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304 Pages·2005·3.92 MB·English

IMAGINING CITIES
The city has always been a meeting point for cross-disciplinary discussion within the
debates of modernity and, more recently, postmodernity. Imagining Cities gives students
access to the most exciting recent work on the city from within sociology, cultural studies
and cultural geography.
Contributions are grouped around four major themes:
• The theoretical imagination
(cid:127) Ethnic diversity and the politics of difference
(cid:127) Memory and nostalgia
(cid:127) The city as narrative
While these representations consider the interplay of past and present, imagined and
substantive, the final section of the book links present and future in examining the idea of
the virtual city. Here, the world of cyberspace not only recasts our imaginaries of spaces
and communication, but has a profound impact on the sociological imagination itself.
Contributors: Roger Burrows, David Byrne, David Chaney, Julie Charlesworth, Allan
Cochrane, Phil Cohen, James Donald, Max Farrar, Stephen Graham, Tim Hall, Barnor
Hesse, Ruth Jamieson, Graham B. McBeath, Edward W.Soja, lan Taylor, Stephen
A.Webb, Elizabeth Wilson.
Sallie Westwood is Professor of Sociology and John Williams is Football Trust
Research Lecturer, both at the University of Leicester.
IMAGINING CITIES
scripts, signs, memory
Edited by
SALLIE WESTWOOD and
JOHN WILLIAMS
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of
thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1997 British Sociological Association
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-39735-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-39765-7 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-14429-9 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-14430-2 (pbk)
CONTENTS
Figures vi
List of contributors vii
Acknowledgements viii
IMAGINING CITIES 1
Sallie WestwoodJohn Williams
Part I Theorising cities
1 SIX DISCOURSES ON THE POSTMETROPOLIS 19
Edward W. Soja
2 IMAGINING THE REAL-TIME CITY: 31
TELECOMMUNICATIONS, URBAN PARADIGMS AND THE
FUTURE OF CITIES
Stephen Graham
3 CHAOTIC PLACES OR COMPLEX PLACES? CITIES IN A POST- 49
INDUSTRIAL ERA
David Byrne
Part II Racial/spatial imaginaries
4 OUT OF THE MELTING POT INTO THE FIRE NEXT TIME: 71
IMAGINING THE EAST END AS CITY, BODY, TEXT
Phil Cohen
5 WHITE GOVERNMENTALITY: URBANISM, NATIONALISM, 85
RACISM
Barnor Hesse
6 MIGRANT SPACES AND SETTLERS’ TIME: FORMING AND 103
DE-FORMING AN INNER CITY
Max Farrar
v
Part III Nostalgia/memory
7 LOOKING BACKWARD, NOSTALGIA AND THE CITY 125
Elizabeth Wilson
8 AUTHENTICITY AND SUBURBIA 137
David Chaney
9 ‘PROPER LITTLE MESTERS’: NOSTALGIA AND PROTEST 149
MASCULINITY IN DE-INDUSTRIALISED SHEFFIELD
Ian Taylor and Ruth Jamieson
Part IV Narrating cityscapes
10 THIS, HERE, NOW: IMAGINING THE MODERN CITY 179
James Donald
11 (RE) PLACING THE CITY: CULTURAL RELOCATION AND 201
THE CITY AS CENTRE
Tim Hall
12 ANGLICISING THE AMERICAN DREAM: TRAGEDY, FARCE 219
AND THE ‘POSTMODERN’ CITY
Julie Charlesworth and Allan Cochrane
Part V Virtual cities
13 CYBERPUNK AS SOCIAL THEORY: WILLIAM GIBSON AND 235
THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
Roger Burrows
14 CITIES, SUBJECTIVITY AND CYBERSPACE 249
Graham B.McBeath and Stephen A.Webb
Bibliography 261
Index 283
FIGURES
2.1 Characterising urban places and electornic spaces 47
3.1 Cleveland households ,no car 61
3.2 Leiceste rhouseholds,n o car 61
9.1 ‘Teeming’ statue, Market Street, Meadowhall Shopping Center, Sheffield 152
9.2 Gable-end imaeg of Sheffield forgeworker, Castle Street, Sheffield (design: Mr 153
Paul Waplington) ,1986
9.3 Whitbread Trophy billboard advertisement ,South Yorkshire, early 1990s 154
9.4 Still from Stones’ Breweries ‘Sheffield Gold’ television ad, winter 1994 155
9.5 ‘An equal and opposite eraction’: later image from ‘Sheffield Gold’ television 156
ad
9.6 Little Mesters: table knife grinding, 1902 158
9.7 Stones’ Berweries: new corporate logo, 1994 160
9.8 Steel furnace gang, Vanadium Steel Compnay, Union Lane, Sheffield, early 160
twentieth century
11.1 The International Convention Centre 210
11.2 An iconography of industry, Forward, by Raymond Mason 215
CONTRIBUTORS
Roger Burrows is a researcher in the Centre for Housing Policy, University of York.
David Byrne lectures in Sociology at the University of Durham.
David Chaney lectures in Sociology at the University of Durham.
Julie Charlesworth is a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open
University.
Allan Cochrane is a member of the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University.
Phil Cohen is Director of the New Ethnicities Unit at the University of East London.
James Donald is Reader in Media Studies at Sussex University.
Max Farrar is lecturer in the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan
University.
Stephen Graham is a researcher at the Centre for Urban Technology, Department of
Town and Country Planning, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Tim Hall is lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography and
Geology, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education.
Barnor Hesse teaches Sociology at both the University of London and the University
of East London.
Ruth Jamieson is a researcher of the University of Keele.
Graham B.McBeath teaches in the School of Social Studies, Nene College,
Northampton.
Edward W.Soja is Professor in the Department of Urban Planning, University of
California, Los Angeles.
Ian Taylor is Professor of Sociology at the University of Salford.
Stephen A.Webb is lecturing at the University of Derby.
Elizabeth Wilson is Professor of Media Studies at the University of North London.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to offer generous thanks to all our contributors for their support in the
production of this volume. Equally, our thanks to members of the Sociology Department,
staff and students, especially James Fulcher, at the University of Leicester for their
involvement in the 1995 British Sociological Conference, Contested Cities, from which this
volume developed. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Robert Ash for his detailed and
expert work on the text. Personally, Sallie Westwood extends warmest thanks to Rashpal
Singh and Jitu Kachhella, who supported the conference and the book.
SW/JW
IMAGINING CITIES
Sallie Westwood and John Williams
If the spectre of Communism no longer haunts Europe, the shadow of the
city, the regret of what has died because it was killed, perhaps guilt, have
replaced the old dread. The image of urban hell in the making is no less
fascinating, and people rush towards the ruins of ancient cities to consume
them touristically, in the belief that they will heal their nostalgia.
(Lefebvre 1996:142–3)
The city has always been a locus of research and discussion for sociological discourses
generated by the debates with and around modernity and, more recently, the volatile
terrain of postmodernity. This volume brings together some of the most recent and
exciting work on the city from within sociology, social geography and cultural studies.
The cross-disciplinary nature of this collection should be read as a further sign of
confirmation of the resolution of the longstanding debate on the ‘specificity of the urban’;
that is, whether specifically urban, social and spatial forms can provide an appropriate
object for theorisation for writers drawn from across the ‘social science academic
coalition’ (Soja 1989:69). The main themes of the book derive from the notion of
imaginaries, whether these relate to literary productions, notions of urban myth, memory
and nostalgia in the city and its environs, or to the sociological imagination re-cast within
the changing realm of new technologies and forms of communication.
The book is organised around five major themes. The first of these is the theoretical
imagination and how sociologists and geographers are currently theorising the enormous
socio-cultural, economic, technological and spatial changes that are effectively re-
inventing the city. From the recently ‘rediscovered’ work of Simmel onwards,
sociologists and others have generated a sociological imagination with which to frame the
city and urban life, and the first section of the book elaborates on the range of current
debates within (and outwith) the discipline. One of the crucial, constitutive elements of
cities throughout history has been their diversity in relation to spatial and economic
divisions of labour and in terms of ethnicities. Ethnic diversity and the politics of difference
generated by such diversity is the second major theme of the book and this section includes
chapters that address the binaries of the local and global, nation and citizen, home and
away, and black and white. These binaries are often constructed through an imagination
which looks back to some time of greater certainties and this form of retrieval of the past