Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City (review)

The "space of modernity" is, if nothing else, an oxymoron. The "modern" is a temporal marker, of course, signaling a transition or rupture from a traditional past. This rupture/transformation of time and history must occur (or have occurred) in space, and yet how can we think of one space ("traditional space") as temporally distinct from another (the "modern space")? The problem is nowhere more acute than in modernist studies, which despite all the allegations of formalism and ahistoricism so often leveled against it, has always been a fundamentally historico-temporal pursuit. Perhaps the charges stem from the fact that modernist history (and hence modernist historicism) always seems to come forth in terms of spatial disposition, whether in the page layout of Pound, Joyce, or de Campos; the distortions of surrealist and cubist painting; or the geometric figuration of Le Corbusier, van der Rohe, and Niemeyer.

The inherently contradictory "space of modernity" has recently spawned a powerful interdisciplinary field of urban socio-cultural studies, precisely because the historical forces of modernization and globalization have concentrated into urban networks worldwide. That is, scholars from far-flung disciplines have, over the past decade, focused attention on the "network" of politico-economic, architectonic, and cultural structures emerging in "global cities." The essays of Urban Imaginaries tackle these problematic "spaces of modernity" in full contradiction, drawing on scholars from an impressive array of disciplines.

We should not call the critical discourses at play in Urban Imaginaries as "universal," "unified," or "global," as they are decidedly those of art history, ethnic studies, history, literature, political science, and sociology, in each respective chapter. Nonetheless, what links each chapter into anything approaching a cohesive whole is the rather shrewd definitions of "city" and "urban" provided in the editors' introduction. (These definitions are reiterated convincingly in a brief opening chapter by Anthony D. King, and summarized neatly in a concluding chapter by coeditor Thomas Bender.) The editors write that " . . . rather that focusing on the city's materiality for definition, the emphasis of these chapters is on the city as a field of experience as well as the way social and physical space is imagined and thus made into urban culture" (xi). In other words, the city is not a space or place with firmly demarcated boundaries. Instead, the city is "located" paradoxically—constituted by the daily experiences, imaginaries, and movements that are simultaneously shaped by the city itself. The editors explicitly state that the city is not a "thing" to be contemplated, but a process that may often be as virtual and aesthetic as it is concrete. Such conceptualizations necessarily alter how one locates politics, economics, and history within the city and its "oxymoronic logics."

Urban Imaginaries, however, is not a work of theory, so much as it is a series of theoretically informed interpretations of specific cities. The first section of three essays treats new possibilities of mapping cities with respect to the "globe" (here conceived, of course, as a "global market"). Such mappings are largely read as aesthetic (as in the case of Los Angeles seen through Latino cinema in Camilla Fojas's contribution, or Hausmann's Paris seen through journalism, literature, and drawing in Margaret Cohen's.) Deniz Yükseker leads off the section by "mapping" gender relations through the international circuit of trade between Istanbul's male merchants and their female suppliers from the former Soviet republics. The question of mapping is extended into the second section, also of three chapters: AbdouMaliq Simone's essay on the African city; Beatriz Jaguaribe's take on the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and realist portrayals thereof; and in perhaps the most impressive item in the volume, Mark LeVine's brilliant rendering of the multiple and contradictory mappings of Jaffa-Tel Aviv in Palestine-Israel. The collection concludes with four articles interrogating dynamic junctures and disjunctures between city and nation in four distinct Asian cases: Ankara (Alev Çinar), the postcolonial "Steel Towns" of India (Srirupa...