No Maps for These Territories: Cities, Spaces, and Archaeologies of the Future in William Gibson

252 Pages·2011·1.84 MB·English

by  Karin Hoepker

No Maps for These Territories
Spatial Practices
An Interdisciplinary Series in
Cultural History,
Geography and
12
Literature
General Editors:
Christoph Ehland (Universität Paderborn)
Chris Thurgar-Dawson (Teesside University)
Editorial Board:
Christine Berberich
Catrin Gersdorf
Jan Hewitt
Peter Merriman
Ralph Pordzik
Merle Tönnies
Founding Editors:
Robert Burden
Stephan Kohl
No Maps for These Territories
Cities, Spaces, and Archaeologies
of the Future in William Gibson
Karin Hoepker
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Cover Image: Adapted from the Series “Nachtbilder” by Mathias Otto
Cover Design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISSN: 1871-689X
ISBN: 978-90-420-3353-5
E-book ISBN: 978-94-012-0052-3
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
Printed in the Netherlands
The Spatial Practices Series
The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical
turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in
the study of spaces and places which have been appropri-
ated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and ur-
ban places which have specific cultural meanings that
construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified na-
tional or regional culture and their histories, or whose
visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the
lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited
which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of
cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geogra-
phy.
Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdis-
ciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructiv-
ist approaches to questions of culture and identity that
insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses,
but also that cultural objects and their histories and geog-
raphies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules,
tropes and topographies.
Robert Burden
Stephan Kohl
Founding Editors
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 9
1 Introduction:
New Cartographies – New Cartographers? 11
1.1 A Proposal for an Archaeology of Future Spaces 15
1.2 Real-and-Imagined Spaces 23
2 A Short Introduction to Science Fiction
since the 1980s: Contextualizing William Gibson 29
2.1 The Novum and the Subject Object Shift 34
2.2 Science Fiction and Postmodernism 37
2.3 Cyberpunk 38
2.4 William Gibson 42
3 Sprawl Space 47
3.1 Sprawl as Urban and Architectural Pattern 57
3.2 Hypermart: Marketplaces and Street Level Interaction 64
3.3 The Junk Collector: At the Finn’s 71
3.4 Geographies of Waste 75
3.4.1 Kipple 79
3.4.2 Gomi 82
3.5 Generic Urbanity and Cognitive Mapping 88
4 Junk Art – Towards a spatial poetics 95
4.1 Boxmakers: Navigation of the heteroclite 98
4.2 Ekphrastic Fear 100
4.3 Wunderkammer Poetics – Architectonics of Meaning 106
4.4 Death and the Labyrinth 109
5 Space and Habitation:
Century City II – City within a City 115
5.1 Sprawl Space as Habitat 124
5.2 The Arcology – Utopian Topographies 126
5.3 Corporate Arcologies 131
5.4 Turner’s Tactics 140
5.5 The Projects –Arcologies Appropriated 155
5.6 Sprawl and Homogenization: Enclaves and Envelopes 165
6 Replascape – Urban Nature
and Artificial Landscaping 167
6.1 Urban Landscapes and Picturesque Nature 167
6.2 Replascape and Artificial Life 171
6.3 Second Nature 178
6.4 Replascape as Architecture 183
7 The Malling of Space 189
7.1 Mall Space: Container City 190
7.2 The Bridge 205
7.3 Franchise and Tourist Site: Bridge Space Revisited 217
8 Conclusion:
Pattern Recognition and the End of the Future 225
9 Works Cited 233
Index 249
Acknowledgements
This book is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation submitted in
American Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-
Nuremberg (FAU). First and foremost, I would like to express my
gratitude to my advisor Helmbrecht Breinig for his continued encour-
agement and advice, as well as to Heike Paul for becoming my second
reader and for her support during the final stages of my writing.
My research was funded by the Freistaat Bayern through a fel-
lowship for the “Förderung des künstlerischen und wissenschaftlichen
Nachwuchses des Freistaats Bayern” and by the DFG Graduier-
tenkolleg “Kulturhermeneutik im Zeichen von Differenz und Trans-
differenz” at the Friedrich-Alexander University, as well as the
“Stipendienprogramm zur Förderung von Nachwuchswissenschaftle-
rinnen der Philosophischen Fakultät” of the FAU, which supported me
during stages of revision.
I am indebted to the Graduiertenkolleg for providing a frame-
work for interdisciplinary study, stimulating thought, and inspiring
discussions. The friendly and supportive atmosphere created by my
friends and colleagues Solveig Mill, Alexandra Ganser, Iris Gruber,
and Antje Kley has helped me through many dire straits.
I would like to thank Joe Tabbi for giving me a nudge in the
right direction at a very early stage of research, M. Christine Boyer for
taking the time to discuss Foucault and architectural matters. Katra
Byram provided for inspiring library tea breaks. Marina Rubina gave
me the perspective of someone who actually builds houses and added
interesting comment to quite a few talks at the Princeton University
Department of Architecture Lecture Series. I am also grateful for the
input provided by talks and discussions at the Princeton University
Shelby Cullom Davis Center, whose “Utopias and Dystopias” study
series encouraged me to realize the relevance of my research. Michael
Lackner deserves thanks for enjoyable hours of conversation on and
off the Institute for Advanced Studies grounds. To Jens Klenner, who
has a very good friend across at times considerable distances, goes my
gratitude for believing in me, for being persistent, and for sometimes
just being there.
10 No Maps for these Territories?
My special thanks goes to Rachel Galvin and Kylie Crane for
their heedful proofreading and helpful suggestions, as well as to the
entirely unrelated brothers Frasier and Niles Crane, who cheered me
up during the final weeks of writing. Melanie Schwarz, Franziska
Fröhlich and Elke Demant are to thank for their speed and diligence in
preparing the manuscript for publication and Stephan Kohl and Robert
Burden for kindly accepting it into the Spatial Practices series.
Not a line of this dissertation, however, would have been possi-
ble without the encouragement and support of my family.
Erlangen, 2010 K.H.