City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
Editat de Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, Maria Sulimmaen Limba Engleză Hardback – 22 aug 2023
Storytelling shapes how we view our cities, legitimizing histories, future plans, and understandings of the urban. City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists to engage a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things”—how they intervene in the world and take action in everyday life. A multidisciplinary cast of contributors approaches this new way of looking at cities through the stories people tell about them, looking especially at political activism and urban planning, which depend on the invention of plausible stories of connectedness and of a redemptive future.
The stakes are especially high in cities where economic, ecological, and social futures are delimited by histories of large-scale extraction and racialized industrial labor. Contributors thus focus on cities in postindustrial areas of Germany and the United States, examining how narratives about cities become scripts and how these scripts produce real-life results. This approach highlights how uses of narrative and scripting appeal to stakeholders in urban change. These actors continually deploy narrative, media, and performance, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.
Contributors: Lieven Ameel, Juliane Borosch, Barbara Buchenau, Florian Deckers, Barbara Eckstein, Kornelia Freitag, Walter Grünzweig, Randi Gunzenhäuser, Jens Martin Gurr, Elisabeth Haefs, Chris Katzenberg, Johannes Maria Krickl, Renee M. Moreno, Hanna Rodewald, Julia Sattler, Maria Sulimma, James A. Throgmorton, Michael Wala, Katharina Wood
The stakes are especially high in cities where economic, ecological, and social futures are delimited by histories of large-scale extraction and racialized industrial labor. Contributors thus focus on cities in postindustrial areas of Germany and the United States, examining how narratives about cities become scripts and how these scripts produce real-life results. This approach highlights how uses of narrative and scripting appeal to stakeholders in urban change. These actors continually deploy narrative, media, and performance, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.
Contributors: Lieven Ameel, Juliane Borosch, Barbara Buchenau, Florian Deckers, Barbara Eckstein, Kornelia Freitag, Walter Grünzweig, Randi Gunzenhäuser, Jens Martin Gurr, Elisabeth Haefs, Chris Katzenberg, Johannes Maria Krickl, Renee M. Moreno, Hanna Rodewald, Julia Sattler, Maria Sulimma, James A. Throgmorton, Michael Wala, Katharina Wood
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814215524
ISBN-10: 0814215521
Pagini: 253
Ilustrații: 13 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.51 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814215521
Pagini: 253
Ilustrații: 13 b&w images
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 33 mm
Greutate: 0.51 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
"This book demonstrates the value of transdisciplinary narratology and exemplifies the value of the expanding application of the literary tools of analysis … City Scripts thereby makes a strong case for the necessity of a clear understanding of the powers and structures of narrative in the quest for a more just future." - Carlos Tkacz, DIEGESIS
"City Scripts reenergizes discussions at the intersection of urban studies and literary and cultural studies. Innovatively reading material spaces using narratological tools developed through the analysis of fictional texts, it will be a rich and productive resource for scholars across disciplines." - Erin James, author of Narrative in the Anthropocene
"There are tremendous political and economic challenges to creating more just and resilient cities, but City Scripts is a reminder that the stories we tell about cities can be just as important as a new policy or funding scheme. The essays in this volume, along with a great conceptual introduction, are a vital entry point to understanding the importance of literary and cultural analysis in the broader field of urban studies." - Robert R. Gioielli, author of Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago
"When reading this book, urban planners in the US and Germany will understand why transdisciplinary city narratives often provide better information on what citizens need than do master plans and voluminous technical reports on sustainable development. While declining industrial cities in the US and in Germany have long been branded as losers of economic transformation and capitalism, the case studies at the heart of this book tell other stories—of successful interventions and revitalization." - Klaus R. Kunzmann, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London
"City Scripts … [provides] a new framework through which to analyze urban phenomena in cities that have gone through deindustrialization and reindustrialization. Interesting in its contemporary emphasis and material. … The collection is bound to be eye-opening to those interested in contemporary urbanism." - Meeria Vesala, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Notă biografică
Barbara Buchenau is Professor of North American Cultural Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Jens Martin Gurr is Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Maria Sulimma is Junior Professor of North American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg.
Extras
Have we come to a new era of narrating the city in Western democracies? And is narration an appropriate technique to influence powerful transformations? In a video statement announcing the United Nations Policy Brief “Covid-19 in an Urban World” in July 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres evoked stories of atomic wars and 9/11 alike when he described cities as “ground zero” of the global pandemic (United Nations). Like Guterres, many politicians, activists, scientists, and journalists framed the COVID-19 pandemic as a decidedly urban phenomenon, challenging their listeners to understand the spread of the virus as a fundamental threat to their cities. Urban dwellers, infrastructures, and lifestyles were registered by the media as the first and foremost victims. Simultaneously, public discourse and the professional fields of urban management and urban planning picked up on the added sense of opportunity and futurity that emerged from this multiauthored narrative documentation: The pandemic was seized as an incentive to rethink and restructure urban communities. Between 2020 and 2022, several factual as well as fictionalized narratives surrounding cities and pandemics surfaced in newspapers, statements of politicians, or social media posts from around the world. These texts contributed to the recrafting of the canonical and starkly racialized scripts of urban flight and deserted cities.
Urban flight, deserted cities: each a pas de deux that refers readers back to a contingent, albeit conspicuous, assemblage of narrative techniques, performing characters, medial frames, and figural interpretation. They recall past crises, sketch present urban isolation, and call for future urban action. They are especially familiar descriptors for transformational processes in so-called “legacy cities” adapting to major global shifts in the heavy industries. Most importantly for the volume at hand, they are scripts—consequential, but rather terse and stereotyping placemaking strategies at the intersections between textuality, urban space, mediality, performativity, and materiality. Drawing on mental schemata and conceptual models, scripts tend to renew outdated explanations of social transformations to pitch story arcs forward into the future. This new pandemic life given to two well-worn abbreviations of urban change is one example of city scripts as highly condensed, and yet expansive in scope, dynamic storytelling phenomena to be methodically analyzed in this book.
As the example of the compressed yet complex storytelling sparked by the rise of a pandemic demonstrates, factual and fictional stories affect how we imagine our cities and life within them. Two contrapuntal fields of urban practices equally depend on this ability to invent plausible stories of collective action, partial cohesion, and selective connectedness: political activism and urban planning. This volume suggests the city script as a methodological and conceptual framework to better analyze and understand such future-oriented storytelling. The conceptualization of scripts as much as the observation of material practices of scripting and the performative dimension of “scriptivity” permit innovative insights into the transgressive overlap and interdependence of fictional, factual, and real-life modes of urban and anti-urban imaginaries.
City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists such as Rita Felski in Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020) and Paula M. L. Moya in The Social Imperative (2016) to develop methods for a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things” by, for instance, allowing their readers to enter into emotionally and epistemically transformative “interracial friendship[s]” with literary characters and with the narrative progression that can and will “prompt a reader to question and then revise some of her assumptions about structures of racial and economic inequality.” We are particularly interested in how narratives take action in everyday life. This book will analyze polysemic assemblages of narrative, media, and poetics with their multiplying and contesting temporal, spatial, and material groundings.
Urban flight, deserted cities: each a pas de deux that refers readers back to a contingent, albeit conspicuous, assemblage of narrative techniques, performing characters, medial frames, and figural interpretation. They recall past crises, sketch present urban isolation, and call for future urban action. They are especially familiar descriptors for transformational processes in so-called “legacy cities” adapting to major global shifts in the heavy industries. Most importantly for the volume at hand, they are scripts—consequential, but rather terse and stereotyping placemaking strategies at the intersections between textuality, urban space, mediality, performativity, and materiality. Drawing on mental schemata and conceptual models, scripts tend to renew outdated explanations of social transformations to pitch story arcs forward into the future. This new pandemic life given to two well-worn abbreviations of urban change is one example of city scripts as highly condensed, and yet expansive in scope, dynamic storytelling phenomena to be methodically analyzed in this book.
As the example of the compressed yet complex storytelling sparked by the rise of a pandemic demonstrates, factual and fictional stories affect how we imagine our cities and life within them. Two contrapuntal fields of urban practices equally depend on this ability to invent plausible stories of collective action, partial cohesion, and selective connectedness: political activism and urban planning. This volume suggests the city script as a methodological and conceptual framework to better analyze and understand such future-oriented storytelling. The conceptualization of scripts as much as the observation of material practices of scripting and the performative dimension of “scriptivity” permit innovative insights into the transgressive overlap and interdependence of fictional, factual, and real-life modes of urban and anti-urban imaginaries.
City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists such as Rita Felski in Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020) and Paula M. L. Moya in The Social Imperative (2016) to develop methods for a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things” by, for instance, allowing their readers to enter into emotionally and epistemically transformative “interracial friendship[s]” with literary characters and with the narrative progression that can and will “prompt a reader to question and then revise some of her assumptions about structures of racial and economic inequality.” We are particularly interested in how narratives take action in everyday life. This book will analyze polysemic assemblages of narrative, media, and poetics with their multiplying and contesting temporal, spatial, and material groundings.
Cuprins
Introduction City Scripts in Urban Literary and Cultural Studies Part 1 Urban Spaces Chapter 1 Black Lives Matter Graffiti and Creative Forms of Dissent: Two Sites of Counterscripting in Denver, Colorado Chapter 2 Walking Down Woodward: (Re)Telling a City’s Stories through Urban Figures Chapter 3 Tiny Architecture and Narrative: Scripting Minimal Urban Living Spaces Chapter 4 Narrative Path Dependencies in Sustainable and Inclusive Urban Planning: Portland’s Albina Neighborhoods Part 2 Urban Literature Chapter 5 Scripting the Inclusive City, Narrating the Self: Contemporary Rust Belt Memoirs in Poetry and Prose Chapter 6 Whose Detroit?: Fictions of Land Ownership and Property in Postindustrial America Chapter 7 To the Bodega or the Café?: Microscripts of Gentrification in Contemporary Fiction Chapter 8 Redemptive Scripts in the City Novel Part 3 Urban Histories of Ideas Chapter 9 Patterned Pasts and Scripted Futures: Cleveland’s Waterfronts and Hopes of Changing the Narrative Chapter 10 The Creative Democracy: A Critique of Concepts of Creativity in Contemporary Urban Discourse Chapter 11 Forms, Frames, and Possible Futures
Descriere
Via German and American case studies, analyzes uses of narrative and scripting to appeal to stakeholders in urban change, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.