’ (James). Nettlefold headed the City Council’s recently-established housing committee. He returned with the view that a city corporation should own as much land as it possibly could (Yelling 482). The enlargement of the city became a goal for Nettlefold, who aimed at Birmingham ‘gaining land around the periphery that the city could utilize to create low-density private housing on cheap land’ (James 2013). Nettlefold was aware of, but unconvinced by, the garden suburb movement associated with Ebenezer Howard. A few years earlier, Howard (17) had proposed in Garden Cities of To-Morrow the creation of a city containing ‘no smoke’ and ‘no slums.’ For Howard, ‘a better environment and provision of amenities was to be merely one product of a web of individual and collective activities and voluntary associations which would bind the community together’ (Yelling 482). Nettlefold sought instead large-scale commercial development of housing districts by private developers. On his model, this would be enabled by the city corporation’s acquisition of large tracts in what had been rural areas surrounding Birmingham (James). Thus, the origin of the land-grab which would

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later make the construction of Lion Farm and Chelmsley Wood possible was not in visionary thinking built around conceptions of ideal cities (on one definition, utopian thinking). Instead, it lay in an alternative to that, namely a capitalist belief in government’s limited ability to make the conditions available for development by private investors who would be the direct bringers of change. Nettlefold was a municipal official and Howard an independent reformer and writer, but they were driven by related impulses. In the words of Peter Hall, ‘the concerns of […] pioneers’—like both Howard and Nettlefold—‘arose, objectively enough, from the plight of the millions of poor trapped in the Victorian slums,’ people pitied but also feared by such reformers, ‘obsessed’ as they were ‘with the barely suppressed reality of violence and the threat of insurrection’ (7). But there were differences. For one thing, Nettlefold was much less of a visionary than Howard. Visionary approaches to city planning often begin by talking about a city that does not exist yet, whether created by the mind of, say, an architect or by framing it in a literary form such as the dream or voyage narrative, then use this imaginary city to intervene in real life. Lion Farm and Chelmsley Wood, by contrast, were created at the far extremes of the city expanded by the Nettlefold land-grab near the beginning of the century. They are continuations of that, formed as part of the housing-driven aggression of later leaders such as Manzoni. In The Production of Fifty Thousand Houses , Manzoni imagined the reshaping of the city on a model provided by the mass production of cars. Automobile production at Longbridge on Birmingham’s south-western periphery had been massively successful from the mid-1920s onwards under Herbert Austin, manufacturer of the Austin Seven, Britain’s first mass-market car. Manzoni proposed the same model for housing.

Other of the City or Its Essence? Lynsey Hanley and the Estate Lynsey Hanley’s memoir and nonfiction polemic Estates unfolds via an autobiographical narrative. The author portrays herself as someone raised on one main type of UK estate who later lived on the other. As a child, Hanley lived in the expansive, peripheral and low-rise Chelmsley Wood, built as slum clearance by the City of Birmingham. Later, as a young writer-researcher, she gained a ‘toehold on the property ladder’

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as a lease-holding, mortgage-paying flat-owner in an East London innercity development including high-rise blocks, the stereotypical dangerous concrete jungle whereas Chelmsley Wood was an extended world of ‘anonymity and conformity’ made up of cul-de-sacs and paths (Hanley 34, 202). The first chapter of Estates is a long, rich account of revisiting Chelmsley Wood about a decade after the author-narrator’s departure for London, aged eighteen. It combines political history, personal memory and an account of a walk through ‘the Wood’ as it appeared in the mid-2000s. Hanley’s book has frequently been mentioned in the extensive sociological and activist literature on the UK estate and the British working class (e.g. among numerous others Back 828; McKenzie 206–7; Reay 159). The constitution and nature of the working class in Britain have generated much controversy in the era of austerity after 2010 with a great deal of intensity added following the 2016 Brexit referendum. In these accounts, Hanley’s book supplies terms for use in conceptualising the estate and estate lives. These terms, like ‘psycho-social bruise’ as the result of coming from an estate, or ‘estatism,’ are not actually applied by the sociologists, rather they seem like anecdotal support to their arguments. Scholars of literature and drama in the same period have investigated council estate fictions and stage dramas (Cuming; Bell and Beswick). So far, however, no scholar has attempted a literary close reading of Hanley’s book. Read as a literary text, the generic status of Estates emerges: it is both memoir and polemic, growing from a British social observation and cultural studies tradition that earlier contained George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Peer (1937) and Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957). In Estates, Hanley moves from the nuanced and thoughtful place writing of its first chapter to a journalistic narrative of what is presented as the rise and fall of council housing in the UK during the twentieth century (50–147). Her two chapters in this section both refer in their titles to the concept of the slum: ‘The End of the Slums’ is followed by ‘Slums in the Sky.’ Here, Hanley argues that while the concept of the slum came into existence to protest what seemed outrageous and shameful in the wealthy but deeply unequal Victorian city, and ultimately to remove it, the largescale construction of estates in the twentieth century led simply to a new form of slum. This is followed by a final group of chapters attempting diagnosis and action (148–233). These build on Hanley’s presentation of her own experiences in Tower Hamlets, East London, on an estate where ‘the kids are going nowhere fast, and they know it,’ leading them to rev

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up cars pointlessly outside the writer’s window, where there also form groupings of gamblers, street drinkers and drug dealers: The betting shop’s concrete awning, directly to the right of the door, shelters a six-strong array of harmless drunks day and night, but also young men in pastel tracksuits who circle the dead space outside, following the same pattern as the swooping seagulls who have followed the smell of cod and chips up the Thames. (187)

These doubtful characters ‘talk in code’; they are ‘up to something, and it so happens that they do their something between my front door and the Londis grocery twenty paces away, where I need to get my milk’ (187– 88). Hanley’s account of the neighbourhood resembles literary and filmic dystopias. Yet here, in ‘more hostile an environment than any in which I’ve ever lived’ (188), Hanley and some of her neighbours begin to act together. They vote on the future of the estate, and in the action group, lease-holding owner-occupiers like Hanley herself and council tenants serve together. Overall, Hanley portrays the council estate as simultaneously a dangerous and abnormal site in UK social thinking, and also somewhere both uninteresting and peripheral in relation to most notions of urbanity. Yet in her account of it, the estate also comes across as the central fact in the social life of the UK since the Second World War. Recalling the Derridean concept of supplement once more, it becomes a sort of other to the urbanism of the twenty-first century. Following 1960s and 1970s writing by the likes of Jane Jacobs, Lefebvre and Richard Sennett, a new generation of urbanists proposed the revitalisation of downtowns and inner-city areas with longer histories and variegated architectural fabrics (Jacobs; Lefebvre, Urban Revolution; Sennett). Hanley seeks to defend estate dwellers from what Loïc Wacquant calls ‘territorial stigmatization,’ as part of a ‘new regime of marginality’ emergent in Europe and the USA from the 1970s to the 2000s (and exacerbated since Wacquant and Hanley wrote). The examples of social housing most prominent in early twenty-first-century UK urban debates were estates in or next to city centres, particularly those most threatened by neo-liberal financialisation and gentrification in zones like inner London. Examples include accounts of the demolition of the Aylesbury and Heygate Estates in Southwark, and the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington which killed 72 people (Campkin; Lees; MacLeod).

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A danger in Hanley’s approach is that of conflating places and social phenomena that are actually different from each other under the heading or label of ‘estate.’ After all, in the book she brings together the experience of living in a brutalist block in inner East London surrounded by extremely antisocial behaviour, crime and physical threat, with a childhood living in a house with a garden, in which her father went to work wearing a tie. He was a wages clerk for Birmingham City Council (Hanley 3). When as an adult Hanley visits her parents, still living in Chelmsley Wood, and writes of the experience, neighbours’ respectable new cars are parked in a peaceful cul-de-sac outside (25). She identifies herself as an estate person, even though, as an adult, she is an owner-occupier who has made a financial investment in the East London estate and is therefore even an early-stage gentrifier of it, and even though it gradually becomes apparent that her upbringing was considerable more middle class than that of most dwellers in ‘the Wood.’ Hanley’s claim is that an ‘apartheid’ exists dividing estates and estate dwellers in the UK from owner-occupiers (17). Her analysis concentrates on a binary division between the two. For instance, she notes how boundary changes have made the largely suburban, owneroccupier borough of Solihull responsible for Chelmsley Wood, built by Birmingham City Council for rehoused city people: Since 1980, the Wood has been controlled – neatly and effectively, but with the same air of mortification displayed by the archetypal snob Hyacinth Bucket whenever her slovenly brother Onslow comes to visit in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances – by the more affluent Solihull metropolitan borough council. It refers to its unrepentant problem child as ‘North Solihull.’ (Hanley 17)

In remarking that ‘to anybody who doesn’t live on one (and to some who do), the term “council estate” means hell on earth,’ Hanley might seem to resemble Victorian and Edwardian slum explorers in London such as William Booth, Jack London and C.F.G. Masterman who claimed that they were doing something akin to journeying through darkest Africa (5). Such writers exoticised the zones they wrote about. But the relationship between Chelmsley Wood and the rest of Solihull, or between the estate overall and the rest of the UK, viewed more prosaically, is an example of what Pinder, developing Lefebvre, identifies as minimal differentiation: ‘the expression of existing individual and group identities’ rather than of

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much richer and more plural possible lives (‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 34). Hanley conceives this differentiation through the notion of ‘The Wall in the Head,’ the title of Chapter 4 of the book (148–84). She draws this notion from post-unification Germany but argues that it exists equally for working-class Britons, whose task becomes to ‘find a crack in it and whittle out a little escape route’ (Hanley 149).

Weaving a Web Around Lion Farm: Robert Clayton and Jonathan Meades In 1990 and 1991, hearing that six of the ten tower blocks on the Lion Farm estate west of Birmingham in Oldbury, West Midlands, were about to be demolished, Robert Clayton went there with his camera. The site is as far west of central Birmingham as Chelmsley Wood is to the east. It was built for the local authority by the building company George Wimpey ‘in their traditional red-brick style’ from 1960 to 1964, ‘on land reclaimed from old mine workings’ (Grindrod). Indeed, both Lion Farm and Chelmsley Wood are formally outside the present-day boundaries of the City of Birmingham. These estate territories represent a living legacy of Nettlefold’s civic expansionism and the road-building plus decanting of people from the inner city promoted by Manzoni later in the twentieth century. Taken together, Clayton’s photographs and Meades’s film built around them form a more complex unity than Hanley’s book, as an account of the UK estate that is both an artistic representation and a critique of national policy and attitudes. The photographs, and the pairing of them with the words and voice of Meades in the film, help understanding of the estate as a phenomenon but are multiple texts in their own right: Clayton’s photographs are themselves a text; Meades’s film another. The images stand alone, but also become illustrations of Meades’s views about the UK estate overall. The complex of words and images created around Lion Farm by Clayton and Meades share with Hanley’s account of Chelmsley Wood a status as both site of personal memory and representative site. All of the artistic and activist creators of these works place West Midlands localities—and their ‘gas-like’ region, to recall Keunen—into dialogue with the idea of the estate in the UK, including the stark division identified by Hanley with estate people on one side and owner-occupiers on the other. In Hanley’s case, this dialogic treatment happens both through the historical narrative of ‘The End of the Slums’ giving way to new ‘Slums

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in the Sky,’ and in the relationship between ‘the Wood’ and its partner seen as if in a hall of mirrors, the author-narrator’s East London estate with its concrete and drug dealers. Seen in isolation from Meades’s commentary, Clayton’s photographs hint at a harsh and bleak sort of kitsch as the estate’s key characteristic. The colour palette is striking, flat and matt, yet containing hard pale reds and greens. And yet they also give the landscape of the estate an atmosphere that is both deeply bucolic and bleakly picturesque, set in sweeping green slopes (e.g. Clayton, ‘Estate Images 1990/91’—‘Cheviot House’).2 Landscape appears in Hanley’s account of the estate too, but is there in a sense that ‘the Wood’ is founded on a sort of pretence: it counterfeits the spacious suburbs of owner-occupiers only in a narrower way, on a flat land actually suited to highways, railways and air traffic. The ‘rus in urbe’ pretences of ‘the Wood,’ Hanley writes, are exposed when ‘the wind’ blows through it. When it blows in the wrong direction, towards the house, the trickle of the goldfish pond and the twirrup of the birds gives way to the modern-day roar of the M6, M42 and M45 motorways, which converge less than a mile away. Then there is the grating pulse of intercity trains a further mile from that, and the thrust of engines from the adjacent airport. (Hanley 24–25)

Both Hanley and Clayton present views of the West Midlands that allude, however unconsciously, to traditions in viewing the region which, stretching back beyond J.R.R. Tolkien, raised there before the First World War, to the early-modern epic poet Michael Drayton, situate it as the epitome of a green and cosy England. Tolkien and Drayton were both from Warwickshire, the county within which Birmingham grew to great size. Clayton presents both landscape images of the estate and a sort of portraiture. People sit in their flats often on one side of the image, sometimes out of focus, looking just off straight into the camera, or sidelong (Clayton, ‘Estate Images 1990/91’—‘Babysitting, Wilson House,’ ‘Resident, Harry Price House’ and ‘Mothers and Children, Playground,

2 On the website lionfarm.co.uk, the earlier photographs are inside the tab ‘Estate Images 1990/91’ and, with gallery view toggled, can all be seen at the bottom of the window. A button labelled ‘i’ gives titles (e.g. ‘Cheviot House’) for most of the individual images.

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Wilson House’). His exterior shots occupy the border dividing portraiture from street photography, in which participants are caught unawares or are even unwilling (‘Cheviot House, One,’ ‘Moving, One,’ ‘Old Bike,’ ‘Crusader Close’). Place, as much as people, is always a central topic. The short film written and narrated by Meades was made a generation after Clayton’s photographs were taken, as part of the publicity surrounding the publication of Estate in 2015. Clayton himself directed it (Estate 16:40). In the context of UK history, it thus came after several years of austerity in public services but before the Brexit referendum. In the seventeen-minute film, Meades uses Clayton’s photographs as the backdrop (literally—they are visible while he speaks) for a sweeping account of the UK council estate which he sums up architecturally, in the shape of the tower block. This interpretation derives from a position as a journalist-critic of the built environment famous in Britain as a mediator between architectural modernism and the viewing public. He finds Lion Farm as represented by Clayton a suitable site for such a critique, as perhaps he would not find Hanley’s ‘labyrinthine’ Chelmsley Wood with its little houses of ‘sandy brick’ and ‘net curtains’ (Hanley 24, 26). The places of Lion Farm, Meades claims, are characterised by ‘incoherence’ and ‘shapelessness’ rendering them ‘bewilderingly illegible’: ‘their identity is frail,’ he claims (Estate 10:39). In his commentary, Meades repeatedly veers towards statements about the baleful negativity of the UK council estate which lack Hanley’s autobiographical nuancing. And yet he is an acute reader of Clayton’s photographs. As Meades points out, ‘Clayton resists drama and melodrama, he eschews exaggeration’: he refuses to ‘flatter’ buildings by making them ‘look like standalone objects without surroundings, as conventional architectural photography does’ (Estate 9:22). Such statements by Meades fit into a critique of modernist centrallyplanned architecture already alive and well in the 1970s when Richard Sennett spoke of the ‘dead public space’ created by the Brunswick Centre in London and by comparable buildings in Paris and New York (12– 16). In the UK, such critiques were often followed by statements to the effect that buildings like the ten Lion Farm blocks needed tearing down (as indeed the majority of them were shortly after Clayton’s visit). Meades offers more than anti-tower-block polemic, though, in pointing out the contextualised representation of the Lion Farm blocks in Clayton’s images. But the 1990–1991 photographs collected in 2015 by Clayton and presented as Estate have qualities that Meades misses. While

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he critiques the decontextualising tendencies of architectural photography, which isolate buildings as the work of the creating architect, the sheer oddity of Clayton’s Lion Farm, its surreal Alice in Wonderland quality, passes him by, perhaps because his perspective on them is fundamentally architectural. Meades misses the suggestions Clayton makes through his photography about juxtapositions—of size, object, scale, age, material (concrete, textile, vegetation)—foregrounded on the high-rise estate. These are present on the estate, Clayton’s photographs show, as not in either the classic eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban fabrics lauded by Benjamin, Jacobs and Sennett, or in the affluent suburb of privately-owned houses with gardens, the other of Lion Farm in the urban periphery. Clayton’s 1990–1991 set of photographs portray the survival, perhaps distorted, of working-class pride miles outside the inner city. He leaves the audience unsure whether to worry about this place, Lion Farm, or to pity the inhabitants, or to admire them for their cool resilience. Their environment, despite its smashed windows and graffiti has something pristine and orderly about its geometry, its relations of grass, brick and concrete (Clayton, ‘Estate Images 1990/91’—‘Cheviot House,’ ‘Moving, One,’ ‘Pay No Poll Tax’). The people of this Lion Farm, at the tail end of the 1980s, belong in a rock video, perhaps a post-punk one, not a sociological tract. Clayton reveals a specialness, an aesthetic dimension, in the estate which has been absent from most accounts of it. He is not the only photographer to do this: Will Faichney’s photographs of London estates, for example, emphasise their spectacular geometric qualities. It is this quality, perhaps, which could be the key that opens up possibilities in the UK estate of the sort which Pinder mines from Lefebvre. Clayton exhibits none of Hanley’s part-repressed yearning for a different kind of British upbringing to that provided by the estate. For the photographer, the estate seems to offer unique qualities worth valuing. These are not completely excluded by its graffiti, broken windows and lives framed by the television and the alcohol shop (Clayton, ‘Estate Images 1990/91,’ ‘Alcohol’). They are not reached, that is to say, by romanticising or sentimentalising the imaginative place of the estate, since the images convey the struggles and confinement of its inhabitants. Clayton’s images exhibit a reluctance to pass judgement, allowing the estate to retain a quality of mystery. In the late 2010s, Clayton returned to the Lion Farm Estate and took more photographs, nearly thirty years on from his first set (‘Estate Return

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Images 2019’). These have a different tonality to the first set: mild and misty; less garish. Subjects’ clothes tend towards navy and grey as opposed to the turquoise and coral of the late 1980s. Many of the photographs Clayton took on his return are more explicitly portraiture than those of the first set, their subjects directly engaging with the camera through a strongly held gaze rather than seeming to be spied upon or caught in passing as with the 1990–1991 photographs. Clayton seems to have taken these photographs in autumn, perhaps the autumn of 2018 (shortly after I was there), on a cloudy day. This second set, collected by Clayton for an exhibition and book under the title ‘Estate Return,’ contains a consciousness of a duty of care towards the estate dwellers represented, be they teenagers or pensioners, health-service key workers or EU27 migrants with small children, in contrast to the more disdainful and carefree air of the first set. Compared with the photographs I took in October 2018, Clayton’s second set is bleak, soulful and far more focused on the human subject. People are actually central in many of these images, compared to Clayton’s own 1990–1991 images in which they most often appear offcentre or seen at a distance. Place, arguably, becomes less important in the second set.

The Walker-Analyst and His Problems I grew up in the UK but not in an estate. Instead, I grew up in an older suburban house bought with inherited capital. Never a social tenant or the tenant of a municipality, I did live, for eight months in 2001 and 2002, as a private tenant in a London flat on a small 1950s estate. The flat’s owner had bought it under the Right to Buy scheme in the 1980s and later lived in another part of the UK renting it out and living partly off the proceeds. I have never stayed one night in a flat or house on a large UK peripheral estate. These personal revelations appear here in the effort to ground these scholarly investigations honestly, to become aware of their inescapable perspective. My view of the UK estate, among people who grew up in England, is that of an outsider to them. I grew up within a dichotomised view of housing: owner-occupiers versus tenants, with the latter rather messily subdivided into private tenants and council tenants. Because I went to school in a comprehensive school not a private school, I went to school with people who lived on estates, but even within the school, there was something of a division, almost entirely non-hostile, between people who came from owner-occupier families and people who

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lived on estates. Enriching and complicating this was the fact that I grew up in a suburb of outer London to which many families had moved from inner East London because of improved financial circumstances. Many owner-occupiers, even the wealthiest, were seriously ‘cockney,’ proudly plebeian Londoners in speech and culture—but many other families had been moved to the area’s estates, built by the London County Council, in post-war slum clearance programmes. Many of these families had come to the area from the poorer parts of London’s East End. Less obviously present was the post-industrial sort of housing estate, on which many residents formerly worked for a few large employers, typically in manufacturing or extraction, although in that sector of outer London there were clear hierarchies of status dividing estates, as well as dividing estate dwellers from owner-occupiers’ children. Hanley uses autobiography as a mode, and so does Meades in reading Clayton. Clayton leaves his own relationship to what he depicts completely opaque. It is impossible to say, viewing his photographs, whether the photographer’s gaze is that of someone who grew up in flats like these, around shops like these, or that of someone to whom this environment is alien. Something about the photographs, the flatness of their greens, greys, reds, the attitudes human figures strike in them, their garishness and yet dignity, manages to project both familiarity and a quality of the alienating. Meades speaks with an exaggerated received pronunciation accent, presenting himself to fellow English viewers as a patrician, yet claims to have had a grandmother among the ‘hundreds of thousands of people’ in Britain living in inadequate housing without bathrooms before the construction of estates like Lion Farm in the 1960s (Estate 03:58). As Eric Prieto writes elsewhere in this volume, Lefebvre’s urban thinking aims ‘to break out of congealed thought patterns and revise outdated theories by constantly testing them against direct experience’ (24). Arguably, direct experience of the estate can be had by visiting estates, rather than reading about them or looking at photographs of them. But such a practice is filled with challenges of its own. It could be regarded as ‘exclusionary,’ because carried out by a male scholar with the research funding enabling it, or as ‘valorised’ in ways that other walks (of mothers and children living on the estate; of key workers commuting by bus into Birmingham) are not (Ward 762). Walking through the estate and physically connecting it with the city centre seven miles off, I made no attempt to understand or interpret the lives of the people who lived there. In this respect, my activity

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was different from the work of Hanley, Clayton and Meades alike. My research method aimed to avoid any scholarly imperialism whatever: to avoid exoticising or making assumptions about estate lives. This is a survey of surface topography almost in the manner of Drayton, the West Midlands’ poet of England. He was the author of Poly-Olbion (1612– 1622), or multiple England, a topographical verse journey in rhyming couplets divided into two parts published a decade apart. In Song 13 of eighteen in the first of these, Drayton reached his native county of Warwickshire, ‘That Shire which wee the hart of England well may call’ (Drayton 8.2). The record of my walk exists in this written account and in an online album of photographs (Finch, ‘Sandwell and Birmingham’). According to Gerald D. Suttles, writing in the 1980s, ‘the cumulative texture of local culture’ requires attention from sociologists who have tended to see ‘sentiments and symbols’ as ‘as a subjective and methodological embarrassment’ (Suttles, ‘Cumulative Texture’ 283, 284).3 Sociologists continue to see case studies as means of testing hypotheses formed in dialogue with earlier research, but recent work on the UK estate, some of it cited in this article, takes personal experience as charted by Hanley, Clayton and Meades more seriously than the field formerly did. Still, to walk in the estate or take photographs there is to make the sociological, the aesthetic and the personal meet, abrasively. One feels uncomfortable, but then one should. The aesthetics of walking through creates bodily knowledge of urban concentric rings. It forces understanding of the inaccessibility of others’ lives in the large numbers of which one becomes vaguely aware when moving between different zones in one metropolitan area. This contrasts with the autobiography of Hanley, the portraiture of Clayton, and the technique in classical sociological inquiry such as Suttles’s earlier work on Chicago of getting to know one or two locals and reaching the meaning of a neighbourhood through them (Suttles, Social Order of the Slum). The estate itself: it has a bucolic and mild air in comparison with others I have walked through, for example the Chalkhill Estate in Wembley, North West London, or the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, West Yorkshire. It contains little paths bordering muddy sports grounds. Its varied jumble of buildings includes small houses with gardens in curving, symmetrical streets, but also some surviving blocks, their facades renewed.

3 I am grateful to Jens Martin Gurr for referring me to this article by Suttles.

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One big tower, where work was underway when I visited in October 2018, stands up a slope from much of the estate, towards where a telecoms mast pokes from a stand of trees, the highest point in the vicinity. The bleakness of Clayton’s interiors was not apparent, and nor were his bold and chilly primary colours. Instead, the whole feel was more mellow, grown together with the surroundings. Lush patches of wet green revealing hidden walkways passed canals and streams extending off them; there were pinkish-red masses of fallen leaves from imported tree-species (Finch, ‘Sandwell and Birmingham’ 3223, 3727, 3228–30). Equally marked, both within and just outside the estate itself, were some spruce and well-kept front gardens, alongside others that were untended (e.g. 3235). One was filled with ceramic animals and miniature disco balls surrounded by gravel, and others were richly coniferous or simulated a Mediterranean landscape (Finch, ‘Sandwell and Birmingham’ 3238, 3253–54). In some sections of Lion Farm, a rural feeling is conveyed by mature trees which seem to predate the roads and buildings of the estate (Finch, ‘Sandwell and Birmingham’ 3248–49, 3264). Such aspects of Lion Farm recall the rural fringes of Birmingham as treated by Jonathan Coe in his 2001 novel The Rotters’ Club. As I have written elsewhere, Coe refers directly to Tolkien in the shape of his protagonists’ ‘hobbitlike’ grandparents with their comforting rituals and unchanging routines just beyond the city’s south-western frontier (Finch, ‘Comic Novel, City Novel’ 61–62; Coe 135). This was just one moment, though. The weather was warm for midOctober and the sun mostly shining. It was a weekday in term time, so children, audible playing beyond a wall that I passed, were at school. Workers in shops, offices and factories were off the estate at work. Thinking of Hanley’s notion of walls in the head and an ‘apartheid’ dividing the estate from other sorts of British living, the walk connected the estate with its neighbours rather than dividing them. There are houses that are on the fringes of the estate but not quite of it, whose status is uncertain. The physical and territorial division had seemed starker at Wembley and Bradford than it did here. Other boundary lines hereabouts include those of local government areas: the estate is at the south-western corner of Oldbury, while Throne Road immediately south of it is in Rowley Regis; Oldbury and Rowley Regis are constituent parts of the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell, itself one of six subdivisions of the West Midlands county. There are roads leading from here to the centres of Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and to the profoundly decayed centre

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of Oldbury itself, and beyond that the railway station of Sandwell and Dudley (trains to London and Scotland).

Conclusion: Shedding the Estate Skin In visiting, analysing, depicting an estate, we are looking both at an example of a category and at a place unique in its own right, a unit whose minimal differentiation is between itself and everywhere else. The conundrum is presented in books’ titles: Hanley’s Estates, plural, versus Clayton’s Estate, singular. The estate encountered here is meaningless outside its geopolitical context. This has been a chapter with a focus on the nation-state, rather than on the individual city or global trends which come to the fore in other contributions to the present volume (e.g. Henryson, Prieto in this volume). Within that particular nationstate, the UK, the focus has been on a region, the West Midlands, early industrialised and with a very large city, Birmingham, at its heart, yet without much metropolitan status for that city even within the region, let alone the nation-state as a whole. The region is analysable in the terms proposed by Keunen for networked areas of middle-sized urban zones, yet also presents productive abrasion between that analytic tool and another focused on urban hierarchies (Birmingham is very big but, equally, is no London). The West Midlands stands out among UK regions as one that could metonymically figure the overall national polity, in fact. It is intermediate between the oddity of the metropolitan South-East, focused on London, and the more fully provincial and peripheral cities of northern England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (while some of those are much more metropolitan than Birmingham within their own contexts). Pinder writes of Lefebvre’s visionary urban thinking as produced at the end of the 1960s that in contrast to terms then current, such as postindustrial, leisure or consumer society, it spoke to a long-term process of urbanisation through a sequence of fields and urban forms, its focus falling on the most recent ‘critical zone’ characterised by the implosion/explosion of the city into a generalised urban fabric and by the supersession of the problematic of industrialisation by that of the urban. Lefebvre’s concern was not with conventional historical analysis of urban transformations but with identifying tendencies and orientations, continuities as well as ruptures or relative

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discontinuities, in which the virtual enables examination of the realised, and in which the ‘blind fields’ that prevent the emergent reality of the urban from being adequately understood are challenged. (‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 33)

The history of the estate in Britain as narrated in its pain and contradictions by Hanley represents one of these ‘blind fields.’ Potentially, Pinder’s redeployment of Lefebvre could transform the understanding of mass living conditions framed in the estate. The estate is a twentieth-century relic, which is not to say that it ought to be removed. Rather, user control of it needs establishing. The peripheral estate, in fictional descriptions such as Maureen Duffy’s 1962 autobiographical novel That’s How It Was (based on Trowbridge, Wiltshire) and Andrea Dunbar’s 1980 stage play The Arbor (based on Bradford), is a particular type of estate (the inner-city slum clearance or bombsite estate being another). It has an externality to the city, in distance, remoteness, in being, at the extreme represented by Dunbar, positioned on a hillside facing away from the city in the valley. Yet this is also the etymological estate in the sense of a country tract owned by a landowner: Bloomsbury in London was once one of these, and so were the peripheral estates of Liverpool, bought by a municipality from those landowners. It is on this sort of estate, perhaps, that an ‘emergent reality of the urban’ can grow (Pinder, ‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 33). In this essay, the methodology of the physical visit and walk plus its juxtaposition with reading of multiple texts of the estate, verbal, visual, commentaries and first-person narratives, has aimed to allow this ‘emergent reality’ to come forward. The estate as actual organising unit of mass living needs to fall away like a shed skin, while the buildings previously labelled as such gain a new life that is more socially multiple, and more driven by inner community life. The ‘possible-impossible’ imported from Lefebvre’s post-1968 perspective by Pinder in the 2010s indicates a way forward. We must desire, proclaim and demand what seems impossible, namely that the minimal differentiation of creditworthy aspirant rentier and wage-earning or unwaged estate dweller in Britain simply collapse and go away. Its replacement could be proclaimed as ‘festive, creative, affective, unalienated, fully lived forms of plurality and individuality that assume rich social relations unfettered by forms of “indifference” (individualism, pluralism, imitation, conformism, naturalized particularism)’

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(Stefan Kipfer qtd in Pinder, ‘Reconstituting the Possible’ 34). In extraordinary times brought about by externalities that human beings have in fact repeatedly endured, the impossible can suddenly become possible. Where now? Images like Clayton’s with their grasp of the visual strangeness of Lion Farm as an aesthetic quality could resist more orthodox cultural representations of the estate such as those of Hanley and Meades via open-minded thinking about the estate as territory and place. This could include connecting the estate to imaginative notions of boundedness such as the fairy-tale kingdom, or the urban park. The ‘impression’ is not the one Meades finds ‘overwhelming,’ ‘want and emptiness, a void in the heart of England’ (Estate 12:16). It is instead, on Lefebvre’s terms, much more dialectical. In The Urban Revolution, Lefebvre writes that something ‘strange and wonderful, which helped renew dialectical thought’ happened when cities expanded greatly (13– 14). Following nineteenth-century industrialisation, ‘the non-city and the anti-city would conquer the city, penetrate it, break it apart, and in so doing extend it immeasurably, bringing about the urbanisation of society and the growth of the urban fabric that covered what was left of the city prior to the arrival of industry.’ Could the estate do something ‘strange and wonderful,’ conquering the rest of England? In the current millennial atmosphere, who knows?

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Lefebvre, Henri. ‘Right to the City.’ 1968. Translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Writings on Cities, Blackwell, 1996, pp. 63–181. ———. The Urban Revolution. 1970. Translated by Robert Bononno, U of Minnesota P, 2003. MacLeod, Gordon. ‘The Grenfell Tower Atrocity.’ City, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 460– 89. McKenzie, Lisa. Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Contemporary Britain. Policy Press, 2015. Pinder, David. ‘Errant Paths: The Poetics and Politics of Walking.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 29, no. 4, 2011, pp. 672–92. ———. ‘Reconstituting the Possible: Lefebvre, Utopia and the Urban Question.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 2015, pp. 28–45. ———. Visions of the City. Edinburgh UP, 2005. Prieto, Eric. ‘The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul’ [Chapter 2 in this volume]. Reay, Diane. Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes. Bristol UP, 2017. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. 1977. Penguin, 2002. Smith, Neil. ‘Foreword.’ Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution. U of Minnesota P, 2003, pp. vii–xxiii. Stephens, W.B. ‘The City of Birmingham.’ A History of the County of Warwick: Volume 7, the City of Birmingham, edited by W.B. Stephens, 1964. British History Online. www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol7/pp1-3. Accessed 23 June 2020. Suttles, Gerald D. ‘The Cumulative Texture of Local Urban Culture.’ American Journal of Sociology, vol. 90, no. 2, 1984, pp. 283–304. ———. The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. U of Chicago P, 1968. Wacquant, Loïc. ‘Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality.’ Thesis Eleven, vol. 91, no. 1, 2007, pp. 66–77. Ward, Miranda. ‘The Art of Writing Place.’ Geography Compass, vol. 8, no. 10, 2014, pp. 756–66. Yelling, J.A. ‘Land, Property and Planning.’ The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1850–1950, edited by Martin Daunton, Cambridge UP, 2001, pp. 467–93.

CHAPTER 12

Afterword: Urban Possibilities in Times of Crisis David Pinder

[T]he category (or concept) of the ‘real’ should not be permitted to obscure that of the possible. Rather, it is the possible that should serve as the theoretical instrument for exploring the real. Henri Lefebvre (‘Comments’ 125)

I The streets, squares and other public spaces of many cities this year fell strangely quiet. Previously crowded sites emptied out. The daily rush of commuters stilled. Transportation lay dormant. Populations were ordered to stay at home. Distance was presented as the condition of survival. Propinquity, encounter and mixing were treated not as essential qualities of urban life and democracy, or as everyday pleasures, but as threatening. Those outside were in many cases there by necessity or for work deemed ‘essential’. They were often masked or keeping away from others.

D. Pinder (B) Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_12

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Cities were depicted as under siege or, in a cliché beloved by politicians, as key fronts in a war on a hidden enemy. Images circulated widely of normally bustling urban places and buildings now uncannily deserted, with human urban life seemingly paralysed or on hold. Numbers of cases and deaths were—and, as I write, remain—clocked daily, a crude index for devastation and grief. Commentaries on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities and urban life as it has been unfolding during 2020 have not surprisingly drawn frequently on dystopian and apocalyptic references from literature, film and popular culture. The emptiness of quarantined public spaces itself conjures up dystopia, according to the introduction to a series of photographs of urban public spaces in the New York Times, which refers to the images as ‘haunted and haunting, like stills from movies about plagues and the apocalypse’ (Kimmelman). News reports and mainstream cultural representations deploy tropes familiar from horror and zombie genres (Filho). If dystopian fiction was already apparently ‘hot’ before COVID-19, with sales of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 among others having apparently ‘skyrocketed’ in recent years for reasons relating to the dominant political climate, then those featuring diseases have ‘taken on new life’ (Shames and Atchison). In the uncertain period in which I write, when COVID-19 infections are rising again amid talk of ‘second waves’, and when moves to reopen many cities are countered by renewed restrictions in others, questions are repeatedly asked about what kind of return should be made, to what kind of ‘normal’? Or what forms of urban life are desired and how might they be built? Writing about Albert Camus’s The Plague, sales of which soared in the early stages of the pandemic, Jacqueline Rose notes how it presents pestilence as ‘at once blight and revelation’, and so brings ‘the hidden truth of a corrupt world to the surface’. The revelatory dimensions of the present virus are often noted more widely with it also being likened to a ‘lightning flash’ that illuminates the ‘suffering, inequality, and the deep fragmentation that has set in due to decades of prioritising growth over care’ (Davies and Railton). Lockdowns have themselves exposed and magnified the depths and brutalities of contemporary injustices and systemic discriminations along lines of class, race and gender. Vast gulfs in life chances are highlighted not least between those able to sequester themselves behind walls in private residences and gardens, or safely flee cities altogether to secluded retreats, and the poor and precarious whose continued labour ensures basic urban

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services and health care. Enforcing physical distancing leads for many to physical compression in already overcrowded settlements where home, if such exists, can prove more threatening than nurturing. Attempts to escape cities by others, for example millions of impoverished citizens and migrant workers in India seeking to return to their villages on foot after expulsion by landlords and employers, were barred and beaten back for supposedly imperilling the countryside (Roy). The pandemic has devastatingly demonstrated the inadequacies of dominant neoliberal models with their economisation of social life and privatisation of responsibility, and with their decades-long vaunting of market ideology over public welfare and health care. Powerful actors have nevertheless been urging return to business, if not as usual then at least so as to restore circuits of capital accumulation and the roles of cities with them. They look beyond ‘war economy’ measures designed to shore up national economies, stressing their temporariness as they weigh market needs against those of public health. Deepening inequalities beckon, along with extending powers of digital surveillance and police control ushered in through emergency powers. Many predict increased flight from cities by those with means, combined with heightened seclusion through private transport and home working. If this fuels interest in dystopian urban narratives, however, the current crisis and intersecting political struggles also call for attending to possibilities. The interruption of capitalist economies and urbanisation processes through the suspension of labour, and with that the sudden overturning of principles that have for so long been viewed as necessary and even unquestionable, particularly concerning the roles of public institutions in tackling public problems, and the assumed centrality of the commodity form to social life, have shifted terrains of the possible and impossible. Of further significance is a growing consciousness of interdependence and interconnection, at both local and global levels. That comes not only from understanding the workings of the virus itself but also from support and mutual aid initiatives from below, along with other political mobilisations worldwide, from Black Lives Matter through to the huge street protests that challenged structural conditions across much of the world in the latter stages of 2019. Current suspensions and cracks, even of the smallest kind, can offer opportunities to see and experience urban life differently. They provide openings to be exploited. With reference to air qualities, for example, one specialist with the C40 group of global megacities notes: ‘Citizens around the world can see change is possible. Just

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put yourself on the rooftop and imagine seeing mountains for the first time, and thinking how amazing it feels to realise this is possible’ (qtd. in Watts).

II Reading the preceding chapters in this context—when the grounds and forms of urban life have been so profoundly shaken, and when the trajectories of their possible futures remain so sharply in question—underlines the significance of their central concerns. The authors address urban possibilities as socially shaped in historically and geographically specific ways as they are imagined, performed and practised under distinct conditions. They are also actively contested, for instance between powerful actors who seek to script the futures of urban spaces, and the visions and values of inhabitants, often resisting these narratives and carving out others. Among the many merits of this volume is its attendance to the specific roles of literary texts in addressing such possibilities, considering their distinct forms and affordances. Mobilising the suggestive notion of literature as a ‘laboratory of the possible’ (Westphal 63), it explores both imagined possibilities for cities, a theme that connects with long histories of utopian and dystopian literatures, and urban environments as sites of individual and social possibility. Through cases that range widely in genre and geography, literature is situated alongside and understood to be bound up with, other modes of representation associated with urban development, planning, policy, architecture, activism as well as urban theory. Material and literary worlds are viewed as intertwining, with attention paid to the continuities and performative exchanges between literary and non-literary works. Yet there is also insistence on the distinctive qualities of language, narrative form and the like, and what these mean for how literature enables thinking about and exploring urban worlds. This is valuable in the context of wider interest in literary geographies, ‘geocriticism’, and ‘deep locational criticism’ that are often associated with a spatial turn in literary and cultural studies, and that the editors and others gathered here have already done much to shape (e.g. Ameel et al.; Finch; Tally). It is further significant in relation to critical urban studies and urban theory where there have long been productive engagements with literature in addressing urban processes and futures.

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To mention only a few prominent cases, we might think of David Harvey’s acknowledged indebtedness to novelists such as Dickens, Zola, Balzac, Gissing and Pynchon alongside urban historians for his Marxist analyses of capitalist urbanisation (Harvey, Consciousness ). Harvey elsewhere discusses more specifically the affordances of literature for exploring the political possibilities of space, place and environment in relation to the novels of Raymond Williams, where he considers how the novel form allowed Williams to represent the daily lives and cultural practices of people in ways that he felt were not available to him in his cultural theorising. He also suggests that it provided Williams with a more open way of handling the situated personal choices and possibilities involved in historical and geographical change (Justice 27–29). That theme Harvey later takes up in Spaces of Hope in the course of developing his perspectives on dialectical or ‘spatiotemporal utopianism’, when he acknowledges the current significance of the ‘possible worlds’ of literature as a site for exploring utopian sensibilities, and when he considers in particular the potential of the novel form for exploring the dynamics of making alternative socio-ecological worlds—even if he soon returns himself to the realms of social and political theory (Spaces 189–91). We could also consider Mike Davis’s contention that contemporary trends involving the securitisation and militarisation of urban life at street level have been rendered more realistically and politically sharply in popular science fiction and cyberpunk than urban theory, and the way in which he turns to the writings of Octavia Butler, William Gibson and others to outline ‘the dark possibilities of the near future’ of Los Angeles ‘beyond Blade Runner’ (362). Or, to take another key urban theorist who threads through a number of pages of this book, there is Henri Lefebvre’s interest in the possible and impossible variations of future urban society explored by science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, and his claim in 1968 that it was to them, rather than philosophers and urban analysts, that one must now turn to find representations of ideal cities (‘Right’ 160). Lefebvre also recalls the importance of Clifford Simak’s novel City (1952) for his thinking about the potential of automation for liberating people from work, and for the anticipation of the construction of urban societies beyond capitalism that he was discussing with the situationists and especially Constant, as the latter developed his revolutionary New Babylon project from within that group and then beyond it through the 1960s (Ross 274–75).

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This discussion could be taken further in thinking about the historical importance of literary texts and notably utopian fictions for urban planners and visionaries. Among them is Ebenezer Howard, whose avid readings of utopian texts by Thomas More, Edward Bellamy and William Morris were crucial for the development of his garden city ideals that were meant to enable the realisation of a new civilisation, which he discerned to be on the horizon at the end of the nineteenth century (Pinder, Visions 29–55). But if one of the present volume’s key concerns is with the imagined possibilities for cities, and if this intersects with the historical prominence of utopian imaginations in literary representations of cities, it now comes in what many contend to be the wake of utopian visions of cities and urban societies, and perhaps the wake of utopia as such. It certainly follows the failures of many earlier experiments and projects for urban transformation from Howard’s time and on, and a widespread retreat from anticipations of urban futures that are radically different and better from those found in the present. Some of the remnants, relics and legacies are subjects of chapters here. None of which is to say, of course, that possible urban futures do not currently command attention. Far from it: there is intense speculation, anticipation, concern and planning involving urban futures across a wide range of fields. The possibilities of urban life are frequently emphasised, often at the level of individual exhortation, as if their realisation were simply a matter of personal responsibility and effort. There is also the imagineering and rhetorical promotion of new urban spaces, from glittering waterfronts and luxury apartments rising from former industrial zones, to whole cities conjured from the ground, boasting of unparalleled ecological and sustainable credentials. All cities, so it seems, must have strategic visions designed to steer development towards futures framed in terms of global or worldly ambitions. But at the same time there is a closing of horizons in terms of collective visions of radical social and urban transformation, with senses of possibility constrained inside the co-ordinates of the existing social-economic system. Anything beyond is dismissed as fantastical and impossibly utopian in the pejorative sense of that last term. The future turns increasingly into a site associated more with fear than hope and positive expectation, argues Zygmunt Bauman, as he coins the term ‘retrotopia’ to refer to emerging and increasingly prevalent visions that are ‘located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet unborn and so inexistent future’ (5; see Ameel and Bar-Itzhak, this volume).

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III Such imaginative closures and retreats have been shaped by material economic, political and social forces and processes, as incessant drives for profit and growth have buffeted and reconfigured urban lives through creative destruction, displacement and segregation. A concerted ‘war against human political imagination’ has suppressed consciousness of possibilities so as to present conditions as inevitable and beyond intervention (Graeber 222). Multiple and overlapping crises fuel senses of impending or existing catastrophe, as COVID-19 joins vaster global threats relating to climate change and collapse. That not all possibilities are desirable is vividly attested by numerous contemporary dystopian narratives. Yet the present volume pushes against the prominence given to dystopias in recent writings on literary cities. The editors highlight instead the potential of literary imagination to expand senses of urban possibility among readers beyond what is already established, particularly through finding ways of ‘evoking, questioning and critiquing urban possibility’ (9). In this orientation to the possible, the book can be aligned with strands of utopianism that have recently been the subject of renewed interest and debate, as will be discussed further in due course. The subject matter is not utopian literature as such, however, and its declared aims are directed more towards ‘realist’ modes, whereby urban environments are addressed as sites of individual and collective possibilities through everyday, mundane and personal experiences as well as grander visions. We are invited to think, for example, about the sense of possibility that often drives journeys to cities. That is even in the face of the vast problems that grip so many and the ways in which pollution, and now pandemic, threaten to make city air more fraught than freeing. There is also the array of possible lives charted by those moving through them, only some of them followed and realised. The authors follow and explore trajectories, movements and journeys, sometimes literally mapping out interconnections and criss-crossing paths, other times metaphorically doing so. Renunciating ‘blind faith’ in the future allows significant engagement with multiple ‘tenses of the imagination,’ to use Raymond Williams’s phrase. That includes attending to lost possibilities, to routes that might have been taken, to futures that were abandoned or stolen. It is a realm of varied subjunctives as well as counterfactuals and ‘paths of the might

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have been’ (Prendergast). Other literary means by which possibilities are evoked and questioned include estrangement, a cognitive and creative operation that focuses on a given situation in a way that unsettles takenfor-granted perspectives and enables it to be viewed afresh. A matter more of textual form than of content, this has been the focus of much appreciation of literary utopias and science fiction in particular by critics—notable among them Darko Suvin, for whom it is central to his famous definition of science fiction—determined to draw out how such texts may critically interrogate aspects of the historical moment as they hold open the possibility of different futures. In these and other ways the authors confront the challenges of registering and representing not only multiple temporalities but also open and multiple urban spatialities. If the term translocal is significant here, so too is an outward-looking geographical imagination of the kind advocated by Doreen Massey that gives fuller recognition to contemporaneity, and that in so doing approaches spatiality as ‘a multiplicity of stories-so-far’ (189). But in thinking about the challenge for writing and literature, we might also recall John Berger’s earlier remarks on the ‘crisis of the modern novel’, which he originally made in 1969, and which he attributes to an increasing appreciation that narration can no longer involve a sequential unfolding in time. Referring to the range of modern means of communication, to the scale of modern power and exploitation, to the indivisibility of the world along with its uneven geographical development, and to how personal actions are implicated in global events, he argues that we are now ‘too aware of what is continually traversing the story line laterally’. That awareness ‘is the result of our constantly having to take into account the simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities’ (Berger 46). When he goes on to make his now well-known assertion that ‘it is space and not time that hides consequences from us’, we can add that it also hides possibilities. In which case, how might we further address and explore them?

IV Some years ago the architectural historian and theorist Jane Rendell noted the obsession within urban discourse with ‘figures which traverse space,’ among them various figures on foot who represent ‘urban explorations, passages of revelation, journeys of discovery.’ Following Michel

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de Certeau, she referred to them as ‘spatial stories’ (Rendell 1). An extensive urban literature has developed around such figures and their modes of engaging with the city and its possibilities. Among inveterate literary wanderers of the modern city was the surrealist André Breton, who once wrote that it was in the street, with its ‘surprising detours’, that he ‘could test like nowhere else the wind of possibility’ (4; see Pinder, ‘Breath’). There has been considerable interest more recently in what Benjamin Rossiter and Katherine Gibson term ‘the enabling potentialities of representing the city from the street’, and in how walking specifically can be seen as contributing to ‘a counter-discourse of the urban’ as it ‘creates stories, invents spaces, and opens up the city’ (490–91). They assert that the ‘ambulatory occupation of urban space permits a myriad of unrealized possibilities to surface, triggering emotions and feelings that may lie dormant in many people’ (491). As is often pointed out, however, to walk in the city involves both possibilities and interdictions that are structured and experienced in highly unequal ways, depending on class, gender, ethnicity and much more. In his highly influential examination of the ways of operating of ‘ordinary practitioners’ and ‘users’ of the city, de Certeau refers to how an ‘ensemble of possibilities’ is partially actualised through walking. But at the same time it is transgressed, ignored, passed over and reworked in ways that increase the numbers of both possibilities and prohibitions (98). He thus presents walking as an enunciatory operation that spatialises from ‘down below’, one that is missed or written over by efforts to render it as a line on a map. Behind this conceptualisation of how possibilities are actualised lies a broader distinction that has long structured much work in urban and cultural studies between strategies and tactics. As again framed by de Certeau, strategies of the powerful produce their own structure and ‘proper’ place. They appear in spatial terms as a ‘mastery of time’ and a ‘synchronic system’. In contrast, everyday tactics lack their own place and must play upon the imposed terrain. They are dependent on time, with their necessary dynamism and mobility being that of the poacher or the practitioner of the ‘guileful ruse’. They ‘must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment’ (37). There is not room here to unpack the problematic features of such dichotomous formulations, a number of which betray the structuralist roots that de Certeau was seeking to go beyond (Massey 45–47). Here I simply want to register how this emphasis on practice and use, for all

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its focus on agency and creative resistance, remains framed by a given structure, whose power relations remain inadequately examined. We are presented with an ‘ensemble of possibilities’ that is organised within a spatial order. And in binary opposition there are tactical operations that resist and rework it from within the enemy’s terrain. These tactics seize offered possibilities ‘on the wing’ but they are crucially without power to shape their fundamental framing or co-ordinates. There is resistance, but to what is this directed? And what does it take for granted? While there are certain shared concerns and intersections between these conceptions of use, appropriation and urban possibilities and those developed shortly before by Lefebvre, there are also significant differences that are worth highlighting in this context. In particular, appropriation for the latter takes on a more transformative dimension. This is directed not simply towards making do with and reworking the possibilities at hand, but also towards structural social and spatial change that encompasses the wider conditions through which those possibilities are framed and produced. As Lefebvre makes clear through his claims about ‘the right to the city’, it is about a full usage of spaces that depends on the ability to shape and produce those spaces in terms of the needs and interests of inhabitants. This is thus set against exchange and domination. Some of the stakes involved in these perspectives become apparent in the readings of housing estates in Sweden and the UK in preceding chapters here by Lydia Wistisen and Jason Finch. Growing up in 1970s high rise suburbs of the Swedish Million Programme, the teenage protagonists of the young adult urban novels discussed by Wistisen drift the streets and vent frustration and anger that seem to be generated by the environment itself. Yet critical to her account of these texts is a differentiated understanding of resistance and appropriation, one that is alive to the double-edged nature of the representations she is addressing, and to the politically contested character of the urban environments and their possibilities. It is further developed in relation to contemporaneous children’s literature, with its greater emphasis on potential spatial transformation and the seeds of different futures. Wistisen attends to such Lefebvrian themes as the relationships between bodies and spaces, the generative resistance of bodies to the reduction of abstract space, and the intense everyday moments in which possibilities are glimpsed and might be crystallised. In the ‘fantastic’ image of a dandelion piercing through the asphalt, and in the scene of flowers blooming across a suburb, having been sown by children from stolen

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seeds, it is hard not to see resonances with the revolutionary slogan from Paris in May 1968 of sous les pavés, la plage (under the paving stones, the beach). At the same time, the tenor of the young adult texts in particular guards against romantic idealism. In that light we might also cite the words from the year before by another utopian thinker, Herbert Marcuse, when he opened his address to radicals, hippies and intellectuals at the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at London’s Roundhouse: ‘I am very happy to see so many flowers here and that is why I want to remind you that flowers, by themselves, have no power whatsoever, other than the power of men and women who protect them and take care of them against aggression and destruction’ (175). A more direct engagement with utopian perspectives derived from Lefebvre, meanwhile, follows in Finch’s chapter about representations of council housing estates in the British West Midlands. Lefebvre’s ideas about appropriation and the right to the city, as with his critical project more generally, and as he saw the work of Marx before him, are oriented to the possible. He was, in his own words, ‘a partisan of possibilities’ (Everyday Life 192). What are the conditions of possibility for radical urban change? How can the ‘real’ be explored through the possible? How can what is possible be extended through demanding what is currently deemed impossible? A key theme for Lefebvre in addressing such questions is the ‘possible-impossible’, which he understands dialectically also in relation to the real. In contrast to utopian thought that leaves the horizon or loses itself in the clouds, Lefebvre roots it in everyday life and space. It comes out of urban changes unfolding around him and engages the prospects of transforming them through contestation and struggle. But crucially, rather than working within a given ensemble of possibilities or seeking to fulfil those currently defined, it questions and seeks to change their co-ordinates. It focuses on reconstituting the possible (Pinder, ‘Reconstituting’). While Finch’s chapter is not focused on utopian fiction or spaces as such, he deploys such perspectives in his analyses of representations of estates in the West Midlands region. Rather than counterposing their many-storied realities to the possible or impossible, he thereby addresses their realities as emergent and in dialectical relationship with the latter through text, image and embodied encounter. In my final section of this chapter, however, I want to offer some closing remarks of my own on this theme by returning to the social and political context with which I started.

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V In May 2020 the Danish newspaper Information commissioned thirteen writers and artists to create a special issue devoted to ‘utopias for the world after the pandemic’ (Lykkeberg). Whether this was intended to contribute to discussions about possible post-pandemic worlds, or more simply to stimulate the moods of readers then chastened by the reach of COVID-19 and associated restrictions—the newspaper presented it as ‘like a new bouquet of flowers’—the following day it was followed by an article on the histories and contemporary roles of utopias, based on an interview with sociologist Michael Hviid Jacobsen. ‘We live in a world that cries out for utopia, for its hopefulness, optimism and belief that the world can become a better place than it is currently’, Jacobsen asserted. Acknowledging the disastrous historical consequences of many utopias and, after Bauman, noting the recent rise of retrotopias oriented nostalgically around mythic notions of the past, he nevertheless insisted that utopias can offer more. ‘We are facing a climate crisis, a corona crisis and many other crises, where precisely utopia can give us support to dare to believe that we can do better’ (qtd. in Frydenlund). These interventions and the ways in which they were framed raised questions about the potential roles of utopias for responding to current urban and social crises, not only COVID-19 but more generally. Can they provide critical perspectives on present and future possibilities? Or do they serve mainly as forms of entertainment, distraction or escapism? Do they challenge or compensate for current difficulties with affecting radical change? What to make of their common association with ‘impossible’ ideals, and how do these relate to the real and the possible? And why does it seem so difficult to imagine urban worlds beyond capitalism compared to, say, those defined by environmental breakdown and catastrophe? Such questions have been generating much discussion in recent decades especially within the interdisciplinary field of utopian studies, where there has now long been interest in conceptualising utopias in open ways as dynamic expressions of desire for better ways of being and living, and in insisting they can be much more than blueprint plans or fixed ideals for the future, in particular as a method or process (Levitas). Utopias are conceptualised in these terms not as an impossible ‘other’ to reality but rather as enabling its critical exploration. They can be a means of challenging the supposed inevitability of present conditions in terms of the possible and what could be, and of approaching that present

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critically in relation to the unrealised or suppressed possibilities it contains. That has already been discussed here through reference to Lefebvre and the ‘possible-impossible’. The philosopher Ernst Bloch has also been influential in this regard. In his monumental The Principle of Hope, he writes: ‘Reality without real possibility is not complete, the world without future-laden properties does not deserve a glance, an art, a science any more than that of the bourgeois conformist’. He adds: ‘Concrete utopia stands on the horizon of every reality; real possibility surrounds the open dialectical tendencies and latencies to the very last’ (223). Bloch is wary of literary and other efforts to present fully realised future utopian states, as if in a fixed and closed plan, yet literature is a significant means through which he explores wishes, dreams, longings and other manifestations of utopian consciousness that anticipate what is not yet. In focusing on possibility, he seeks to move beyond wishful thinking as well as abstract visions of the future that can lead into the kinds of compensatory fantasising that is often associated with utopias. He distinguishes real possibilities from formal and theoretical ones, and proposes concrete utopias that are anticipatory and reach towards the ‘Real Possible’. To address urban possibilities critically today, as I argue these thinkers still help us to do, and as this volume does through engaging with a wide range of literary texts from different places and periods, is vital. How lines between the possible and impossible get defined and drawn, and how the possibilities of urban life are constituted and challenged, require attention. At the start of the chapter, I mentioned current talk about what kinds of urban life might be made post-pandemic. Many planners, designers and others are promoting different visions in a context where temporal horizons have been interrupted (Thelle and Bille). Perspectives from the English New Town movement and Ebenezer Howard are among those that are being dusted off for advocating de-densified, sustainable urban futures. What is missing, and what emergent realities might be discerned? How to think beyond restoration in ways that open onto systemic change? Rather than utopia being conceived as a form of ‘idle dreaming’, we might think of it as ‘a matter of innermost urgency, something we are pushed into as a matter of survival, when it is no longer possible to go on within the parameters of the “possible”’ (Žižek 123–24). Such an urgency lies behind Arundhati Roy’s characterisation of COVID-19 as a rupture that, in the midst of despair, offers a chance to rethink. ‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew’, she writes. ‘This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between

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one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it’ (214).

Works Cited Ameel, Lieven, et al., editors. The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History. Routledge, 2019. Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia. Polity, 2017. Berger, John. ‘The Changing View of Man in the Portrait.’ The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays. Pantheon, 1969, pp. 41–47. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, Volume 1. 1954. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. MIT Press, 1986. Breton, André. The Lost Steps. 1924. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. U of Nebraska P, 1996. Davies, Sasha Milavic, and Lucy Railton. ‘Everything that rises must dance.’ YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHuyg10Uh3o. Accessed 26 October 2020. Davis, Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Metropolitan Books, 1998. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. U of California P, 1984. Filho, Lúcio Reis. ‘No Safe Space: Zombie Film Tropes During the COVID-19 Pandemic.’ Space and Culture, vol. 23, no. 2, 2020, pp. 253–58. Finch, Jason. Deep Locational Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching. John Benjamins, 2016. Frydenlund, Sally. ‘Utopierne vil blomstre, så længe mennesker tør drømme.’ Information, 30 May 2020. www.information.dk/moti/2020/05/utopierneblomstre-saa-laenge-mennesker-toer-droemme. Accessed 26 October 2020. Graeber, David. ‘Debt, Bullshit Jobs, and Political Self-Organization – David Graeber and Maja Kantar, April 15, 2020.’ Everything Must Change! The World After Covid-19, edited by Renata Ávila and Sre´cko Horvat. OR Books, 2020, pp. 217–29. Harvey, David. Consciousness and the Urban Experience. Blackwell, 1985. ———. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwell, 1996. ———. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh UP, 2000. Kimmelman, Michael. ‘The Great Empty.’ New York Times, 23 March 2020. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/23/world/coronavirus-greatempty.html. Accessed 26 October 2020.

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Lefebvre, Henri. ‘Comments on a New State Form.’ 1979. Translated by Victoria Johnson and Neil Brenner. State, Space, World: Selected Essays, edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden. U of Minnesota P, 2009, pp. 124–37. ———. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. Athlone Press, 1984. ———. ‘Right to the City.’ 1968. Writings on Cities, translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Blackwell, 1996, pp. 61–181. Levitas, Ruth. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Lykkeberg, Rune. ‘Utopier om verden efter pandemien.’ Information, 29 May 2020, www.information.dk/utopier?lst_srs. Accessed 26 Oct. 2020. Marcuse, Herbert. ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society.’ The Dialectics of Liberation, edited by David Cooper. Penguin, 1968, pp. 175–92. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Sage, 2005. Pinder, David. ‘The Breath of the Possible: Everyday Utopianism and the Street in Modernist Urbanism.’ Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, edited by Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash. Princeton UP, 2010, pp. 203–30. ———. ‘Reconstituting the Possible: Lefebvre, Utopia and the Urban Question.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 2015, pp. 28–45. ———. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism. Edinburgh UP, 2005. Prendergast, Christopher. Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been. Bloomsbury, 2019. Rendell, Jane. Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London. Athlone Press, 2001. Rose, Jacqueline. ‘Pointing the Finger.’ London Review of Books, 7 May 2020. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/jacqueline-rose/pointingthe-finger. Accessed 1 October 2020. Ross, Kristin. ‘Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview.’ Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough. MIT Press, 2002, pp. 267–83. Rossiter, Benjamin, and Katherine Gibson. ‘Walking and Performing “the City”: A Melbourne Chronicle.’ The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Blackwell, 2011, pp. 488–98. Roy, Arundhati. ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal.’ Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction. Penguin, 2020, pp. 203–14. Shames, Shauna, and Amy Atchison. ‘Are We Living in a Dystopia?’ The Conversation, 29 April 2020. https://theconversation.com/are-we-living-in-a-dys topia-136908. Accessed 26 October 2020.

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Tally, Robert, editor. The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. Routledge, 2017. Thelle, Mikkel, and Mikkel Bille. ‘Urban Porosity and Material Contamination: From Cholera to COVID-19 in Copenhagen.’ Journal for the History of Environment and Society, vol. 5‚ 2020, pp. 185–196. Watts, Jonathan. ‘Blue-sky Thinking: How Cities Can Keep Air Clean After Coronavirus.’ The Guardian, 7 June 2020. www.theguardian.com/enviro nment/2020/jun/07/blue-sky-thinking-how-cities-can-keep-air-clean-aftercoronavirus. Accessed 26 October 2020. Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Williams, Raymond. ‘The Tenses of Imagination.’ Writing in Society. Verso, 1983, pp. 259–68. Žižek, Slavoj. Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. Verso, 1994.

Index

A Abish, Walter, 123, 214, 226 Alphabetical Africa, 123 Acke, Daniel, 3, 145 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 143, 159 affordances, 3, 6, 46, 52, 61, 258, 259 Afghanistan, 216 Africa, 21, 26, 70, 123, 240 Alÿs, Francis, 234 Ameel, Lieven, 3, 6, 8, 11, 12, 45–49, 52, 53, 57, 58, 66, 102, 140, 144, 145, 258, 260 Anatolia, 26, 28 Andström, Bobby, 192, 204–208 Angotti, Tom, 25 Aravena, Alejandro, 22, 23, 38 Ashcan School, 220 Asia, 21, 25, 26, 70 Asimov, Isaac, 2, 259 Foundation trilogy, 2 Atwood, Margaret, 256 The Handmaid’s Tale, 256

Austin, Herbert, 237 Austin Seven, 237 Austria, 214–218, 220, 221 Avermaete, Tom, 22, 23 B Babel, 48 Badiou, Alain, 40 Baeten, Guy, 9, 176 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 127 Balasopoulos, Antonis, 232, 233 Balzac, Honoré de, 3, 26, 259 Lost Illusions , 3 Barber, Benjamin, 20, 21 Bar-Itzhak, Chen, 5, 12, 13, 62, 74, 260 Barnes, Trevor J., 213 Barthelme, Donald, 13, 89–111 ‘The Balloon’, 90, 94, 106–108 City Life, 89, 90, 93, 96, 97, 101, 103, 109 ‘A City of Churches’, 103 ‘Critique de la Vie Quotidienne’, 90, 101, 102

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9

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272

INDEX

‘The Glass Mountain’, 90 ‘The Great Hug’, 105 ‘I Bought a Little City’, 90, 107 ‘The Indian Uprising’, 89–91, 96, 98, 102 ‘Paraguay’, 103 Sixty Stories , 90 Barthelme, Donald (Sr.), 107 Barth, John, 99 Bater, James H., 119, 126 Baudrillard, Jean, 95, 126 Bauman, Zygmunt, 5, 12, 13, 62, 65, 66, 75, 76, 82–84, 260, 266 Beatty, John, 147 Bellamy, Edward, 2, 57, 260 Looking Backward 2000–1887 , 2, 58 Belousov, A.F., 118, 119 Benjamin, Walter, 82, 151 Berger, John, 31, 37, 262 Berggruen, Nicolas, 175 Berlin, 3, 14, 165–189, 215–216 Charlottenburg, 172 Dahlem, 172 Friedenau, 172 Friedrichshagen, 173, 174 Friedrichshain, 172, 173 Hasenheide, 172 Kreuzberg, 169, 171, 172, 174, 183 Mitte, 173 Neukölln, 169, 172, 181 Prenzlauer Berg, 169, 173, 183 Schöneberg, 172 Steglitz, 172 Südstern, 172 Wedding, 172 Berlin Wall, 166, 169, 183 Beta: Sensored Reality (Vacklin and Parhamaa), 45, 54 Bhabha, Homi K., 221 Bieger, Laura, 140

Bilbao, 50 Bindura (Zimbabwe), 144, 157 Birmingham, 15, 232–237, 241, 242, 246, 248, 249 Longbridge, 237 Birmingham City Council, 236, 240 Björk, Ingvar, 192, 204–208 Black Lives Matter, 257 Blade Runner, 259 Bloch, Ernst, 76, 84, 267 The Principle of Hope, 267 Boele, Otto, 115, 117, 128 Bonnier (publishing house), 197 Booth, William, 240 Boston, 58 Botstiber Foundation, 215 Bourdieu, Pierre, 167, 180 Boym, Svetlana, 4, 5 Bradford, 247, 248, 250 Buttershaw Estate, 247 Braun, Georg, 159 Brell, Aljoscha, 14, 166, 179–183 Kress , 14, 166, 179 Bremer, Jan Peter, 14, 166, 174–178, 184 Der amerikanische Investor, 14, 166, 174, 184 Breton, André, 263 Brickell, Katherine, 14, 141 Brillembourg, Alfredo, 37 Broch, Hermann, 214 Bryansk, 114–116, 121–123, 125, 128 Buell, Lawrence, 129 Burgess, Anthony, 197 A Clockwork Orange, 197 Bushnell, Anthony, 218 Butler, Octavia, 259 Butt, Amy, 8 C C40 Group, 257–258

INDEX

Camus, Albert, 256 The Plague, 256 capital, 25, 39, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 62, 115–117, 121, 125, 127, 167, 168, 175, 178 cultural, 167, 168, 178, 180, 181, 184, 185 financial, 167, 168, 170, 173, 178, 181, 183–185 social, 168, 180, 182 Castells, Manuel, 4, 232 Castro, Fidel, 192 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 37 Chekhov, Anton, 119, 127 Chelmsley Wood estate (West Midlands, UK), 232, 234fn1, 235, 236–238, 240, 241 Cherepovets, 116 Children’s literature, 192, 195, 204, 206, 264 chronotope, 127, 128 ‘City of N.’ (generic toponym), 118 Clayton, Robert, 15, 233–234, 241–245, 246, 247 Estate, 15, 234, 243, 249 Estate Return, 245 Lion Farm Estate, 234 Coe, Jonathan, 248 The Rotters’ Club, 248 Cole, Teju, 159 Open City, 159 Constant (C. Nieuwenhuys), 259 Cooper, David, 138 Coover, Robert, 96, 99 council estate (UK), 3, 15, 233, 239, 243 COVID-19 pandemic, 16, 256, 261, 266, 267–268 Crang, Mike, 150 D Dagens Nyheter, 194

273

Danilov, Dmitrii Dvadtsat’ gorodov, 114, 115, 119 Est’ veshchi povazhnee futbola, 115 ‘Neob’iatnyi malen’kii Briansk’, 115 Opisanie goroda, 114, 115, 118, 120, 125 Danube, River, 227 Datta, Ayona, 9, 14, 141 Davis, Mike, 24, 25, 29, 30, 33–35, 39, 40, 259 Planet of Slums , 24–25 de Boeck, Filip, 22 de Certeau, Michel, 37, 122, 228, 263 Debord, Guy, 196, 206 Deep locational criticism, 15, 124, 235, 258 Deleuze, Gilles, 106, 107 Derrida, Jacques, 233 Desna, River, 123 Dholera, 8, 9 Dickens, Charles, 4, 26, 259 Diogenes the Cynic, 66, 73 disorientation, 13, 89, 93, 95, 97–99, 101, 107, 217 displacement, 91, 166, 169, 170, 174, 176, 178, 182–184, 228, 261 Dobychin, Leonid, 119 Gorod En, 119 Doležel, Lubomír, 7 Doody, Margaret, 46 Drayton, Michael, 242, 247 Poly-Olbion, 247 Duffy, Maureen, 250 That’s How It Was , 250 Dunbar, Andrea, 250 The Arbor, 250 Duncan, James S., 213 E East Berlin, 169, 173, 181. See also Berlin

274

INDEX

Edinburgh, 137–163 Arthur’s Seat, 145, 150, 153, 157 Calton Hill, 156 Castle Rock, 153 central mosque, 155 Craigmillar, 147 Duddingston Village, 147 Leith, 152 North Bridge, 152, 153 Scottish Parliament building, 147 Waverley Station, 153 Edström, Vivi, 196 Edvinsson, Behnn, 192, 204–208 Eliot, T.S., 223 The Waste Land, 223 Essen, 145 Europe, 15, 25, 47, 54, 68, 70, 72, 79, 159, 194, 214, 219, 231, 239

F Faichney, Will, 244 Fels, John, 142, 143 Ferguson, Erika, 149 Finch, Jason, 8, 13, 15, 91, 114, 122, 124, 125, 170, 196, 235, 247, 248, 258, 264, 265 Deep Locational Criticism, 13, 114, 235 Fischer, Brodwyn, 25 Florida, 226 Folkhem programme (Sweden), 193 Fontane, Theodor, 179 Foucault, Michel, 196–198 Franzén, Lars-Olof, 194, 201 Freud, Sigmund, 228 Fried, Erich, 215 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 215, 224 Futurism, 4, 220

G Galveston (Texas), 107 Garnier, Xavier, 37 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 4 gecekondu, 12, 25–31, 34, 38 Gelfant, Blanche, 3 Gentrification, 11, 14, 91, 165–174, 176, 179–185, 239 George Wimpey (building company), 241 German Democratic Republic (GDR), 173, 183 Germany, 169, 171, 180, 216, 236, 241 Gibson, Katherine, 263 Gibson, William, 259 Gidlunds förlag, 192, 195 Gillen, Francis, 91, 94 Gissing, George, 259 Glass, Ruth, 165, 167 Global South, 19–23, 25, 26, 235 Gogol, Nikolai, 119, 127 Gomel, Elana, 84 Goodman, Nelson, 7 Greater Birmingham Act (UK), 236 Grossberg, Mimi, 226 Grosz, Elizabeth, 106 Guattari, Félix, 106, 107 Guggenheim, 12, 45, 47, 50–52, 56 Gulf of Finland, 57

H Haifa, 3, 13, 65, 67–85 Hall, G. Stanley, 194 Hall, Peter, 237 Hall, Stuart, 170 Hamburg, 170 Hanley, Lynsey, 15, 232–235, 237–244, 246–251 Estates: An Intimate History, 15, 232, 237–241, 249

INDEX

Hartwig-Manschinger, Greta, 15, 214, 226, 228 ‘A Man is Homesick’, 214 Harvey, David, 9, 165, 184, 232, 259 Spaces of Hope, 259 Hassan, Ihab, 104 Hayden, Lisa, 120 Hegarty, Mary, 149 Heise, Ursula, 20 Helsinki, 3, 12, 45–63 Baana, 59–61 Guggenheim (proposed museum), 12, 45, 47, 50–52 Herttoniemenranta, 59 Herttoniemi, 60, 61 Jätkäsaari, 59, 61 Kalasatama, 51, 60, 62 Kivinokka, 60 Lammassaari, 53 Marjaniemi, 59 Old Town Bay, 60 Pasila, 57, 61 Ruoholahti, 59 South Harbour, 50 Tokoinranta, 55 Henryson, Hanna, 14, 165, 249 Herman, David, 140 Herz-Kestranek, Miguel, 221 Herzl, Theodor, 67–76, 82, 85 Old New Land, 67, 68 high-rise housing, 12, 14–15, 29, 51, 52, 61, 191–210, 237–238, 244 Hirvonen, Elina, 54 Kun aika loppuu, 54 Hogenberg, Frans, 159 Hoggart, Richard, 238 The Uses of Literacy, 238 Holappa, Pentti, 53 Yksinäiset , 53 Holocaust, 216 Howard, Ebenezer, 236, 237, 260, 267

275

Garden Cities of To-Morrow, 236 Huchu, Tendai, 14, 138, 139, 141, 144–148, 150–159, 161 The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, 14, 137, 138, 144 Hudson, River, 227 Hultberg, Ulf, 192, 204–208 Hungary, 216 Huntington, Samuel, 20 Huyssen, Andreas, 5, 66

I image-fiction, 96 Information [newspaper], 266 Iraq, 216 Isakson, Börje, 192, 197, 208 ‘Fixa nåt…’ ‘Vaddå?’ , 192, 197 Iser, Wolfgang, 141 Israel, 67, 68, 75, 76, 79, 80, 85 Istanbul, 3, 11, 19–41, 216 Kültepe, 29

J Jacobsen, Michael Hviid, 266 Jacobs, Jane, 104, 239, 244 Jacobson, Gun, 192, 196–203, 205, 208 Hela långa dagen, 192, 196–198, 200, 201, 203, 205, 208 Jameson, Fredric, 9, 13, 40, 92–95, 98, 104 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 92 Järnefelt, Arvid, 53 Veneh’ojalaiset , 53 Jung, Bertel, 47

K Kaiser, Konstantin, 221

276

INDEX

Kalinin, Mikhail, 119 Karpat, Kemal, 26, 35, 40 Kaskinen, Teemu, 54 Sinulle, yö , 54 Kauranen, Anja, 53 Pelon maantiede, 53 Keilaniemi, 58 Kelly, Kevin, 40 Keunen, Bart, 4, 231, 235, 241, 249 Kiev, 116 Kirkwood, William, 152 Kiss (rock group), 198 Kitchin, Rob, 8, 9 Klapuri, Tintti, 127, 128 Klee, Paul, 82 Klumpner, Hubert, 37 Kneale, James, 8, 9 Kollontaj, Alexandra, 192 Koolhaas, Rem, 22, 23 Krajewski, Christian, 167, 171, 179, 180 Krygier, John, 142, 143 Kundera, Milan, 7 The Art of the Novel , 7

L Lanchester, John, 159 Capital , 159 Lappela, Anni, 13, 129 Las Vegas, 10, 156 Latin America, 21, 26 Lebedev, Sergei, 115, 119, 120, 127 Le Corbusier, 103, 193 The Modulor, 103 Lees, Loretta, 91, 167–170, 178, 183, 239 Lefebvre, Henri, 24, 94, 99–100, 102, 113fn1, 129, 150, 196, 197, 198, 200, 208, 232, 235, 239, 240, 244, 250, 251 Critique of Everyday Life, 100

Everyday Life in the Modern World, 150 The Right to the City, 198, 200 The Urban Revolution, 198, 251 Lehan, Richard, 4 Lehtonen, Joel, 53 Henkien taistelu, 53 Leibniz, Gottfried, 7 Leino, Piia, 54 Taivas , 54 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 128, 192 Lethem, Jonathan, 3 Dissident Gardens , 3 Levine, Caroline, 6 Lion Farm estate (West Midlands, UK), 15, 233–235, 237, 241–245, 246, 248, 251 literary cartography, 118, 121, 125 literary urban studies (LUS), 3, 4, 8, 11, 13, 20, 69, 90, 91, 99 Liverpool, 236, 250 London, 54fn8, 151, 157, 165, 218, 223, 237, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245–246, 247, 249, 250 Aylesbury Estate, 239 Bloomsbury, 250 Brunswick Centre, 243 Chalkhill Estate, 247 East End, 246 Grenfell Tower, 239 Heygate Estate, 239 North Kensington, 239 Tower Hamlets, 238 Wembley, 247 London County Council, 246 London, Jack, 240 Los Angeles, 259 Lotta och daghemmet (Hultberg and Edvinsson), 192, 204, 207 Luther, Annika, 45, 55 De hemlösas stad, 45, 55 Lynch, Kevin, 148, 154

INDEX

The Image of the City, 148 Lyotard, Jean-François, 92, 95, 98, 104 The Postmodern Condition, 95

M Ma, Eric Kit-wai, 141 Madrid, 140 Mäkinen, Esa, 45, 55 Totuuskuutio, 45, 55 Malaga, 170 Manzoni, Herbert, 236, 237, 241 The Production of Fifty Thousand Houses , 237 mapping, types of authorial pictorial , 145, 148, 157, 158, 160 local knowledge, 145, 152, 156, 160 streets and landmarks , 145, 147, 148, 150, 152, 160 See also literary cartography March-Russell, Paul, 93, 97 Marcuse, Herbert, 265 Marx, Karl, 265 Marxism, 39, 192, 196, 197, 200, 232 Maslow, Abraham, 36 Massey, Doreen, 262, 263 Mass housing, 15 Masterman, C.F.G., 240 Mattheis, Lena, 14, 144–146 McCaffery, Larry, 96, 98 McGuirk, Justin, 39 McHale, Brian, 92, 95, 98, 107, 123, 126 Postmodernist Fiction, 92, 151 Meades, Jonathan, 15, 234, 235, 241–244, 246, 247, 251 Meretoja, Hanna, 2, 7, 139, 140 Mesila Le-Damesek, 67, 74, 75, 78, 80

277

Million Programme (Sweden), 14, 192, 193, 195, 206, 264 Minsk, 115 Mitchell, Peta, 125 Mitford, Mary Russell, 139 Our Village, 139 Mittelpunkt, Hillel, 67, 75, 76, 82, 83, 85 More, Thomas, 66, 260 Moretti, Franco, 3, 14, 124, 125, 138, 139 Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, 138 Graphs, Maps, Trees , 138 Morris, William, 260 Moscow, 114, 115, 121, 125, 129 Muehrcke, Juliana, 123, 124, 139, 141, 142 Muehrcke, Phillip, 123, 124, 139, 141, 142 Mumbai, 54 Murmansk, 129 Musil, Robert, 7 The Man Without Qualities , 7

N Nettlefold, John Sutton, 236, 237, 241 Neuwirth, Robert, 38, 40 New Left (Sweden), 195 New Orleans, 170 New Songdo (South Korea), 9 New Town movement, 267 New York City, 49, 50, 54fn8, 59, 90, 91, 101, 102, 140, 151, 170, 213–230 Broadway, 219 Bronx Zoo, 227 Brooklyn Bridge, 218 Brooklyn Heights, 170 Grand Central Station, 227

278

INDEX

Greenwich Village, 104 High Line, 59, 106 Manhattan, 214, 218, 229 Meatpacking District, 227 Statue of Liberty, 227 Times Square, 227 New York Times, The, 256 Nineveh, 48, 49 Nixon, Rob, 36 Norilsk, 13, 119, 125, 126, 129, 130 Nornickel (company), 129 Northern Ireland, 249 nostalgia, 4, 5, 27, 62, 127, 128, 144, 147 Nu blommar det i Blomlunda (Andström and Björk), 192, 204, 206, 207 O Okri, Ben, 37 Oldbury (UK), 15, 241 Orwell, George, 238, 256 1984, 256 The Road to Wigan Pier, 238 Österreichischen Volkszeitung , 220 P Paker, Saliha, 31 Pamuk, Orhan, 11, 12, 25–27, 29–31, 33–36, 38–40 A Strangeness in My Mind, 12, 25–27 paralogy, 95 Parhamaa, Aki, 45, 54 Paris, 235, 243, 265 Parker, Joshua, 15, 213, 214 Parts, Lyudmila, 113, 114, 116–118, 127 Perkiömäki, Mika, 129 Peterson, Lars, 191, 192, 197–200, 202, 208

Snöret , 191, 192, 197–199, 202 Petushki, 116, 119 Piatti, Barbara, 125 Pieterse, Edgar, 22, 37 Pike, Burton, 122, 145 Pinder, David, 8, 9, 15, 16, 66, 231–235, 240, 244, 249–251, 260, 263, 265 Pithouse, Richard, 25 place attachment, 157, 161 Plato, 2 Republic, 2 Poole, Ralph J., 216 postmodernism, 91–93, 95, 99, 104, 109 Prieto, Eric, 7, 11, 19, 143, 144, 246, 249 Pritzker Prize, 22 protopia, 38, 40 provinciality, 113, 131 Pynchon, Thomas, 99, 259

Q qualia, 46, 52, 56, 62

R Ramos, Maria, 138 real-and-imagined spaces, 127 Rendell, Jane, 262, 263 retrotopia, 5, 13, 62, 67, 75, 76, 79, 82–85, 260, 266 Ridda, Maria, 151, 159 Riesman, David, 98 The Lonely Crowd, 98 Right to Buy scheme (UK), 245 Right to the city, the, 102, 198, 200, 204, 208, 264, 265. See also Lefebvre, Henri Roden, Max, 15, 214, 215, 220, 221, 224, 225

INDEX

‘First Days in the HouseMountains’, 214, 220 ‘In Vienna 1956’, 214, 224 Rogers, Lola, 59 Rome, 10 Rose, Jacqueline, 256 Rossetto, Tania, 14, 124, 138 Rossiter, Benjamin, 263 Rothmann, Ralf, 14, 166, 171–174, 183 Fire Doesn’t Burn, 166, 171, 183 Roussel, Raymond, 123 Impressions of Africa, 123 Rowley Regis (UK), 248 Roy, Ananya, 19 Roy, Arundhati, 267–268 Rushdie, Salman, 159 Fury, 159 Russia, 13, 84, 115, 116, 118, 123, 125 Russkaia zhizn’ (magazine), 115 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 7, 140, 144, 149

S Saarinen, Eliel, 47 Saisio, Pirkko, 53 Betoniyö , 53 Salmela, Markku, 10, 13, 89, 103 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 127 Salzburg, 216 University of, 216 Sandwell and Dudley railway station, 249 Sandwell, Metropolitan Borough of, 248 San Francisco, 170 Sassen, Saskia, 21, 47 Scotland, 144, 156, 249 Scott, Allen, 91, 103 Segal, Lore, 217

279

Sennett, Richard, 106, 239, 243, 244 Shehovtsova, Tatiana, 126 Shemtov, Vered K., 84 Sierra, Nicole, 103, 104 Simak, Clifford, 259 City, 259 Simbirsk. See Ulyanovsk Simcities. See also Soja, Edward Simmel, Georg, 94 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 22, 37 Skidmore University, 221 Smith, Neil, 168, 169 Smith, Zadie, 3, 11, 159 NW , 3, 159 smooth space, 106, 107 Social Democratic Party (Sweden), 193 Socialist Writers’ Union (Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller, Austria), 221 Soja, Edward, 13, 94–95, 97, 113fn1 Postmetropolis , 94 Postmodern Geographies , 92 Thirdspace, 95, 113 Solihull, 240 Soviet Union, 118, 128 Stadler, Jane, 125 Staffordshire, 236 Stieglitz, Alfred, 220 Stockholm, 196–198, 202, 205 Hallonbergen, 197, 205 Jakobsberg, 197, 198 Skärholmen, 197 Slussen, 198 Slussplan, 198 Storper, Michael, 91, 103 St Petersburg, 51 striated space, 106 Stringl, Daniela, 221 Susanino, 116 Suttles, Gerald D., 247 Suvin, Darko, 262

280

INDEX

Sweden, 193–195, 264 Swift, Jonathan, 60 Gulliver’s Travels , 60 Sydney, 170 Syria, 216

T Tallinn, 57, 62 Talvio, Maila, 12, 45, 47–49, 51, 52 Children of Nineveh, 12, 45, 47 Tekin, Latife, 12, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33–38, 40 Berji Kristin, 12, 25, 26, 30, 31, 38 Buzdan Kiliçlar, 34 Thacker, Andrew, 138 Thames, River, 239 Tharoor, Ishaan, 159 Thirdspace, 95, 113, 114 Tolkien, J.R.R., 242, 248 Tolstoy, Leo, 26 Town and Country Planning Acts, 1944 and 1947 (UK), 236 transduction, 23, 24 Translocal Geographies (Brickell and Datta), 141 translocality, 6, 137, 141, 142, 159 Troller, George, 217 Trowbridge (UK), 250 Trump, Donald, 217 Tuomainen, Antti, 12, 45, 57, 58, 60–62 The Healer, 12, 45, 57, 58 Turgenev, Ivan, 127 Turkey, 25, 26, 38 Turner, John, 38, 39

U Ukraine, 115 Ulyanovsk, 128

United Kingdom (UK), 3, 15, 159, 232–241, 243–245, 247, 249, 264 United States of America (USA), 213, 214, 217, 226, 239 Upstone, Sara, 121 Uspensky, Gleb, 58, 127 Utopia, 5, 9, 12, 13, 40, 58, 60, 65–67, 69, 73–76, 80, 81, 83–85, 104, 231–233, 260, 262, 266, 267 Uurto, Iris, 53 Kypsyminen, 53 V Vacklin, Anders, 45, 54 Venice, 10 Venturi, Robert, 104, 105 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 104 Vestin, Frances, 195 Handbok i barnindoktrinering , 195 Vienna, 15, 68, 73, 213–230 Franz-Josefs-Kai, 227, 228 Herzmansky’s (department store), 226, 227 Ring Road, 227 Schönbrunn, 227, 228 Spinnerin am Kreuz, 226, 228 Stefansplatz, 227 Westbahnhof, 227, 228 W Wacquant, Loïc, 239 Waldinger, Ernst, 15, 214, 221–223, 228 ‘A Horse in 47th Street’, 214, 223 ‘The Skyscraper’, 214, 221 Wales, 249 Wallace, David Foster, 96, 99 ‘E Unibus Pluram’, 96

INDEX

Warwickshire, 236, 242, 247 waterfront, 12, 45–47, 49–53, 58, 59, 61, 62, 260 weak signals, 56 Wesselman, Daan, 106, 107 West Berlin, 169, 171, 173, 183. See also Berlin West Midlands region, England, 231–253, 265 Westphal, Bertrand, 7, 8, 23, 121, 140, 143, 258 Geocriticism, 7, 143 Wiener Zeitung , 220 Williams, Raymond, 259, 261 Wischmann, Antje, 195, 203 Wistisen, Lydia, 14, 191, 195, 202, 209, 264 Wolverhampton, 248 Wood, Denis, 139, 142, 143, 156 Woolworth’s, 227

281

Worcestershire, 236 World War I, 47, 215, 242 World War II, 15, 61, 193, 214, 239

Y young adult literature, 3, 14, 192, 195, 208, 209

Z Zaionts, L.O., 113, 116, 117, 127, 128 Zimbabwe, 144, 145, 157 Zionism, 68, 69, 83 Žižek, Slavoj, 40, 267 Zola, Émile, 259 Zweig, Stefan, 15, 214, 218–220, 223, 228 ‘The Rhythm of New York’, 214