Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory, Spectacle

CONSUMING THE ENTREPRENEURIAL CITY

This collection offers a global perspective on the changing character of cities and the increasing importance that consumer culture plays in defining their symbolic economies. Increasingly, forms of spectacle have come to shape how cities are imagined and to influence their character and the practices through which we know them—from advertising and the selling of real estate, to youth cultural consumption practices and forms of entrepreneurship, to the regeneration of urban areas under the guise of the heritage industry and the development of a WiFi landscape. Using examples of cities such as New York, Sydney, Atlantic City, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Douala, Liverpool, San Juan, Berlin, and Harbin, this book illustrates how image and practice have become entangled in the performance of the symbolic economy. It also argues not just that it is how the urban present is being shaped in this way that is significant to the development of cities but also that a prominent feature of their development has been the spectacular imagining of the past as heritage and through regeneration. Yet the ghosts that this conjures up in practice offer us a possible form of political unsettlement and alternative ways of viewing cities that are only just beginning to be explored. Through this important collection by some of the leading analysts of consumption, cities, and space, Consuming the Entrepreneurial City offers a cutting-edge analysis of the ways in which cities are developing and the implications this has for their future. It is essential reading for students of Urban Studies, Geography, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Heritage Studies, and Anthropology. Anne M. Cronin is a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of Advertising and Consumer Citizenship and Advertising Myths. Kevin Hetherington is Professor of Geography at the Open University, UK. He has published widely on issues of spatiality and consumption. His most recent book with Routledge is Capitalism’s Eye: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity.

CONSUMING THE ENTREPRENEURIAL CITY Image, Memory, Spectacle

edited by Anne M. Cronin and Kevin Hetherington

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “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.” © 2008 Taylor & Francis 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. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Consuming the entrepreneurial city: image, memory, spectacle / edited by Anne M. Cronin and Kevin Hetherington. p. cm. 1. Urban economics. I. Cronin, Anne M., 1967– II. Hetherington, Kevin. HT321.C663 2008 330.9173'2—dc22 2007031562 ISBN 0-203-93209-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 10: 0–415–95518–1 (hbk) ISBN 10: 0–415–95519–X (pbk) ISBN 10: 0–203–93209–9 (ebk) ISBN 13: 978–0–415–95518–8 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–415–95519–5 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978–0–203–93209–4 (ebk)

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword

vii ix xi

Sharon Zukin

Introduction

1

Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

1

Marketing the City in Crisis: Branding and Restructuring New York City in the 1970s and the Post-9/11 Era

19

Miriam Greenberg

2

Home Alone: Selling New Domestic Spaces

45

Justine Lloyd

3

Urban Space and Entrepreneurial Property Relations: Resistance and the Vernacular of Outdoor Advertising and Graffiti

65

Anne M. Cronin

4

Stars, Meshes, Grids: Urban Network-Images and the Embodiment of Wireless Infrastructures Adrian Mackenzie

v

85

vi • Contents

5 Always Turned On: Atlantic City as America’s Accursed Share 107 Mimi Sheller

6 The Ruins of the Future: On Urban Transience and Durability 127 David B. Clarke

7 Just Another Coffee! Milking the Barcelona Model, Marketing a Global Image, and the Resistance of Local Identities 143 Antonio Luna-Garcia

8 Broken Links, Changing Speeds, Spatial Multiples: Rewiring Douala

161

AbdouMaliq Simone

9 Consuming the Night: Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Youth Culture

181

Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida

10 Contesting the Night as a Space for Consumption in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico

201

Patria Román-Velázquez

11 “The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country”: Harbin’s Architectural Inheritance

221

Yukiko Koga

12 Liverpool’s Rialto: A Ghost in the City of Culture

255

Glen McIver

13 The Time of the Entrepreneurial City: Museum, Heritage, and Kairos

273

Kevin Hetherington

Contributors Picture credits Index

295 298 299

Illustrations

1.1 Ronald Reagan at the New York City Partnership in 1981. 29 1.2 NYC & Company’s official New York City guide, 2002 version. 33 1.3 George W. Bush rehearsing for his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2004 with Communications Director Dan Bartlett in the background. 35 1.4 Statue of Liberty at Planned Parenthood Rally. 37 2.1 Cover, Lumina Magazine, 2000. 56 2.2 “Home Alone,” Lumina Magazine, 2000. 58 2.3 “Get on Top of the Dishes,” Lumina Magazine, 2000. 59 2.4 “Get on Top of the Dishes,” Sydney Morning Herald, 2001. 59 2.5 “Watch the Box . . . ,” Lumina Magazine, 2000. 60 2.6 “Home Alone,” Sydney Morning Herald, 2001. 60 3.1 The eye logo from Channel 4’s television programme Big Brother. 67 3.2 Symbollix’s “Adidas” advert next to graffiti and mural. 68 3.3 A shopfront in Manchester’s Northern Quarter (photo: A. Cronin). 71 3.4 Graffiti in a building site in Manchester’s Northern Quarter (photo: A. Cronin). 72 5.1 Dilapidated housing with casinos beyond (photo: M. Sheller). 116 5.2 Urbanoid pseudo-streets in Atlantic City (photo: M. Sheller). 118 5.3 The Forum shopping pier under construction (photo: M. Sheller). 119 vii

viii • Illustrations

8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1

11.2

11.3

New Bell Cemetery, Douala (2005). Witnessing free fall in New Deido, Douala (2005). Traffic islands: spaces for youth gathering and sociability. Redesigning spaces: the doorway as the place for getting together and having fun. A typical street in Old San Juan. Signs of the old. Plaza San José, Old San Juan. San Sebastián Street, Old San Juan. The Modern Hotel on Central Avenue. The hotel was once the center of social life in Old Harbin. People used to comment that “the fashion in Paris flies to Harbin in two weeks.” The restored St. Sophia Cathedral is now the face of the city. The cathedral and its surrounding Harbin Architecture Square have become a popular place for both locals and visitors. The destruction of St. Nicholas Church in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution.

168 171 190 194 202 202 216 217

227

230 241

Acknowledgments

The idea for this book and several of the papers published here originated in a series of workshops on contemporary issues in the city held at Candido Mendes University, Rio de Janeiro and Lancaster University in the UK in 2003 and 2004. We are grateful to both the British Council and Lancaster University for providing funding to make these workshops possible. We would like to thank Candido Mendes, Beatriz Jaguaribe, Isabel Mendes de Almeida and Enrique Laretta for organization and support of the Rio workshops and to Bob McKinley at the Lancaster end. Thanks also to Bob Jessop, Bülent Diken, Monica Degen, John Urry, and Sharon Zukin, with whom we discussed some of the issues developed here, many of them through discussions and papers subsequently presented at the Material Culture and Consumption study group at Lancaster University. We would also like to thank Dave McBride, who commissioned the book when he was at Routledge, and Stephen Rutter, Anne Horowitz, and Beatrice Schraa at Routledge for their continued support and for seeing the book through the production process. Anne M. Cronin, Lancaster University Kevin Hetherington, the Open University

ix

Foreword SHA RON Z U K I N

Cities are an endless source of fascination, and the biggest cities fascinate us most because of their excessive hold on our imagination. Buildings are taller, fashions are newer; time seems to flow more quickly in the daily drama of their flashing signs and crowded streets. Feeling that the city is bigger and faster than ordinary life both feeds and flatters the engine that drives its current usefulness—the city’s symbolic economy, where cultural images are made, marketed, and most visibly consumed. Today the city’s business is, to put it simply, finance, fashion, food, and art. Although stock markets are a major production site where concrete commodities are turned into abstract symbols, we commonly see the symbolic economy at work in the media, art museums, iconic buildings, and leisure spaces like cafés, boutiques, and bars. As the authors of this book remind us, the symbolic economy works its way into the city’s character by organizing its complexity into simple, but powerful, images. These images both evoke emotion and repress critical thought. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood for the city as a global financial capital without creating concern—at least, in New York— about what this power really means for men and women in other countries; the heart in the much copied slogan “I♥NY” stands for loyalty that does not question whether the city treats all residents fairly. Because elected officials, business leaders, and a large corps of paid professionals in public relations and media arts do the cultural work of creating and promoting these images, they become effective marketing tools for cities to develop xi

xii • Sharon Zukin

their brand identity. Like brands, however, most cities develop the same marketing tools. They all have tall towers and modern art museums. They all hire the same famous architects from overseas. They all offer lattes at sidewalk cafés. They are all “creative.” But branding is a necessary cultural strategy in our age of image inflation. A city that does not curate its image and manage its story is out of date. It cannot compete with other cities for investors, tourists, and affluent consumers. It cannot pay its own way. Cities have been forced to become more entrepreneurial by national states’ withdrawal from financing local needs while catering to transnational business projects. Lower corporate taxes, less stringent controls on financial transactions, fewer legal barriers to both outsourcing and reducing wages—not to mention rising costs of managing air and water, climate change, and the built environment: cities have been left on their own with a diminishing economic base and a growing need for capital investment. Like city residents who scurry for jobs and scavenge for food, they have become more speculative actors. Like aging socialites or movie actors, they look to a makeover to enhance their image and give them a new career. Cities take great financial risks when they bid for the Olympics, subsidize corporate locations, and encourage developers to build luxury housing. But few public representatives challenge the rhetoric of growth that dominates our time, with its repertory of public–private partnerships and media buzz. Growth is considered the only game in town, and the only strategy for growth is to keep on reinventing urban space. So we have ever more cosmopolitan cities that embalm their past in meticulously preserved fragments of architectural time while sweeping longtime residents and recent migrants to distant districts on the urban edge. From the stone shikumen, or small houses, that ring the fancy Xintiandi shopping center in Shanghai to the remaining chimney of the old Domino sugar refinery on the new residential waterfront of Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, investors, developers, and marketers are recasting modern cities. They are removing historical traces of physical labor, propelling distinctive social spaces into the standardized markets of global brands, and upscaling neighborhoods for the hip, the rich, and the cool. They are creating a new narrative of cities—a narrative in which we all live by selling each other lattes, or apartments, or art. In this spirit, I turn with great appreciation to the book that Anne Cronin and Kevin Hetherington have put together. Other writers have tried to describe the shift from production to consumption in contemporary cities by highlighting spectacle, but the writers of these pages insist that before we can understand the consumption of spectacle, we must understand the competitive pressure to produce it. This pressure breaks down distinctions between public and private sectors, and between capitalist

Foreword • xiii

promotion and individual self-assertion. Several chapters look at specific types of consumption spaces that set everyday spectacle in place—bars that draw a young and mobile nighttime crowd; advertisements that show young, mobile, and often female residents of new luxury apartments; cafés that move away from traditional local coffeehouses towards a new style of sociability that we associate with Starbucks. In these spaces, almost without our being aware of it, a new urban sensibility is being formed: that of the twenty-first century flâneur, who is in equal parts shopper, tourist, and entrepreneur.

Introduction K E V I N H E T H E R I N G TON A N D A N N E M . C RON I N

Over the past three decades we have seen cities across the world take on a new character and a new dynamic that has forced issues of culture and consumption more prominently to the fore. Those changes have taken shape against a background need for competitiveness that has involved the development of a changing form of economic mix and changing forms of governance (Harvey, 1989a; 1989b). The city today is a place where unprecedented global flows of people, capital, and information see ongoing transformations no longer shaped by the managerialism of the past but instead embracing an intensified entrepreneurialism. The entrepreneurial city as it has come to be known has become a key feature of neoliberal capitalist societies: from the small number of world cities with global reach to the intensified redevelopment of smaller towns and cities. Whatever the size, a profound impact has been felt on the cultural as well as economic and political character of urban living during this time. The processes are still unfolding and developing. To date, most academic interest in these changes has been focused on the development of forms of urban governance within such a changing economic environment (see Hall and Hubbard, 1998). The emphasis on profitability, fiduciary controls, and the need to engage in partnerships with the private sector in the development and the running of cities has been prominent in such analysis. Yet consumer culture has played an ever-increasing role in shaping cities to the extent that its involvement with the symbolic economy of cities is now often central to their future prosperity 1

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

(see Zukin, 1995a; 1995b; O’Connor and Wynne, 1996; Dicks, 2003; Stevenson, 2003; Miles and Miles, 2004). Based on a Western capitalist model but now found across the world, the entrepreneurial city’s symbolic economy— associated with finance, media, tourism, heritage, gentrification, and, above all, with consumerism—plays an ever-prominent role in shaping urban form, economies, and the lives of the city’s inhabitants (Zukin, 1995a; 1995b). Furthermore, a globalized urban consumer spectacle (Debord, 1977) would seem now to be all-pervasive in shaping the future of such cities. This book sets out to explore the implications of the processes associated with various aspects of the consumer culture of cities, their local variations, consequences, and impact on the possible futures of our cities. We focus less on issues of governance than on the multiple ways in which consumer culture frames contemporary entrepreneurial cities and how people experience and imagine those cities. As well as the hegemonic forces of branding and managed tourist experiences, this book includes an emphasis on the characteristics of lived urban spaces that can make those spaces less than amenable to the entrepreneurial imperative and explores the modes of resistance, opposition, or nascent counterhegemonic impulses that this entrepreneurial turn elicits. The symbolic economy has become a site of actual and potential contestation and while as a social movement it remains weakly defined by a few anticapitalist protests and culture jammings (see Klein, 2001), a space of politics is nonetheless opened up within this symbolic economy around questions that have less to do with territory and more to do with identity and lifestyle. Sometimes urban transformation has been dramatic and has followed on from unexpected and dramatic events—one thinks of the global rebranding of world cities such as Berlin as part of the reunification of Germany (see Cochrane and Jonas, 1999; Till, 2005), or the reimagining of New York after 9/11 (see Sorokin and Zukin, 2002; Greenberg—this volume). More typically, entrepreneurial neoliberal redevelopment might be associated with a response to years of economic decline and the injection of new money, often centered around the development of service-sector employment, the weakening of older forms of municipal governance (see Cooper, 1998) and the promotion locally of the culture industry (shopping, heritage, tourism, leisure, upmarket urban lifestyling). Another route to development has been to focus on the competitive environment in which cities now find themselves, often premised on the successful bidding in a prestige competition such as that of the Olympics, expos, or the European City of Culture initiative. On a more basic level, issues of culture and consumption typically come together now in the redevelopment of medium-sized towns, a trend evident in the creation of urban entertainment complexes, tourist

Introduction • 

attractions, or attractive waterside developments that include upmarket housing (see Miles and Miles, 2004). Amongst the first to identify this change, David Harvey succinctly outlined what he saw as underlying this shift to entrepreneurialism: The new urban entrepreneurialism typically rests, then, on a public– private partnership focussing on investment and economic development with the speculative construction of place rather than amelioration of conditions within a particular territory as its immediate (though by no means exclusive) political and economic goal. (Harvey, 1989a: 8) According to Harvey, there are four principal issues underlying the form of governance within cities (1989a: 8–11; see also Harvey, 1989b). These involve: 1.

2.

3. 4.

responding to competition within the international division of labor. This is typically achieved by taking advantage of local resources (location, natural resources, landscape), developing existing investments, promoting the use of new technology, and allowing the use of tax breaks to encourage investment; developing a local economy that is focused on services such as tourism, leisure, and retail and that encourages gentrification and place-marketing; making full use of local finance, government, or information command functions; and use of central government resources available regionally.

While all of these overlap with the development of cities as sites of consumer culture, our interest here is mainly in exploring the impact of the first and second of these and how they are articulated through image, memory, and spectacle—it is in these terms that we wish to consider the symbolic economy that is taking shape in entrepreneurial city environments. How cities are constituted as places is increasingly shaped by a combination of service sector industries, municipal authorities, and the lifestyle promotion of an image-conscious consumer-oriented culture industry associated with the arts, music, film, sports, and entertainment complexes, as well as retailing, tourism, and eating and drinking. These have always been a part of city life, particularly city-center life. But in the past they were very much a part of the interests of the commercial or private sector and often associated with popular culture. Culture, high culture, in contrast, was very much a civic virtue somewhat removed from this world of popular

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

entertainment and commerce—at least that was the image it presented. But this is no longer the case. The so-called blurring of the boundaries between high art and popular culture that has been associated with postmodernism and consumer culture (see Featherstone, 1991) does not take place in the abstract or just in the media, it takes place in the culture of towns and cities across the world—leaving a lasting impact on them in turn: on their shops, cinemas, theatres, museums, streets, waterfronts, and neighborhoods. The defining of city cultures by the more worthy and highbrow civic entertainment, recreation, and educational concerns is no longer sustainable as distinct from commercial activity; increasingly it is understood as part of this consumer culture and of the lifestyling of urban inhabitants (see Lury, 1996; Stevenson, 2003). This shift is shaping approaches to urban regeneration and development on a fundamental level—cities are increasingly being framed by the strategic initiatives of governing authorities, rather than just the profit-oriented activities of capital investment, as places to play and consume (and not just to work and be housed). We seek to explore the consumerist dynamics of this process through the case studies and conceptual frameworks that are developed in the following chapters. Central to the successful development of such cities is the nurturing of their symbolic economy (Zukin, 1995a). The symbolic economy of cities is neither singular nor unchanging; rather, it involves the multiform ways in which the cultural symbols and myths of a place are combined with both economic activity and urban governance with the aim of promoting a capitalist future for the city. Historically, as Sharon Zukin has suggested, this economy takes three main forms and influences how a place is seen, promoted, and developed: at its most basic form symbolic economy implies profiting from the look of a place established over time and the representations and marketable place-myths that such a look generates; a second element involves investment in a city in cultural forms such as museums, parks, and monuments by businesses and municipal authorities often for civic and philanthropic reasons to promote the public good and indirectly to both reflect and promote economic prosperity in that city; and third, we see overt profit-driven place-making investments by “place entrepreneurs” engaged in speculative activity. Up to about the mid-1970s in the US and early 1980s in Europe, this latter role was mainly the province of real-estate developers, corporate organizations and venture capitalists—what Harvey Molotch called the “place entrepreneurs” (1976)—people and companies who sought to develop the city for private-sector interests (in the form of office developments, retail, etc.) and for the housing market. Centered on issues of real estate, marketing, and advertising, this kind of symbolic economic activity always placed a strong emphasis on branding or the construction of a positive

Introduction • 

place image that promoted the interests of capital, consumerism, and privatized quality-of-life aspirations (lifestyle). The public good of the citizen (rather than the customer) was left to a largely non-profit, civic symbolic economy of the local authority, driven by managerialist concerns, or the national state conceived in the nineteenth century as a public benefactor with varying degrees of development and success from one nation to the next. Since that time a shift from managerialism and civitas and onto entrepreneurialism and consumerism has occurred that has seen a change in the composition of the symbolic economy. While it has not always been the case that the private sector has supplanted the public sector in defining the symbolic economy around the core values of society, the public sector has now had to become more commercially driven and more concerned with profit—sometimes within itself and sometimes through public–private partnerships. Evidence points to the central importance of consumer culture in this shift (Lury, 1996). The development of service-sector business in deindustrialized cities and regions, the weakening of financial and direct control functions of municipal authorities over redevelopment, and their need to team up with the private sector directly or indirectly (as well as compete with what other cities are doing for local, national, and global resources) all go hand in hand with the current blurring of the boundaries between the civic and the entrepreneurial symbolic economy of cities that is defined by this consumer culture. No longer driven by public-sector provisioning and collective consumption (Castells, 1977), the public and the private can no longer be neatly separated. Through practices such as regeneration and city branding we see the involvement of both sectors. But where once it was argued that the study of consumption might be taken as an alternative to the study of urbanism (Saunders, 1986), we can see now that urbanism and consumption have become mutually defining. In this book we aim to highlight three themes that we think most directly allow us to explore some of the major consequences of these consumer developments: image, memory, and spectacle. Our focus concentrates, therefore, on issues of representation, but in a sense of the term that has been broadened by recent theoretical developments. Work on “non-” or “post-representational” theories (e.g. Amin and Thrift, 2002; Thrift, 2005) has sought to understand urban space in ways which challenge classic semiotic accounts that attend to the production of meaning in, and of, cities through systems of signs (e.g. Gottdiener and Lagopoulos, 1986) or which frame people’s engagement with cities as a form of “reading” and “writing” of urban texts (de Certeau, 1988). Non-representational accounts place emphasis on alternative modes through which space is produced and is experienced by people. Rather than meanings that are articulated and disseminated in texts such as maps,

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

advertisements, tourist guides, films, or novels, such accounts emphasize bodily and technological engagements with urban space through affect and ontology (e.g. Massumi, 2002; Terranova, 2004; Thrift, 2005). Such understandings open up important questions about the interplay of information, bodies, and spaces, and offer a useful complement to overly textual interpretations of cities. Their insights interface in interesting ways with debates about memory and traces as embodied, politically charged, and not amenable to capture by conventional representational systems. Questions still remain, however, as to how we should understand images and spectacle, for the framework that they enact still appears central to our orientation to the world and more particularly to urban space in its consumerist, entrepreneurial form (see Miles, 1997; Donald, 1999; Liggett, 2003; Pile, 2005). If, as Thrift (2005: 13) argues, capitalism is “a continual struggle to release new forms of representation that can capture how the world is,” how should we understand the capitalist character of the entrepreneurial city and its emphasis on consumption and representation? Through the themes of image, memory, and spectacle, the book explores these issues. In the first case—image—we see a reliance on the presentation and marketing of the city through advertising images, brands, brandscapes, and changes in the temporal life of the city. These not only change the look of a city but also help to promote it to inhabitants, workers, and tourists, and facilitate its competition with other cities for resources. The book examines how images, brands, and texts have a recursive relationship to the flows of knowledge, capital, and ideas that constitute contemporary entrepreneurial cities—such texts perform urban spaces and understandings of those spaces while enacting opportunities for dissonance or opposition. In moving from images to memory we look in particular at the material traces of the past found as a key theme in cities. This is not just because it is a central part of the entrepreneurial transformation of cities that has involved the regeneration of run-down areas, gentrification, and the development of a heritage-industry marketing of the past in promoting the city, but also because the past exerts itself as a discursive excess, or figural moment of disruption to the so-called memory industry that has shifted ideas about the urban past from the register of history to that of heritage (Derrida, 1994; Huyssen, 1995; Koga—this volume). The changes to the symbolic economy in this more entrepreneurial phase also suggest a different approach to the time of the city compared to the past. The civic symbolic economy developed in times when industrial capitalism defined social time in terms of progress and an orientation to the future. The past was indexed as a resource for memorializing the flow of time as History—grand civic buildings, monuments, parks, and so on (see Benjamin, 1999; Maleuvre, 1999), thereby establishing the (bourgeois)

Introduction • 

present as a point of contact and a key vehicle for the translation of the best values from the past into the capitalist future and for everything else to be something that we measure our progress against. But we no longer live in societies where this progress time-horizon is hegemonic. Capitalism and culture have changed to produce a concern less with future-oriented progress (the sense of certainty in it and the imperative to build for the future have gone) and more with what Helga Nowotny has called an accelerated present and a time of simultaneity (1994: 10; see also Koselleck, 2004). History, in this context, has given way to heritage; progress to regeneration. As the idea of the future is collapsed into the idea of a simultaneous present, perspectives on the past begin to change. A culture organized around the idea of a simultaneous present is one that can do without the idea of history, but it cannot do without the idea of before. As cities ever more become junkspaces of capitalist accumulation (see Koolhaas, 2001; Clarke—this volume), conserving something from before as meaningful becomes ever more urgent as a measure of the cultural significance of this space without time. The past is called on to enrich the seeming cultural vacuity or sameness of a present that has no sense of either history or future. Yet this heritage industry creates, it has been suggested, a condition of social amnesia rather than remembrance because it packages past and present lived realities of cities as a spectacle to be consumed now (see Huyssen, 1995; 2003; Dicks, 2003). As the old practices of conservation become ever more valued in our heritage-obsessed society, the sophisticated narrative skills of curation are going into decline. Curation becomes less about telling a historical story and more about indexing important events or creating an attractive aesthetic hang within a gallery space in order to have impact as spectacle. Mediated by the social relations of power that define capitalist societies, the dominant spectacle of the entrepreneurial city is not, therefore, one of progress and a utopian future, but more often the transformation and making safe of a troubling past so that the present’s sense of endless continuity and now-ness can be maintained. Through this process, definitions of the past, and of the effect that a genuine historical moment can have (see Greenberg—this volume), have become one of the key sites of contest within cities. Where once local resistance might have concentrated around questions of local space—neighborhood against development— now the main site of resistance is local, lived time versus redevelopment and its ideology of the now. How traces of that time are reinvoked as practice, as events or moments (see Nowotny, 1994) against their representational subjugation in regeneration strategies, will be a second key theme in the book. While this is not yet the site of any coherent social movement, it is where, we would argue, the power-effects of capitalist spectacle are at their

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

most visible and open to challenge. We would anticipate this to become ever more a site of struggle in future years within entrepreneurial cities as people begin to see that heritage is not the same as history and begin to question what is being done with their memories through processes of conservation and regeneration. We will develop this theme through the issue of trace (expressed here as anachrony (Koga), memory (McIver), and Kairos (Hetherington)) as a source for looking at both engagements with the openings onto history, examining how such traces impact upon the temporal strategies of the entrepreneurial city. Each in slightly different ways deals with the pausing or disrupting effect that the historical moment can have—as an absent presence—upon a space defined through the idea of a simultaneous present. The themes of image and memory come together in our third key term that is addressed throughout this book—spectacle. This is not merely a synonym for image or representation, it inscribes the dominant characteristic of the social relations of power found in the entrepreneurial city and defines the conditions of possibility for practices associated with consumption, heritage, regeneration, place-marketing, and tourism (see Debord, 1977). When Debord coined this term in the 1960s, based as it was on a Lukacsian reading of the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism applied to the world of consumption rather than production, he had in mind not the idea that it acted as some kind of allure to consumers but that it was a source of social mediation with fetishized social relations presented as images. Spectacle, in this respect, is a form of power through which consumption comes to be understood in mature capitalist societies. That argument has come to dominate thinking on consumer culture in recent years (see Clark, 1984; Bowlby, 1985; Crary, 1990; 1999; Richards, 1991; Friedberg, 1993). It is only recently that the totalizing and overdetermining character of this theory has come to be challenged. While we would question its universalizing of commodity fetishism and the model of subjectivity on which it is premised (see Hetherington, 2007), we use the word spectacle here to understand the importance that image plays in representing the concerns of entrepreneurship within the city (see also Lefebvre, 1991). Through place-imaging, advertising, the creation of brandscapes, and the mediatization of cities, and through the image practices associated with regeneration and heritage, a sense of spectacle or spectacular presentation of consumer images and ideals comes to dominate. But set against this are practices and the space of the city itself. Spectacle, therefore, is how capitalist power is exercised in entrepreneurial cities but it is also how it is resisted. A key feature of Debord’s theory of spectacle was the centrality he gave to the spatialization of time within the development of capitalism as it shifted away from a society defined by production to one defined by consumption

Introduction • 

(1977: 125–164): “The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time” (1977: 158; original emphasis). His conceptualization of the spatialization of time within consumer capitalism chimes with more recent social-science ideas about the development of a simultaneous present that we have highlighted here (Nowotny, 1994) or with the culture of non-places associated with that time (see Augé, 1995)—Debord gives this the name unified irreversible time (1977: 145) on which spectacle is grounded. When the city comes to be experienced in such a way the image and the brand become the means through which the city is presented (and is open to contest) and the traces those of a historical time outside of the defining power of spectacle that, as Walter Benjamin already identified in the 1930s (1973; 1999), might be a resource not only for redeeming the past but for reimagining a future within a society that has seemingly disposed with the idea. In order to try and demonstrate the global spread and relevance of these entrepreneurial processes and their effects, we have selected chapters for the book that focus on key cities across the world with examples from the United States, Britain, Brazil, Australia, Cameroon, China, Puerto Rico, and Spain. Some of the cities discussed in these examples can be seen as centrally engaged with the strategies of consumer development while others are geographically more marginal to such a development’s reach and are affected by, or have to deal with, the consequences of developments elsewhere in the global economy. Our aim is to be broad in the range of cities and issues associated with the entrepreneurial city as a site of consumer spectacle in a time of intensifying globalization, while retaining a strong coherence in addressing our major themes of image, memory, and spectacle as key to understanding the dynamics of the symbolic economy of these cities. Miriam Greenberg’s chapter explores the branding of New York at two key moments of historic crisis: the financial crisis of the 1970s and the political and economic crisis precipitated by 9/11 in 2001. Paradigmatic of urban branding, and of the question of image in general, the case of New York demonstrates that image crisis can exacerbate economic crisis and shows how cities can respond in an aggressively entrepreneurial mode to events that threaten their status as tourist and consumer centers. Examining the urban authorities’ responses to these crises, Greenberg highlights the significance of new “branding officers” and marketing initiatives situated within the context of specific political and social contexts. Parallel to Lury’s (2004) conception of the brand, Greenberg’s discussion shows how the city brand is neither the product of a simple process nor a static formation. As a form of representation, it performs a set of relations. Here,

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

“the brand” holds together a range of actors, ideas, ideals, and interests in a provisional constellation or symbolic economy that is open to change and contestation. On one level, the branding process effects a reform and retrenchment of class power. But by creating a rupture in the discourses and operation of the urban economic system, image crises such as these call into question the legitimacy of those in power. Greenberg outlines how these powerful branding initiatives are mirrored by organized resistance to, and subversion of, that branding and how these struggles mark the tensions between needs of New York citizens and consumers. Justine Lloyd’s chapter on the promotion of new-build flats in Sydney, Australia shows how concepts of gender, domesticity, and public and private space are central to how entrepreneurial initiatives imagine and rework the city. Analyzing advertisements for these glamorous new flats, Lloyd shows how in the gentrification of parts of Sydney the long-contested figure of the housewife and tensions about domestic work reemerge and are transformed. The new space of these über-cool flats is defined in the developer’s advertisements and promotional literature by what it is not (domestic) and by what orients its prospective buyers (a consumption-focused lifestyle). While the advertisements and lifestyle magazines are targeted at both male and female (middle-class, professional) consumers, the discursive framework remains fundamentally gendered and sexualized—the consumer comes to be recoded as a private individual through consumerism. Thus “the feminine” which was articulated in the well-established, classed trope of the housewife is reworked as a hyperreal figure of urban femininity which is oriented by the consumerist ethos of the self-interest of the private individual and its project of self-completion. The representation of gendered living space in the entrepreneurial city is thus much more than a mirroring of urban realities; it is a space in which the tensions between feminism and domesticity are worked through and the “solution” presented as an issue of consuming space. Anne Cronin’s chapter analyzes the relationship between advertising and graffiti in the contemporary entrepreneurial city. While advertising has been seen to represent or embody capitalism in all its seductive and insidious manifestations, graffiti has often been understood to represent the resistant, counterhegemonic impulses that subsist in urban life. This relationship is often imagined to be played out in property relations in which advertising facilitates property’s valuation and exchange, and graffiti mounts a countercultural challenge to ownership and rights to urban space. Cronin argues, however, that their relationship is more ambiguous, representing and performing a shifting paradigm of urban entrepreneurialism and its relationship to property and space. Within this dynamic, notions of resistance and transgression are reworked, and advertisements

Introduction • 

operate as “wish images” in Walter Benjamin’s sense—they function as crucibles of feelings, thoughts, and memories that focus ideals for how cities could be otherwise. Within the context of the entrepreneurial imperative, such ideals (albeit dimly perceived and barely articulated) may challenge the cities’ relentless focus on corporate interests and profit. Adrian Mackenzie’s chapter on wireless networks in cities challenges conventional ways of thinking about images in, and of, cities. Here, too, there is an emphasis on how images are performed and the chapter uses this emphasis on performance to rethink urban forms and infrastructures. Mackenzie shows how wireless networks cut through architectural space, confounding accepted notions of inside and outside, and form a “network-image” that holds together patterns of action and perception, consumption, and governance. This network-image is derived from the collective “image repertoires” of city dwellers—embodied formations of perceptions, movement, and connection with others that orient individuals’ experience of their body and also include nonhuman elements. But these image repertoires picture nothing—instead, they process relations and organize responses (such as movements, gestures, or feelings). Mackenzie argues that individuals’ image repertoires gradually come to incorporate elements of urban life, including aspects of the wireless networks, and become attuned to the possibilities of connection or association that wireless infrastructures enable. But while the growth of wireless networks can be seen as emblematic of cities’ entrepreneurial turn, the creative potential and distributed nature of such networks and their relationship to people’s image repertoires means that no single force controls wireless networks and entrepreneurial initiatives struggle to harness them. Mimi Sheller’s chapter analyzes the “casino capitalism” of America’s Atlanta City and how its constant reevaluation of place is based on entrepreneurial speculation and spectacle-making. Drawing on Bataille and Goux, Sheller explores the close associations between entrepreneurship and gambling, with their emphasis on squandered profits, debt, and lavish consumption. Atlantic City constantly reinvents itself as a city of spectacle and speculation in which entire urban regions come to be reliant on an “economics of emptiness” in which businesses produce nothing but consumption. But the new casino developments do not signify a loss of authenticity or an emptying-out of public space; instead, they reference a nostalgic intensification of the city’s earlier incarnation as a space of spectacle, leisure, and consumption. For Sheller, the casino economy of Atlantic City offers no redeeming or nostalgic space, but instead presents a bald portrait of American capitalism—its accursed share. David Clarke also takes up this theme of the excess of spectacle in his broad-ranging chapter on consumption and its relationship to city

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

life. Drawing on the work of Debord, Bataille, Koolhaas, Baudrillard, and Bauman, Clarke seeks to explore what consumption has come to mean in the modern capitalist city. The key motifs in this city of spectacle and fetishism are, for Clarke, those of junkspace (Koolhaas), eternal recurrence (in Benjamin’s Arcades reading), and transient durability (Bauman). The city of consumption, image, and spectacle is a space in which everything is consumed and where everything that is consumed remains as part of this space of rubbish, junk, and fabricated memories. For Clarke, as for Baudrillard, this is a city of seduction in which creative destruction of things and images helps to perpetuate the circuit of capital and its hold in shaping the city as a space of imaginary and yet false progress. The city has become here the equivalent of consumer society and its spectacular form of mediation, one where myth replaces history, and the drive to perpetual change hangs over everything. Antonio Luna-Garcia also considers the relationship between symbolic economy, city branding, and image in his chapter on Barcelona. He considers the long history of the spectacular presentation of the symbolic economy of the city in presenting complex and often contested issues of tradition and modernity associated with the local, regional, and national identity of the city. Following a discussion of the use of architecture to present the symbolic economy of the city as modern in the early twentieth century, he moves on to look at the use of logos and coffee shops in more recent times. Through these cases he explores the complex way in which image gets caught up in issues of politics at the local, regional, national, and indeed global scale. While originating in the private sector as revealed by the example of La Caixa bank, the centrality of image and logo as a way of presenting place came to be used in similar ways by the city in its regeneration associated with the 1992 Olympics. The coffee houses were once very local spaces that played an important part in the making of the city and traditions of Catalan identity and also came to mark out Barcelona as a modern, European city with a civilized culture. The more recent introduction of Starbucks into that city—a chain that originally drew on this place-imaging heritage in its own branding—has seen a shift away from the local and the regional to global branding and a new take on cosmopolitanism that impacts on the character of the city’s symbolic economy. AbdouMaliq Simone takes Douala in Cameroon as his focus, looking at how entrepreneurship is performed within African cities and how that performance helps constitute the spaces through which it moves. His aim is to challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions associated with the term “entrepreneurial” when applied in the context of Western cities. Central to this deconstructive analysis are the issues of mobility and ghostly traces. For Simone, entrepreneurship is not something fixed or represented

Introduction • 

that just happens within the defined spaces of markets. Rather, in this city of becomings, a condition that characterizes the crumbling infrastructure of Douala, entrepreneurship traces itself through many spaces and the fluid associations through which it is made, like a zombie devouring and consuming all that it finds in its path. To be entrepreneurial is to be fluid and to become a trace rather than a fixed presence; performing market functions in many guises and across multiple locations. To be able to get on in such an unregulated and often corrupt environment requires subjects to be able to travel at speed, assembling and disassembling through fluid associations with others and with the urban infrastructure. In her chapter on Rio de Janeiro, Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida also considers how mobility is key to the performance of space in the entrepreneurial city. She focuses on the nighttime consumption patterns of young middle-class people to reveal not just a nighttime economy but the lived reality of the spectacle of spatialized time in their consumption practices. Here we get a sense of how the city’s consumer spectacle is lived, revealing that it is far from uniform and totalizing in its effects on subjects even if they do not challenge in any overt way the consumer space that they make their own. As they drift like urban nomads across the city in their cars, visiting petrol stations, fast-food joints, bars, and nightclubs in order to socialize with friends, it becomes apparent that they treat the night not simply as a time in which to go out but as a space in which to construct sociability as a memorable event. Their culture, now part of the urban mainstream, especially in Rio’s city center and the Zone Sud associated with the beaches, is one of mobility and flows. The car and the mobile phone, as much as any particular location, help to define the space of the city to mark out its peripatetic territories, neo-tribal doorways, and places of cool. Unlike the marked-out subcultural territories of the young in the past (see Thrasher, 1923; Foot Whyte, 1955), what matters here is the ability to move through and to appropriate, for a short time, the city’s spaces of consumption, sometimes using them for their intended purpose and sometimes for a novel use that marks out this space more than any “street-corner” or beach territory. Everything is about the oscillations of culture associated with movement: vibe, buzz, gathering, and dispersal. Patria Román-Velázquez’s chapter examines the relationship of traditional and modern forms of nighttime consumption in Puerto Rico’s Old San Juan. She tracks how the imperative to attract tourists to the city and to stimulate consumption has driven forms of urban regeneration and governance. The authorities see the nighttime economy of leisure and consumption as central to these processes of revitalization and have worked to present an image of Old San Juan as a heritage city replete with old-fashioned charm. Young people traditionally occupied the city’s streets

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

at night—drinking, chatting, and socializing—giving the city its character and vitality. But the authorities saw these practices as unruly and at odds with the image of the city that they wished to promote. So while the entrepreneurialism of the city’s authorities drew on the image of Old San Juan as vibrant and authentic—an image created precisely by the bohemian youth culture of the city that was centered on consumption—it also sought to regulate and dilute those practices. Román-Velázquez shows how, in the entrepreneurial drive to remake the city for the benefit of some, others are excluded. In the final three chapters we move from a concern with looking at the relationships between image and various forms of practice to looking at how the city itself speaks through its urban form often against the discourses of spectacle and consumption. In so doing, we move away somewhat from the territory of Bataille, Debord, and Baudrillard and onto that of Derrida and Benjamin. In the first of these chapters that look at the effects that the past can have on the regeneration of the entrepreneurial city, Yukiko Koga discusses the case of the renovation of colonial architecture in the Chinese city of Harbin. The need to regenerate cities in order to attract tourism and local development is now an important part of China’s economic development, with tourists the intended target audience. These practices of regeneration, though, are set against the Chinese Communist Party’s continued desire to present history in line with Party interpretation. In particular, that presentation seeks to operationalize a discourse of Wenming (“civilization”), but in so doing it manages to confound itself in unexpected ways. Through regeneration practices in Harbin and in the stories and local debates that surround it the intention has been to produce a chronological narrative of Chinese history that conforms to Party interpretation. However, the past does not always seek to be presented in such a way. The excessive character of discourse is able to enact a series of what Derrida calls betrayals (1994) through which other stories come to be told. Through an exploration of the regeneration of the St. Sophia Cathedral, through a debate in the local newspapers by leading local historians about the beginnings of the city and its relationship to colonialism, and through the effects brought about by a series of photographs shown locally, Koga reveals that the past has the ability to step outside of chronological narrative and take on an excessive or uncanny voice, bringing with it anachronic moments in which repressed versions of the past are able to find voice and be revealed. Increasingly, that is what characterizes the politics of representation within postcolonial understandings of the city. In a similar light but in a quite different context, Glen McIver takes up this theme of contrasting the loss of the past with developments in the present, focusing on the disappearance of Liverpool’s Art Deco Rialto

Introduction • 

cinema and some of the recorded memories that surround it. He reads that as a counterpoint to what is happening in that city at present in the run-up to it becoming European City of Culture in 2008. This space, once an emblem of progressive modernity in the 1920s, fell into decline after World War II, as many of Britain’s northern cities such as Liverpool began to experience the effects of deindustrialization, becoming a furniture warehouse until it was burnt down in the Toxteth riots of 1981 and subsequently rebuilt as a community center. McIver explores how the trace of lost hopes can haunt a city and challenge and possibly unsettle the confidence in redevelopment that typically marks out entrepreneurial development and regeneration. Through this disappeared space, through ruin, the memories of the past are brought into contact with the present, allowing a fuller story of a city’s history and place myths to be revealed. In this way the ruined space is shown to be a powerful resource of countermemory and an alternative space from which cities can be imagined. We see in this how the ruin can take on the form of a historical moment (Nowotny, 1994), challenging the seamless ahistorical present that characterizes the role of heritage in entrepreneurial redevelopment. In a similar light, Kevin Hetherington’s chapter looks at the importance of issues of heritage to the processes of urban regeneration, something that has become a prominent feature of entrepreneurial cities across the world. Where once history was a key part of the civic symbolic economy of the city, the past two decades has seen it shift to a more market-driven, consumerist register of commercial ventures, entertainments, and public–private partnerships that has implications for how the past gets constituted in the regeneration of towns and cities: it gets constituted as heritage. Hetherington’s chapter explores the presentation of the urban past around the issues of heritage, spectacle, remembrance, and history. Through a critical engagement with the work of Benjamin, Koselleck, Huyssen, and others, Hetherington examines the typically static and ahistorical representation of time within heritage practices and opens up the idea of the city as a space of another unspoken heritage and another time, not an anachronic one, though the effects that Koga describes under that heading are similar, but a kairological one—a space of the precipitous moment—in which the countermemories of the urban past present themselves as a material and figural effect in ways that alter how those cities are timed and experienced. Hetherington’s chapter poses the question of time-as-Kairos as a challenge to the image-dominated presentation of the urban past as heritage in the current urban capitalist context of regeneration, and to the spatialization of time in contemporary society more generally.

 • Kevin Hetherington and Anne M. Cronin

References Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Re-imagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). Augé, Marc, Non-places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973), 245–255. Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Bowlby, Rachel, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985). Castells, Manuel, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984). Cochrane, Allan and A. Jonas, “Re-imagining Berlin: World City, National Capital or Ordinary Place,” European Urban and Regional Studies, 6 (1999), 145–164. Cooper, Davina, Governing Out of Order: Space, Law and the Politics of Belonging (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998). Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Crary, Jonathan, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977). de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Derrida, Jacques, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994). Dicks, Bella, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability (Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill, 2003). Donald, James, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone Press, 1999). Featherstone, Mike, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage/TCS, 1991). Foot Whyte, William, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Gottdiener, Mark and A. Ph. Lagopoulos (eds), The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Hall, Tim and Phil Hubbard (eds), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime and Representation (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1998). Harvey, David, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler, 71B (1989a), 3–17. Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989b). Hetherington, Kevin, Capitalism’s Eye: Cultural Spaces of the Commodity (New York: Routledge, 2007). Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Klein, Naomi, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2001). Koolhaas, Rem, “Junkspace,” in C. J. Chung, J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, and S. T. Leong (eds), Guide to Shopping (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 408–421. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Liggett, Helen, Urban Encounters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Lury, Celia, Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Lury, Celia, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (London: Routledge, 2004). Maleuvre, Didier, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Introduction •  Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Miles, Malcolm, Art, Space and the City (London: Routledge, 1997). Miles, Stephen and Malcolm Miles, Consuming Cities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Molotch, Harvey, “The City as a Growth Machine,” American Journal of Sociology, 82 (1976), 309–332. Nowotny, Helga, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). O’Connor, Justin and Derek Wynne (eds), From the Margins to the Centre: Cultural Production and Consumption in the Post-industrial City (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996). Pile, Steve, Real Cities (London: Sage, 2005). Richards, Thomas, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London: Verso, 1991). Saunders, Peter, Social Theory and the Urban Question (London: Harper Collins, 1986). Sorokin, Michael and Sharon Zukin (eds), After the World Trade Centre (New York: Routledge, 2002). Stevenson, Deborah, Cities and Urban Cultures (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003). Terranova, Tiziana, “Communication Beyond Meaning: on the Cultural Politics of Information,” Social Text, 80 (2004), 51–73. Thrasher, Frederick, The Gang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923). Thrift, Nigel, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005). Till, Karen, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Zukin, Sharon, The Cultures of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995a). Zukin, Sharon, “Space and Symbols in an Age of Decline,” in A. King (ed.), Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995b), 43–59.

CHAPTER

1

Marketing the City in Crisis Branding and Restructuring New York City in the 1970s and the Post-9/11 Era M I R IA M G R E E N B E RG

Until recently, New Yorkers tended to assume that business would take care of itself and that the City’s size and natural strengths would function as an automatic magnet . . . The financial crisis in particular has changed many of these attitudes—spurring the City’s determination to become a self-promoter and enlisting the loyalties of local businessmen. Mayor Abraham Beame (1976) In the wake of 9/11 we’ve had to reorient our priorities . . . We’re going to imaginatively, aggressively, and relentlessly market our cultural attractions and all our competitive advantages . . . We’re confident (this) will win us attention from businesses around the world that are looking for new markets and opportunities for growth. And we’ll take advantage of our brand. New York is and will be the best-known city on the planet. Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2003)

Since the early 1970s, urban governments and elites have had to contend as never before with the fact that, in an increasingly volatile and media-linked global marketplace, the declining image of a place can accelerate its economic and political decline—i.e. that image crisis can exacerbate economic crisis. In particular, image crises have shown their capacity to undermine a city’s “climate” for business and tourism—an all-important economic indicator in the age of the entrepreneurial city, whether measured by credit 19

 • Miriam Greenberg

rating services, corporate location scouts, or travel agencies. This has become clearer as economic crises have struck major cities with ever-greater force and frequency—whether triggered by fiscal mismanagement, terrorist attacks, or environmental disasters. The spectacular dimensions of these crises have been transformed by a sophisticated media industry into some of the most potent images of cities in recent history. Equally arresting imagery has been made of the underlying urban problems that these crises have dramatically exposed—namely the deepening inequality of race and class, and the frequent inability of local government to protect public infrastructure, maintain public safety, or provide for basic social needs. Thus contemporary crises have presented urban leaders with a dilemma: should they focus precious political and economic resources on addressing the long-term social and infrastructural needs of local residents, or on repairing the perception of their city held by tourists and markets beyond their gates? These options need not, and should not, be mutually exclusive. And yet they appear to be to a great many entrepreneurial city leaders, facing as they do the pressure of interurban competition, and adhering to a strict neoliberal calculus that calls for market-led solutions. According to the latter, the high price tag of addressing long-term social needs—which in a previous era would have been subsidized by a strong federal government—is steep in comparison to the relatively small investment involved in partnering with the private sector to entice business and tourism back to the city. In addition, under the tutelage of marketing consultants and advertising firms, urban leaders have found that the coordinated “branding” of a positive urban image, in conjunction with broader pro-business measures, can in fact be influential in re-establishing investor and consumer confidence. Urban branding has played a strategic role both economically and politically. First, it has been integral to broader entrepreneurial forms of economic development—as seen for instance in the upbeat TV and print campaigns used to promote incentive packages for tourists, investors, and corporations. In addition, post-crisis political coalitions have used branded urban imagery as a tool in the broader construction of a discourse of recovery. Severing economic crisis from its structural and historical roots, such discourse imbues the present with transcendent notions of urgency, exceptionalism, and the need for unity in trying times. In so doing, urban crises may be exploited by leaders at both the local and national level to advance often unpopular reforms. Thus marketing and PR have served in the formation of private-sector-led “crisis regimes,” the imposition of harsh “austerity” measures, and the suspension of forms of democratic oversight that, it is argued, would impair the executive branch in an “emergency” situation.

Marketing the City in Crisis • 

To understand these dynamics, I turn to New York City. A city at the center of global financial and media markets, New York has been racked by some of the worst periods of image and fiscal crisis of the last 30 years, and has made very strategic use of urban branding and rebranding campaigns in its efforts at recovery. I will analyze the two periods of crisis in which the interaction between urban image-making and political economic restructuring has been most significant. The first is the era of the 1970s fiscal crisis, during which the city’s first official marketing campaigns—“Big Apple” and “I♥NY”—were developed and used in conjunction with the imposition of austerity measures and pro-business reforms. And the second is the recessionary period following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) of September 11, 2001 when, guided by the media and marketing savvy of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city matched a federally enhanced package of tax cuts and corporate subsidies with the marked expansion and institutionalization of city marketing. As we shall see, these two periods of urban branding have other important aspects in common. Both involved the largest and costliest city marketing campaigns previously undertaken by New York, and yet were launched in times of wide-scale budget-cutting in which scarcity was being imposed in most other aspects of social spending.1 The campaigns in both periods responded to dystopian imagery of New York as a wounded, crisis-ridden city through the production of their own utopian vision of a city of resurgence, security, and solidarity. In addition to enhancing the climate for business and tourism, this newly branded New York imagery provided local and national leaders with an attractive package for more controversial political agendas. These included the call for the national restructuring of the Reagan Revolution in the early 1980s, and the call for a broad conservative shift in the wake of 9/11 by George W. Bush. And yet, in both periods, the new New York brand became a site of political contestation, as oppositional movements took aim at official campaigns and appropriated the New York image for their own ends. In what follows, I will analyze the contexts in which both branding eras emerged, the urban images they deployed, and the new political terrain which they helped to construct.

Branding New York City in the 1970s New York City can be seen as a paradigmatic case in the rise of urban branding and the entrepreneurial city. This is due first to the ramifications of the city’s devastating fiscal crisis of the 1970s—the largest public-sector default then on record. Though cities nationwide were threatened by similar problems beginning in the late 1960s, the scale and timing of New York’s default epitomized for many the broader crisis afflicting older,

 • Miriam Greenberg

industrialized, left-leaning cities. And not only was New York hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs, it was losing thousands of high-end service jobs in finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE), and tourism, as corporate headquarters and tourists were also abandoning the city. In an increasingly conservative and anti-urban national climate, pundits, policy-makers, and CEOs alike blamed the default on New York’s generous social spending— largely ignoring the role of other factors like the retrenchment of the federal government and the accumulation over the previous decade of short-term public debt to finance long-term private-sector real-estate development (see e.g. Tabb, 1982; Fitch, 1993; Beauregard, 1993; Fainstein, 2001). Thus the New York fiscal crisis became a cautionary tale about the inevitable perils of civic liberalism and the welfare state. The scale and scope of the city’s entrepreneurial transformation in response to the crisis—exemplified by the sweeping “austerity measures” and “planned-shrinkage” policies imposed at the time—were equally unprecedented, and served as a “harbinger of a new era in social policy” that was to arise under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (Lichten, 1986).2 With the rapid takeover of local government by a state-appointed “crisis regime” of bankers and financiers, “emergency” measures were taken to regain fiscal solvency by leveraging the pensions of the city’s workforce and, with a constant eye on municipal bond markets, by “producing scarcity” in every aspect of the public sector (Ross, 1995: chapter 2). This led to the lay-offs of tens of thousands of public-sector workers over a two-year period, as well as to severe service cuts affecting hundreds of thousands of city residents, particularly in the poorest districts. But New York’s paradigmatic status as tragic liberal turned born-again entrepreneur was not only due to the scale and severity of its restructuring. It was also a result of New York’s position as “media capital of the world,” and the unequaled media coverage this entailed for both the city’s crisis and its aftermath. Throughout its 300-year history, New York City served as birthplace and national center of the most important media technologies of the day,3 and became one of the most represented and recognizable urban spaces on the planet. By the late 1960s and the 1970s, with the growth of media as a force in the global economy, this local trend only increased. Largely on the strength of the television, magazine, and reviving film industries, New York’s media and marketing sectors grew to about 12% of private-sector employment, and as such were a very rare source of economic strength—indeed the only major sector still growing through the recession (Greenberg, 2008). Yet in this time of crisis, New York’s growing representational power became a double-edged sword, transforming the city’s image on a national and global scale.

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From Image Crisis to Fiscal Crisis By the late 1960s a new, image-driven economic dynamic that I will call image crisis was being observed, whereby negative media representation was seen to be actually fueling New York’s financial decline. A definitive early indication of this was reported by the New York Times in 1971 when “the city’s bad publicity resulting from crime, strikes, welfare and other municipal problems” was cited as the major reason that Standard and Poor’s had not upgraded New York’s credit rating in five years, after it was downgraded from “AAA” to “B” in 1966 (Ranzal, 1971) Following this, in 1972, the economist Wolfgang Quante defined a new “vicious cycle of imagery,” claiming that “perhaps the most detrimental effect of [NY’s] corporate exodus,” even greater than its effect in terms of lost jobs, taxes, and business services, was “its impact on New York City’s image as the business capital of the nation.” Losses in employment, taxes, and general business, while significant, only represented a small percentage of the overall base, and thus “are not by themselves essentially crippling.” On the other hand, “The weakening of the City’s business image strikes directly at the heart of its existence” (Quante, 1976). Sociologist William H. Whyte illustrated this analysis, showing that across mainstream media—from TV news to commercials for new office parks—one found the same contrasting images of New York as “hell on earth” and the suburbs as “Arcadia.” These stereotypes were then reinforced through the highly questionable survey techniques of “location consultants,” who used skewed formulas to prove New York’s “tangible” disadvantages—like strong labor laws and long commutes for “average” (read suburbanite) workers—as well as the “intangible” disadvantages of its “environment” for business: It is the intangibles, executives say, that are the key. “Environment” is the umbrella term. Shorn of euphemism, here is what it means: (1) New York City is a bad place—crime, dirt, blacks, Puerto Ricans, etc. (2) Even if it isn’t, Americans think it is a bad place and so they don’t want to be transferred here. (3) To hold and attract people a company has to offer a better setting. Thus Union Carbide concluded after a two-year study: “The long-term quality-of-life needs of our headquarters employees” were the overriding factors. (Whyte, 1976: 88) Such racially encoded “bad publicity” was reinforced by a spate of wildly popular films shot on location in New York beginning in the late 1960s. This “asphalt jungle” genre ranged from such critically acclaimed films as Midnight Cowboy (1967) and Mean Streets (1973), to B-movie action thrillers

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like Death Wish (1974) and Fort Apache the Bronx (1979). As these films became increasingly crass and low-budget over the course of the 1970s, their depictions of New York became increasingly dystopic, even sociopathic. In these 1970s movies, the New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote, New York has become a metaphor for what looks like the last days of American civilization . . . It’s run by fools. Its citizens are at the mercy of its criminals . . . The air is foul. The traffic is impossible. Services are diminishing and the morale is such that ordering a cup of coffee in a diner can turn into a request for a fat lip. (Canby, 1974)

“Big Apple” and the Road to Recovery For the city’s embattled new middle classes and FIRE elites, this “asphalt jungle” representation had to be addressed in an increasingly coordinated fashion. Through different means they would seek to take control of the local institutional matrix of media, marketing, and tourism and rebrand New York—and ultimately form a coalition that pressured city and state government to join them. In contrast to the traditionally diverse representations of Gotham, and to contemporary images of “asphalt jungle,” these urban branders would construct a single, hegemonic, and utopian image of the city as a safe place for the middle class to consume, play, live, and invest. In so doing, they would visually erase New York’s many other realities, and would engage the city in a new kind of symbolic battle between opposing urban representations. The first instance of branding New York began outside the elite strata in an upstart publication called New York magazine, created in 1967 by a young, aspiring team of writers, artists, and editors. They used cutting-edge graphic design, editorial style, and marketing strategy to define a hip “New York attitude,” and to brand the image of a consumer-friendly city in a time of crisis (Greenberg, 2000: 228–263). The growing ability of the media to enhance the city’s image was soon perceived by the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), created in 1971 by power-brokers in tourism and real estate as New York’s unofficial advertising and PR agency (Reeves, 1971).4 Under the activist leadership of realtor Lewis Rudin, ABNY members identified the root cause of the city’s problems, and their own vacant real estate and hotel rooms, in the “visual deterioration of the city” as seen on the streets and in films and TV. They combated this scourge through what their vice-president, Alton Marshall, termed a “two-pronged approach.” On the one hand, they used behind-the-scenes lobbying, e.g. VIP breakfasts, trips to Washington, and closed-door meetings with TV executives, urging them to “clean up” their representations of the city. On the other hand, they

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championed a new form of populist city marketing: the “Big Apple” campaign. Through full-page ads in New York and the Times, plus PR-stunts like the distribution of bullet-proof jackets at police stations, street-cleaning mops on Fifth Avenue, and golden apple lapel-pins at Grand Central Station, ABNY sought to project images of a solidaristic, white middle class taking charge, and making the city safe for business and tourism. Alton Marshall described the approach as “two-pronged” in his interview, conducted for Lew Rudin Way documentary (2000.)5 Big Apple lost traction with the intensification of the crisis, but in 1976, at the crisis’ height, was rescued under the auspices of Mayor Abraham Beame’s newly created Office of Economic Development (OED). As laid out in its opening report, OED brought ABNY’s two-pronged approach into City Hall, focusing on a dual agenda of “pro-business restructuring” and “the marketing of the city.” The former involved tax breaks and incentives, and the latter entailed publicizing these enticements to businesses and tourists.6 As the report explained, until the current crisis New Yorkers had “tended to assume that business would take care of itself and that the City’s size and natural strengths would function as an automatic magnet.” Now it was undeniable that the city must become a “self-promoter” and enlist “the loyalties of local businessmen” to do so (Beame, 1976). The OED approach involved joining with ABNY to host two blockbuster events designed to receive maximum media coverage: the 1976 Democratic National Convention (DNC) and Bicentennial celebrations. The main photo opportunity was “Operation Sail,” a three-day extravaganza in which regattas of colonial-era tall ships and modern luxury liners cruised New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty and the downtown skyline crowned by the newly completed—if largely empty—World Trade Center (Greenberg, 2004). This visual montage of New York’s glorious past and triumphant future would serve, it was hoped, to blot out the ongoing, present-day horrors of crisis and austerity. It would also present New York City as a family-friendly tourist destination and an attractive site for investment, conventions, and corporate headquarter location.

Contradiction and Backlash Yet, by launching an official marketing campaign at a time of deep cutbacks and scarcity, the city created its own contradictions, and the conditions for political backlash. The latter took the form of insurgent media attacks, whereby protestors of the city’s austerity budget purposely undermined New York’s image as a safe and solvent “Big Apple.” The innovation of this strategy came from the police and fire unions, who responded to plans to lay off 50,000 city workers by launching a “Fear City” campaign in June

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1975. Fear City was to involve handing out fliers at airports, train stations, and midtown hotels, warning people to “stay away from New York if you possibly can,” due to the increase in crime and arson that would inevitably result from the proposed cuts (Committee for Public Safety, 1976).7 Meanwhile, 1975 was also the “peak” year for a citywide movement of subway graffiti-writing amongst young people living in the neighborhoods hardest hit by austerity and planned shrinkage. Seizing the subway network as a kind of “alternative public broadcast system,” the writers’ ever-more sophisticated murals covered whole cars that transected the city, thus inserting their marginalized voices into the center of a citywide debate (Austin, 2001). While “subway bombers” were not as politically organized as uniformed officers, and indeed were otherwise in opposition to them, their aims here were largely the same. Using low-end yet ingenious media tactics, they both sought to symbolically “write back” to a city turning its back on its own working-class residents, neighborhoods, and diverse cultures. And in this they succeeded: news spread rapidly around the world of both Fear City and subway graffiti, thus subverting the “Big Apple” brand on a global scale. The strategic power, and fate, of these counterbranding movements was in their timing. Both coincided with New York’s Bicentennial, and as the city was making its national bid to host the DNC. Never before had city leaders been as obsessed with promoting and policing an image of the city as safe for travel and tourism. Thus, when the effort by government officials to arrest Fear City’s organizers was foiled on First Amendment grounds, the level of pressure brought against them by public- and private-sector leaders (articulated through an ABNY mediation session) ultimately convinced them to abandon the strategy (e.g. Fowler, June 13, 1975: 1; and June 18, 1975: 19). And while it would take another decade and some $500 million to complete, 1975 was the year that the city’s “war on graffiti” was launched, turning the act of spray-painting on city property from a misdemeanor into a felony offense carrying jail time (Austin, 2001). The speed and anger of the reaction revealed the new priorities that had emerged with the crisis. It appeared that the long-term preservation of New York’s brand image as a safe place for tourists and business travelers became more important than responding to the demand for jobs, social services, and recognition from the city’s own workers and residents.

Purging New York through I♥NY The branding coalition did not see the holes in the Big Apple image as due to inherent contradictions, but rather to the need for greater brand management and market saturation. Their response to the counterbrand-

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ing challenges of 1975–1976 was to launch a more coordinated, national, year-round campaign in 1977–1978. To do so, they hired marketing consultants to lobby the state legislature to increase funding for the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) tourism budget more than 30-fold. These included market researchers Yankelovich, Skelly, and White (YSW) and Consumer Behavior Inc.; Wells Rich & Greene, the vanguard of the “new advertising”; and New York magazine’s artistic director Milton Glaser. Their combined creative talents helped brand an affluent, consumer-oriented New York in the early 1970s for the new middle class. Now, in the late 1970s, they were to do the same for the public sector. With the DOC’s I♥NY campaign, the official branding of New York City entered its final, publicly managed stage. It was soon to become the best known city marketing campaign that the nation, let alone the city, had ever seen. Through a focus on Broadway shows and their captivating performers, against the backdrop of a twinkling Manhattan skyline, the campaign helped brand New York as a resurgent financial and cultural capital. And it did so by selling the city’s hip attitude and uplifting ability to pull together in a crisis. The DOC then continued to use images and data generated by the campaign to lobby the legislature to spend tens of millions more dollars on marketing for tourism, as well as to dramatically increase pro-business reforms—like tax cuts and corporate incentives. The link between tourism marketing and neoliberal restructuring was made clear by YSW’s surveys amongst “key experts and CEOs.” In order to show the city was no longer “anti-business” the report urged: “the fiscal crisis can and should be addressed in marketing strategy—[as in] New York is ‘purging’ itself and changing ways” (Yankelovich, Skelly and White, Inc. 1977). In effect, the branding coalition took a two-pronged approach similar to that developed by ABNY and the OED—but on a much wider scale with the state government at the helm. High-profile, publicly funded marketing campaigns provided positive, populist, and ubiquitous imagery, selling the city to both “tourists and middle managers” (Chipkin, 1988: C1).8 Meanwhile, changes in economic development policy that benefited business and tourism at the expense of city workers and outlying neighborhoods happened behind the scenes. Thus, in 1977, the infamous year of blackouts, garbage strikes, and the “Summer of Sam” murder spree, marketers hoped to obscure the city’s ongoing social crises and to distract public attention from this radical reorientation of fiscal priorities toward the private sector. And so it was only fitting that on January 14, 1982, in the immediate wake of the crisis, and with marketing showing the city’s entrepreneurial comeback, President Ronald Reagan should have chosen the New York City Partnership (NYCP) as audience and backdrop for a speech on the first anniversary of his inaugural address. It was a significant event:

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Reagan had just introduced his Task Force on Private Sector Initiatives, an unelected group of business leaders and non-profits who, as one of his advisors infelicitously put it, were tasked to “pick up the slack” for cuts in government programs now occurring nationwide (Lenkowsky, 2004). And New York’s public–private partnerships—with NYCP a more powerful outgrowth of ABNY founded by David Rockefeller in 1979—had been one of Reagan’s models.9 In his speech that day, the President spoke about “the spirit of shared sacrifice” that allowed New York’s financial and political leadership to overcome the city’s recent troubles, thus becoming “a beacon” for his administration’s own plans for free-market reforms (Reagan, 1982; see also: New York City Partnership, 1981/2). The symbolism was lost on no one when Reagan took his standing ovation draped in an I♥NY scarf. It was perhaps the crowning moment in the decade-long transformation of New York City’s image from “working class city” (Freeman, 2000) to a symbol for the nation’s emerging, neoliberal right wing (see Figure 1.1).

Rebranding New York after 9/11 For the city’s official marketers New York isn’t just a wounded city, but a challenged brand . . . [and] like all challenged brands, it needs . . . an overarching scheme to reposition itself in the American popular consciousness. (Ruth Shalit, 2001) New York City’s marketing-led response to the attacks of September 11, 2001 was almost identical to that devised by the coalitions of the 1970s fiscal-crisis era. Perhaps the most significant difference was one of degree: contemporary branding is occurring on a much wider scale, and with some of the business world’s most experienced marketers—now called “branding officers”—ensconced at the highest levels of government. With former media mogul Michael Bloomberg as mayor, a central component of City Hall’s economic development strategy is to “take direct coordinated custody” of New York’s deteriorating image, and to “rebrand the city”—a booming echo of the Beame administration’s effort to create a “comprehensive plan to market the city,” and to finally “turn New York into a self-promoter” (Beame, 1976; Bloomberg, 2003). As in the 1970s, this new marketing agenda is only the public face of an increasingly entrepreneurial model of growth—in this case one which spurs development through enhancing the perceived value of New York City as a “luxury product” and by offering direct giveaways and incentives to private-sector firms (Stohr, 2003). Given the geopolitical significance of the attacks of 9/11, this local branding approach, embodied in the patriotic “New York Stronger than Ever”

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Figure 1.1 Ronald Reagan at the New York City Partnership in 1981.

campaign, once again put New York City in the national spotlight. And once again, this image of a city battered but unbowed was found particularly useful by the national Republican Party, which staged the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) a week after the third anniversary of 9/11. The contradictions produced by the city’s entrepreneurial shift, as well as by this conservative appropriation of New York’s image, again elicited a backlash in the form of counterbranding campaigns. In this case, as we shall see, it took the form of a massive “counterconvention,” as some one million protestors

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descended on New York over the week of the RNC. This conflict also placed New York City, and the question of urban branding itself, at the heart of larger national debate on the status of civil liberties and the right to dissent in a time of crisis.

Branding Coalition Redux One of the city’s very first recovery strategies following 9/11 was to “rebrand” the WTC site, and thereby the city as a whole, as a safe and patriotic tourist destination and corporate location. This entailed mounting massive advertising and PR campaigns, while also offering economic incentives tied to September 11 to shoppers, tourists, and corporations. This was only the most visible side of a dual economic development strategy being pushed by the city’s public- and private-sector leadership. Efforts were also under way to restructure the city and state’s tax code and budgetary process so as to allow for direct incentives and subsidies to be offered to business—thus continuing the much-criticized corporate retention strategy begun in the 1970s, and advanced by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) of the 1990s. The largest of these private subsidies, and one scarcely covered by the media, was when New York Governor George Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg allowed $5.5 billion of the $20 billion in federal disaster aid to be siphoned off for corporate tax breaks, regardless of whether companies actually stayed in the city or had ever intended to leave in the first place (Bowles, 2001; Bagli, 2002: A1; Fitzgerald, 2002).10 Leading the way once again were NYCP and ABNY, the “public–private partnerships” established in the midst of the 1970s fiscal crisis, and still representing some of the biggest financial and real-estate interests in the city. After a two-decade period of relative dormancy, they quickly re-established relationships with same entrepreneurial city and state economic development agencies, including NYC & Co., the EDC, and, at the State level, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC).11 Also in a pivotal role was a new quasi-public agency appointed by the ESDC and Governor Pataki called the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, 80% of whose members represented major business interests (Reconstruction Watch, 2002). With the assistance of major media and marketing firms, many of whose CEOs sat on the boards of the above organizations and donated their services pro bono, the coalition quickly created influential new city marketing groups such as New York Rising and the Crisis Communications Committee. As the Wall Street Journal put it, those behind the rebranding originally fell into two camps, the “pile fetishizers” and the “pile minimizers,” with the former seeking to market quasi-spiritual pilgrimages to “ground

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zero,” emphasizing human suffering and the need for healing, and the latter seeking to downplay the tragedy itself and focus instead on New York’s victorious spirit and ability to stand up to the terrorists (Shalit, 2001: W17). The specificity of the debate was not accidental. It was informed by a 600-page, three-part, nationwide market research report, purchased by ESDC, and conducted by D. K. Shifflet & Associates, Ltd in the months immediately following 9/11 (D. K. Shifflet & Associates, 2001–2002). In this report, different “traveler types” were identified according to their psychographic reaction to events, ranging from “focused business travelers” to “the sad and anxious.” Over three months, the numbers of trips taken by the former, mostly male upper-income earners, were found to increase, while those of the latter, mostly low- to middle-income-earning women, were slightly decreasing. Thus public-sector city marketers were trained in the same psychographic market research techniques, and bottom-line calculations, as their colleagues in the corporate sector. A balance was tentatively struck between the pile’s minimizers and fetishizers. For a brief moment, marketers emphasized the city’s unflagging strength and patriotism in the face of attack, while also highlighting, and capitalizing on, the flood of sympathy evoked by the tragedy. But over time, the balance shifted decisively away from expressions of sympathy and references to tragedy. This move indicated the coalition’s desire to target the more lucrative “focused business travelers,” and its disregard for “the sad and anxious.” It also signified the coalition’s attention to the essential principle of branding, namely to saturate a culture with a monolithic and positive image of a product, so as to inspire its loyal consumption. It was undoubtedly understood that consumption would be far more difficult to inspire if the New York City product was saturated with grief, horror, and anxious memories of the past—rather than strength, valor, and visions of future triumph.

Brand Management A further sign of the corporatization of the public–private coalition was in their understanding that constant brand management was required to sustain this subtle yet all-encompassing marketing approach. For instance, while the branding coalition helped fund a multi-million-dollar “ground zero viewing platform” on Church Street, and included the logos of sponsoring corporations on the official signs, they explicitly forbade the posting of any of the original missing posters created by loved ones of those trapped in the towers, or of the myriad handwritten notes, placards, and mementos that honored the deceased and sent condolences to New Yorkers. Image policing was also extended to charity drives—as when ESDC forbade

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Milton Glaser from using a newly created logo—“I♥NY more than ever,” with a black mark over the heart—as a fund-raising device for victims’ families. As owners of the original logo designed by Glaser, David Catalfamo, ESDC senior deputy commissioner, explained, “We think the heart of New York is bigger and stronger than ever. We don’t want to show a damaged heart.” Instead they launched two upbeat campaigns: a 25th-anniversary version of “I♥NY,” emphasizing Manhattan shopping and entertainment, and “New York Stronger than Ever,” accompanied by a red, white, and blue infinity symbol, which became the city’s new official logo. Through branding partnerships with global corporations like American Express, Mercedes Benz, and AOL Time Warner, this logo, slogan, and patriotic sentiment were extended through giant billboards and glamorous TV commercials promoting both the city and the sponsoring corporations. As Glaser responded, when his less easily commercialized, if equally patriotic, design was rejected: “There isn’t a lot of poetry in politics or marketing” (Purnick, 2001: B1) (see Figure 1.2). Understanding that such policing required leadership that was strong and centralized—if not publicly accountable—Bloomberg took steps in the following year to bring brand management into the core of city administration. He established a top-level position of “chief marketing officer” (a title borrowed from the corporate sector) to oversee all of the city’s promotion and marketing efforts and to seek out sponsorship, merchandising, and other such revenue-generating opportunities for the city.12 The mayor had also assembled a “special task force” of leaders in business and advertising to help the city encourage investment, attract jobs, and expand tourism which reported directly to him (see Commercial Alert, 2003).13 And, finally, Mayor Bloomberg formed a “permanent host committee,” to help New York attract major events—namely the Republican National Convention and the Olympics (Stohr, 2003).14 The committee’s offices were placed in the city’s own EDC headquarters, and as such it worked closely with the sympathetic deputy mayor and EDC chairman Dan Doctoroff—who previous to taking this public office had been the chairman of “NYC 2012,” the public–private bid to win the Olympics in international competition. All of these efforts packaged and sold post-9/11 New York City as a patriotic symbol of the nation’s indomitable spirit. The economic development pitch was essentially that, through buying an association with New York City, its newfound symbolic capital could easily be extended to enhance the brand value of a range of commodities, and thus increase profits. As Deputy Mayor Doctoroff explained, “Whether it is the [city’s] energy and the excitement, or more recently the resiliency and courage, those are attributes that companies want to associate with” (Saltonstall, 2003). And according to the Daily News, “Most independent advertising executives yesterday agreed [with

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Figure 1.2 NYC & Company’s official New York City guide, 2002 version.

Doctoroff ], suggesting that New York could reap tens of millions of dollars” through selling its courageous, resilient, patriotic post-9/11 image (ibid.).

The RNC in NYC New York’s upbeat yet macabre approach to rebranding itself after 9/11 was successful in many ways. The city attracted a growing wave of “patriotic tourism,” and by the summer of 2002 had channeled two dozen meetings

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to New York at least in part because of 9/11. The rise in convention business since 9/11 had already been met with a dramatic rise in tourism to downtown Manhattan to visit “the ruins” of the WTC—a shift that became an oft-cited economic indicator. According to the Downtown Alliance, already by September 2002 the site of the fallen towers was drawing an astonishing 3.6 million visitors a year, doubling the number drawn to the observation deck atop the actual WTC (Blair, 2002: B1, B4).15 As a New York Times article noted: “the fallen trade center site has done what it could not do when standing: turn the financial district into one of the city’s top attractions” (ibid.). Many tourism officials saw in New York’s new patriotic image an opportunity to rebrand their own industry by association. Thus William Maloney, executive vice president of the American Society of Tourist Agents, explained his selection of New York for their convention: “[it’s about] the symbolism of helping our compatriots in New York, but also the symbolism that travel agents must lead the way to travel. Travel is an inherent right, and we cannot let it be taken away” (Scott, 2002).16 A similar tone of national unity and capitalist opportunity was struck when New York was chosen to host its highest profile and controversial post-9/11 convention yet: the Republican National Convention (RNC), at which George W. Bush was to be nominated for a second term as President. From the moment of New York’s selection, masterminded by Republican strategist Karl Rove and communications director Dan Bartlett, the symbolism was overwhelmingly apparent (see Figure 1.3).17 The Republican Party would be “rallying around its nominee in the city that had come to embody the nation’s resolve in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.” This unity would be echoed by images of the president “rallying the nation to unite in the war on terror”—as epitomized by the photograph of “Bush with his arm around a New York City fireman, holding a bullhorn, atop the still smoldering rubble of the twin towers” (Slackman, April 2004: B1; and Rutenberg, 2004). Use of images of 9/11 by Republicans had already proven controversial, as it gave the appearance of exploiting a national tragedy for political gain. When the Bush campaign put out its first commercial containing a split-second clip of firefighters dragging a flag-draped coffin from the rubble of the fallen towers, resulting protests led the campaign to edit the ad. This symbolic allusion became even more controversial once the Bush administration invaded Iraq in April 2003, and used what would later be shown to be false claims linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda’s attacks of 9/11 as justification for the invasion. Thus the choice of New York City for the four day-long RNC—which at over $100 million was the most expensive convention in US history—was seen by the President’s supporters and detractors alike as extremely risky. Not only did the use of the city at a time of deteriorating conditions in Iraq create an impression of political profiteering, New York

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Figure 1.3 George W. Bush rehearsing for his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2004 with Communications Director Dan Bartlett in the background.

City’s own residents were also overwhelmingly Democratic and opposed to the Bush administration’s policies—particularly the war in Iraq (Slackman, April 2004).18 This was a city where, only days after 9/11, thousands of New Yorkers embraced the slogan “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War,” in anticipation that the tragedy would be used to justify a war they did not support. Nonetheless, exploiting the symbolic and political capital of New York’s courageous and resilient brand—what Bloomberg and the host committee

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dubbed “America’s City”—was an opportunity the Republicans could not pass up (Bloomberg, 2004). This was particularly the case in a close race against Senator John Kerry, a decorated war hero, and with the President’s own military credentials and judgment being daily called into question. In this tenuous situation, image was everything—for as the major news agencies were constantly reporting, “Polls show that perhaps Mr. Bush’s greatest strength over Mr. Kerry is the perception that he is protecting the nation from terrorist attacks” (Rutenberg, 2004, my emphasis). And the image of Bush atop the smoking ruins of the WTC was the best, if not the only, evidence the campaign had to back up this perception. While RNC organizers were loath to admit it publicly, delegates spoke enthusiastically about using the city as a “stage,” arguing this symbolism was vital to the President’s re-election strategy, and by extension his defense of the war. As Richard Aguilar, a delegate from Minnesota, put it: “We absolutely need to invoke September 11 in the convention. This election will determine how we fight a war on terror that began right here in this city” (ibid.) (see Figure 1.3).

Counterbranding at the Counter-Convention It is in the contradictory nature of media symbols to be subverted by groups with sufficient political power and creativity to do so, and urban brand images are a case in point. In what may be remembered as one of the most massive and carefully orchestrated acts of counterbranding, or détournement, in history, over one million people came to New York City to protest over the four days of the convention, and to turn the New York City symbols appropriated by the RNC on their head. Myriad forms of creative resistance became part of the “Counter-Convention.” These ranged from a massive, permitted march of over 500,000 people past the convention site at Madison Square Garden—the largest in the history of US political conventions—to an array of smaller acts of civil disobedience and direct action situated and designed to gain maximum media attention.19 Protestors sought coverage from the hive of spectacle-hungry mainstream journalists who were being dispatched to cover events with military-like precision from their “media command center” in the luxuriously retooled main post office, connected via a specially constructed bridge to the Convention Center itself.20 In addition, activist groups were aided by independent media-makers who, having learned from past protests, took advantage of inexpensive new text messaging and digital media technology to both coordinate and cover the many events. Dubbed “the New York Model,” Indymedia’s innovation involved posting a live newswire to inform activists, legal observers, and the media—as well as the police—of what was happening simultaneously in multiple locations (Scahill, 2004).21 This media-saturated

Marketing the City in Crisis • 

Figure 1.4 Statue of Liberty at Planned Parenthood Rally.

environment lent itself to highly symbolic, satirical, and spectacular forms of protest, and often attracted more cameras than participants. This included a raft of newly formed groups like Billionaires for Bush, and Axis of Eve—the latter organizing “Operation Expose and Depose,” in which lines of women ceremonially stripped to reveal panties emblazoned with risqué, anti-Bush slogans, and then marched military-style through Battery Park, the Statue of Liberty in the background, with a phalanx of news media covering every move.22 It also included mainstream national organizations, like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, which also seized upon New York symbols like I♥NY and the Statue of Liberty to represent their opposition to the Bush administration (see Figure 1.4). Ultimately, however, the predominant image shown on network television, the primary news source for most Americans, was of the meticulously orchestrated convention itself. In addition to the media networks’ own actions,23 this emphasis was made possible by the unprecedented level of image policing provided by the Bloomberg administration and its high-powered RNC host committee. The first such move happened in federal court, where a “First Amendment showdown” took place in the week prior to the convention, ultimately prohibiting the main march from culminating symbolically in a rally in Central Park’s Great Lawn.24 Once the convention week began, tens of thousands of local police, private security, and national guard units turned several blocks around Madison

 • Miriam Greenberg

Square Garden into a “frozen zone,” closed to all pedestrian and vehicular traffic except delegates and credentialed media. While this security level had federal mandate and some degree of popular support due to the threat of terrorism, the paramilitary “zero tolerance” tactics employed by the police led to critiques of chilling political speech, symbolically equating protestors with terrorists, and infringing civil liberties.25 Ultimately, a total of 1,821 arrests were made over four days, more than during any other convention in US history. According to legal observers, unlawful police tactics and delays in processing those arrested were common, and appeared to be part of the city’s plan to keep unruly protestors “out of sight” of the delegates and news cameras, by any means necessary (Perry, 2003–2004).

Conclusion: If They Can Make It Here . . . In both the 1970s and post-9/11 periods, the city’s marketing-led “recovery” from crisis was held up as a model for an anxious nation in transition, and embraced by a newly elected Republican leadership. In both eras this seemed counterintuitive. Here was a famously liberal city that epitomized just about everything that the conservative, anti-urban movement opposed. And yet here was also a city that held an enduring place in popular culture as the nation’s most significant proving ground, its urban crucible. As was poignantly conveyed by “New York, New York,” Kander and Ebb’s defiant paean to “old New York” in the depths of 1977, “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere . . . It’s up to you, New York, New York.”26 Thus, Republican reasoning went, if neoliberalism could make it in New York, it could literally make it anywhere. If Gotham could be transformed into a model of conservative values, it would only be a matter of time before the rest of the nation fell into line. By 1985, when the Frank Sinatra version of “New York, New York” hit the top 10, and when Mayor Koch named it “New York’s Official Song,” the city’s brand became synonymous with the indomitable spirit of the individual, and the free market itself. And in 2004, when President George W. Bush restaged his bullhorn speech at ground zero, and as the song played over the loudspeakers in Madison Square Garden, this Democratic stronghold was used to re-elect a Republican president, and symbolize the nation’s resolve and call for war. Yet the branding of New York has not only entailed symbolic appropriation. The city’s embrace of marketing in both periods was part of a dual effort: to transform New York’s image as a product in the minds of its targeted consumers, while pursuing policies and economic development strategies that prioritized tourism and business over the long-term social and infrastructural needs of local residents. As such, it created an enduring rift between these constituencies. As has been pointed out by

Marketing the City in Crisis • 

scholars of urban tourism, the interests of “citizens and visitors” can and do overlap—with citizens benefiting from quality-of-life improvements, cultural enhancements, and jobs created by the tourism economy, and with consumers benefiting from public amenities like transportation and parks that citizens pay for out of their tax dollars (Hoffman, Fainstein, and Judd, 2004; Greenberg, 2008, chapter 8). This could happen in New York, in tourism and in other sectors geared towards the global market. But meanwhile those vital public goods and civil liberties that tourists, conventioneers, and investors do not need, and which do not figure in marketing campaigns—from affordable housing to the right to free speech—would have to be fought for. In both the late 1970s and the 2000s, New York’s image improved dramatically in the eyes of many. Tourists, corporations, and global real-estate developers all returned to the city in great numbers. Yet in both periods fundamental social indicators—like employment rates, hourly wages, housing affordability, and standards of living—continued to decline precipitously for most New Yorkers (see, for example, Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Fiscal Policy Institute, 2005).27 Thus we may learn important lessons from studying these two eras of crisis: First, as the image of New York’s “recovery” has become better managed and branded by entrepreneurial coalitions, the city’s iconic symbols can be used effectively to legitimate controversial forms of political and economic restructuring on both a local and national scale. This, in turn, produces new contradictions between the image and reality of contemporary urban life, and forces citizens to challenge the branded version of the city if they are to confront its underlying problems and social needs.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

In my book I explore this history of city marketing in greater depth. While city boosterism was quite common in New York City as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, official cityor state-sponsored marketing was limited to the hosting of occasional world’s fairs. While arguably an early form of branding, they never resulted in long-term institutional shifts in economic development policy. Meanwhile, in the years following the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and preceding 9/11, city marketing was either largely taken over by the state’s Empire State Development Corporation (through the ongoing I♥NY campaign), which focused more on New York State than on New York City, or was picked up by the private sector. As Lichten says, “New York City became the harbinger of a new era in social policy, one that tied the fate of millions of urban dwellers closely to the international and national markets. Cities were only the first target in a still raging struggle over the size and scope of social expenditures, and it may be said that the politics and economics of what was known as the New York City fiscal crisis set the pattern for the new austerity that marks current social policy.” These technologies included newspaper, magazine, and book publishing beginning in the eighteenth century; telegraph, radio, and telecommunications; international news services; photography and film; advertising beginning in the nineteenth century; and live television broadcasting beginning in the twentieth century.

 • Miriam Greenberg 4.

5. 6.

7.

The quote “The association’s primary goal is to establish a positive image for New York, the importance of which was pointed up yesterday by the Standard & Poor’s Corporation, the investment rating service” comes from: Richard Reeves, “Civic Group Is Formed,” New York Times, February 10, 1971, 1. These approaches ranged from corporate street-sweeping initiatives to Rudin handing out the famous “Big Apple lapel pin” to commuters at Grand Central Station. The three goals for the marketing program included: to “convey New York’s advantages as a place to do business and to stress the City’s positive attitude toward business,” to “encourage companies to locate in the City and to stay and expand here,” and to “attract more tourists and conventions.” The introductory paragraph of the “Survival Guide” set the grim tone, advising visitors that “the incidence of crime and violence in New York City is shockingly high.” The leaflet gave nine urgent cautions, including these: “Stay off the streets after 6 pm. Even in midtown Manhattan, muggings and occasional murders are on the increase during the early evening hours . . . If you walk in midtown at about 7:30 pm you will observe that the streets are nearly deserted. Do not walk. If you must leave your hotel after 6 pm, summon a radio taxi by telephone. Avoid public transportation . . . Never ride the subway for any reason whatsoever. In midtown Manhattan you may, at only slight risk, ride the buses during daylight hours. Do not leave valuables in your hotel room and do not deposit them in the hotel vault. Hotel robberies have become virtually uncontrollable. Be aware of fire hazards . . . You may have to evacuate quarters without assistance if a fire should occur . . . Try to avoid buildings that are not completely fireproof.”

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

A copy of the pamphlet is located in the Jack Bigel Archive on Municipal Finance and Leadership at Baruch College, New York City. This was the target market sought by the new DOC Commissioner John Dyson. Reagan first invoked the importance of NYCP in his approach towards “private sector initiatives” during his “Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the National Alliance of Business,” October 5, 1981. As he said, “Now, I know there are cynics who dismiss the notion of Americans helping other Americans . . . They believe voluntarism is a mushy idea, the product of mushy thinking . . . I wish the cynics would call on New York City, the New York City Partnership, an association of 100 business and civic leaders, which this past summer found jobs for about 14,000 disadvantaged youths, the majority of whom would not have otherwise found jobs.” This proved shortsighted when, three years later, New York State senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer were still petitioning the Republican Congress for over half of the remaining money to be delivered. All these agencies had corporatized their names over the preceding two decades. NYC & Co. was formerly known as the New York Convention and Visitors’ Bureau; the Economic Development Corporation was formerly known as the Office of Economic Development; and, at the state level, the Empire State Development Corporation was formerly known as the Department of Commerce. One of the more controversial aspects of this job involved devising opportunities to sell “naming rights,” whereby corporations could pay to replace the name of New York City landmarks and institutions with their own brand name, and/or use public property for their own marketing. The first major deal the CMO signed was with Snapple, who bought the right to be the exclusive beverage vendor in New York public schools, and to do spin-off ads using Board of Education students and property. This deal was investigated by the city comptroller due to possible conflict of interest, and was ultimately found to have lost the city money. The taskforce, convened in March 2003, includes Kathryn Wylde of NYCP, as well as advertising luminaries Rochelle Lazarus, head of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, and Mike Dolan, head of Young & Rubicam, Inc. To the amusement of New York editorial writers, Bloomberg put the former president of the Miss Universe pageants, Maureen Reidy, in charge of the host committee. As quoted in Stohr, Reidy “breathlessly” proclaimed, “We want to secure the biggest deals to bring the

Marketing the City in Crisis • 

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

best events to the greatest city in the world . . . There’s nothing I would rather do than be showing people how great New York is.” This move was also unprecedented because it institutionalized event-planning. According to Jonathan Tisch, CEO of Loews Hotels, chairman of NYC & Co, and co-chair of the new permanent committee, in the past, he told the Sun, “We would have to set up an office, set up a fundraising operation, find people to do a million different things.” “Now there will already be a mechanism in place.” The number put the site in the same league as the city’s two major tourist attractions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art—at 4.6 million visitors—and the Statue of Liberty—at 4.2 million, when open. This was an unprecedented accomplishment for the area of the WTC, where developers had tried and failed since the towers’ inception to create a 24-hour tourist and entertainment destination. On this point see Greenberg (2004). The article also notes that NYC & Co. put together a spreadsheet to track what one bureau official called the “new patriotic meetings”—i.e. two dozen conventions and conferences channeled to New York at least in part because of 9/11. Many also believed the choice of dates was significant. The convention season was traditionally in June and July, but the RNC was pushed back to August 30–September 2, 2004, possibly so that it would coincide with the beginning of celebrations commemorating the third anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Republican Governor George Pataki also planned a special groundbreaking ceremony for the rebuilding of the WTC site so that Republican delegates could attend. Before the RNC Slackman interviewed both Democrats and Republicans alike who speculated on the fallout from the Bush administration’s current political and military difficulties—e.g. “Richard A. Clarke, the 9/11 Commission and a Rising Insurgency in Iraq”— in terms of the symbolic value of New York City as a site for the RNC. “Now, as the administration faces increasing scrutiny of its handling of pre-9/11 terror threats and the wisdom of extending the war on terrorism into Iraq, the question has emerged whether New York is the best place for the Republicans to be gathering this summer.” The premise for coming to New York “is no longer valid,” said Roger Stone, a longtime Republican political strategist who supports President Bush. “Karl Rove’s master stroke idea may turn out to be an unmitigated disaster. It has the potential to highlight an issue that may be a negative by the time he gets to the convention.” The path and ultimate destination of this march, organized by the coalition United for Peace and Justice, itself became a symbolic battle. The city initially attempted—unsuccessfully— to prevent the march from going up Broadway and past the convention center, and to shunt it to the West Side Highway instead, and they ultimately denied the group a permit to use Central Park for a massive post-march rally. The first effort was justified as it was a security risk, and the second was justified owing to concern for the condition of the grass in Central Park. In both cases UFPJ and civil libertarians like the ACLU discounted these justifications, and accused the city of seeking to deny protestors the opportunity to make a powerful symbolic statement that rivaled that of the convention itself by occupying central spaces of Manhattan en masse. The New York City Host Committee designed this media center with all the possible amenities—including concierge service and a gourmet buffet—so as to positively dispose the national and international media to New York City, as well as upstage Boston, the city that hosted the Democratic National Convention. As an article in the New York Times put it: “This touch of five-star extravagance, which organizers say has never been offered during a national political convention, is as much about the rivalry between Boston and New York as it is about hoping that a well-fed, well-manicured news media will make for positive news coverage . . . ‘We wanted to make sure that when the media came to New York after going to Boston, that they would see New York as a place you want to do business, a place that has a level of professionalism you couldn’t find anywhere else in the world,’ said Kevin Sheekey, the president of the New York Host Committee” (Slackman, July 2004, B1). As Scahill says: “This groundbreaking campaign of direct action and comprehensive news reporting . . . was one of the many creative guerrilla tactics employed by the decentralized resistance movement in North America that grew out of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. In contrast to the multi-million dollar security budgets for the Democratic and Republican conventions and at the recent FTAA meetings in Miami, activists are using existing technology that is virtually cost free to mobilize hundreds of actions and thousands of activists.”

 • Miriam Greenberg 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

See links to news coverage at www.axisofeve.org and www.billionairesforbush.org. The limited coverage of protests on mainstream channels was exacerbated by the fact that all of the major TV networks, except PBS, joined in limiting coverage of both parties’ conventions to four hours a day. This was the first time such caps were set since conventions had been televized. Supposedly this was done because ratings were not expected to be high. See e.g. “Lawn Vs. Demonstrators,” New York Times, May 11, 2004. As the Times argued in support of protestors’ request to rally in Central Park, the right to free speech should trump image and park maintenance: “In this era of highly scripted conventions, the protests outside the convention hall may offer the most authentic political discourse of the week. When the nation watches what happens in New York during the convention, we want everyone to fully appreciate the glories of the city, and the way it has come back from the disaster of 9/11. But viewers also need to see a New York that is and always has been a place in which political expression is valued and protected.” Intimidating police tactics included the use of scooters as a form of crowd control; pervasive surveillance of lawful activity, which could result in political dossiers or files of critics of the government; and the use of pens, barricades, and netting to make mass arrests that often engulfed uninvolved bystanders. Those arrested were searched and held without due process and for extended periods in overcrowded conditions in a makeshift jail set up in a bus depot at Pier 57, which appeared to be contaminated with harmful chemicals. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department made no meaningful efforts to facilitate their processing and many people were not released until a court ordered the city to do so, under threat of heavy fines, in response to a complaint filed by the New York chapter of the ACLU. On September 3, 2003 a state judge found the city to be in contempt of court, and imposed a $1,000 fine for each of the 470 still being held. There was no report of final payments. “New York, New York,” by composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, was written for the 1977 Martin Scorsese film, New York. The film starred Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli (who sang the song). A Frank Sinatra recording of “New York, New York” brought the song much wider fame. In the three months of 2003 before the mayor made his celebratory State of the City speech, the Fiscal Policy Institute and the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the city’s unemployment averaged 9%, or double the rest of the state, and much higher than the rest of the country. All told, New York City total job loses, which began with the recession of December 2000, had ballooned to 240,000 jobs lost by June 2003, a 6.4% decline and more than three times the national decline. Real wages for the middle and working classes fell relative to inflation for five consecutive years. Meanwhile, as a recent front-page New York Times article noted, top executives and high-income-earning professionals are flocking back to the city, which has regained its reputation as a “fun” city in their eyes (McGeehan, 2006).

References Austin, Joe, Taking the Train: How Grafitti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia, 2001). Bagli, Charles, “Staying or Not Wall Street Giants Could Reap Aid,” New York Times, March 21, 2002, A1. Beame, Abraham, “Economic Recovery: New York City’s Program for 1977–1981” (New York City Department of City Planning, 1976). Beauregard, Robert, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (London: Blackwell, 1993). Blair, Jayson, “Here Dignity Rubs Elbows with Demand: Ground Zero Crowds Don’t Please Everyone,” New York Times, June 26, 2002, B1, B4. Bloomberg, Michael, “State of the City Address,” www.nyc.gov (2003). Bloomberg, Michael, “It’s New York, New York in ’04: ‘America’s City’ Will Host the National Party’s Biggest Bash, August 30—September 2, 2004,” Rising Tide: The Magazine of the Republican National Committee, Spring 2004. Bowles, Jonathan, “Payoffs for Layoffs,” New York: Center for an Urban Future, February 10, 2001. Canby, Vincent, “New York’s Woes Are Good Box Office,” New York Times, November 10, 1974. Chipkin, Harvey, “New York City’s Campaign for Agency Business,” American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) Management, 1988, C1.

Marketing the City in Crisis •  Commercial Alert, “Draining off the Commons, One Sip at a Time,” www.commercialalert.org, September 15, 2003. Committee for Public Safety, “Welcome to Fear City—A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York,” 1976. D. K. Shifflet and Associates, USA Travel Recovery/Monitor: A Blueprint for Rebuilding Travel (New York: D. K. Shifflet & Associates Ltd, December 3, 2001–February 15, 2002). Fainstein, Susan S., City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980–2000 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2001). Fiscal Policy Institute, “New Yorkers Treading Water in a Tenuous Recovery: Gains of growth go to corporate profits and high-wage earners. Middle class shrinks,” New York: Fiscal Policy Institute, September 4, 2005. Fitch, Robert, The Assassination of New York (New York: Verso, 1993). Fitzgerald, J., “Retention Deficit Disorder,” NYC Inc./Center for an Urban Future, March 2002. Fowler, Glenn, “Union ‘Guide’ to Fear City Is Banned by a Court Order,” New York Times, June 13, 1975, 1, 77. Fowler, Glenn, “‘Fear City’ Booklet Rights again Upheld,” New York Times, June 18, 1975, 19. Freeman, Joshua, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since WWII (New York: New Press, 2000). Greenberg, Miriam, “Branding Cities: A Social History of the Urban Lifestyle Magazine,” Urban Affairs Review, 36 (2), November 2000, 228–263. Greenberg, Miriam, “The Limits of Branding: The World Trade Center, Fiscal Crisis and the Marketing of Recovery,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27 (2) (June 2004), 386–418. Greenberg, Miriam, Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World (New York: Routledge, 2008). Hart, Susanna, and John Murphy (eds), Brands: The New Wealth Creators (New York: New York University Press, 1998). Harvey, David, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” in Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Hoffman, Lily M., Susan S. Fainstein, and Dennis R. Judd, Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space (London: Blackwell, 2004). Kapferer, Jean Noel, Strategic Brand Management: New Approaches to Creating and Evaluating Brand Equity (New York: Addison Wesley, 1996). Lenkowsky, Leslie, “Ronald Reagan Helped Philanthropy, Despite How Much Nonprofit World Objected to His Policies,” Chronicle of Philanthropy, June 10, 2004. Lichten, Eric, Class, Power, Austerity: The New York City Fiscal Crisis (Amherst, MA: Greenwood Press, Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1986, 3). Marshall, Alton, interview conducted for the Lew Rudin Way documentary (New York: Tupelo Honey Productions, 2006). McGeehan, Patrick, “Top Executives Return to Offices in Manhattan,” New York Times, July 3, 2006, A1. Mollenkopf, John H. and Manuel Castells (eds), Dual City: Restructuring New York (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991). New York City Partnership, Annual Report (New York: The Partnership, 1981/2). Perry, Robert, “The 2003 Legislative Session in Review,” New York Civil Liberties, LI (2) (Winter 2003–2004). Purnick, Joyce, “Metro Matters: New Yorkers, Walking a Line to Keep Going,” New York Times, October 15, 2001, B1. Quante, Wolfgang, The Exodus of Corporate Headquarters from New York City (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1976). Ranzal, Edward, “Publicity Is Said to Bar Better Credit for City,” New York Times, February 10, 1971, 86. Reagan, Ronald, “Remarks at the Annual Meeting of the National Alliance of Business,” The Public Papers of Ronald Reagan, October 5, 1981. Reagan, Ronald, “Remarks at the New York City Partnership Luncheon in New York,” The Public Papers of Ronald Reagan, January 14, 1982. Reconstruction Watch, “Profiles of the Members of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation:

 • Miriam Greenberg Who Are These People and Where Did They Come from?” New York: Good Jobs NY, February 2002. Reeves, Richard, “Civic Group Is Formed,” New York Times, February 10, 1971, 1. Ross, Andrew, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (New York: Verso, 1995). Rutenberg, Jim, “In TV News, Philosophies about Images of 9/11 Differ,” New York Times, August 30, 2004, A1. Saltonstall, David, “City’s Going on the Block: Naming Rights to be Offered,” New York Daily News, April 3, 2003. Scahill, Jeremy, “The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad,” Counterpunch, September 9, 2004. Scott, Janny, “Tourists to the Rescue of a Wounded City: New York Finds Sympathy a Powerful Draw,” New York Times, March 24, 2002 B1, 47. Shalit, Ruth, “Brand New: How Do You Sell New York Now? Great Minds Are Working on It,” Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2001, W17. Slackman, Michael, “Second-Guessing of Bush Now Extends to Convention Site,” New York Times, April 10, 2004, B1. Slackman, Michael, “For Press at the Republican Convention, Pens, Pads and a Concierge,” New York Times, July 20, 2004, B1. Stohr, Kate, “I Sell New York,” Gotham Gazette, March 17, 2003. Tabb, William K., The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982). Tupelo Honey Productions, “The Lew Rudin Documentary Project,” 2000, provided by executive producer Sandra Roberts. Whyte, William H., “End of the Exodus: The Logic of the Headquarters City,” New York, September 20, 1976, 88. Yankelovich, Skelly, and White, Inc., Research to Support New York State’s Economic Development Activities; Discovery Phase: Qualitative Hypotheses, prepared for State of New York Department of Commerce, March 1977.

CHAPTER

2

Home Alone Selling New Domestic Spaces J U S T I N E L L OY D

During 2001, while writing up material for a historical study of the figure of the housewife in 1940s and 1950s Australia, I came across what I came to think of as a series of afterimages of postwar suburban femininity. At the time I was working on a co-authored history of the cultural spaces of 1940s and 50s femininity, revealed in representations of women and the domestic in postwar films, magazines, and radio programs. We discussed and documented the relationship between the housewife and the feminist of the second wave. We were particularly interested in the route by which the housewife as domestic subject became an abject self for feminists to cast out or leave behind in the 1960s (Johnson and Lloyd, 2004). Immersed in the details of the conflicts over the social definitions of the postwar housewife, I couldn’t help but compare present imaginaries of femininity and home in advertising with the archive. Every weekend, as I half-heartedly flicked through the real-estate supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald, I was drawn to one series of ads for an apartment redevelopment, Lumina, in particular.1 And each week the image used to sell the complex was more “sensational” than the last. Set within pages that usually give purely informational descriptions of flats for sale across several columns of plain text (the kind of ads that usually describe only size, layout, location, and price of properties for sale) were some lavish, full-color promotions for apartment developments. Sexy images of a woman, posed on her designer furniture in an intensely minimalist flat; images of autonomous 45

 • Justine Lloyd

pleasures and appropriate, tasteful consumption that stood out against the grey slabs of newsprint (see Figures 2.4–2.6 on pp. 59–60). As a woman alone, she was framed by various headlines and commentary as a desiring subject, and as herself desired. She was positioned as an owner, rather than a worker in her home, entirely “at home” in a space of leisure and pleasure. Her claim to be “at home” in this setting mimicked the way that the 1960s bachelor might have been able to enjoy his apartment: as a stage for seduction and mixing a few cocktails, rather than cooking, cleaning, and raising children. This twenty-first-century version of the post-domestic woman, however, seemed to raise more problems than she potentially solved. A “return of the repressed” appeared to be taking place in the ways that tensions between feminism and domesticity seemed to collapse in a spatial, rather than political mode, in these images. Rather than a revolution around issues of housework and domestic labor by moving such issues into the public sphere, the solution was posed as a mode of consuming space: a matter of getting a smaller apartment in the “right” city location. These new housing developments were seemingly free from the labor needed to maintain the suburban home, a familiar theme of postwar advertising culture (Duruz, 1994; Greig, 1995). In contrast, though, such contemporary spaces were associated with a feminine subjectivity organized around self-containment in a space with clearly defined limits: a single woman who was everything but “just a housewife.” In positing this “solution” to the problem of housework and the care of others, deep historical tensions over gender and domestic work in the figure of the housewife seemed to be resurfacing through the powerful associations that real-estate advertisers were making between Central Business District (CBD) residential developments and new, postfeminist forms of femininity. This new subject position, glimpsed here in a series of real-estate advertisements, signals wider changes in the available spaces for women in the city. In this study, I argue that this figure has emerged at the same time as the pressures of gentrification of the inner city of Sydney have increased, which can be argued to have been escalating since the 1970s and peaking in the early 2000s (see Rofe, 2000 for a useful summary of recent work). Twinned with the spatial and material form of the minimalist urban apartment, that byword of gentrification, was a new and identifiable consumer agency— the economically productive female worker investing her highly disposable income in real-estate speculation. This newly feminized space was only intelligible in relation to what it is not (domestic), just as this new subject was only recognizable in terms of what she does not do (housework). This chapter uses these images—and the way that they are implicated in what the editors of this volume have posed as the salient connections between image, memory, and spectacle in the “entrepreneurial city”—to unpack some of the

Home Alone • 

ways in which this gendered subject has been constituted by a certain kind of capitalist urban development. This chapter undertakes a cultural-studies analysis of this emergent kind of feminine private space, in that it focuses on the processes of identification and representation that connect the material and the symbolic. This spatial order of the entrepreneurial city is accomplished through the changes to what Henri Lefebvre calls “representations of space,” which he distinguishes from “spatial practices” and “representational spaces” (1991: 38–39). Representations of space, for Lefebvre, are the symbolic expressions of the underlying mode of production, or the spatial practice of any given society. For my purposes, I take the representation of the gendered space of the woman “home alone” as an expression of gendered spatial practice. I am bracketing the question of what could be called gendered representational spaces. To fully explain how these emerge would be a separate study, one that would seek to capture these spaces at the level of reception and everyday life in order to document both what people actually do with given spaces, and how they might appropriate and reassemble these representations for their own ends. It is clear, however, that this spatial order is a circuit rather than a one-way street. The relationships between image and urban space intensify in the service economy, through what Lefebvre identifies as the “double character of the capitalist city: place of consumption and consumption of place” (1996: 170). The sophisticated production of place that is achieved through advertising and other media forms is one of the key indicators of the entrepreneurial city. Similarly, consumption of place refashions the ways we belong to the city and how we feel about living where we do. Looking at city apartments, as a practice, even if you do not want, or cannot afford, to buy one, is connected to the heightened circulation of images in an economy in which cultural labor is central. In the first section of this chapter I suggest that we can best understand these connected domains only as a nexus between production, identification, and consumption that is key to the contemporary city. In the second section, I suggest that this process involves both economic transformation and the transformation of subjectivities, by describing the ways that both class and gender are transformed and reconnected in gentrification. In the final section I connect the production of certain identities and the consumption of this space through the urban landscape by means of an account of the branding exercise that surrounded the development and its resulting print campaign.

A New Development Urban (rather than suburban) homes “branded” as feminine clearly represent the construction of a new, economically useful space within the terrain

 • Justine Lloyd

of the Australian city, and one that has emerged from local conditions. During this period, the inner-city apartment has been promoted worldwide through a set of popular representations as the site, symbol, and space of the proper urban individual for the neoliberal city, and increasingly this individual has been depicted as a single, heterosexual woman. The real-estate market represents an assemblage of forces that work together to produce space in the inner city, and no single actor is responsible for her rise. This female figure and her “apartment lifestyle” gather together a whole set of factors that choreograph the kinds of cities under investigation in this collection: the entrepreneurial city’s cultural–industrial complex, which is centered around real-estate speculation, redevelopment of abandoned or under-performing industrial sites, and the definition of the “creative class” (Florida, 2005; 2002; see also Zukin, 1995). This complex propels entrepreneurial–cultural activity, on which it is in turn dependent. This phenomenon is cosmopolitan and international in its reach, but in its local articulation in Sydney is shot through with national and regional determinants. Property development has participated as both sign and actor of a new “urban lifestyle” that transcends the spatial order of the twentieth-century Australian cities, which were divided into zones in which suburbs were for living and cities for working. Australian cities during the 1980s and 1990s have been instead marked by the emergence of a new spatial order characterized by a centralization of wealth and a lack of “edge city” developments. The Australian urban sociologist Blair Badcock has termed this new order a “cone of wealth . . . at the heart of the cities like Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, and now Brisbane and Perth as well, that most distinguishes urban restructuring in Australia [from many other similar cities around the world]” (Badcock, 2000: 211). One of the key factors in this spatial order has been that while demand for office space has been steady, there has also been a slight oversupply of new and refurbished office developments, lessening the pressure on the development of outlying suburbs and keeping property investment centered on the established centers. In the late 1990s this spatial paradigm of inner-city redevelopment, rather than greenfield expansion, created an unprecedented demand for apartments near Sydney’s CBD. Here, urban policy and planning coordinated by state and national governments and the global market economy met at a point of spatial production and consumption. This juncture has significant insights to offer into the current role that the state plays as an actor in urban development. This convergence between public control and private development is particularly apparent in the stated objectives of Sydney City Council (SCC), which tries to mediate very local pressures over space while creating a favorable climate for property investment. The SCC’s stated planning policy is to:

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Establish a critical mass of permanent residents in the city. A city with a sizeable residential population makes good economic and social sense, as city residents help support a range of services and contribute to city identity and cultural life. (SCC, 2002) These objectives are being achieved by new kinds of zoning which differ radically from the dominant modes of urban planning in Australia during the mid-twentieth century: firstly, new planning regulations do not prohibit “mixed use” and consider living and working as compatible; secondly, they create requirements to build three- and four-bedroom apartments as part of overall projects, thereby trying to entice families to the inner city (who may have originally been looking for detached housing in neighborhoods near the CBD but who now find such housing outside their budget); thirdly, they try to regulate the oversupply of the most cost-effective and profitable form of housing, the bed-sit or one-bedroom apartment, which has been overbuilt in massive new developments attracting speculators moving their capital between different sectors of the economy. During the 1990s several inner-city local councils moved to rezone industrial and commercial land as residential as they sought to capture and manage global flows of capital and labor for national benefit within a city experiencing significant population growth at the same time as a shortage of land for development. This was also largely a reaction to local conditions, namely the high demand for inner-city housing and higher income streams from rates and taxes that residential tenants, in comparison to commercial tenants, are currently providing. These phenomena combined spectacularly in Sydney, where, despite its status as a “Pacific Rim” capital for global companies, investment in commercial office stock has declined alongside a sharp rise in profits to be made in the housing sector. A new kind of city was emerging, a city based on financial speculation, service industries and cultural consumption, rather than industrial production and trade in commodities. Following the local building boom from the mid-1970s onwards, vacancy rates in commercial buildings in the Sydney CBD rose throughout the 1990s from 2% to well above 10%, one of the highest among Australian state cities. Conversely, the demand for housing stock in Sydney has increased, with the rental vacancy rate in some suburbs negligible. Just 2% became the average vacancy rate across the inner city during the 1990s. The scramble to build apartments and flats rather than commercial property has seen residential developments in the most unlikely places, with formerly “unliveable” or low-value areas close to the city, previously seen as lacking a “lifestyle,” now rebranded as desirable addresses for apartments. Even brand new business parks were resumed for housing during the peak period of this

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phase during the late 1990s. The new trend towards refitting office buildings for apartments followed the increasing scarcity of lofts and warehouses, but also took advantage of the downsizing or takeover of Australian companies by transnational corporations, and the ensuing movement of global capital offshore for labor- and space-intensive work, following cheaper labor and less restrictive industrial regulations into the Asia–Pacific region. Changes to local zoning regulations further enabled this phenomenon. For example, in 2001 Meriton, a massive Sydney property concern specializing in apartments, purchased the brand new “Mascot Central Business Park” within the industrial suburbs surrounding Sydney airport for residential conversion for AU$27 million. The company’s purchase was reported in the financial section of the Sydney Morning Herald as a “surprise”: The surprise wasn’t so much the price paid but the fact that what was essentially a new, 17,000 square metre office/warehouse building was bought not for commercial use but for residential conversion/redevelopment . . . one can see how much impact the new zoning is having on the traditional industrial market. [O]ne in every two buildings, especially major ones, are being sold for residential redevelopment. (Taylor, 2001) A key factor in this process has been the reinvestment of considerable personal fortunes developed from merchant banking and funds management in many high-profile urban renewal developments around Sydney. The paragon of this trend is the Sydney real-estate entrepreneur Robert Whyte, who was involved in many inner-city redevelopments of offices and hotels during the 1990s through his company Trafalgar Properties. The most high-profile of these (and the initiator of many followers, such as Lumina) was the “Republic,” a highly priced, designer inner-city apartment redevelopment (Business Review Weekly, 1998) completed in the late 1990s. These developments subtly diverge from the postindustrial model of the 1970s and 1980s, during which unused nineteenth-century industrial buildings such as small workshops, warehouses, and lofts were converted into housing (Zukin, 1982). The “branding” of apartment developments in Sydney can be seen as a synecdoche for the wider transformations in the city-space that globalization engenders. Firstly, it rests on an amalgamation of service industries and cultural work signaled by an unprecedented rise in the value of the labor undertaken by fashion designers, advertising agencies, and photographers, as well as real-estate agents, café owners and chefs, architects, and town planners. Secondly, an ever-increasing escalation of financial activity and investment value is brought into play through the previously run-down inner-urban spaces and neighborhoods to which

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creative workers have been traditionally drawn because of low rents, large spaces, and relaxed restrictions on the formal boundaries between home and work. And thirdly, a rapid circulation of the signs and symbols of economic mobility has taken place through new regimes of consumption. These regimes are indicated in a range of spaces of consumption that reconfigure traditional gender stereotypes and expand the domestic-as-commodity’s address to a range of sexualities. As Leslie and Reimer have argued, new popular cultural forms, in particular the rise of “lifestyle” magazines of the 1990s, represent a move away from “traditional home magazines that solicited a female consumer” (2003: 305). They note that “new titles [such as Wallpaper*] construct the consumer of modernism as a highly mobile young urban professional who might be male or female, straight, or gay” (2003: 305). I would argue, however, that this consumer is not free of discourses of gender and sexuality, but is recoded as a private individual through consumerism. Femininity becomes disembedded from private space and loosened from traditional notions of the separation of spheres, but only through an exaggerated display of gender through consumer identities that emphasizes individual agency and community through consumption. Rather than a decline or disappearance of signs of the feminine, a new, hyper-real figure of urban femininity has emerged. At a global level the Sex and the City stereotype of economically independent but emotionally insecure single women living in glamorous New York apartments embodies this spatialized subject.2 The sites I examine here (advertising discourses, the real-estate market, and the flats themselves) seem to be operating together as tools for the displacement of historically developed spatial practices—that is, the position of the woman within a national discourse of the nuclear family and postwar suburban development—in favor of more flexible and international subjectivities that are implicated in the power dynamics of urban space outlined above. The very self-aware and complexly constructed images associated with the apartment developments seem to hail a new kind of female subject in the home, while at the same time closely defining her spatial practice. In the next section I explore what kinds of critical positions these contradictions produce. By using the insights of both feminist geographical and urban theory, it becomes possible to question the class bias of much contemporary work on gentrification and consider its gendered dimensions.

Gentrification and Feminine Consumption Neil Smith has analyzed gentrification as a class-driven process, blurring distinctions between gentrification proper (defined as the rehabilitation of residential stock following disinvestment) and redevelopment, which

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involves wholly new development (1996: 39). He suggests that this occurs with a uniform impulse across capitalist society, which he terms the “revanchist city” of displacement and dislocation, and is aimed at and constitutes an urban underclass. He links local struggles over particular sites to this totality: Gentrification [in the new landscapes of downtown Baltimore or central Edinburgh, waterfront Sydney or riverside Minneapolis] is no longer about a narrow and quixotic oddity in the housing market but has become the leading residential edge of a much larger endeavour: the class remake of the central urban landscape. (Smith, 1996: 39) Feminist geographers such as Linda McDowell, Mona Domosh, and Liz Bondi have critiqued these aspects of gentrification theory during the 1990s. Bondi recognizes the “inherently problematic nexus of culture and economy in the gentrification debate” (1991a: 195). Like many other feminist and cultural geographers, Bondi has argued that gender and class are interacting social categories, and that the history of gentrification must be understood as producing particular forms of middle-class femininity: In mid-19th-century Britain large-scale factory production precipitated a spatial separation between home and work and created the possibility of separate spheres of life for women and men. A particular social form, namely a nuclear family with a dependent wife, has operated as a factor contributing to changes in the spatial organization of urban areas in the form of suburban growth. After decades of outward movement by affluent social groups, a return to small pockets within inner-urban areas is now evident under the rubric of gentrification which is closely connected with the increasing success of middle-class women in obtaining well-paid career jobs. (Bondi, 1989: 2) In her 1991 paper on the role of gender in gentrification Bondi questioned the “rent-gap” theory of gentrification by commenting that Smith’s work “serves as a foil against opening up questions of gender practices: he prioritizes abstract economic processes over the cultural conditions of their operation” (Bondi, 1991a: 194). In this she was following other feminists’ critiques of Smith during the 1980s, when the gendered dimensions of middle-class identity were further explored. Bondi, writing with Mona Domosh, more recently has contended that class and gender are further linked in urban consumption, as the increasing visibility of women in public space is a factor that relativizes its coding as “masculine”:

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[M]iddle-class women’s increased participation in the public sphere and especially their greater freedom of movement in public space can be understood in terms of the expansion of commercial consumer activities traditionally associated with the feminine . . . what is often described as a decline of public space is closely linked with a feminization of such spaces. (Bondi and Domosh, 1998: 285) The breaking down of modernist distinctions and boundaries between work and home is connected with a sense of bodies out of place in the contemporary city. The trajectory by which the inner city is linked with femininity during this period is, however, uneven and paradoxical because it has taken place at the same time as the displacement of female low-income and part-time workers from affordable rental properties in the inner city.3 That it is an economically powerful single woman who becomes the urban figure of the late 1990s and early 2000s needs to be highlighted from urban theoretical and feminist perspectives. The class-based analysis of gentrification lucidly describes the economy’s role in the mode of spatial production, but is less sensitive to the spatio-cultural imaginaries, or new consumer subjectivities, which might be attracted to and constructed within this new landscape. A feminist perspective needs to be alert to the framing of gender within new kinds of economic activities. A case study of the gendered production of space in Sydney’s inner city further undercuts a solely class-based analysis of gentrification in several ways. Firstly, as described above, governments as much as private investors are actively remaking the city by investing in urbanist projects. These projects court capital through policy decisions that are aimed at moving their area up the ladder of value though class mobility, but also engender more general kinds of mobility in which class itself is changing as much as gender. Secondly, in Sydney in particular, distinctions between state bodies and capital investors are blurred, with many statutory bodies positioned outside normal channels of accountability and governance. By taking on entrepreneurial roles in the city’s redevelopment, these bodies operate as flexibly public and private and blur boundaries between capital and its governance. Thirdly, and beyond the scope of this chapter, new intersections with categories of race as well as gender emerge, as a discourse on capitalist restructuring cannot ignore the recasting of “otherness” in racial terms at the same time as the field of female economic power is expanded. These urban redevelopment projects also displace longstanding ethnically diverse communities and shore up whiteness as an index of cultural power.4 By looking at the spatial forms that gentrification has produced in Sydney, it becomes apparent that developments outlined above have happened for reasons of class transformation as much as class struggle. Gentrification has transformed

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Sydney’s self-image in a constitutive way and, taken as a whole, the redevelopment of the inner city has engendered new formations of class and gender rather than being led by an identifiable “class” engaged in a remake of the city in its own image. In the next section, I work through the case of the Lumina campaign in detail in order to consider the contradictions they point to in the relationship between public and private spaces for women. The project wants to consider if, as the ads suggest, women really can get “on top of the dishes,” and once there, if they are able to perform the role of “post-housewife”? What forms of privacy, what kinds of private space, are offered to women in a world of uneven equality in the public sphere and increasing divergence between middle- and working-class women’s lives? And if gendered subjectivity is related to gendered spatiality, does the “feminization” of public space described by Bondi and Domosh find its parallels in a “masculinization” of private space?

The Lumina Woman We can see the contours of this new discourse on gender, class, and private space emerging in the example of the Lumina development only once we also look at its neighborhood: East Sydney. East Sydney since the early twentieth century has been associated with inner-city “bohemia,” first as the site of organized crime during various economic depressions from the 1890s onwards when it became a center for informal economic activities such as after-hours drinking, prostitution, and betting. In the postwar era, following the movement of the Anglo working-class population to outer suburbs during the inner-city slum clearance projects, it was resettled by single migrant Italian men who lived in boarding houses, and terrace houses converted into small flats, and ate at local Italian cafés. Most recently, a wave of gay gentrification has been moving towards the city from the eastern suburbs. As a result of the latest waves of gentrification, the most noticeable brothels and increasing numbers of street sex workers have been moved out. With most of the terrace housing stock now converted back to desirable homes from boarding houses, and all available vacant blocks developed into new residential blocks, property developers have turned to existing and under-performing structures, such as the office block that was the target of the Lumina development. The first way in which the Lumina development extracted itself from its neighborhood was in its naming. The brand eschewed the dominant pattern of names for real-estate developments—evident in several other developments promoted in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald during the same period—which evoke tradition and nature and conjure up images

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of private open space (“Moore Park Gardens”), privilege and exclusivity (for example, “Gateway,” “Concierge,” or “Top of the Town”), or bare-faced descriptions of a relationship to capital (“Equity”). “Lumina” instead invokes abstraction and light, rather than any point on the spectrum from solid space and fixed location to investment and materialism. The Lumina development as a relationship to space, rather than a space in itself, was further promoted in the way that potential buyers were invited to interpret the flats as a mode of privacy rather than a place with fixed boundaries. An item on the development that appeared in a national lifestyle television program described the design of the interior space of the flats as lending “itself to fluidity and shaping by the needs of the owner” (Our House, 2000). The interior-design team included in the larger architectural project, Keith Glover and Trudi Scrymgour, are quoted in the development’s publicity materials as epitomizing modernist high-cultural impulses “that good design should be about economy, simplicity and beauty.” Their company name, “Form Follows Function,” also reflects twentieth-century high-cultural modernist attitudes to domestic design in its quotation of Le Corbusier. Their manifesto reflects the consumer turn of modernism: “Light and air circulating freely, designs that permit and promote the occupant’s desires” (Kenny, 2000: 27). The apartments were designed not as a large “open workshop” space like that of a loft, “but with moveable glass screens based on Japanese home design” which could be reorganized to suit changing uses along the lines of the open-plan office: How many times have you wished you could just slide that wall away and create a whole new living area? Well now you can! A new and exciting style of living, where your space is no longer determined or cramped by solid walls is emerging in Sydney. Under construction now is an apartment block, designed with “sliding walls,” so you can transform your living area into a spacious open plan or into separate living rooms. (Our House, 2000) Any banal connection to the building’s history as an office block, however, needed to be downplayed, revalued and repackaged in this new incarnation. Rather than as a place of work, the site was translated into play, harnessing the ludic and symbolic urban functions to promote Sydney as a creative, entrepreneurial city. Its location, on the edge of the CBD, was packaged as a means of access to Sydney as zone of pleasure and consumption instead of labor and capital flows (Lefebvre, 2003: 18). In this aspect, the promotion of the development as the headquarters of the “sexy Sydney lifestyle” was underpinned by a print branding campaign, coordinated by Sophie Tatlow, a director of the inner-city design firm Deuce Design.

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Figure 2.1 Cover, Lumina Magazine, 2000.

The agency was given the task of creating a “complete identity” for the Lumina development to sell it to group of young city workers who would also benefit from a government first-home-buyers grant and tax exemptions, and would most likely be wanting to move out of group housing or escape living with their parents. To this end the Lumina logo was used as the masthead of a fictional “lifestyle magazine” published as a limited-issue collectible magazine edited by Tatlow (Figure 2.1). The magazine focused on the “sexy Sydney lifestyle” with its tagline on the front cover, “Welcome to the New Warm Cool,” and was inspired by ultra-groovy international home design magazines such as Nest and Wallpaper*. Highlighted in the design company’s portfolio on their website, “The pioneering Lumina Magazine pushed the boundaries of traditional property advertising. It featured chic fashion spreads, intimate portraits and provocative art direction” (Deuce Design, 2005). Very little architec-

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tural imagery, design specification or information on the apartments was included in the magazine. Instead it sought to associate the development with the inner city itself and to depict localized consumption activities under the heading “Lumina Living”: not only places to buy stylish interior design and decoration objects, but nearby exercise venues including local gyms and swimming pools, profiles of the project’s designers and architects, local residents and street identities, and a directory of local bars, nightclubs, and cafés. In the form of a home-making magazine, the first section, titled “Urban Lodgings,” set out to identify the elements of inner-city cultural capital. This was provided in the ways various local people organized their homes under the rubric of “Style without Styling.” The Lumina team investigates a random selection of Inner East homes and apartments. A peek at how the average and not so average urbanite lives; here’s your chance to view other people’s dirty laundry, clean cupboards, favourite chairs and design desirables. (ibid.: 6) The selection of living spaces ranged from photographs of empty interiors that were familiar from home decoration magazines, to images that referenced social documentary photojournalism, with a series of portraits of backpackers selling their mobile homes in a weekly well-known car market set in a car park in Kings Cross. The following section, “East City Soul,” also mixed elite cultural forms and street culture, by featuring full-page portraits of local cultural entrepreneurs (artists, gallery dealers, fashion designers, retro furniture sellers, chefs) alongside portraits of an outreach psychiatric nurse, a street paper seller, a tattooist, and a land-rights law student (ibid.: 14–20). The signification of gender took place most explicitly through a section titled “Home Time” and subtitled “You’ve just finished a hard day at the office—now it’s time for the real work. Make the most of every moment, relax, and take our advice . . .” (31). It is from this section that images from the campaign were chosen for re-publication in the newspaper real-estate supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). This print re-publication defined the Lumina brand in broadsheet media distinctively through the figure of a woman “at home alone.” In very different ways to the magazine, these images sexualized the form of privacy as a commodity that the development was offering, and introduced it to a wider audience through a fairly mundane form of print medium: the newspaper real-estate supplement. Four print ads were chosen from the many dozens of images commissioned for the 50-page magazine, three of which depicted the model shown on the cover and in the “Home Time” section.5 All the images of this Lumina

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Figure 2.2 “Home alone,” Lumina Magazine, 2000.

woman were posed glamour shots that focused on furniture and fashion in the magazine (Figures 2.2, 2.3, and 2.5). Deuce’s website documents this re-publication process as the “reapplication” of “edgy imagery . . . to a diverse range of media advertising” and notes that “strong public and industry reaction [to the overall campaign] translated into an immediate sell out of the project.” In fact this “strong reaction” included complaints from readers, and the SMH’s director of classified advertising, Pam Lohse, eventually withdrew two of the most obviously offensive ads, the first of which showed a nude woman from behind, wearing only a plastic, transparent dry cleaner’s bag (Figure 2.2). The second showed a woman in a sleek black evening dress with her hand resting on her thigh and with the tagline “Home alone” (Figure 2.6), which SMH complainants found “offensive due to the insinuation that the woman was masturbating at home” (Kaye, 2001). The

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Figure 2.3 “Get on top of the dishes,” Lumina Magazine, 2000.

Figure 2.4 “Get on top of the dishes,” Sydney Morning Herald, 2001.

advertising trade magazine B & T interviewed the real-estate agent responsible for sales about the ban: “It has nothing to do with that,” said the MD of [the property agents] who commissioned the ads, whose take on the ad is that there is nothing better than sitting at home alone in one of the new apartments. (Kaye, 2001) The final ad in the series (Figure 2.4), which was not withdrawn by the SMH, featured the shot of a woman’s bare legs from the knees down standing in stilettos on two dinner plates on a wooden table with the tagline “Get on top of the dishes.” The text below the image put a consumer spin on the original image from the magazine: “FORGET THE DISHES. Lumina is surrounded by an abundance of fabulous restaurants, cafés and bars. A tranquil tree lined street, yet only a minute’s walk across Hyde Park to the city, Oxford St, East Sydney Village and Cook and Phillip Pool & Gym.” From these examples, it seems that a new production–consumption nexus brought about in the process of gentrification seems to entrench a discourse on class through a counterdiscourse on the transformation of gender roles. The possibility of being a-woman-at-home, but not subjected

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Figure 2.5 “Watch the box . . .,” Lumina Magazine, 2000.

Figure 2.6 “Home alone,” Sydney Morning Herald, 2001.

to its regimes of labor, is brought into focus through the convergence of the several factors I have described in this chapter. “Getting on top” of the dishes implies the reversal of an existing political relationship established for women in the conventional domestic setting. The visual joke of the woman standing on the plates literally serves her up for a male consumer and viewer, but it also speaks to the desires of a female subject who is addressed through the codes of fashion photography and home decoration magazines. This fantasy moment of the transcendence of domesticity is achieved by putting the sexualized body of the fashion model into the uninhabited space of designer home magazines, bringing a fantasy body into a fantasy space. As McDowell has suggested, the separation of spheres is reflected in a “duality between what is regarded as a necessary masquerade at work and an essential ‘real’ self that is allowed complete dominance in off-stage activities—perhaps in leisure, but particularly in home life which has always been portrayed as more real or authentic” (McDowell, 1997: 161). As countless feminist critiques following both the idea of “masquerade” and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing have shown, the situation of “to-belooked-at-ness” of femininity brings a distancing of the female subject from her representation (Berger, 1972). It has been suggested that this distance configures subjectivity and self as in opposition rather than correspond-

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ence, and thus the breakdown of the opposition between presentation of self and a real, “authentic” self carries rather less import for women than it does for men. The performance of the self at home figured in the advertisements brings together a discourse and counterdiscourse on women and the domestic in a single moment in a very powerful manner. In this process, the single woman as subject, positioned as being home alone in such a public setting, can consume space in such a way that the domestic is no longer posed as a boundary that structures the paired worlds of public–private, home–work. Domesticity here is a mode of privacy that always already assumes another looking on, even if one is “at home” alone. The Lumina woman is constantly on display, just as the space of her subjectivity is implicated in a new kind of transparency, demonstrating the disruption this new consumer-orientated definition of middle-class femininity makes to a traditional understanding of the separation of spheres. Following this appearance of the single woman as the figure of gentrification since the mid-1980s, the spatial practices of the entrepreneurial city have taken on new dimensions that have displaced gender norms via the language of individualism. The state-sponsored policies of urbanism, the further concentration of real-estate capital in the inner city, and the professionalization of women’s labor all intertwine in this image. A new attitude by middle-class women towards their work in the home is mythically posed in the material complex of the urban apartment, but this seems to be available only to single, professional women who are proper subjects of a service economy. The gentrification of the inner city provides a new landscape for female subjectivity, but it does not guarantee that its consumer forms will be as democratically available as it promises.

Conclusion Advertising campaigns such as these offer us the future of domesticity, as well as the possibility of other alternative visions. A new kind of private life offered in the advertisements, which is supposedly without the disadvantages of traditional gender roles, acts as an afterimage to the traditional authority and agency that women have had over domestic space. In this space, the domestic is figured as something other than the challenge to tenets of liberal democracy suggested by Joan Williams in her essay “Domesticity as the Dangerous Supplement of Liberalism,” where she terms domesticity an “enshrinement of humane and communal values [which] articulates a challenge to the legitimacy of self-interest as the guiding principle of social life” (1991: 69). Self-interest and self-completion rather than “humane and communal values” are the outcomes of the entrepreneurial city, just as is the reconfiguration of class and gender that the Lumina

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woman enacts. In this chapter I have traced some of the ways in which the relationship between femininity and the private individual has been reconstituted within the entrepreneurial city. As Lesley Johnson and I discuss elsewhere, the circuits of labor that Western middle-class women in the entrepreneurial city are drawn into are increasingly complex and exploitative as they become further privatized, hinting at the question of who is actually doing the dishes if the modern woman (or man) is not (Johnson and Lloyd, 2004: 149–160). I have used the case study of a branded apartment development to show that categories of class and gender are under transformation in the city. The feminine figure produced at the intersection of private capital investment in housing and an expanded range of consumer sexualities is depicted within this urban discourse as being beyond domesticity, precisely because it is established within the new service economies that such a city invokes. The images surrounding the development and the way in which they are framed within a gentrifying city are laid out here to help unpack the relations between interconnected spatial practices: the production and consumption of space through a local real-estate market which promises certain kinds of flexibility, and the emergence of a figure of middle-class femininity who is defined by such flexibility. Any possible conflict between the discourses of the dream home and the daily practices of domesticity is overcome through the loosened bonds of postdomesticity promoted by the apartment complex. As feminine agency moves from domestic production to consumption, it becomes quite unstable and open to reinscription. The Lumina ads represent a moment in which the redistribution of certain codes and symbols of gendered domesticity took place on a local level in Sydney. The way in which the apartment is gendered in this way creates possibilities as well as problems for feminist cultural analysis. Whether as the housewife—or, in the postdomestic form of feminine subjectivity, figured as the urban single woman—the women in the ads are still implicated in powerful discourses that define who belongs (or does not belong) to the city. Here, a new female subjectivity has emerged that is playful and aware of gender role construction; however, women are still contained within the domestic sphere despite their shifting roles from production to consumption. It is a (re)development of which feminist analysis needs to take heed. This is a situation that makes a feminist cultural-studies analysis attuned to the conflicting processes of identification and subjectification in urban spaces increasingly relevant. In her local manifestation as Lumina woman, this new feminine figure troubles the understandings of women as a class of persons with something in common. The new relationship to domesticity that is proposed in the advertisements sets middle-class women very much apart from women with less disposable income, as it defines the cosmo-

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politan inner city as a place of liberation through appropriate consumption against suburban images of overconsumption and the double-shift. The service economy is the link between these two sites, but it is pushed into the background (and outside) the home, rather than imaginatively engaged. These new feminine consumer identities are attractive and powerful, but it is obviously not possible that a containment of the self, cast purely in the mold of (masculine) individualism, can simply dislodge the politics of domesticity for the “woman at home alone.” These are the revealing and deep disjunctures at which such afterimages appear.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

Returning to Sydney after working in a regional university for 18 months, it quickly became clear to me that I had no possibility of ever buying a house or an apartment near to my place of work in Sydney on an academic salary. The Sex in the City characters all work in cultural-service industries: Carrie is a newspaper columnist, Charlotte is a curator in a private art gallery, Miranda is a lawyer, and Samantha owns her own public-relations firm. Badcock notes that in 1995 single women working part-time and solo mothers were the fastest growing group of public tenants (2000: 219). The most deliberate campaign to displace non-Anglo and economically disadvantaged communities from the inner city has been playing out in Redfern’s indigenous community with the intervention of the New South Wales state government in the Aboriginal Housing Corporation and the gentrification project targeted at the “Block” (see Anderson, 1993). The only advertisement to show a man did not, interestingly, show him inside the apartment, but depicted a photodocumentary-style image of a young man, presumably after a night out, asleep on the steps of a CBD train station with “MISSED THE TRAIN” in red capital letters printed across the middle of the image, and “HASSLE-FREE LIVING: ANNOUNCING LUMINA’S UNBEATABLE LOCATION” below.

References Anderson, K. J., “Place Narratives and the Origins of Inner Sydney’s Aboriginal Settlement, 1972–73,” Journal of Historical Geography, 19 (3) (1993), 314–335. Badcock, B., “Australia: Post-Fordist Transition,” in P. Marcuse and R. van Kempen (eds), Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 211–227. Berger, J., Ways of Seeing (London: BBC, 1972). Bondi, L., “Geography and Gender,” Geographical Review, 2 (5) (1989), 2–6. Bondi, L., “Gender Divisions and Gentrification: A Critique,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16 (1991a), 190–198. Bondi, L., “Women, Gender Relations and the Inner City,” in M. Keith and A. Rogers (eds), Hollow Promises: Rhetoric and Reality in the Inner City (London: Mansell, 1991b), 110–126. Bondi, L. and M. Domosh, “On the Contours of Public Space: A Tale of Three Women,” Antipode 30 (3) (1998), 270–289. Business Review Weekly, “Australia’s Rich 200—$100m and more: Robert Whyte,” May 25, 1998. Available from http://www.brw.com.au/content/250598/rich097.htm. Deuce Design (2005) www.deucedesign.com.au. Duruz, J., “Suburban Houses Revisited,” in P. Hamilton and K. Darian-Smith (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), 174–191. Florida, R. L., The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Florida, R. L., Cities and the Creative Class (London: Routledge, 2005).

 • Justine Lloyd Greig, A. W., The Stuff Dreams Are Made of: Housing Provision in Australia 1945–1960 (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1995). Golombisky, K., “Ladies’ Home Erotica: Reading the Seams between Home-Making and House Beautiful,” Journal of New Media Research, 1999, New Media Centre. Available from http:// nmc.loyola.edu/newmediajournal/current/article3.html. Johnson, L. and J. Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife (Oxford: Berg, 2004). Kaye, L., “Sexy Real Estate Ads Banned by SMH,” B & T, May 21, 2001. Available from http://www. bandt.com.au/news/f2/0c0036f2.asp. Kenny, K., “The Formular,” Lumina Magazine, 27 (2000). Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Lefebvre, H., “Perspective or Prospective?” in E. Kofman and E. Lebas (eds and trans), Writings on Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 160–174. Lefebvre, H., The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Leslie, D. and S. Reimer, “Gender, Modern Design and Home Consumption,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21 (2003), 293–316. McDowell, L., Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Our House, “Lumina Apartments,” Ninemsn, 2000. Available from http://ourhouse.ninemsn.com. au/ourhouse/factsheets/db/artanddesign/08/861.asp. Rofe, M. W., “Gentrification within Australia’s ‘Problem City’: Inner Newcastle as a Zone of Residential Transition,” Australian Geographical Studies, 38 (1) (March 2000), 54–70. Smith, N., The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996). Sydney City Council, City Residential Monitor (Sydney, 2002). Taylor, P., “Housing Projects Crank up South Sydney Industrial Prices,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 1, 2001, 66. Williams, J., “Domesticity as the Dangerous Supplement of Liberalism,” Journal of Women’s History, 2 (3) (Winter 1991), 69–88. Zukin, S., Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Zukin, S., The Cultures of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

CHAPTER

3

Urban Space and Entrepreneurial Property Relations Resistance and the Vernacular of Outdoor Advertising and Graffiti1 A N N E M . C RON I N

People are taking the piss out of you every day. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and the fun is happening somewhere else. . . . They are Advertisers and they are laughing at you. Street artist Banksy (2005: 160) A city is a memory and a promise which are never confused with the totality of what is presently visible, presentable, constructed, habitable. Derrida (1998: 17; original emphasis)

Any set of discourses and discursive practices renders legible certain aspects of the social terrain and this chapter explores how the phenomena of graffiti and outdoor advertising, framed by the developing discourses of urban entrepreneurialism, perform just such a manifestation. Most studies of urban entrepreneurialism take governance as their focus (e.g. Hall and Hubbard, 1998). They examine how new urban economies are rooted in tourism, sport, culture, and entertainment (e.g. Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Hannigan, 1998), draw increasingly on public–private partnerships (Harvey, 1989), and are oriented around symbolic economies that can act to 65

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express and reproduce hegemonic social relations (Zukin, 1995). But if we listen carefully to the hegemonic discourses of urban entrepreneurialism we may be able to access other subterranean, vernacular discourses— resistant, subversive, or perhaps uncategorizable in currently available terms—that are brought into relief and partial legibility by those same hegemonic discourses. Notions of resistance have been a staple of sociocultural analysis for many years and, as McCarthy (2001: 11) argues, this dynamic of “the anonymity of mass culture and the ineffable specificity of its myriad appropriations” is central to the social production of space. My aim is to examine this dynamic in relation to urban entrepreneurialism, exploring how resistance and governance in the specific forms of outdoor advertising and graffiti are articulated in terms of space and property, and are framed by ideas of creativity and innovation. Analyzing outdoor advertising and graffiti and their shifting significance can help us think about the changes wrought by urban entrepreneurialism and any parallel shifts in articulations of governance and resistance. Indeed, I argue that such an analysis points to urban space and spatial practices as paradoxical and unstable and, in parallel, highlights how resistance and domination cannot be imagined as strictly dichotomous phenomena. If we understand the city not as an arrangement of fixed sites but as a confluence of relationships that are constantly reworked (Amin and Thrift, 2002), then we can approach the relationship of outdoor advertising and graffiti as an example of the myriad relationalities that act to make and remake urban space. Further, we can start to think about the material and symbolic associations between space, property, hegemonic governance, and resistance, and thus begin to analyze the terms which enable the provisional and ambiguous legibility of social phenomena. What follows is an exploration of the relations between advertising, graffiti, and urban entrepreneurialism within the context of Euro-American societies. Much of the analysis makes general points about the spatial significance of outdoor advertising and graffiti, but some specific examples and data are taken from the city of Manchester, UK. In spite of their formal and institutionally regulated differences, the connections and overlaps between outdoor advertising and graffiti expose how the urban terrain is composed of a myriad of shifting relationalities between a range of phenomena that materialize and then diffuse. A group called Symbollix, created by British graffiti writer “Moose” (Paul Curtis), present themselves as “pioneers of innovative forms of advertising.”2 Moose uses a stencil, wire brush, and detergent to scrub away the dirt that has accumulated on urban walls and pavements to create sharp-edged logos and taglines that fade over time. Symbollix describes its creations as “bold and clear, although they are non-permanent and environmentally friendly,” embodying an approach to marketing and brand dissemination

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Figure 3.1 The eye logo from Channel 4’s television programme Big Brother.

that has appealed to several companies which have employed the group to create advertisements with an edgy urban feel to target youth markets. The Smirnoff vodka brand and Size? shoes have had their logos and slogans etched into the grime of city pavements and underpasses. The broad hype has had its logo scored through layers of flyposters to create a striking design. The Channel 4 television programme Big Brother has had its eye logo stencilled into the dirt on road signs, as well as onto pavements and walls (see Figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.2 Symbollix’s “Adidas” advert next to graffiti and mural.

As no paint has been used to create these temporary texts and images, the legal status of the act is ambiguous: rather than a countercultural assault like graffiti, it represents a kind of creative “commercial cleaning” of the city. Claiming to operate in “areas previously unused or thought about” and to have “a flexibility with our processes that allows us to work almost anywhere, worldwide,” Symbollix also represent a highly entrepreneurial approach to the city’s visual landscape and potential consumers in that space. In the urban terrain Symbollix’s “products” or artistic creations sit alongside graffiti and other visual phenomena such as murals (see Figure 3.2)—does this engender a dialogue between them, posit a challenge, or effect a transformation? This relationship between graffiti and advertising, however, is not adequately addressed in the existing literature. Despite their ubiquity in cities and their impact on the visual landscape, outdoor advertising and graffiti are rarely analyzed in conjunction, and when they are they tend to be framed and compared only as signifying systems (e.g. Stewart, 1987). Indeed, advertising’s spatial dimension or its impact upon space is rarely considered in the advertising literature except in terms of the (capitalist) conquest of global space through its transnational media networks and market ideologies (e.g. Mattelart, 1991). Considering outdoor advertising and graffiti together immediately signals some striking similarities as well as some key differences. On the one hand, Sontag’s (1987: 129) account typifies approaches which consider graffiti as a resistant mode of communication, acting as “a criticism of public reality.” In many approaches, graffiti is framed as a noncommercial, counterhegemonic or subversive enactment and text, and understood by some sections of society as an attack on the city itself (Austin, 2001). In the hands of the powerless, often created in marginal or disregarded urban spaces, graffiti has been understood as a “mode of outlaw communication” (Keith, 2005: 136).

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Advertising, on the other hand, is seen less as a criticism of public reality and more as exemplifying a capitalist mode of reality that itself deserves criticism (e.g. Goldman, 1992; Williamson, 2000). Other accounts see advertising as a form of “capitalist realism,” in which its images and words portray not life as it is, but life as it should be according to the principles of capitalism—a hegemonic understanding of “the good life” oriented by the production of, and aspiration for, consumer goods (Schudson, 1993). Urban advertising and graffiti thus appear differently inflected with “producer motivations” and seem to represent divergent ideals and relationships to mainstream culture and modes of urban governance. But a subtle approach can begin to tease out complex relationalities. Several accounts have focused on the interconnections between outdoor advertising and graffiti. Best (2003) notes that in Barbados graffiti writers’ tags copy the logos of transnational brand names such as Fila and Nike. Lachmann (1988: 237) states that “taggers compare themselves to advertisers, arguing that they purchase space with their boldness and style rather than with money,” and notes that advertisements are rarely targeted by graffiti writers as they admire advertising artistry and see a consonance between the advertisements’ appropriation of space and their own spatial practices. The crossover between advertising and graffiti can be even more direct and indeed commercial. Some advertisements, such as a series for Chrysler’s PT Cruiser car, use the motif of graffiti to create an edgy urban feel and “creative” association for their product. Conversely, as Stewart (1987) argues, graffiti borrows from advertising: despite its status as a mass medium promoting mass-produced goods, advertising’s textual address often promises potential consumers identities based on notions of difference and individuality. For Stewart, graffiti appropriates and subverts this empty promise of individuality, and at the same time mirrors advertising’s mode of simultaneous distribution, scattering across the city its tags which mark “the stubborn ghost of individuality and intention in the mass culture, the ironic restatement of the artist as ‘brand name’” (Stewart, 1987: 174–175). In this account, graffiti works with and then subverts advertising’s form and conventions, and acts to reinscribe the agency, intention, and individuality which advertising attempts to suppress or channel for its own commercial ends. Stewart’s analysis of graffiti as a signifying system is fluent and persuasive, and raises important points about textuality and inscription. But by assuming unambiguous intentions on the part of graffiti writers and by caricaturing the advertising industry, the account oversimplifies phenomena as both practice and textual product. Using ethnographic data, Halsey and Young (2002) argue that graffiti is a heterogeneous phenomenon and that graffiti writers have a range of different motivations. Although it may appear a counterintuitive claim, it is also important to recognize advertising as an equally

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complex and ambivalent form which can be attributed no simple intentions and has few identifiable, unambiguous effects (Schudson, 1993; Miller, 1997; Cronin, 2004). Setting aside the issue of intention as a key comparator, we might instead open up some questions about the social, discursive, and spatial context of these two urban forms. Halsey and Young (2002: 180) note that graffiti’s perceived status as “‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the limits of ‘proper’ expression” is unsurprising considering that the capability to make one’s mark legally is circumscribed by the capacity to buy or rent legitimate spaces of inscription such as billboards. This, they suggest, should lead us to question other urban signifying practices such as outdoor advertising and ask if a company such as Nike can be seen as a “corporate tagger,” a producer of urban scrawl and visual pollution (ibid.). But in what follows I will argue that the most significant feature of the advertising–graffiti relationship is not merely a formal resemblance or even its potential capacity to question the legitimacy of all manner of urban signifying practices; rather, it is the way in which it embodies, performs, and signals a shifting social paradigm of urban entrepreneurialism and its relationship to space and property, an issue highlighted by the example of the Symbollix group’s advertising introduced earlier. On a popular level, this relationship is articulated through the urban ubiquity of forms such as graffiti and outdoor advertising with their hypervisible marks of identity, artistry, property, and ownership. The entrepreneurial drive evident in discourses around cities, and practices in cities, is also expressed and performed at the level of shifting relationships between what is conventionally understood as the mainstream on the one hand, and practices and understandings of resistance on the other.

Space, Property Relations, and Signs Spatiality is a key factor deployed in the practices of defining “the resistant” and “the mainstream” or hegemonic, and coordinates the social and regulatory response to particular signifying practices accordingly. Hung (2000: 766) notes that as graffiti exists both in the space of the art gallery and on the street, “to decide which part of it is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ means precisely to come to terms with one’s own positioning in relation to a city at large.” This emphasizes social positioning such as class and race-based in/exclusion as well as spatially distinct urban zones. This positioning operates not only on the level of gallery/street, but on the related and more amorphous terrain of popular commercial culture, and works to define illegitimate and legitimate signifying practices in relation to the ownership and performance of those spaces. For instance, a Manchester shop selling youth-oriented streetwear uses graffiti-style artwork as a façade (see Figure 3.3).

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Figure 3.3 A shopfront in Manchester’s Northern Quarter (photo: A. Cronin).

Here, the (sub)cultural value and “outsider status” of graffiti are used by a legitimate commercial enterprise as a branding exercise, and the graffiti-style images position the viewer as a potential client of the shop and consumer of its products. In parallel, the “graffiti-ads” produced by those such as Symbollix are seen as controversial by city councils not because they take a specific graffiti style or form but because they exist outside the legitimate space of the billboard (a space which is privately owned and commercially rented, and whose content is regulated). In contrast, there is little sanction against graffiti in ruined or derelict areas of the city as such sites are already coded as “unsightly and excessive” (Edensor, 2005: 33). In these unvalued and disorderly spaces, or in spaces which have been temporarily suspended from regimes of value as they undergo a process of transformation, graffiti is deemed less problematic or transgressive as the site’s place in property relations is ambiguous or in process (see Figure 3.4). In these examples it is clear that spatial demarcations are crucial for defining the social significance of texts, images, and practices, but the point I wish to emphasize in relation to graffiti and advertising is the significance of the relationship of space to property. Graffiti has been seen as a struggle over inclusion, entitlement, and belonging (Keith, 2005). And as both advertising and graffiti attempt to lay claim to space, this struggle is

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Figure 3.4 Graffiti in a building site in Manchester’s Northern Quarter (photo: A. Cronin).

framed by key relationships between place, property, and ownership. Ley and Cybriwsky’s (1974) study claims that black youths use graffiti to make a claim on the world outside the ghetto or to mark turf ownership. And particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, graffiti came to embody societal fears that the dispossessed would rise up and take possession of what had been denied them (Milnor, 2005). Graffiti’s association with “excessive,” resistant, or dangerous activity is common and graffiti is often elided with vandalism (Young, 2005), or, more strongly, seen as a symbolic attack on property. Some accord graffiti considerable power in this regard: Stewart claims that “graffiti attempts a utopian and limited dissolution of the boundaries of property” (1987: 175). In contrast, advertising represents the mainstream or hegemonic culture of consumer capitalism and has been seen as an emblem, mediator, and propagator of principles and practices of property and ownership (Goldman, 1992; Wernick, 1992; Williamson, 2000; Leiss et al., 2005). Indeed, the ubiquity of advertising, and its presumed success in commercial persuasion, is often understood as symptomatic of an ever-increasing commodification of society.3 But such overarching and unnuanced accounts of advertising and graffiti—the unrealistic optimism at graffiti’s challenge to property relations in parallel with the overdrawn pessimism about advertising’s impact on society—do not provide an

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adequate analysis of the two forms, nor do they comprehend the more subtle but no less important societal changes that are now occurring. An analysis of these two forms reveals a broader urban shift which cannot be understood simply as a further commodification of city space or a branding of place. One form of this shift—what we could call a new constellation of phenomena—centers on urban entrepreneurialism’s appropriation and exploitation of discourses and practices of creativity and innovation.

The Excessive or Paradoxical City If we accept that capitalism is performative and thus always under construction (Thrift, 2005), we must recognize that there are shifts in the terms and effects of governance and also in the terms of resistance to this governance. The quotation by Derrida (1998) at the head of the chapter suggests that the city always exceeds what is represented, what is legible, or framed as viable at any one moment, and that this openness is articulated, at least in part, by memory and by a diffuse urban promise. And if we take seriously the claim that cities are spaces that are constantly in process (Lefebvre, 1991), then we must direct more attention at understanding the shifts in the ways in which the city exceeds its legibility. We must analyze the particularity of urban constellations of practices, ideas, ideals, and strategies. One important way to understand such shifting constellations and the complex relationality between hegemony and resistance is through Gillian Rose’s (1993) concept of paradoxical space. In attempting to analyze the place of women in social space and the gendered theoretical structures that underpin many academic understandings of space, Rose challenges conventional demarcations, dichotomies, and polarities. She argues that certain spaces can be seen as paradoxical: “spaces that would be mutually exclusive if charted on a two-dimensional map—centre and margin, inside and outside—are occupied simultaneously” (Rose, 1993: 140). Such spaces are “impossible” in conventional terms but for Rose represent not only women’s lived experience of social spaces but also the poverty of conventional (masculinist) geographical theories. Thus, in paradoxical space, plurality and contradiction are inherent: “any position is imagined not only as being located in multiple social spaces, but also as at both poles of each dimension” (Rose, 1993: 151). Rose is here drawing on Teresa de Lauretis’ (1989) notion of a space “elsewhere,” a space outside the frame of hegemonic knowledges which functions to define that which is within the frame or space of hegemony. Understandings of space and social positionings are produced by an oscillating movement between that which is within the frame and the elsewhere or “space-off,” as it would be understood in filmic terms. This elsewhere or space-off is not visible or legible within the

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frame yet it is implied by the frame: the space of representation articulates with the non-represented, the space-off, or the elsewhere. This articulation—itself the tension which locks the realms together—is the force which generates the very borders of discourse and enables them to be imagined and visualized. But, for de Lauretis, this “elsewhere” is neither a mythic past nor a utopian future. It is the blind spot of discourse, that which is not represented but which is implicated in the construction of what is represented. Thus the space of representation and the elsewhere are: neither in opposition to one another nor strung along a chain of signification, but they exist concurrently and in contradiction. The movement between them, therefore, is not that of a dialectic, of integration, of a combinatory, or of différance, but is the tension of contradiction, multiplicity, and heteronomy. (de Lauretis, 1989: 26) Through the tensions inherent in paradoxical space and the nebulous potential of the “elsewhere,” Rose points to how we can begin to imagine other ways of thinking space and social positionings that are not entirely subordinated to hegemonic discourses.4 I have been arguing that a shift is occurring on the discursive terrain on which the terms of hegemony and resistance are played out. This discursive terrain can be understood in broad terms as a paradoxical space with all the associated implications of plurality, contradiction, and counterhegemonic potential. And while cities have long been paradoxical spaces, there is a current constellation of space, property relations, and images that is articulated by the entrepreneurial city. In Derrida’s terms, this is indeed a promise of the city, an openness, and a struggle whose outcomes are at present unclear. Thus we need not interpret outdoor advertisements only as textual muggers, hurling insults at passersby (see Banksy, 2005), nor as capitalist heat-seeking missiles which efficiently and inevitably channel our consciousness into predefined purchasing habits or consumption-oriented identities. One way to reconsider this paradoxical space and the promise and open-endedness of urban forms like outdoor advertising might be to frame them as “wish images” in the way Walter Benjamin (2003) outlined in their relation to commodities. He imagined that commodities could exceed the role and meaning defined for them by the market and that they could provide the material base from which people could grope towards an understanding (or dream)—albeit hazy and provisional—of a society that could take a form other than that of its current capitalist structure. Such an alternative society is not represented in or by commodities in any transparent way, but a broad understanding of its contours might nevertheless be released by the ambiguous form that is the commodity. In de Lauretis’ terms, this can be seen as an “elsewhere”

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which is not immediately visible in commodity capitalism or the entrepreneurial city, but it might just be legible flickering at the corner of our consciousness, structuring what might be possible for urban futures. In this spirit, might not the urban hyperpresence of advertisements and the glut of their extravagant textual promises and threats invoke a rather different response from that hoped for by advertising agencies and their clients? Might not this response be a turning away from such an intense consumption-orientation and a triggering of dreams of how we could live otherwise, how cities might be otherwise? Of course, such a response was articulated by the Situationists some years ago (see Debord, 1994) and more recently by various counterhegemonic groups such as The Billboard Liberation Front and Adbusters which subvert the textual content of advertisements, offer critiques of the consumerist logics of Western ways of life, and present alternative conceptions of social relations (see Cresswell, 1998; Klein, 2001; Carducci, 2006).5 These groups use mainstream advertisements as a trigger and focus for resistance, and as a point of departure for a broader critique of capitalist societies. Advertisements here do not function as facilitators or catalysts of capitalist modes of consumption, but as the raw materials for elaborating modes of dissent. But advertising, graffiti, and countercultural activist groups all operate by overwriting urban space with rich layers of texts, images, and meanings, subtly altering those meanings in the process. Advertisements build on our (perhaps hazy, imagistic) memories of previous ads offering “new, improved” products or a more entertaining visual display. Graffiti writers and the subverters of advertisements use a process of “détournement” made famous by the Situationists in which hegemonic meanings are overturned and overwritten in order to jolt passersby from their complacency. Both these hegemonic and counterhegemonic practices are able to function precisely because urban space is a site of multiple and contested meanings, visualities, and practices. They draw on “the street” not merely as a location or space, but as an idea, an aesthetic, and a potential. This joint openness in understanding the street points to important connections between these forms and practices—a particular constellation in which the openness and promise of the advertisement as wish image takes a broader form from that of the classic “hegemony-and-resistance” model offered by many accounts of graffiti and advertising (and its subversion). Such a response might not be restricted to a politicized and articulate activist minority such as the Adbusters group— it also challenges the standardly conceived distinctions between resistance and hegemony, mainstream culture, and the countercultural. In different ways, both outdoor advertising and graffiti have been seen as exterior to, or excessive of, mainstream culture: as a commercial form advertising is thought to infiltrate that culture and commodify it (e.g. Goldman, 1992;

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Williamson, 2000), and as a countercultural form graffiti has been seen as an outsider which transgresses into mainstream culture and attempts to mark it (e.g. Keith, 2005). It is clear that only a minority of urban dwellers use graffiti writing as a medium for challenging mainstream culture or as a way of asserting denigrated or invisible identities. For the vast (non-graffiti writing) majority, graffiti’s significance is more ambiguous. Indeed, the distinction in advertising and graffiti’s status as either inside or outside, mainstream or subversive, cannot be seen as tenable. They occupy a paradoxical space with multiple and contradictory positionings. Neither advertising nor graffiti can be understood simply as extraordinary attempts to lay claim to ownership of city spaces, nor simply as external challenges to a generalized mainstream culture as some studies claim: many graffiti writers are firmly embedded in a commercial culture (of fashion, music, and so on) and, as noted earlier, some even see an affinity between their practices and those of advertising practitioners. With the changes in understandings of the value of city space, as well as the shifts in more diffuse notions of property relationships that urban entrepreneurialism effects, there are subtle and perhaps subversive changes in notions of property and entitlement. The ubiquity of outdoor advertisements and graffiti mean that they have become quotidian and familiar elements of the city. This does not mean that people necessarily like or approve of urban graffiti and outdoor advertising; indeed such forms can be the focus of local discontent or serve for some as representative of more general societal ills. But because both advertising and graffiti punctuate people’s everyday experiences and create an urban vernacular, these forms nevertheless articulate an embeddedness of place and experience alongside a diffuse sense of a possible “elsewhere.” In effect, they have become framed as belonging to the city and its people. For instance, a graffiti piece was commissioned by Manchester’s City Art Gallery from local graffiti artist “Kayze” (Tony Brady) with the aim of creating a backdrop for an exhibition on Manchester city life and popular culture.6 This commission signals not only how graffiti has come to be seen as a key characteristic of urban life but also highlights its perceived capacity to mediate urban space—to act as the vernacular medium for the life and character of a city. Indeed, Manchester’s Urbis museum of city life held a graffiti exhibition called “Ill Communication” in 2004, creating the UK’s largest-ever exhibition of street art, featuring ten graffiti artists from around the world. This explicit deployment of graffiti to capture the street-level essence of the city appears not so far removed from urban entrepreneurialism’s emphasis on place-marketing, that is, the packaging and advertising of the essence of a particular city to attract tourists and various forms of inward investment. But the recognition and performative enactment of

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graffiti as an established mediating form of the city is precisely a recognition that forms such as graffiti and advertising belong to the city in a way which is rooted, everyday, and pedestrian in every sense of the word. They belong to the city as its “elsewhere” or set of “wish images” which articulate a dream of how urban life could be otherwise. This is a very different form of property relation from that instanced in corporate ownership of city space, or that embodied in the textual, consumerist exhortations of specific advertisements. It is a rooted sense of place that is marked by— and, more strongly, mediated by—the presence of advertising panels and billboards and the often opaque poetry of graffiti, while not being reducible to the specific textual content of either form. That is, it is often not the words, images, or messages of these forms that carry the most social traction or symbolic potential; it is their explicit mediating presence as a dream-medium of paradoxical space. The medium is not so much the message as the performative enactment of a tacit sense of place and belonging in which people belong to places but places also belong to people. It belongs to them as a right to imagine their lives and their cities in ways beyond the frame of hegemonic discourse. This sense of belonging subsists at a barely tangible and often unarticulated level but nonetheless contains the potential of being tapped and used to challenge modes of governance and specific entrepreneurial initiatives which aim to “tidy up” and rebrand lived urban spaces. For instance, in 2004 Manchester launched the campaign “Challenge Manchester—100 days to a clean city” which aimed to mobilize the public to create a tidier urban environment, targeting various “urban problems” of litter, graffiti, and flyposting. But systems of governance, whether in the form of city councils or advertising companies, are sensitive to subtle social shifts such as this mildly subversive sense of belonging that subsists outside the hegemonic discursive framework of entrepreneurialism and urban rebranding. Hegemonic forces, too, can mobilize the paradoxical quality of spaces to their own ends—as Rose (1993) reminds us, paradoxical spaces may not remain emancipatory. These hegemonic systems respond by developing a range of strategies to identify and channel shifts in attitudes: focus groups, mapping projects, stakeholder consultations, and demographic analyses, combined with qualitative research methods such as interviews and consumer profiling.7 But it is important to recognize that such initiatives are not necessarily evidence of the dominance of hegemonic forces, but are born of a reactive anxiety centered on the need to know and the difficulties in controlling the social world. Amin and Thrift (2002: 129) argue that such systems of governance “acknowledge that they are dealing in part with the unknown and ungovernable; they do not just tell their inhabitants what to do, they learn from them.” These systems sense shifts in the makeup of cities and changes

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in people’s relationships to cities. At the same time, they recognize how both cities and people exceed the multitude of representations that are produced by the many technologies of knowledge production that those same systems initiate. Such strategies should therefore be understood not as a further evidence of such groups’ unassailable power but as a sign of their ignorance, their limitations, and an instance of organizational improvisation rather than systematized, rule-based responses (Amin and Thrift, 2002).

Creativity and Innovation as Urban Paradoxes City councils and private entrepreneurs have responded recently by attempting to tap into this excessive, imaginative, innovative quality of people’s urban engagements by trying to exploit the notion of “creativity” and, in parallel, the creative industries. Some time ago now, Harvey (1989: 9) argued that the shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism meant that cities had to appear “innovative, exciting, creative,” citing the UK cities of Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool as examples of urban reinvention along just such lines. But now there is an intensification of such discourses in the UK and a diffusion in the parameters of what is understood by the innovative and the creative. The advertising industry has long been associated with creativity (see Nixon, 2003), and by siting its offices in key urban spaces has contributed to cities’ “creative,” innovative, forward-looking image, which has been important for attracting inward investment (O’Connor and Wynne, 1996). Recent academic and policy-oriented literature on “creative cities” tends to focus rather instrumentally on the potential of creativity to generate prosperity (Landry, 2000; Dvir and Pasher, 2004; Healey, 2004). Richard Florida (2002: xiii) has famously claimed that “human creativity is the ultimate economic resource” and others maintain that cities are the ultimate creative milieu (Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999). In economic terms, some claim that “the industries of the twenty-first century will depend increasingly on the generation of knowledge through creativity and innovation” (Landry and Bianchini, 1995: 4). Others, however, are most sceptical of the potential of creative initiatives to deliver the results imagined by city entrepreneurs. Indeed some sectors of the “creative industries” also question this impulse, particularly in relation to public art’s assumed role. The artists Hewitt and Jordan have used billboards to disseminate various provocations that challenge hegemonic narratives about the “good” of public art used in entrepreneurial initiatives. These billboards carry slogans such as “The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property” and “The function of public art for regeneration is to sex up the control of the under-classes.”8

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The context for this recent emphasis on creative cities is the well-documented shift from industrial production in urban spaces to urban service economies reliant on “the new knowledge economy.” This knowledge-based economy is understood as design-intensive, and centered on the production of signs and the trade in information (Lash and Urry, 1994; Leadbeater, 1999) and, in effect, produces an “informational city” (Harvey, 1989: 10). In this new knowledge-based economy, or “the cultural circuit of capitalism,” creativity, commodities, and innovation have been seen to take a central role (Thrift, 2005: 6). The “culture industries” such as advertising, music, film, and publishing play an important part in this shift, but, in a move which mirrors that of UK government policy, these sectors have been reframed by academics as “creative industries.” This reconceptualization seeks to describe “the conceptual and practical convergence of the creative arts (individual talent) with Cultural Industries (mass scale), in the context of new media technologies within a new knowledge economy” (Hartley, 2005: 5). The creative industries are central to how the UK government frames growth initiatives and international competition. In the 2001 Creative Industries Mapping Document, the government flags the importance of the UK’s creative industries, citing the significance of these industries in the new knowledge economy and the government’s desire to make Britain “the world’s creative hub” (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2001). The department’s 2004 economic estimates state that the creative industries accounted for 8% of gross value added in 2002, with an average growth of 6% per annum between 1997 and 2002 and a 9% growth per annum for the advertising industry. While the department’s figures may be contested, the overall aim of the various reports was to raise the profile of the creative industries and their economic potential, an aim that they have achieved (Oakley, 2004). Certain cities have been seen as forerunners in this national drive to tap creativity and innovation. In a speech in June 2005, the minister for creative industries cited Manchester as an example of how the creative industries can transform a city. And indeed Manchester City Council was a founding member of Manchester: Knowledge Capital. Established in 2002 with the aim of “stimulating and supporting increased business innovation from research, science, and knowledge,” it includes the strategic health authority, four universities, and a range of businesses. One of its key initiatives, City Growth Strategy, aims to tackle inner city deprivation by investing in several areas including “creative and media.” The Council’s Northern Quarter Development Framework cites one area of the city (the Northern Quarter or “N4”) as having a major concentration of creative industries such as advertising agencies and artists’ studios. It claims that “the creative businesses in the N4 will be of growing importance in a world where

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employment generation is increasingly based on knowledge, innovation, new ideas and entrepreneurialism.” The document goes on to stress that some of the key barriers to achieving this development and image change in the Northern Quarter are the presence of derelict buildings, empty sites, and associated problems such as graffiti. This is rather ironic as the bohemian, “creative” character and appeal of the Northern Quarter is generated precisely by its “edgy” feel, its ramshackle aesthetic, and the sense of subversion created by its aging buildings marked by graffiti. This stress on urban creativity and innovation is pervasive and has a distinct entrepreneurial emphasis. In a policy-oriented approach, Dvir and Pasher (2004: 16) argue for the fostering of “urban innovation engines”— complex systems which include a range of participants such as people, relationships, values, technologies, and physical and financial infrastructure. Innovation is here understood as “the process for turning knowledge and ideas into value” (ibid.). It is notable that in this and many other governmental and policy interventions, creativity and innovation are seen as both resources and income-generators, but also as representative of the excessive, unpredictable, ungovernable elements of urban life. By drawing on these wild, creative aspects, urban entrepreneurial initiatives hope both to tame them and to capitalize on them. As I have argued, one irony in this is that by placing an emphasis on the unpredictable and the ungovernable, these initiatives open up the field for new articulations of resistant or subversive possibilities. By intervening and attempting to channel these forces and thus create a new constellation of practices and ideas, modes of governance inevitably unleash a whole host of other reactions, interconnections, paradoxes, and possibilities.

Conclusion Sharon Zukin notes that “as cities have developed as service economies, they have both propagated and been taken hostage by an aesthetic urge” (1996: 44). Many accounts have followed this insight, citing the development of galleries, public art projects, the renovation of derelict areas of cities, cleaning and rebranding initiatives (such as Manchester’s 100 Days project). This tendency is also evident in the desire to visually represent particular cities back to their inhabitants, as in Manchester City Gallery’s exhibition of life in the city, Urbis’ staging of aspects of city life, or advertising’s use of urban tropes such as graffiti in the textual content of ads on its panels and billboards. But city spaces are contested, multiple, and paradoxical; they signal an elsewhere that is outside the frame of hegemonic discourse and so is not clearly visible or legible in familiar terms. Yet this elsewhere is also constitutive of that which is within the frame. Advertising

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acts as capitalist lure but also exceeds this narrowly defined role; graffiti is a mark of marginal or explicitly counterhegemonic groups but also forms a poetry that speaks to many mild or inarticulate public dissatisfactions. Thus advertising and graffiti, although differentially positioned in relation to mainstream, commercial, and hegemonic cultures, also function to connect city dwellers to a dream-space, a barely articulated or nebulous sense that urban life could be different. Like Benjamin’s commodities, advertisements and graffiti can act as “wish images” that bridge the here and the elsewhere, the present situation and different possibilities. Unlike Benjamin’s account in which wish-images are longings for a utopia, in Rose’s (1993) and de Lauretis’ (1989) terms this elsewhere is part of the “now” and the “here” and is the dormant or presently barely legible potential for social change. This doubling of the mainstream and the subversive also works on the level of property, space, and belonging. Urban entrepreneurialism’s intensified emphasis on the aesthetics of city space and “the street” has some unintended consequences: people may sense that forms which mark their everyday visual experience of the city such as outdoor advertising and graffiti belong to the city in ways which exceed the terms of property relations, spatial relationships, and profit orientation. And people can come to feel that they own or have some entitlement of belonging with regard to the “buzz” or creative feel of their city. This is often articulated in a more diffuse sense in popular critiques of development or regeneration destroying the “character” of certain urban areas. This tendency strains against the reality that the spectacle of the city is increasingly owned by private interests, or public–private initiatives, whether through rebranding projects or image-oriented building projects. But resistant or counterhegemonic impulses cannot be suppressed. These responses are being articulated and performed in new ways, ways in which space and property are rearticulated by urban entrepreneurialism. Thus the hegemonic and the resistant are woven together in particular constellations and this struggle is worked through space and spatial practices such as those articulated in outdoor advertising and graffiti. This is a terrain that has not been fully conquered by private interests as there is no such thing as a clearly defined “capitalist space” and capitalism cannot be considered a cohesive or closed system (Lefebvre, 1991: 11). Instead, it is open, “so open, indeed, that it must rely on violence to endure” (ibid.). That violence may take many forms, in this case that of an incorporation and rechanneling of creativity and innovation in the entrepreneurial initiative. But this openness also attests to the subtle power of the “elsewhere” inherent in the paradoxical spaces of capitalism. Shifts in both governance and counterhegemonic responses are unpredictable and may often be inaccessible to current modes of knowing (whether

 • Anne M. Cronin

generated by academic analysis or by corporate governance). As Derrida notes, the city’s memory and promise escape any particular time’s frameworks for representation. It may be that these shifts set new questions that exceed capitalism’s modes of knowing.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

I would like to thank Monica Degen and Kevin Hetherington for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. See http://www.symbollix.com For a critique of this tendency see Cronin (2004). See Cronin (2000) for a discussion of de Lauretis’ (1989) concept of “an elsewhere” in relation to gender and advertising. See the Adbusters’ website: http://www.adbusters.org/home/. The Billboard Liberation Front’s website is http://www.billboardliberation.com/. In a more conventionally political sense, advertising billboards in Northern Ireland are also hijacked and used for political slogans (McCormick and Jarman, 2005). See Kayze’s website: http://www.urbandamage.com. There is an established practice of resituating graffiti from the street to the art galleries and reframing it as art, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s (see Milnor, 2005). Manchester’s City Gallery and Urbis museum’s displays of graffiti apparently aim to draw on its vernacular capacity to embody the experience, look, and feel of the city rather than to frame graffiti explicitly as “art.” See Cronin (2006) for a discussion of outdoor advertising companies’ research strategies and their commercially oriented attempts to tap into the rhythms of the city. See Hewitt and Jordan’s website: http://www.hewittandjordan.com/. See Miles (2005) for a discussion of public art in urban spaces.

References Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). Austin, Joe, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Banksy, Wall and Piece (London: Century, 2005). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). Best, Curwen, “Reading Graffiti in the Caribbean Context,” Journal of Popular Culture, 36 (4) (2003), 828–852. Carducci, Vince, “Culture Jamming: A Sociological Approach,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 6 (1) (2006), 116–138. Cresswell, Tim, “The Crucial ‘Where’ of Graffiti: A Geographical Analysis of Reactions to Graffiti in New York,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10 (3) (1992), 329–344. Cresswell, Tim, “Night Discourse: Producing/Consuming Meaning on the Street,” in N. R. Frye (ed.), Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Cronin, Anne M., Advertising and Consumer Citizenship: Gender, Images and Rights (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Cronin, Anne M., Advertising Myths: The Strange Half-Lives of Images and Commodities (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Cronin, Anne M., “Advertising and the Metabolism of the City: Urban Space, Commodity Rhythms,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (4) (2006), 615–632. Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994). De Lauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989). Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Creative Industries Mapping Document, http://www. culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2001.

Urban Space and Entrepreneurial Property Relations •  Derrida, Jacques, “Generations of a City: Memory, Prophecy, Responsibilities,” in J. Knechtel (ed.), Open City (Concord: House of Anansi Press Ltd, 1998). Dvir, Ron and Edna Pasher, “Innovation Engines for Knowledge Cities: An Innovation Ecology Perspective,” Journal of Knowledge Management, 8 (5) (2004), 16–27. Edensor, Tim, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005). Florida, Richard, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Goldman, Robert, Reading Ads Socially (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Hall, Tim and Phil Hubbard (eds), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime, and Representation (Chichester, New York, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, and Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 1998). Halsey, Mark and Alison Young, “The Meanings of Graffiti and Municipal Administration,” The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 35 (2) (2002), 165–186. Hannigan, John, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Hartley, John, “Creative Industries,” in J. Hartley (ed.), Creative Industries (Oxford, Malden, Carleton: Blackwell, 2005). Harvey, David, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler, 71B (1989), 3–17. Healey, Patsy, “Creativity and Urban Governance,” Policy Studies, 25 (2) (2004), 87–102. Hung, Wu, “Zhang Dali’s Dialogue: Conversation with a City,” Public Culture, 12 (3) (2000), 749–768. Judd, Dennis R. and Susan S. Fainstein (eds), The Tourist City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). Kearns, Greg and C. Philo (eds), Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993). Keith, Michael, After the Cosmopolitan? Multicultural Cities and the Future of Racism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Klein, Naomi, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (London: Flamingo, 2001). Lachmann, Richard, “Graffiti as Career and Ideology,” American Journal of Sociology, 94 (2) (1988), 229–250. Landry, Charles, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (London: Earthscan Publications, 2000). Landry, Charles and Franco Bianchini, The Creative City (London: Demos and Comedia, 1995). Lash, Scott and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994). Leadbeater, Charles, Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (London: Penguin, 1999). Leadbeater, Charles, and Kate Oakley, The Independents: Britain’s New Cultural Entrepreneurs (London: Demos, 1999). Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Leiss, William et al., Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Ley, David and Roman Cybriwsky, “Urban Graffiti as Territorial Markers,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 64 (4) (1974), 491–505. McCarthy, Anna, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001). McCormick, Jonathan, and Neil Jarman, “Death of a Mural,” Journal of Material Culture, 10 (1) (2005), 49–71. Mattelart, Armand, Advertising International: The Privatisation of Public Space, trans. Michael Chanan (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Miles, Malcolm, “Interruptions: Testing the Rhetoric of Culturally Led Urban Development,” Urban Studies 42, 5/6 (2005), 889–911. Miller, Daniel, Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 1997). Milnor, Kristina, “Gendering Ghetto and Gallery in the Graffiti Art Movement, 1977–1986,” in L. Dowler, J. Carubia, and B. Szczygiel (eds), Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Morality and Space (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Nixon, Sean, Advertising Cultures: Gender, Commerce, Creativity (London: Sage, 2003). Oakley, Kate, “Not so Cool Britannia: The Role of Creative Industries in Economic Development,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (1) (2004), 67–78.

 • Anne M. Cronin O’Connor, Justin and Derek Wynne (eds), From the Margins to the Centre: Cultural Production and Consumption in the Post-industrial City (Aldershot: Arena, 1996). Rose, Gillian, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). Schudson, Michael, Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (London: Routledge, 1993). Sontag, Susan, “The Pleasure of the Image,” Art in America, 75 (1987), 122–131. Stewart, Susan, “Ceci Tuera Cela: Graffiti as Crime and Art,” in J. Fekete (ed.), Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1987). Thrift, Nigel, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005). Wernick, Andrew, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (London: Sage, 1992). Williamson, Judith, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2000). Young, Alison, Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005). Zukin, Sharon, The Cultures of Cities (Malden, Oxford, and Carleton: Blackwell, 1995). Zukin, Sharon, “Space and Symbols in an Age of Decline,” in A. D. King (ed.), Re-presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st-Century Metropolis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).

CHAPTER

4

Stars, Meshes, Grids Urban Network-Images and the Embodiment of Wireless Infrastructures A DR IA N M AC K E N Z I E

Modern cities are full of representation experiments and inventions, from the many children of Surrealism through to the recent work by numerous teenagers on the social possibilities of wireless communication, which are attempts to sense the city in different ways. Amin and Thrift (2002: 158)

In late 2004, Taipei announced that it had installed a citywide wireless information network (WiFi) grid (Mo, 2006). The history of urban forms tells of many grids (Kostof, 1992). Street grids orient and control movement in numerous cities. Taipei’s wireless grid proved to be one in a series of networks that have appeared in Asia, North America, Europe, and parts of the Middle East and South America, growing strongly in cities such as Philadelphia, Bangalore, San Francisco, New Orleans, Glasgow, and London. Different interests develop these wireless grids, also called “clouds” or “meshes.” They are sometimes municipal government projects (Hellweg, 2005); sometimes the products of telecommunication enterprises (Tropos Networks, 2006b); sometimes driven by alliances of community groups, political activists, artists, and technologists; and sometimes an accidental by-product of thousands of private wireless networks adjacent to each other. No single actor, such as the state, business, popular culture, or individual, drives network growth. They combine market and political 85

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dynamics. Very often, the same city will have more than one wireless grid overlaid on it, in the same way that it might have more than one cellular phone network (but rarely more than one sewerage or electricity system). The question addressed in this chapter concerns how such grids come into existence, how they relate to each other, and, in particular, how they combine movements and images. The wireless networks pose some challenges to standard ways of thinking of images as representations in/of cities (e.g. Hall and Hubbard, 1998). They also, perhaps, solicit new ways of thinking about the generation of urban forms and infrastructures. The relationships between images and urban spaces have undergone extensive analysis, particularly in relation to the “selling of places” (Kearns and Philo, 1993). Some work identifies space and urban forms as types of image. Phil Hubbard writes that “the physical spaces of the city can be considered as belonging to the same set of cultural forms (brochures, videos, guidebooks, advertisements) which promote a partial and selective view of the essence of the city” (Hall and Hubbard, 1998: 200). Accounts that equate image and place do not fit wireless networks. On the one hand, like many images of cities displayed in promotional materials, the wireless networks function as symbols of place. Their presence signals the convenience, proximity, openness, and technological acumen of a city. They signal a place equipped for the lives of “knowledge workers,” netizens, hackers, or e-shoppers. On the other hand, unlike many of the urban images, forms, and spaces analyzed in literature on the branding and marketing of city images, wireless networks change experiences of spaces and forms. For all the frequent announcements of their presence in cities, and their extremely rapid adoption, wireless networks have no single, stable visible form. They come into existence and sometimes compete with each other. This is because a network-image of urban wirelessness meshes together different patterns of perception and action, relationality, consumption, forms of governance, architecture, and infrastructure. Images of wireless networks emerge from experiments, festivals, hacks, events, partnerships, alliances, artworks, and advertisements. Technical and economic forces affect the network-image. Primarily, however, the network-image stems from the perceptions and actions, the sensations and movements, of city dwellers. Their embodied “image-repertoires” generate the network-image and the infrastructures that materialize out of it. The network-image precipitates, sometimes unstably, different network topologies of communication and flows of information. Importantly, it displays different orientations to markets and transactions. These range from outright resistance to any market mechanisms through to thoroughgoing entrepreneurial brand-driven consumption of network connectivity. The network-image

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also propagates ideas of sociality, public participation, and citizenship. The figures of “consumer” and “citizen,” normally assumed to exist in separate spaces (Couldry, 2004: 21), come together in it. Because no single force (government, business, community, private) controls wireless networks, entrepreneurial initiatives struggle to harness them. Alliances between municipal governments and telecommunications enterprises spring up at the same time as new forms of communicative collectivity.

The Network-Image and the Informatic Forms of a City A post-representational treatment of images underpins my understanding of the urban network-image of the wireless city. We can explain the difference between conventional accounts of images as representations or pictures and this account of images as embodiments in performance by starting from the forms of cities. The forms of a city, according to Richard Sennett, arise from bodily experience. In Flesh and Stone he writes that urban “spaces take form largely from the ways people experience their own bodies” (Sennett, 1994: 370). Sennett describes how people’s experiences of their own bodies organize not only the form of cities (layouts, plans, designs, spaces, etc.) but the physicality of the city, the material textures and concreteness, sensed as light, sound, smell, and movement. That is, the “stones” of a city attest to a certain singular and specific embodiment or “flesh” of its inhabitants. People’s experience of their own bodies in cities cannot be disentangled from what they see, hear, touch, and, as Pile (2005) argues, dream. Images of many kinds intensively organize what they experience. This is nothing new. Today, images in and of cities have much to do with information. This is newer. In recent urban forms and materials, embodied experiences of information perform important functions (Mitchell, 2003; Thrift, 2004b). Information and communication technology participate intimately in the embodiment of urban life. Whereas work such as that of Hansen (2004), Hayles (1999), and Lash (2002) has theorized the general embodiment of information, the embodiment of information in urban forms poses specific problems in several respects. Daily, people see many images of information and communication technologies (billboards and large screens advertising phones and other gadgets, shop display-windows, internet cafés and wireless hotspots, etc.). Information systems extensively image/imagine cities at various scales: huge volume of city-related web content, streams of digital city images, tens of millions of city-directed or located webcams, geographic information systems as navigational and administrative aids, Google Earth as platform for locational experimentations with data. Information and communication systems use and produce images to record,

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guide, and channel the movement of people and things in the city (information display screens, traffic, and CCTV video systems). Images track and attract modifications, and movements of bodies inform information. We usually think of images as drawn or projected on surfaces such as hoardings or display screens. However, images trace embodiments. They do not simply picture some aspect of a city. They create or alter viewers, spectators, and observers. They demarcate past or potential modifications of perception and movement. Images make those modifications perceptible. There are two ways of framing this point for the purposes of my argument. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s notion of “image repertoire,” Sennett argues that in modern cities embodied images enable people to sedate themselves against stimulation triggered by movement and encounters with many different human bodies. City dwellers develop image repertoires as internal psychosocial constructs or maps that allow them to associate with or accommodate diverse others by quickly filtering them according to categories. Typically, an image repertoire helps an individual city dweller walking down a crowded street to know who to steer clear of, who to smile at (if anyone) and who to push past. Image repertoires picture nothing. They process relations. They collectively contract perception and trigger movements, gestures, and feelings. The image repertoire, a core element of the way people experience their own bodies as urban, includes nonhuman components or fragments. The figural, gestural, perceptive, motor, and emotional schemas of the image repertoire come together more explicitly in some recent new media theory. Seeking to understand how information is embodied rather than disembodied in digital imaging techniques, Mark Hansen concludes, “In sum, the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to include the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience” (Hansen, 2004: 9). Hansen mainly has in mind the experience of digital interactive media here, but his conclusion complements Sennett’s idea of how an image repertoire shapes the embodied experience of city dwellers. The combination of Hansen’s embodied information image with the Sennett–Barthes’s image repertoire of urban form could help link individual and collective dimensions of citizen-consumer experiences of wireless networks. The analysis of embodied experience of city wireless grids in the discussion below will seek to move from image repertoire to the expanded network-image.

Image Repertoire and the Formation of the Wireless Infrastructures In what ways does information become perceivable in embodied experience and in experience of one’s own body in wireless cities? Wireless networks

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directly connect movement, imagining, consumption, and citizenship. In advertising their grid or “matrix,” CambridgeMatrix, a commercial wireless network provider based in Cambridge, in the UK, connects the freedom of movement associated with internet access to being present in a public space: Imagine being able to sit on

Common with your Wi-Fi mobile phone, laptop or PDA and have high-speed Broadband Internet access. From the office, home or out and about round town CambridgeMatrix offers always on fast Internet access across the city. This “Internet anywhere” service is possible because of 802.11 or “Wi-Fi” mesh networking technology, and gives the same freedom of movement you would expect from your mobile phone. The technology allows us to link multiple locations creating a community wireless network with free access to local content and a low cost subscription for Internet access. (CambridgeMatrix, 2006) Several different repertoires of movement mingle here. The unwired, mobile monad surfs flows of information in a bubble that floats between office, home, and “out and about.” The bubble, however, also opens to others: “a community wireless network” with “free access to local content” suggests a different connectivity. Community, local content, and free access represent the values of public-sphere participation, as does the arcadian-sounding but nonetheless real place Midsummer Common. Actually, CambridgeMatrix imagines wireless network connectivity relatively conservatively. Enterprises such as FON aim to globalize the vision: “FON is a WiFi revolution. Our objective: to build a WiFi world. Our method: to permit all users to synchronize their access points into one: FON. Pay for connection at home; connect anywhere. Join the FON movement!” (FON, 2006). In the FON project, a “WiFi world” grows from “all users” connecting their domestic wireless equipment to FON’s databases. It creates a network without passing through local communities or public places. Both cases exemplify the unfolding of urban forms from flesh or embodied experience. Sennett and Barthes’s concept of the urban image repertoire describes an embodied relation to others in the city. What image repertoire, what modality of embodiment, takes shape when a city wireless grid or WiFi mesh is mapped on a world scale? In contemporary cities, the synthesis between bodies and urban forms is convoluted and intricate. Movement, sensation, and images bear historically laden forms and concepts such as

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“community,” “public,” “market,” “home,” and “local.” These forms and concepts act on the “scene of collectivization” (Blum, 2003: 3) present in the city. People move and feel as both consumers and citizens. Their image repertoires encompass movements mediated by electronic communication media, and by the panoply of devices (phone, PDA, laptop) and systems that communicate, calculate, record, and control movements (see Thrift, 2004a). Image repertoires structure, obliquely perhaps, the relatively invisible, technical forms of urban life in cases such as FON. They enable the formation of infrastructures. The infrastructure of an information network is an urban form. It derives from certain intense zones of activity in the image repertoire, zones in which others are experienced as Other. WiFi wireless networks date from 1999. They have a highly fluid infrastructure built from prosaic commodity computer equipment originally designed for domestic and office spaces. IEEE 802.11b/g or Wi-Fi™ access points allow people to connect to information networks such as the internet without plugging into a network or telephone socket.1 A very large population of objects are associated with wireless networks. As one handbook of wireless networking enthuses, “With so many people using and experimenting with it, 802.11b is arguably the most hackable (and customizable) wireless protocol on the planet” (Flickenger, 2003: 5). WiFi equipment has been extremely popular in houses and apartments. It has been modified and installed in many portable computing devices (laptop computers, PDAs, increasingly in mobile phones and cameras) in recent years. Infrastructural components such as access points and routers (key elements of the network topology discussed below) have become very cheap (starting at $10), especially in the form of now slightly older, slower equipment. Municipal governments and business can now imagine metropolitan wireless grids, meshes, or clouds that blanket the whole city because wireless connectivity has entered into the image repertoire of individuals at a smaller scale. Some of these arrangements suggest that embodied image repertoires of contemporary city life do not just include images of others in the city, but forms of coordination, connection, interaction, and transaction with others attached to information networks. Such image repertoires, when they become components of a collective experience of bodies, generate infrastructures.

From Network Resource to Network-Image This way of understanding the formation of infrastructures out of embodiment contrasts with their typical framing as resource. For instance, in an account that concentrates on convincing readers of the radical novelty of

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wireless technologies, Mitchell (2003: 147) writes, Skeptics about wireless networks like to emphasize that wireless merely provides the last link in a telecommunication infrastructure that is, in fact, mostly wired. Furthermore, it is a relatively unreliable and inefficient link. They are right, but they completely miss the point. As these examples illustrate, for good or ill, continuous fields of presence provided by wireless networks can fundamentally alter patterns of resource availability and space use. The fundamental alteration Mitchell refers to as “patterns of resource availability and space use” remains too abstract if we are to understand how contemporary experiences of bodies inform urban forms, and how the same city can precipitate different grids overlapping each other. “Resource availability” and “space use” in cities are certainly changing in concert with wireless technologies. The avalanche of recent announcements of municipal wireless networks in cities such as London, New York, Philadelphia, Taipei, and Copenhagen, suggests that movements of information are intensifying in certain ways. Municipal wireless networks seek to change the availability of information resources for their own workers in carrying out their administrative duties, for citizens and for visitors such as tourists and business travelers. They alter ways in which spaces are monitored and maintained. The use of wireless networks, for instance, to connect digital video cameras is already radically changing the topology of CCTV networks. In the same way that webcams inject live-updated images of particular places into the WWW, CCTV cameras become just another peripheral device on municipal information networks. Any treatment of wireless networks solely in terms of resource availability or space use is not only highly decontextualized, as Latham and Sassen (2005), following earlier criticisms of virtuality and cyberspace (Slater, 2002), argue—it cannot account for the embodied action of people in creating, selecting, and informing information, in contesting what a resource is or how a space is inhabited. The mixing of information with other forms, organizations, and mediating practices (Latham and Sassen, 2005: 18–19) must also be taken into account. Graham and Marvin acknowledged this when they wrote, “infrastructure networks, and the sociotechnical processes that surround them, are strongly involved in structuring and delineating the experiences of urban culture and what Raymond Williams termed the ‘structures of feeling’ of modern urban life” (Graham and Marvin, 2001: 10). They suggest attending to “how the wires, ducts, tunnels, conduits, streets, highways, and technical networks that interlace and infuse cities

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are constructed and used” (8). The general implication is that the embodied image repertoire as experience of urban culture somehow encompasses in some form the city’s infrastructures, including information infrastructure that very markedly takes form as a network. Contemporary city image repertoires incorporate what we might call for this and several other reasons a network-image. This concept of the network-image refers to the fact that images are themselves increasingly networked in cities (as described above), and that images of networked processes enter deeply into the comportment of urban dwellers.

Image Repertoire and the Problem of Separation Wireless networks cut architectural space, and in particular affect the maintenance of differences between inside and outside, an elementary facet of any experience of one’s own body in a city. Wireless networks make the difference between inside and outside increasingly independent of distance or metrics. The mainly Euclidean geometries of separation and distance designed in European and North American cities over the last few centuries rely on an infrastructure of ducts, vents, windows, pipes, and conduits through which flows of water, air, light, and heat pass. Separation between inside and outside also depends increasingly on bundles of wires and antennae through which messages and media (images, sounds, text, and control signals) pass. The reorganizations of domestic, commercial, and public architecture around these flows have been profound. Experiences of one’s own body draw on and attach to these flows and reorganizations. These infrastructures condition embodiments of comfort, solitude, sociality, separateness, and rest in cities. Withdrawal and separation are the very possibility of comfortable life in cities, especially global and multicultural cities. In wireless networks, withdrawal and separation encounter new topological twists. The very term “wireless” highlights the prevalence of wires as constraints, tethers, or even entanglements in built environments. On the one hand, wireless networks contribute to and intensify the possibility of withdrawal from others. They are experienced as connecting people to digital network infrastructures with less effort, complication, or entanglements. They free people to move around in built environments and to change where they sit. Much of the imagery associated with wireless networking advertising in particular makes much of the potential of WiFi to simplify everyday life, and to afford new individual freedoms and mobilities within separated places of urban environments. Images show people using a laptop on the balcony, on a sofa, in the garden or in the kitchen. Wireless signals propagate through or around most building partitions so that they can be received outside the building or in adjacent buildings. On

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the other hand, there is still a separation associated with WiFi networks. The signal does not propagate everywhere. Yet indistinct zones of overlapping signals produce overflows and leakages between architecturally separated spaces. This leakage soon became evident in domestic settings. As people started installing wireless networks in their apartments, neighbors often accidentally discovered they could connect to them. The ethics and legality of “sharing” or “leeching” signals in the neighborhood were widely discussed, especially in the post-September 2001 anxieties over the security of information infrastructures in the USA. When telecommunications and internet service providers attempted to control access to domestic wireless networks, strange complications arose. People found themselves suddenly blocked out from networks they had previously shared with their neighbors without any problems (Napoli, 2004). While all WiFi equipment has encryption capabilities that can restrict access, these capabilities are often not switched on. As a result, many wireless nodes remain deliberately or accidentally “unsecured” (Joel, 2004). The very experience of separation, a key feature of city life deeply inscribed in city image repertoires, intensifies and dissipates at the same time in wireless networks. This ambiguity has consequences for people’s experience of their own bodies. When Sennett writes, “The trajectory of designed pleasure led the human body to an ever more solitary rest” (1994: 375), he points to one aspect of this intensification. We aspire to live in more or less sealed architectural environments. We experience buildings and rooms as separate from the life of the city. In private spaces such as houses and apartments, and various commercial spaces such as bars, cafés, restaurants, cinemas, and some shops, this separation affords people’s sense of comfort, rest, and withdrawal from the stimulation and movement of city life (Sennett, 1994). Some public buildings modulate this separation, but they are exceptions. By definition, public buildings, such as a transport terminus, a hall, a place of worship, an arena, a stadium, or other large public institution, expose people to others, albeit in regulated ways. The wireless networking of apartments, offices, shops, houses, and even vehicles in cities reinforces a certain solitary separation, but one that also relies on a form of sociality and overflow. In 2005 certain wireless hotspot cafés in Seattle, USA were reported as having shut down their wireless networks on weekends. They were attempting to liberate the conversation and atmosphere of the café from the intent silence of customers hunched over laptops for hours on end (Fleischman, 2005). Wireless networks are difficult to link to either private pleasure or its opposite—public life. Rather than simply intensifying private pleasures (in the form of web-surfing, game-playing, emailing, or downloading music or video files), wireless networks contribute to the

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mobilization of private pleasure and the encapsulation of private media consumption in public locations.

Network-Image as a Shifting, Nebulous, Topological Form In the light of this complication, what happens to the image repertoire? It shows instabilities. It flickers and wavers. The network-image is not always easy to visualize. At a technical level, as Flickenger (2003: 43) writes, “Perhaps the most difficult task in wireless networking is trying to visualize what is really going on.” Various attempts have been made to provide citywide images of the 802.11 networks: “in April 2004, Humphrey Cheung and some colleagues flew two single-engine airplanes over metropolitan Los Angeles with two wireless laptops. The project logged more than 4,500 wireless networks” (Marriot, 2006). It is strikingly difficult to measure the scale of the wireless networks of a city, to find where they are located and who is connected to them. In contrast to the centrally planned, diagrammed, and managed infrastructures of telephones, electricity, water, and sewerage, wireless networks operate on many different scales, ranging outwards from domestic interiors, through neighborhoods, suburbs, or town centers, city-wide meshes or networks, and occasionally across wide geographical distances (up to hundreds of miles in experimental setups). The same technology, which was originally envisaged as a way of networking offices and houses, can also now be found in many odd locations, in trains, vineyards, cattle ranches (Biever, 2004), wildlife reserves (Cohn, 2004), and mountaineer base camps, as well as cafés, hotels, libraries, airports, and living rooms (Mackenzie, 2005). At a hotspot, traveling business people doing email or neighborhood residents sitting in cafés may connect to the same access point. In short, wireless networks occupy many different positions, including some that range outside and between cities. They often represent ways of overcoming some gap or difference between life in the city and life outside it (for instance, in the many wireless community projects found in smaller towns and villages). This difficulty in describing the scale and placement of wireless networks shows particularly clearly in the citywide wireless networks. Here, mapping network topology is a key issue and a matter of contestation between business, the state, citizens, activists, consumers, and so on. Network topology is a technical term used to describe how networks connect computers. From a sociotechnical standpoint, different network topologies are never trivial or neutral. Different flows of information and distributions of agency attach to them (Galloway, 2004). Sometimes topologies are fully planned, centralized systems of control (especially in organizational and institutional settings such as businesses and public bodies). At other times, they

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grow contingently, over time, through the successive addition of new nodes and subnetworks to an existing network. In the first few years of wireless networking, the potential for existing network topologies to change very quickly and fluidly figured strongly in the network-image. Network designers could dispense with the ducting, cabling, and other built infrastructure needed for previous networking technologies such as Ethernet. This sense of plasticity of network topology was immediately evident in the many free wireless network projects that sprang up in almost every developed and developing city. Announcements, websites, wireless festivals, and reports appeared at a high rate in the years 2001–2004. Already at this time free networking had been organized through many voluntary projects. However, just as many commercial hotspot projects sprang up between 2001 and 2005 in city cafés, fast-food outlets, transport hubs, and bars, and as many people installed wireless equipment in their apartments and houses, and zones in the city quickly became encrusted with network connectivity or wireless “clouds.” For many reasons, these networks need to become perceptible, even immediately visible. Often driven by competition between telephone companies and internet service providers (Borland, 2003), commercial hotspots, increasingly widely available in many urban settings such as cafés, bars, service stations, train stations, and hotels, symbolized their presence differently to the warchalkers (Abreu, 2003).2 Sometimes they put small signs or stickers on the window. Occasionally large billboards appeared. Images of connecting to a wireless network in the city were extensively scattered through print and broadcast media and billboards. More comprehensively and perhaps interestingly, many commercial and noncommercial websites sprang up that mapped available network connectivity in specific cities, or occasionally, as in the case of several global WiFi access finders, globally. Some of these websites solicited war-driving contributions (the practice of driving around city streets with a laptop or wireless access point finder, logging all the networks encountered) from many individuals and collated them in databases linked to spatial representations of cities (WiGLE, 2006). Sometimes these websites were the product of commercial enterprises and represented an attempt to federate the many thousands of hotspots into “global roaming” services for itinerant laptop users. Such sites provided dynamically updated maps of cities, particularly in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, supplying the precise locations of WiFi nodes, and sometimes gave details of how to connect to them (for instance, the “Zone Finder” site sponsored by an industry alliance of wireless hardware and software producers (WiFi Alliance, 2003)). In the form of stickers, signs, and websites, the initial wireless network topology of central node and materializations, diversified (itself connected to

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the internet via some other communication infrastructure such as broadband cable or modem, itself subject to its own specific imaginings and materializations). In wireless networks, people have different, sometimes very uncertain, senses of the network topology. Sometimes, for good reason, they do not know to what network they are connected. Wireless networks in urban precincts unpredictably appear and disappear as unknown neighbors reconfigure or switch their access points on and off, as radio interference arises or diminishes, as the sun heats antennae and roofs. People also often do not know who is connected to the network they have set up. They might have an obscure perception of the presence of others when the network slows down (Marriot, 2006). Their senses of how they are connected come from practical images and symbols. For instance, people see small icons showing in the corner of the screen on most computers and mobile devices equipped with wireless network capability. The icons are a sensible image of connection to wireless networks, but they give little sense of the precise topology or relation to others. Computer shops sell small hand-held gadgets known as WiFi access point finders as essential accessories for travellers. Wherever they are, they can see the connectivity available to them. Finally, bodily movement in the city offers an important affordance. People learn to turn their computer around in a different direction, to squat down in a doorway to check their email, and to sit at tables in the café or bar that have good signal strength. Network topologies in the technical sense are figures that begin to affect the embodiment of information flows in built spaces.

Collective Scenes of Connection Wireless networks have been often imagined as offering inhabitants of the city the chance to occupy privileged informatic capsules, elevated above or protected from the tides of people and things moving around them in the city, as if there a truer self could be found. Selfhood in the city comes from rising and falling patterns of association with others. Because of the way they embody images, people’s bodies form associations with others, sometimes almost inadvertently. Affects arise from these associations: “Emotions cluster around images—traces of previous bodily modifications. The power of these images is strengthened or diminished by dynamic social collectivities formed or disrupted by the associations our bodies form with others” (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999: 40). What associations do bodies form with others in wireless networks? As the star topology of organized home/office networks and commercial hotspots permeated people’s experience of their own bodies in relation to others, radically different topologies competed with them and responded to

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their presence. Hence, in these same years (2002–2005), the network-image was difficult to visualize because it contained many overlapping networks. Alternate network topologies emerged and transformed the hotspot or “star” topology in various urban settings. These other topologies were again diverse, mutable, and somewhat precarious, but characteristically they were citywide rather than precinct- or zone-based. Community or free wireless networks appeared in very many places. In London, Consume was a particularly prominent example. As Priest writes, The original idea of Consume was to create a metropolitan meshed network that would link users at the edge of the network together into a coherent local infrastructure. This connection would allow collective bargaining for back haul bandwidth, and a free local infrastructure that could support local content and an autonomous media. (Priest, 2005) The possibilities of sharing networks between neighbors in apartments and more densely built-up areas multiplied. Sometimes shared networks were explicitly organized in the form of community wireless projects that sought to enhance access to the internet for parts of the city that weren’t so well connected (for instance, east London). Community WiFi networks and WiFi user groups could be found in very many smaller towns for this reason. The topology of these networks was different in several ways. As Priest writes of the hopes of Consume, this meshed-edge network would provide a challenge to existing telecoms providers by being able to escape from the star topology and its built-in control points. Using an agreement between local network neighbors, the plan was to encourage a systemic decentralization and distribution of network ownership and operation. (Priest, 2005) They entailed a different sociality since they were often put together and maintained by groups of volunteers who helped their neighbors join or access a wireless node that itself was connected to a commercial broadband internet connection. These attempts to build suburb-, town-, or citywide infrastructures were fragile, sometimes temporary, accomplishments. In order to get information to flow across the network along many different paths, rather than just from periphery to center, community wireless groups experimented with different topologies such as meshes and grids. Free networks envisaged a different topology because they sought to do more than connect people to the internet. Although they had mixed and partial success, the local, online, and print media visibility of the community projects made a difference. Their visi-

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bility allowed free networking groups to change what they hoped to do. As Julian Priest writes, “the Freenetworking Movement has begun to coalesce around new concerns, with recent discourses putting freenetworks and ownership and control of media infrastructure in a freedom of expression context. Control of a network means ultimate control over network traffic” (Priest, 2005). As movements, they have been concerned to activate different kinds of political space through wireless networks. Treating information infrastructures themselves as a key political stake, free networking diverges from alternative media or independent media with their focus on independent content or opinion. However, in taking infrastructure as a key site of contestation, these movements have had to engage in activities that themselves are rarely seen as political. Community wireless networks are not simple or mono-dimensional associations between individuals centered on wireless network access. The case of Wireless London offers an example of the kinds of complicated social organization of wireless networks. The website for Wireless London claims, “Wireless London addresses the creative possibilities, policies, practicalities, and potential of Wireless London” (Wireless London, 2006). The website presents Wireless London as a cluster of network topologies informed by many different uses, ideas, alliances, and connections with other organizations. Many of these organizations, such as Freifunk.net, informal.org, CRIT Mumbai (Collective Research), Arts Council England, and Hive Networks, themselves are not strictly speaking part of London. It would be possible to go through each of these partners and trace how its role in Wireless London is defined and understood. The range of interests is very broad. For instance, Hive Networks “research and develop hiveware for embedded devices and ubiquitous networked computers—tools that enable users to manage space, time, and the boundaries around the self in new and previously unthinkable ways” (Hive Networks, 2006). Life in the contemporary wireless cities is complicated by the fact that many competing associations shape how information moves through cities.

From Premium Zone to Critical Service How do these competing network topologies, with their different connectivities and urban metrics, participate in an experience of the body and urban forms? For most people, they only indirectly affect the topological grounding of bodily experience. Their image repertoire gradually incorporates facets of the network-image as dimly felt possibilities of connection or “association” to wireless infrastructures. Unlike the cell phone, whose effect on image repertoire is directly visible in the way people walk a street,

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the network-image does not clearly figure relations to others. Perhaps this will change as municipal or local governments adopt some of the same topologies and associations developed several years earlier by community and free wireless networks, and combine them with service provision. For instance, in 2004 Westminster City Council in London announced its “Wireless City” project in terms of social inclusiveness combined with “realtime” social services. In the same parts of the city as the freenetworker’s Wireless London, the City Council project has slightly different aims: The concept of the Wireless City is potentially one of the most exciting developments in Westminster’s history. It will allow us to offer opportunity to our residents through community education schemes on our housing estates and integrated social service provision across the city. We will be better able to reduce the threat and the fear of crime through a flexible approach to community safety, cleansing and CCTV—reacting to events and developments as they happen. It will also help us maintain low taxes through the savings that the scheme can offer. (Westminster City Council, 2006a) The mixture of uses here goes well beyond the forms of access to the internet envisaged in the hotspot model or the alternative infrastructures envisaged in free networking. At the launch event in 2004, the dotted-pointed visual presentation by city information services management focused very directly on city administration: Order, opportunity and low taxation Reduce fixed cost base Reduce cost of CCTV extensions Reduce installation costs of CCTV and noise monitoring Reduce the cost of parking meter management. (Snellgrove and Hearn, 2006) Here, the control systems through which the city manages street life appear at the center of the network-image. A year later, in 2005, as the network starts to materialize, its framing directly links entrepreneurial acumen with changes in the administrative control of city life. It has now become the Wireless City Partnership. Announcing its partnership with a telecommunications business, BT, Westminster City Council claims This is the first deal of its kind in the UK and will establish Westminster City Council as a world leader for technology and innovation. The Wireless City will benefit those who live and work in Westmin-

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ster by improving the street environment through reducing crime and disorder, improving the delivery and effectiveness of council services and enabling us to maintain low tax through delivering significant cost savings. BT is the ideal partner for us, combining in-depth communications expertise with a strong experience of working with other local authorities to provide wireless technology. (Westminster City Council, 2006b) The network-image expands here to include the arrangements and “partnerships” between telecommunications businesses and the local governments. It also begins to encompass a set of relationships between different entities in the city. For instance, Tropos Networks, a North American supplier of wireless networks, promotes and hopes for expansion in the scope of WiFi: WiFi’s explosive proliferation gives consumers, businesses, and governments a vast and ever-growing range of fast, easy-to-use and low-cost WiFi-enabled devices. With more than 120 million units shipped, WiFi isn’t just for laptops anymore. It’s also for phones, PDAs, gaming devices, video cameras, parking meters, utility meters and sensors that detect biological, chemical, and radioactive hazards. (Tropos Networks, 2006a) Product manufacturers seeking to supply “metro-scale” networks to municipal governments emphasize the heterogeneity of the network. The product announcements go on to describe how the management of city infrastructures can change by virtue of all the different things, places, and processes that could be interfaced to the networks: Utility meters, SCADA devices, and parking meters have one thing in common—they need to be read regularly. This is normally a manually intensive process. Fortunately the convergence of intelligent, digital meters with networking technology means they can often now be read from a distance, saving human effort, time, and cost. When coupled with a city-wide MetroMesh network, these devices can now be read totally automatically, with no human intervention, from one side of the city to the other. (Tropos Networks, 2006b) Here the network-image of the wireless city affects other infrastructures. City utility providers such as energy companies suddenly have an interest in becoming wireless network service providers. For instance, in early 2006 the main electricity supplier to the city of Toronto, Toronto Hydro Corporation, began installing a citywide municipal wireless network (Tyler

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Hamilton, 2006). This was not so much because it wanted to compete with telecommunications companies as such but because “smart meters” help automate meter reading and billing for the electricity infrastructure. City administrations often see wireless networks as self-organizing and self-administering. The briefing for Wireless Philadelphia, a municipal wireless project, claims: Once the WiFi units have been installed, they create a self-organizing and self-healing wireless mesh. While some of the units will require a high capacity connection to the Internet, most units will only require access to a power source that can be readily obtained from the existing street or traffic light. (Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee, 2006) The idea of the mesh network as “self-organizing and self-healing” is an important development in the network-image. It promises to reduce the technical work needed to keep the city running. Finally, “the people of the city” become part of the network-image. For instance, the Executive Committee of Wireless Philadelphia uses a version of the digital divide to help justify becoming a wireless network provider: A wireless city will be a strategic investment in the people of the city. It will provide an infrastructure that can assist in bridging the digital divide that now exists and prevents many individuals and families from obtaining the full measure of the opportunities generated by the Internet because they can’t afford the cost of wired broadband Internet access. (Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee, 2006) Perhaps more an afterthought or retrospective justification that capitalizes on the visibility of free and community-access wireless networking, the municipal networks incorporate the “digital divide” into the network-image. The experiments and inventions associated with the latter wireless networking projects have given a visibility to WiFi that commercial product releases cannot achieve without significant cost. Just as information networks allow important changes in the control, security, and administration systems of the city (Harvey, 1989), so too the wireless network allows cities to make themselves visible as centers of innovation and creativity in which infrastructures, work, and lifestyle are closely linked: Providing wireless accessibility will be as important in the future as traditional utilities. Providing an environment that attracts and keeps the knowledge workers who drive the economy of today is

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all-important. The economic development benefits of this strategy are clear and compelling. Not only will it make Philadelphia a better choice for firms to do business, but it will enhance the desirability of the city’s neighborhoods as a place to live. (Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee, 2006) The network-image becomes a metasymbol of the city, “enhancing the desirability of the city’s neighborhoods.” The network-image includes the flow of images, texts, voices, transactions, and media content of many different types through the neighborhoods where “knowledge workers” live.

Conclusion The structures of urban feeling embodied in the wireless network-image do not settle or resolve. They dynamically adapt to complex interplays of personal and impersonal forces in cities. The network-image of wireless information incorporates competing network topologies that have arisen around WiFi networks in the last five or six years. The network topologies are not fixed. Wireless infrastructures generate diffuse or cloud-like connections. Star, grid, and even mesh architectures have shifted and mixed constantly in cities. Networks have stretched, expanded, concentrated, folded, overlapped, and “healed” constantly over the last five years. Different topologies coalesce and dissolve. The concept of image used here differs from representational understandings of images as pictures in the world perceived by a viewer. We could imagine the network-image as a shifting mosaic of differently scaled and connected network topologies enacted in individual and collective bodies. Some aspects of the network-image undergo visualization. The many mapping and locating projects generate diagrams and maps. Some visual fragments—signs, beacons, signals, chalk-marks, indicators, or icons attached to the network—go out into the city and signal the proximity of a network. Other aspects of the image flow deeply into corporeal habits. People experience their embodied connection to network topologies as open-ended or even novel in some respects. Bodies, in conjunction with media and technical apparatus, select and arrange information. Finally, the network-image plays out in the wireless infrastructures that invite or compel people to move more, to find and send information anywhere, or to withdraw or to cocoon themselves in solitary rest. The network-image comprises motion vectors, predictions, and indications of potential movements in the city of people, messages, and things. Contra Sennett and Barthes, image repertoires are not just acted out by individuals, as technologies of self-orientation in the wireless city. The

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network-image repertoire synthesizes very different political, economic, and social interests. The municipal networks, in the ways they concentrate and superimpose surveillance, access, administration, control, and service currently mesmerize this imagining. Yet the network-image overflows the metro-nets. The network-image aggregates different sensings of information in the city. It is not the property or attribute of individual citizens or consumers. It forms sociality on the fly (Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger, 2000), adding to and subtracted from relations. The network-image also is not something through which cities, enterprises, or social groups merely symbolize their technical, economic, or political value. Rather, through it, realities propagate into each other. It couples regulation of electromagnetic fields, freedom, place, others, universality, and value.

Notes 1. 2.

Other wireless networks include cellular phone systems (GSM, 3G, etc.) as well as proprietary or special-purpose network communications protocols such as DSRC, Bluetooth, RFID, and IrDA that connect various gadgets and machines together at short range. Warchalking emerged in 2001. It marks walls and pavements with symbols that indicate wireless networks nearby.

References Abreu, Elinor Mills, Plugged In: Web Access in the Clouds. Coffee, Tea, or WiFi? Reuters News, Saturday, February 15, 2003, 08:53 a.m. Available from http://www.reuters.com/. Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). Biever, Celeste, “Virtual Fences to Herd Wi-Fi Cattle,” June 7, 2004. Available from http://www. newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn5079. Blum, Alan, The Imaginative Structure of the City (Montreal, and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). Borland, John, “Telecom: Is Wi-Fi the MISSING LINK?” CNET News.com, February 4, 2003. CambridgeMatrix, Welcome to the Cambridge Matrix Wireless Mesh Network, 2006. Available from http://www.cambridgematrix.co.uk/. Cohn, David, “Pandas Don’t Need Internet,” October 27, 2004. Available from http://www.wired. com/news/business/0,1367,65500,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_11. Couldry, Nick, “The Productive ‘Consumer’ and the ‘Dispersed’ Citizen,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 7 (1) (2004), 21–32. Fleischman, Glenn, “Coffeeshop Turns off Wi-Fi on Weekends,” May 6, 2005. Available from http://wifinetnews.com/archives/005325.html. Flickenger, Rob, Wireless Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates Inc., 2003). FON, “What is Fon?” 2006. Available from http://en.fon.com/info/what-is-fon.php. Galloway, Alexander R., Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Graham, Stephen, “Constructing Premium Networks Spaces,” in R. Hanley (ed.), Moving People, Goods, and Information: The Cutting-Edge Infrastructures of Networked Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003). Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technolog-

 • Adrian Mackenzie ical Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001). Hall, Tim and Phil Hubbard (eds), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime, and Representation (Chichester and New York: Wiley, 1998). Hall, Tim, Phil Short Hubbard, John Rennie, and Kim Yeong-Hyun, “The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime, and Representation,” in T. Hall and P. Hubbard (eds), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime, and Representation (Chichester and New York: Wiley, 1998). Hammersley, Ben, “Working the Web: Warchalking,” July 4, 2002. Available from http://www. guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,748499,00.html. Hansen, Mark B. N., New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2004). Harvey, David, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler, 71B (1989), 3–17. Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Hellweg, Eric, “Wi-Fi for the Masses,” August 19, 2005. Available from http://www.technology review.com/InfoTech/wtr_14705,258,p1.html. Hive Networks, “About Hive Networks,” 2006. Available from http://www.hivenetworks.net/mediawiki/index.php/HiveNetworks:About. Joel, Micah, “Safe and Insecure. I Opened up My Wireless Home Network to the World, and I’ve Never Felt More Comfortable,” May 18, 2004. Available from http://www.salon.com. Kearns, Gerard and Chris Philo, Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1993). Knorr-Cetina, Karin, and Urs Bruegger, “The Market as an Object of Attachment: Exploring Postsocial Relations in Financial Markets,” Canadian Journal of Sociology, 25 (2) (2000), 141–168. Kostof, Spiro, The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form through History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992). Lash, Scott, Critique of Information (London: Sage Books, 2002). Latham, Robert and Saskia Sassen, Digital Formations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Mackenzie, Adrian, “From Café to Parkbench: Wi-Fi and Technological Overflows in the City,” in M. Sheller (ed.), Technological Mobilities (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). Marriot, Michael, “Hey Neighbor, Stop Piggybacking on My Wireless,” New York Times, March 6, 2006. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/technology/05wireless.html?_ r=1&oref=slogin. Mitchell, William J., The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2003). Mo, Yan-chih, “Taiwan: Taipei Honored for World’s Largest Wireless Network,” June 30, 2006. Available from http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article-eastasia.asp?parentid=48362. N/A, “Warchalking: Collaboratively Creating a Hobo-Language for Free Wireless Networking,” May 25, 2004. Available from http://www.warchalking.org/section/pics. Napoli, Lisa, “Adventures in Wi-Fi: Losing a Free Ride,” International Herald Tribune, August 12, 2004. Available at: http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?ile=533715.html. Pile, Steve, Real Cities: Modernity, Space, and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005). Priest, Julian, The State of Wireless London, 2005. Available from http://informal.org.uk/people/ julian/publications/the_state_of_wireless_london/. Sennett, Richard, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). Slater, Don, “Making Things Real: Ethics and Order on the Internet,” Theory, Culture and Society, 19 (5/6) (2002), 227–245. Snellgrove, Andrew and Tim Hearn, “The Wireless City: A Showcase,” 2006. Available from http:// www.westminster.gov.uk/councilgovernmentanddemocracy/councils/modernisation/ westminsterwirelesscity/upload/36080_1.pdf. Thrift, Nigel, “Movement-Space: The Changing Domain of Thinking Resulting from the Development of New Kinds of Spatial Awareness,” Economy and Society, 33 (4) (2004a), 582–604. Thrift, Nigel, “Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of

Stars, Meshes, Grids •  Position,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (1) (2004b), 175–191. Tropos Networks, “The Proven Leader in Delivering Ubiquitous, Metro-Scale Wi-Fi Mesh Network Systems,” March 2006a. Available from http://www.tropos.com/. Tropos Networks, “Applications Overview.” Available from Tropos Networks, 2006b #196. Tyler Hamilton, N., “T.O. to Become Wireless Hotspot,” March 6, 2006. Available from http://www. thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Arti cle&cid=1141643034143&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home. Westminster City Council, “Westminster Pilots ‘the Wireless City,’” 2006a. Available from http:// www.westminster.gov.uk/news/PR-1853.cfm. Westminster City Council, “Westminster Goes WiFi with BT,” 2006b. Available from http://www.west minster.gov.uk/councilgovernmentanddemocracy/councils/modernisation/westminster wirelesscity/index.cfm. Wi-Fi Alliance, “Zone Finder,” 2003. Available from http://www.wi-fizone.org. WiGLE, “Wireless Geographic Logging Engine: Plotting WiFi on Maps,” 2006. Available from http://wigle.net/. Wireless London, “Welcome to Wireless London,” 2006. Available from http://wirelesslondon. info/HomePage. Wireless Philadelphia Executive Committee, “A 21st Century Opportunity,” 2006. Available from http://www.phila.gov/wireless/briefing.html.

CHAPTER

5

Always Turned On Atlantic City as America’s Accursed Share M I M I SH E L L E R

[I]f the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically . . . Minds accustomed to seeing the development of productive forces as the ideal end of activity refuse to recognize that energy which constitutes wealth must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return), and that a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits. Georges Bataille (1989: 21–22)

Atlantic City arose in the nineteenth century on an island strip of marshy coastal New Jersey to become one of the first major vacation destinations in the United States. Since then it has gone through periods of boom and bust, but has kept reinventing itself as a particular kind of city of spectacle and speculation, a place where wealth is lavishly squandered in excesses of conspicuous consumption. What is the relationship between casino capitalism’s spectacles of wealth and the real-estate speculation that spawns new casinos, shopping districts, condo developments, and rows of multimillion-dollar vacation homes up and down the Jersey coast? In the 1980s a new kind of entrepreneurial urbanism arose in the United States involving public–private partnerships to redevelop city centers; this was joined in the 1990s by a “new entertainment economy” that invested heavily in theme parks, theatres, casinos, and sports arenas and stadiums. Atlantic City has become a prime example of the “recent escalation of ‘convergences’ and 107

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‘synergies’ within and among the communications, entertainment, retail, and real estate development industries,” which is driving the resurgence of urban and ex-urban “shopertainment” and property speculation in the United States (Hannigan, 1998: 61–62). In this chapter I will read Atlantic City as encapsulating contemporary US capitalism, showing how gambling informs not only what goes on within the casinos, but also what goes on outside them. The “general economy” (to borrow Bataille’s term) based on squandered profits, lavish consumption, and private and public indebtedness not only informs the continuous remaking of the Atlantic City spectacle, but also represents the normal mode of capitalism in the USA. Entrepreneurship has close associations with gambling and speculation, although the field of entrepreneurial studies usually sidesteps this sibling relation. A recent resurgence of interest in Georges Bataille’s theory of general economy is one of the few places where this connection is noted. Jean-Joseph Goux, in his essay “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” (1998), reads the work of New Right economist George Gilder (who influenced Ronald Reagan) in relation to Bataille (see Botting and Wilson, 1998; Goux, 1998). As Botting and Wilson summarize, For George Gilder, capitalism is very far from being a slavishly utilitarian or calculatingly servile system incarnating the grey, neo-Calvinist bourgeois ethic of industriousness and self-improvement. On the contrary, it distils the spirit of the swashbuckling, risk-taking entrepreneur. Rather than petty calculation, the heroic subject of capitalism is defined by a willingness to hazard everything, to take an immeasurable risk. Gilder writes: “because no one knows which venture will succeed, which number will win the lottery, a society ruled by risk and freedom rather than by rational calculus, a society open to the future rather than planning it, can call forth an endless stream of invention, enterprise, and art.” (Botting and Wilson, 1998: 19) According to Goux, Gilder “praises the spirit open to the paradoxes of chance and gambling . . . profit resides in chance . . . ‘fortune’ regains its most proper meaning: Fortuna, the Roman divinity of chance” (Goux, 1998: 202). From such a perspective postmodern (or late) capitalism and the recent neoliberal policies that neoconservative governance has imposed in the United States can be compared to gambling. The national debt is a roll of the dice; military ventures are good gambles for fortunate businesses. The entrepreneur is the ultimate gambler placing a bet; wealth is good fortune, and poverty tough luck. Hence the US has perfected what might be called “casino capitalism.”

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Consumption, rather than production, is its raison d’être, and the more excessive and extravagant the better. “It is the most extravagant waste,” writes Goux, gratuitous, careening consumption, where accumulated wealth is set ablaze and disappears in an instant, wreathing in ephemeral glory him who makes the offering of this blaze which becomes the central phenomenon, the one through which a society discovers itself and celebrates the deepest values that animate it: its religion, its metaphysics, its sense of the sacred. (Goux, 1998: 196) Atlantic City is the temple not only of gambling or greed, but of the very creed and faith that represent the underlying values of the neoliberal USA. Entrepreneurs like Donald Trump and Steve Wynn, just a step ahead of bankruptcy and floating on junk bonds, are its high priests; the players at the blackjack tables are its acolytes, but so too are the shoppers in its malls, the audiences at its clubs and stages, and the real-estate speculators buying up its properties. All are players in the game of casino capitalism, and now so too are the local governments that place their bets on casinos as the saviors of their tax-base and regional economy. Theorists of entrepreneurship have not taken enough account of spatiality and mobilities, and a closer analysis of one spatialization of casino capitalism can help us to understand the interconnections between its various manifestations. Atlantic City is undergoing a constant process of self-invention in which capital is staked on rebuilding and revaluing place. Casino cities, like other “places to play” (Sheller and Urry, 2004) are produced both economically and culturally through the multiple networked mobilities of capital, persons, signs, and information, continuously being moved, invested, arranged, and rearranged. Out of these complex movements casinos and the urban spaces that support them are assembled in unpredictable and temporary configurations, which are always “in play” in relation to these various mobilities. Casino cities are performed by the actions of developers, investors, regulators, legislators, shoppers, vacationers, and gamblers. Casino cities must afford possibilities for the right kinds of play, or else they will rapidly be surpassed by places with newer material, semiotic, and state infrastructures. Local governments today are competing to attract entrepreneurs by joining the gamble themselves; they gamble away their space through pro-business legislation, tax abatements, and development easements, heaping the old-fashioned values of the “public interest” and “public space” onto the bonfire of consumer capitalism. This continual revaluation (some would say prostitution) of place, I argue, is achieved through the twin processes of spectacle-making (the

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aestheticization of consumption) and speculation (the “frenetic pursuit of the new” (Goux, 1998: 201)). This chapter offers a brief history of Atlantic City as the epitome of Bataille’s general economy, showing how its development was premised on the creation of fantastical and gratuitous illusions of grandeur, much like Disneyland or Hollywood, and that this entrepreneurial spectacle-making in turn drove real-estate speculation, building booms, and mass tourism. But Atlantic City has gone through several cycles of boom and bust, and it stands out as an exemplar of American capitalism in part because of its stark revelation of the relation between excessive wealth, frivolity, and lavish consumption versus the extreme devaluation of marginal spaces of social exclusion. When Georges Bataille proffered his vision of the “accursed share” in the 1960s as the surplus energy that any system must expend—an excess of luxury, consumption, and expenditure that belies any idea of a rational economy—he was hard-pressed to find contemporary examples. Yet his model of excess is a fitting premonition of the spectacular surpluses of expenditure, consumption, speculation, and gaming that inform the impossible fantasies and futures of casino capitalism in the USA. Atlantic City is surely America’s accursed share, and in tracking how its energies are spent we can gain a better understanding of the ways in which American capitalism consumes wealth and produces poverty.

The First Incarnation of Atlantic City as Beach Resort Atlantic City was first developed when real-estate speculators built a train line in 1880 from Philadelphia out to the New Jersey coast, in the hope of luring vacationers. It had its heyday as a high-class resort from 1890 to 1929, with enormous luxury hotels like the Traymore, the Ritz Carlton, and the Ambassador. By the 1920s the urban working classes were also gaining access to vacation time and some disposable income and Atlantic City began “offering overnight accommodation even to people of limited means,” including in cheaper boarding houses that “catered to socially and ethnically diverse clientele” (Aron, 1999: 212–213). After the depression the beachside resort evolved into a working-class vacation spot, where firstand second-generation Jews, Greeks, Italians, and Slovaks could show their entrée into the respectable middle class: Atlantic City, like Disneyland, appealed to middle-class Americans and people who wanted to enter the middle class . . . People on their way up [from Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and all the medium-sized industrial cities in between] made their way to Atlantic City in the first half of the twentieth century . . . One-time outsiders, these chil-

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dren of immigrant ditch diggers and steel workers felt they had made it in America and into the middle class, and they showed off their new-found inclusion in this national community based on comfort, conformity, and consumption—even more than on citizenship—by coming to Atlantic City. (Simon, 2004: 7–8) The success of the resort, Bryant Simon argues, was premised on racial segregation and the exclusion of African Americans from the city’s public spaces. It seems to have reinforced and enhanced the process of “whitening” through social mobility that Matthew Jacobson calls “probationary whiteness” (Jacobson, 1998), in part by allowing well-dressed working-class crowds of “ethnic” immigrant origin to promenade the Boardwalk and display their arrival in American society. “Atlantic City’s ability to stage this public performance of racial dominance, conspicuous consumption, class leveling, and social climbing,” argues Simon, “turned the resort into one of the single most popular tourist destinations in America between 1915 and 1965” (Simon, 2004: 7). In 1939, “more than 16 million women and men—a number surpassing the combined populations of Philadelphia and New York—made the trip to Atlantic City” (ibid.: 34). There they paraded up and down the Boardwalk, where the Miss America Pageant was held, dressed to the nines in fur stoles and elegant hats, taking lunch in the fancy hotel restaurants and pushed in rickshaw-like wicker rolling chairs by African American workers (who were excluded from the white hotels and beaches): With its middle-class crowds and busy Boardwalk, Atlantic City was Disneyland a generation or so before there was a Disneyland . . . From the very start it was conceived as a make-believe place. But this deceit wasn’t disguised. No one mistook Atlantic City for his hometown. This knowledge, this participation in such an easy-to-see masquerade, liberated many. (Simon, 2004: 7) Like Las Vegas later in the century, Atlantic City was all about signs, legibility, and spectacle, false façades and flashy billboard buildings (Venturi, Izenour, and Scott Brown, 1977). This was the fantasy architecture of the Picture Palace (Naylor, 1981), the pastiche culture of American vernacular. The early hotels were designed to offer an “architecture of fantasy”: Anticipating Disney’s Epcot, the gaudy structures offered visitors a quick, cartoon tour of world architecture. The Blenheim copied its design from Istanbul’s St. Sophia. The Dennis mimicked a French Chateau; the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall looked like a temple-topped

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tower with an English Renaissance design; and the Claridge, the last of the city’s great hotels of this era, resembled the Empire State Building. (Simon, 2004: 27) Electric lights were used to enhance the architectural spectacle: rows of streetlamps on the Boardwalk, lights shining on the façades of buildings, theatre marquees, flashing restaurant signs, the electrified amusement rides of Steel Pier, and some of the biggest signs and billboards in the world all contributed to the spectacular visual impact of the city (ibid.: 27–28). Throughout the twentieth century the effect was the same: Spectacles were a trademark of the resort, from “Lucy,” the grotesque building in the shape of a giant elephant at the south end of Absecon Island, to the great electrically lighted advertising signs on the Boardwalk. Anything that was lurid, readily comprehensible, and preferably large was likely to find favor. Atlantic City itself appealed to visitors for its spectacular qualities (the vast crowds, the huge hotels, the seas of merchandise), but there were also specific shows presented as spectacle. (Funnell, 1975: 58) And so the crowds kept coming, for a time, workers spending their hardearned money on frivolity, fun, and façades of glamour. But things began to change in the post-World War II era. During the war public facilities were taken over by the armed forces, and the 50 or so hotels used as temporary hospitals for recuperating soldiers never quite recovered (Kunstler, 1993: 229). “The town’s attractions grew shabby . . . By the early fifties . . . the town catered increasingly to a low-rent convention trade. The place was trapped in a downward economic spiral” (ibid.). The postwar GI Bill helped ethnic immigrants climb out of the workingclass, move to the suburbs, and begin to look for more exclusive forms of leisure (Ortner, 2003). With the rise of white suburbia, the development of Disneyland and other manicured and managed non-urban resorts, and the coming of the Civil Rights movement and desegregation, the resort fell into seemingly terminal decline. By 1965, Disneyland, in Anaheim, California, had “replaced Atlantic City as the nation’s most popular middle-class resort,” in part thanks to its use of gates, high ticket prices, carefully designed advertising strategies, security officers, grooming codes for employees, and its ex-urban location beyond the city and the reach of public transportation. Behind its thick fortress walls, Disney created a public sphere, much like the Boardwalk, the shopping mall, and later the casino, based on the eco-

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nomically viable principles of exclusion mixed with the illusion of equal access and democracy. (Simon, 2004: 16) In contrast to the urban feel and racially and ethnically mixed crowds of Atlantic City, white suburbanites now turned to the automobile-friendly, manicured malls and bland expanses of American suburbia for their leisure. Those who could afford it took their holidays in Florida or the Caribbean, which were increasingly accessible due to cheaper air flights. Urbanism was out of favor and the old kinds of public life and public space were thrown out with it (Jacobs, 1961; Kunstler, 1993; Plater-Syberk and Speck, 2000). By the late 1960s, according to Simon, Atlantic City had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut due to the large swathes of housing that were abandoned and bulldozed, leaving huge gaps in the urban fabric. Hotels were turned into low-rent rooming houses for the elderly, and “urban renewal” schemes led to the clearance of 88 acres in the heart of the city (Kunstler, 1993: 229), leaving only rubble, weeds, and parking lots behind. Atlantic City was dying. Every summer my great-grandmother used to spend a few weeks in a rooming house in Atlantic City. After escaping Ukrainian pogroms and coming to America when she was 14, she worked all of her life, mostly sewing linings into fur coats. Her husband died young and she had to support her family. She was good with figures and the family’s rotating savings and credit association probably helped with the expenses. In the 1940s she used to take her granddaughter, my mother, with her to Atlantic City each summer. Mom tells stories of the guest house where the bathtub had hot and cold seawater, and the ladies sat all day playing cards and gossiping in Yiddish. I have seen photographs of them in their knee-length black bathing costumes. Later, when my mother married and had children, the family bought a vacation home just down the coast, and we spent summers there, sometimes going to Atlantic City to ride on the amusements at Steel Pier and get saltwater taffy, cotton candy and Planters roasted peanuts on the Boardwalk. We could still see the dilapidated old boarding houses, the run-down hotels, the seedy amusements and lounges advertising topless dancers, and the sad face of a once grand resort run into the ground, filled with empty lots and somewhat desperate-looking poor inhabitants whom we studiously ignored. Desperate for some cure, in the 1970s the city embraced gambling as the answer to its problems. New Jersey finally broke Las Vegas’ hold on casino gambling when it licensed Atlantic City as a gaming center in 1976, and the first casino, Resorts International, opened in 1978. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America’s most popular

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tourist spots, with 35 million visitors a year, but many critics have argued that this shift to casino capitalism destroyed public space, blighted urban civic culture, and corrupted government and put it in the pocket of the gambling industry (Pollack, 1987; Johnson, 1992; Goodman, 1995; Simon, 2004). By the mid-1980s Atlantic City’s effort to reinvent itself as the East Coast’s only gambling resort seemed to flounder on the “Boardwalk of Broken Dreams,” as a Time magazine cover story dubbed it in 1989. Under the neon lights and beyond the corridor of billboards that welcomed visitors to the paved-over coastal island, the Boardwalk was seedy, the famous Miss America Pageant was out of favor, and the glitzy spectacle of the dozen or so self-enclosed casinos was tarnished by the surrounding morass of seedy $29-a-night hotels, pawn shops offering cash for gold, hard-bitten street walkers, and desperate day-tripper retirees who came on cheap buses from Philadelphia to spend their last nickels on the slot machines. For James Kunstler, Atlantic City in this era epitomized the decline of public space in America into what he called the “geography of nowhere,” the empty and meaningless landscape of “highway strips, parking lots, mega-malls and junked cities” (Kunstler, 1993). And the casino industry stands for the warped economics driving this process: the delusion of getting something for nothing. Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal Casino, with its gaudy towers of “mogul splendor,” “corkscrewing minarets in cartoon turquoise, pink, magenta, purple, and gold,” is a case in point. It “opened in April of 1990 and was technically bankrupt before the year was out. It drained business from every other casino in town while failing to attract enough business to cover its own debt payments” (ibid.: 232). It had been financed with junk bonds in a kind of economy of delusion in which Trump’s excesses of wealth had to be spent without profit in a theatre of grotesque expenditure, purposeless gambling, unproductive consumption, and bankruptcy (both personal and collective) that perfectly enacts Bataille’s accursed share. And Gilder was the economic prophet of this period of the 1980s, whose superfluous theology, Goux notes, “sees the noble and glorious side of the entrepreneur; he makes of him a gambler who sacrifices in order to ‘supply’ with an uncertain result: wealth or bankruptcy. It is in so gambling that he earns his rank” (Goux, 1998: 204).

The Reincarnation of a Casino Resort Despite the apparent social ills and fortress architecture generated by Atlantic City’s casino economy, by the early 1990s legal gambling spread throughout the United States. State and local governments sponsored and encouraged the growth of a range of gambling enterprises—state lotteries, riverboats for gambling, Indian reservation casinos, and small-town slot-machine

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parlors—which by the mid-1990s were generating over $35 billion in yearly revenues. In order to attract development the public sector offered subsidies, concessions, and guarantees in the form of land acquisition and building condemnation, infrastructure upgrades and additions, financing, tax benefits, and regulatory relief (Hannigan, 1998: 134). Critics argue that the “luck business” has not generated new jobs and revenue as promised, but has instead sucked local residents into addictive gambling and left states and localities with the costs of coping with addictive gambling behavior: bankruptcies, broken families, and petty crime (Goodman, 1995). As has been found in Las Vegas, casino urbanism brings with it a range of problems: it has fostered the spread of compulsive and underage gambling; in the struggles of everyday citizens to afford housing while earning service-sector wages; in the dimunition of public space in favor of private; the bankruptcy of mom n’ pop stores; the ever present fiscal crisis of the local government as it attempts to simultaneously subsidize large, profitable gambling establishments and provide the material and immaterial infrastructure needed to service the local citizenry; and the degradation of the natural environment. (Parker, 1999: 119) Figure 5.1 presents a recent view of the empty lots and abandoned housing that still dot the city, with the casinos looming behind them. Hannigan was able to write of Atlantic City as recently as 1998: Since 1978, the year casinos were first introduced to the city, 100 of the city’s 250 restaurants have closed. Its population now stands at 38,000, a tenth less than when gaming was first established. Property values have declined. There has been little demand for new housing, manufacturing, and warehouse space . . . Rather than returning to its turn-of-the-century glory as a resort city, America’s second gambling capital is still pretty much like it was depicted in Louis Malle’s 1981 film, Atlantic City: seedy, crime-ridden, and going nowhere . . . Atlantic City is “a kind of burnout.” Nor is this likely to change in the near future. (Hannigan, 1998: 163–164) Ah, but how things look different just eight years later. This burnout now seems to have been merely a clearing of the ground before the building of the real pyres. I watch the older girls strutting along the Boardwalk. One wraps her pink leather jacket tighter and tries to keep her stiletto heels from catching between the splintery edges of the rotting grey boards. She stays near the strip of tacky shops whose beckoning lights gleam off her fluorescent face, turned

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Figure 5.1 Dilapidated housing with casinos beyond (photo: M. Sheller).

away from the ominous darkness where the ocean rollers batter the beach and a biting wind whips her black tresses into mascara-rimmed eyes. Past the saltwater taffy shops, the amusement arcades, the nostalgic smell of fried bread, hot dogs and sticky cotton-candy, the gypsy fortune tellers, the lurid souvenir shops where sand crabs scrabble in shells painted with American flags; at last she throws herself upon a row of opaque glass doors and pushes her way into the casino, dragging her acquiescent boyfriend in with her. I am not old enough to follow them across the gaudy patterned carpets as they drift into the gaming hall greeted by the droning hum, clanging bells, and ka-ching, ka-chung of quarters pouring mostly into and occasionally out of the slot machines. I hate the casinos yet am drawn to the tawdry spectacle of senseless expenditure, trying to understand why people gamble, why cities build casinos, why everyone who enters them cannot resist slipping just one or two quarters down the throats of the hungry slot machines. New casinos keep springing up from empty lots. Like the starfish on the beach, each time the casino or the gambler loses a fortune, the broken nub magically regenerates another limb, another source of expenditure. Since the turn of the millennium a new burst of investment and entrepreneurial development has been unleashed in Atlantic City, generating an even more ferocious casino culture. The “AC” has once again miracu-

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lously found a new lease on life through entrepreneurial diversification into the most hyperreal consumer confections and farthest reaches of the 24/7 day-and-night metabolism of urban entertainment. Drawing once again on strategies of spectacle and speculation, the city is attracting a new generation to what is still the East Coast’s main gambling and entertainment capital, along with hungry developers and investors who are stoking a new kind of real-estate market drawing on the surrounding terrain of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to generate overspills of wealth and excess expenditure, especially on vacation homes and beachside condominiums. When American cities increasingly have come to be designed on the principles of theme parks—with the rise of surveillance, private security, gated entry, nostalgic pastiche architecture, and an end to public space (Davis, 1990; Sorkin, 1992; Zukin, 1995; Judd and Fainstein, 1999)— an urban casino and entertainment resort on a seaside location with easy access from several major metropolitan areas is a perfect object of desire as a place to play. It has the potential to become the epitome of the new entrepreneurial city: a fantasy urbanism of “gaming,” entertainment, limitless shopping, and excessive consumption. In the case of Atlantic City, however, this new phase of urban development is not an emptying out of public space, a loss of authenticity, or a postmodern pastiche of what was once real. Instead it is a kind of nostalgic intensification of its earlier incarnations as a space of spectacle and consumption. It is the reinvention of a “there” that was always already an invention, a place that in many ways pioneered “shopertainment, eatertainment, and edutainment” (Hannigan, 1998: chapter 5) even in the early twentieth century. The historical local vernacular of Atlantic City is spectacle and speculation, the “fantasy city” par excellence, the ultimate simulacrum. Thus contrary to those urban theorists who have lamented the loss of authenticity, decline of public space, and suburban alienation in the American “geography of nowhere” (Kunstler, 1993), the contemporary reincarnation of place in Atlantic City is more like a ghost arising from the dead. While nowhere near as gargantuan in scale as the new Las Vegas casinos—like Bellagio with its 12-acre artificial lake, Paris with its 50-storey replica of the Eiffel Tower and other Parisian landmarks, or Treasure Island with its Buccaneer’s Bay artificial lagoon where naval battles are staged between a full-scale Spanish galleon and British frigate—Atlantic City nevertheless can trade on its history as a seaside resort and the Boardwalk as a family entertainment venue. And local government, investors, the media, and the public all seem to have embraced the new-old fantasies of casino capitalism, lapping it up in an explosion of expenditure. When the billion-dollar Borgata Casino Hotel and Spa opened in 2003 it kicked off a new wave of investment and real-estate development in

 • Mimi Sheller

Figure 5.2 Urbanoid pseudo-streets in Atlantic City (photo: M. Sheller).

Atlantic City, described in a Standard and Poor’s Ratings Service report as the “Borgata Effect on Capital Investment.”1 The Tropicana Casino soon opened the “Quarter,” a 200,000 square foot “new public space,” “Modeled on Old Havana and emulating New Las Vegas,” that includes bars, restaurants, nightclubs, an IMAX theatre, a spa, and over 500 new hotel rooms. When the “Cuban-themed” Quarter, opened the Tropicana’s gambling takings increased by 31% over the same month in the previous year, to around $11 million, apparently proving that a full shopping and consumption “experience” helps fuel gambling.2 It is a perfect example of what Paul Goldberger calls new “urbanoid environments,” in which “quasi-streets” simulate the proximities and zest of urban cultural spaces, but do so in ways that are controlled, privatized, and sealed off from the surrounding real streets (Hannigan, 1998: 73–74, citing Goldberger, 1996) (see Figure 5.2). In 2004 a new outdoor town-center shopping district opened, with over 40 high-end factory outlet stores. In the summer of 2006 two new $250 million-dollar investments also opened: a luxury spa, hotel, and shopping area at the Borgata, and a shopping mall opened by Caesar’s (which already operated the highly profitable Forum Shops in Las Vegas). The “Forum Shops on the Pier” at Caesar’s is built on a boardwalk pier extending out over the ocean, with nightclubs

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Figure 5.3 The Forum shopping pier under construction (photo M. Sheller).

and restaurants run by superstar chefs opening soon; over 90 retailers including Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Burberry; glittering marble floors and starry lighting; and at the far end a sound and light show around a circle of fountains, a wedding chapel, and an outdoor promenade giving views back to the casino-lined Boardwalk. The entire structure is encrusted with billboards and will soon be emblazoned with four-story high neon screens and electronic graphics, “a sort of mini-Times Square on a luxury cruise liner” (see Figure 5.3).3 Under the slogan “Always Turned On” (hinting at the electric analogy of illumination, expenditure, and sex) the Atlantic City, New Jersey tourist board promises that “Year round, day or night, whatever turns you on about a destination, Atlantic City’s got it”—and 35 million visitors a year seem to agree. The fact that Pennsylvania has recently voted to legalize slot-machine parlors, with many planned to open in Philadelphia soon, will only help to winnow out the poorer local and elderly gamblers with their social ills and bad fashion sense, leaving Atlantic City to the young, wealthy, and stylish. The new Atlantic City offers an abundance of spectacular shows to keep people coming, reiterations of its past history as a city of fantasy and entertainment. Its recent redevelopment is premised on the idea of attracting a “hipper, younger” crowd with a Las Vegas-style entertainment industry.

 • Mimi Sheller

In the late 1990s there were plans afoot to build a Planet Hollywood casino on the Boardwalk and a Hard Rock Café casino at the ailing Trump’s Castle, but Hilton’s takeover of ITT Corporation, the parent company of Caesar’s Palace, put these projects on hold (Hannigan, 1998: 169). Nevertheless, music-theming plowed ahead. Rock and hip-hop artists like Eminem, the White Stripes, Jay-Z, and Pearl Jam have played in new venues like the $69 million House of Blues at the Showboat Casino and rapper Jay-Z’s 40/40 sports bar/club. The casinos are using pop music—along with poker parlors, bikini bars and spiffy shopping arcades—to try to change the image of a rundown resort full of blue-haired ladies playing the nickel slots to one of a hip, happening destination that attracts a younger crowd with real money to throw around.4 As one journalist describes it, there’s something new in the mix, and it ain’t love. It’s live music pounding out of nightclubs and leopard-spotted hipsters sucking down martinis in elegant lounges. Dancing—dancing—is breaking out on casino floors, and people are slinking to bed closer to dawn than sunset. Fine dining extends beyond two slices with the works. Hope, dressed in Mizrahi and ready to partayyyy, has descended on the city, and it’s as welcome as four aces in a poker hand.5 When beach bars were legalized in 2003, following the granting of special permits for casinos to serve alcohol on the beach starting in 2000, major restaurant-nightclubs like Nikki Beach Inc. quickly colonized Atlantic City beach from their home base in Miami’s South Beach.6 The beach bars have updated the “tropical” and “Caribbean” themes that this Atlantic beach resort has long played upon, trying to lend an exotic luster of sexy hedonism to this cold northeastern clime (see Sheller, 2004). The nearby “Rainforest Café” also trades on tropical themes with Mayan-style pseudo-stonework capped with fiery torches beckoning diners into the fake rainforest populated by animatronic animals and coral-reef fish swimming in aquariums, not to mention the entryway shop packed with bright rainforest T-shirts, toy animals, and nature games. Today the “abundance of Atlantic City gaming provides employment for more than 45,000 people, with annual salaries topping $1.1 billion in 2004. In 2005, gaming revenues topped $5.02 billion, a 4.4% increase from the year before.”7 As Hannigan (1998) points out, the key players who invest in and profit from urban entertainment development are entertainment

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companies, real-estate developers, retail and entertainment operators, and the “casino czars.” The initial wave of Atlantic City casinos was financed by entrepreneurs like Bill Harrah, a major casino-resort owner in Nevada who opened Harrah’s in Atlantic City; Steve Wynn, who used the Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas as collateral to finance junk bonds floated by “junk-bond king” Michael Milken in 1980 to build the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City (Hannigan, 1998: 156); and of course Donald Trump, who operates three Atlantic City casinos despite his brushes with bankruptcy. The industry has consolidated and increasingly draws on public financing, with the major players now including Circus Circus Enterprises Inc., Hilton Hotels Corporation, and MGM Grand Inc. (ibid.). The gambling and entertainment industry is one of the most powerful lobbies in America and has a tight hold on local and state government. When the state of New Jersey recently passed legislation to ban smoking in all public places there was only one place that managed to retain an exemption: the Atlantic City casinos. Now an organization representing the restaurant industry is trying to sue the state, saying this is an unfair exemption, which should be extended to them as well. Given the involvement of the casinos in running the new “eatertainment” and “shopertainment” venues, it would only be fair to allow smokers the full run of urbanoid venues. With luxury beachfront houses selling for several million dollars up and down the New Jersey coast, investors are now for the first time planning luxury high-rise condominiums within Atlantic City (current population approx. 40,000). The first high-rise has gone up, with prices starting at $400,000, despite views over the trash-strewn lots and dilapidated old housing at its feet. Boardwalk condos (with ocean views) will sell for $1 million and up, according to developers.8 While there has been some development of townhouses for middle-income casino workers in Atlantic City, and some investment in schools and roads, there has been little investment in public housing. Yet the casinos depend on thousands of waiters, cleaners, chambermaids, salespersons, and security guards, not to mention lounge dancers and sex workers, most of whom work for very low wages. In addition to the existing African American community, this service economy is attracting a wave of immigrant workers from countries including Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Mexico, and Central America. They are housed in the broken-down old blocks of the old Atlantic City, and neighborhood “ethnic” restaurants and small-scale supermarkets are springing up where once there were Italian and Jewish delis. Meanwhile, down the coast in Ventnor and Margate multimillion-dollar vacation homes line the boardwalk and the beach, cheek by jowl, in an orgiastic show of wealth. Older but perfectly functional houses are constantly

 • Mimi Sheller

bulldozed to make way for the latest architectural confections. Triple-story glass atriums soar over indoor-outdoor swimming pools, a profusion of windows and balconies squeezed onto every façade, turret, and wing. Crowded driveways and triple garages overspill with Mercedes-Benz, Porsches, and Humvees. In the early 1990s Dad hired an architect to rebuild our house, adding more windows, balconies, pickled-oak floors, intercom radios built into every room, a jacuzzi in the master bathroom, a sauna, and an outdoor shower. The house next door, which was a modest single-story and faced the beach, was bought and knocked down. A gleaming new three-story one replaced it, with white walls, a soaring blue-glass atrium in the center, and balconies on the roof. It blocked our view. The one behind us and the one diagonal from us were also built up higher, whiter, gaudier. We can barely see the beach now, except from the roof deck. A block away from the beach the smaller old-style cottages are being knocked down to make way for condos and townhouses. More restaurants are starting to open. The house is worth ten times what he paid for it 30 years ago. The beach is packed in the summer and money drips from the cosseted rich bathers in their sunglasses, sunblock, and designer swimwear. They used to turn up their noses at the casinos, but now they go to the restaurants there, shop at the upscale malls, and take their children to the IMAX cinema, and even their teenagers want to go to the clubs and shows. Beyond the immediate environs, the casino economy is having effects on the wider region. “In Wake of Casinos, Suburbs Mushroom; Beyond Atlantic City, Former Scrubland Now Shares in the Prosperity, and Its Problems,” says one recent New York Times headline. The “gambling industry, with its tens of thousands of employees,” the article notes, “has significantly altered the landscape of what were once sparsely populated communities on the mainland as well as down the shores and in Brigantine, to the north.”9 Egg Harbor township saw its population grow from 19,381 in 1980 to 37,000 in 2000; Galloway Township went from 12,176 to 31,209 in the same period, and Hamilton Township from 9,499 to 20,499. “The proliferation of upscale tract homes and strip shopping centers has given the region a look that is similar to many exurban communities that have sprouted up across the country over the last 20 years” (ibid.). The casino workers, meanwhile, many of whom earn only $10 an hour, have had to move farther and farther from Atlantic City, commuting over an hour to work, with late-night shift work creating a 24-hour commuter culture in the region. In a misguided effort to protect the increasingly valuable real estate along the shore (and presumably to make more room for the casino-run beach bars), Atlantic City and the adjacent City of Ventnor voted to hire the ill-fated Army Corps of Engineers to extend the beach and build sand

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dunes in front of the Boardwalk. In 2004 a huge project was undertaken to dredge up sand from offshore and pump it up the beach and build miles of dunes. Dainty clumps of sea-grass were sprinkled over the dunes and new ramped walkways connected the Boardwalk to the beach, which now lay on the other side of the dunes. The ocean waves used to run right up under the Boardwalk at high tide, and people marveled at how the beach now seemed so much wider, and the ocean so much farther away. But some wondered what would happen when the winter storms came with their powerful nor’easters blowing huge waves onto shore. Sure enough, when home-owners returned to Ventnor at the start of the summer season, the dunes had almost all been washed away, leaving in some places a cliff of sand fifteen or twenty feet above the beach. The walkways all had to be roped off. There was no way to get down to the beach, unless you climbed a fence and then jumped off the cliff of sand. The dunes all had to be bulldozed. The relentless Atlantic has found its way back under the Boards, where children used to splash in the shade. A full-force hurricane has not hit this far north in years, but the increasing intensity, size, and duration of the hurricane season in recent years does not bode well for the future of this overdeveloped strip of land pinned between a back bay and the wide open Atlantic.

Conclusion Atlantic City is not alone in spawning a virulent form of casino capitalism and real-estate speculation; it is just one example of a wider global trend in economies of excess, spectacle, and speculation driving regional capitalist development. Around the world in places like Macao, a small island territory near Hong Kong, developers are in hot pursuit of “Asia’s Las Vegas.” With tourist arrivals projected to rise from 16.7 million in 2004 to 20 million in 2005, casino development in Macao is sparking a race “to build bridges, tunnels, railways, and airports” and possibly even a $3.8 billion 17-mile bridge across the Pearl River, to enable visitors to move easily between Macao’s casinos and Hong Kong Disneyland.10 Another excellent example is the development of Dubai’s Palm Island project, where playful consumption, shopping malls, and real-estate investment are generating new geographies of consumption as a spectacle (see Junemo, 2004). Margaret Crawford suggests that the spread of malls around the world has accustomed large numbers of people to behavior patterns that inextricably link shopping with diversion and pleasure. The transformation of shopping into an experience that can occur in any setting has led to the next stage in

 • Mimi Sheller

mall development: “spontaneous malling,” a process by which urban spaces are transformed into malls without new buildings or developers. (Crawford, 1992: 28) The global mobilities of tourists and shoppers, the rearrangements of place and materials, and the massive public and private expenditures on excessive spectacle and speculation, would seem to epitomize Bataille’s accursed share. Individual and collective wealth goes up in smoke in the false “development” of the casino economy, gloriously burnt in a kind of great potlatch. Entire urban regions become dependent on an economics of emptiness, in which businesses produce nothing except orgies of consumption and governments collect taxes on pure excess expenditure, inflated real-estate valuations, and casino “winnings.” But the notion of a “local” community or “authentic” public space to protect from the encroachment of the casinos simply does not apply in this case. The local population only exists on the dregs of the casinos; the local culture is long grounded in commodification, already expert in contrived vernacular authenticity, and eager to cash in on the profits of gambling. In sum, there is no redeeming space or nostalgic time outside of or before the casino economy. The economy of spectacle and speculation thoroughly permeates the civic realm, the state realm, the economic realm, and even the past. We live and work to spend on this crass entertainment, to gamble it away, to shop until we drop, to party all night, to sink it into flimsy buildings that all might be wiped off the face of the earth when the next big hurricane hits this fragile coast. As in the previous century, participation in this charade of wealth is a kind of liberation, and an escape; it is perhaps the best our culture has to offer, and many certainly experience it as such. Rather than trying to look behind or beyond what is there for some idealized notion of what we really value, or what we have supposedly lost, we should instead face it head on and see it for what it is: the accursed share of American capitalism, the truth about America.11

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Bill Ordine, “The Quarter Making Atlantic City a Better Bet: The Cuban-Themes Mall for Dining, Shopping, and Entertaining Is a Step toward Las Vegas Style,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 2005, N2. Ibid. “Vegas Meets Times Square on Beach: Atlantic City’s Newest Attraction Will Be High-Tech Neon Signs and Huge Graphic Screens for $175 Million Shopping Complex,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Business section, November 20, 2005, E1. Dan DeLuca, “The New Sound of Atlantic City: Promoters Are Bringing in Rock and Hip-Hop Acts Such as Eminem to Revive the Resort’s Dowdy Image,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 10, 2005, A1, A12. John Deiner, “The AC: Atlantic City, NJ, Is Dancing to a New Beat. And It Goes All Night,”

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

Washington Post, Sunday, March 13, 2005, P01; available at http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/articles/A27130-2005Mar11.html Suzette Parmley, “Taverns on the Sand: Beach Bars, Long Illegal, Are Hot in AC. Not All Are Toasting the Change,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Business section, June 12, 2005, E1, E4. US Airways Magazine, March 2006, 192. Suzette Parmley, “Facing New Competition, Gambling Towns See Condos in the Cards. Atlantic City: Half Dozen Luxury Condo Projects Are in the Works,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Business section, January 29, 2006, E1; Antoinette Martin, “Picturing New Condos in Atlantic City,” The New York Times, Real Estate section (NJ), August 21, 2005, 12. “In Wake of Casinos, Suburbs Mushroom,” Robert Strauss, New York Times, May 14, 2006, New Jersey section (Section 14), 1. David Barboza, “In Macao, Giant Pleasure Domes are Decreed,” New York Times, Travel section, September 11, 2005, 3. A new casino-building spree in Atlantic City has just been announced, including a $2-billion twin tower casino to be built by Revel Entertainment Group by 2010, another to be opened by Pinnacle Entertainment by 2012, and even larger plans for a $5-billion complex to be built by MGM Mirage (Parry, 2007).

References Aron, Cindy S., Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (NY: Oxford University Press, 1999). Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989 [Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967]). Botting, Fred and Scott Wilson (eds), The Bataille Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). Botting, Fred and Scott Wilson (eds), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). Crawford, Margaret, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). Davis, Mike, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990). Funnell, Charles E., By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City (New York: Knopf, 1975). Goldberger, Paul, “The Rise of the Private City,” in J. Vitullo Martin (ed.), Breaking Away: The Future of Cities (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1996). Goodman, Robert, The Luck Business: The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America’s Gambling Explosion (New York: Free Press, 1995). Goux, Jean-Joseph, “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism,” in F. Botting and S. Wilson (eds), Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 196–213. Hannigan, John, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London: Routledge, 1998). Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). Jacobson, Matthew F., Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998). Johnson, David, Temples of Chance (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Judd, Dennis and Susan Fainstein (eds), The Tourist City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Junemo, Mattias, “Let’s Build a Palm Island: Playfulness in Complex Times,” in M. Sheller and J. Urry (eds), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Kasson, John F., Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). Kunstler, James Howard, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made Landscape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). Nasaw, David, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic, 1993). Naylor, David, American Picture Palaces: The Architecture of Fantasy (New York: Prentice Hall, 1981).

 • Mimi Sheller Ortner, Sherry B., New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Parker, Robert E., “Las Vegas: Casino Gambling and Local Culture,” in D. Judd and S. Fainstein (eds), The Tourist City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 107–123. Parry, Wayne, “Atlantic City in 2012: A new world in gambling resort,” Associated Press, 10 November 2007. Available at http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/ny-bc-nj-atlantic city-futu1110nov10,0,1989233.story Plater-Syberk, Elizabeth and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: Northpoint, 2000). Pollack, Michael, Hostage to Fortune: Atlantic City and Casino Gambling (Princeton, NJ: Center for Analysis of Public Issues, 1987). Sheller, Mimi, “Natural Hedonism: The Invention of the Caribbean as Tropical Playground,” in David Duval (ed.), Tourism in the Caribbean: Trends, Developments, Prospects (London: Routledge, 2004), 23–38. Sheller, Mimi and Urry, John (eds), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Simon, Bryant, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Sorkin, Michael (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). Venturi, Robert, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). Zukin, Sharon, The Cultures of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).

CHAPTER

6

The Ruins of the Future On Urban Transience and Durability1 DAV I D B . C L A R K E

One can imagine entire cities put together not from the waste of what has already served a purpose and therefore retained some trace of its previous usage, but of things that were waste “from the outset” (as is already the case with generations of missiles, and with industrial plant and real estate), assured of never growing old or being revived in any memory—the phantoms of breakneck investment and even more rapid disinvestment. (Baudrillard, 1994: 79)

Introduction [T]he technical organization of consumption is only the first element of the general dissolution which has led the city to the point of consuming itself. (Debord, 1987: §174; original emphasis) Long before it became commonplace to view the city as possessed of some kind of Schumpeterian Unternehmergeist, Baudrillard (2001: 56), in a brief note originally published in 1967, remarked that the “ephemeral is without doubt the truth of the future habitat.” Despite compelling evidence of cities increasingly undertaking “Entrepreneurial measures narrated in entrepreneurial terms” (Jessop, 1998: 80), the frequently self-serving tendency to equate the most recent round of urban transformations with the actions of a new breed of self-styled “urban innovators” 127

 • David B. Clarke

(Center for Civic Innovation, 1999) neglects a far more fundamental transition in the metabolism of cities. Indeed, there is nothing to suggest that urban entrepreneurialism is not merely a symptom of a society dedicated to an increasingly ephemeral existence. For as Harvey (1989a: 105–106) suggests, it is not “the mythologized capacities of the entrepreneur,” but rather the fact that “Creative destruction is embedded within the circulation of capital” that propels the city towards a condition in which transience becomes, paradoxically, a permanent state of affairs. Consumption, which derives its ephemerality from its very nature, provides the model for the reduction of two counterposed logics to a single, synchronic logic. For although, as Baudrillard (2001: 56) notes, “the symbolic design of inhabiting is that of foundation and investment,” consumption succeeds in inhabiting the ephemeral. It is in terms of this accomplishment that we might begin to assess the full implications of consumption for the city. Consumption involves using up, wearing out, wasting away. It amounts to expending, exhausting, devouring, destroying, annulling, annihilating. Consumption implies, therefore, the very opposite of permanence and durability—the conversion of every durable into an ephemeral form. Yet some things are meant to endure. Formerly, for example, only in times of war, revolution, or disaster might the city have been consumed—by flood, fire, or tempest; by earthquake or volcanic eruption; by bombs, pestilence, plague, and suchlike apocalyptic visitations. Such extremes of circumstance aside, the city has always harboured intimations of immortality. In the perfection of its ideal image, the city is bathed in eternal light (Ovid’s urbs æterna). Idealized in its permanence, the city itself is an image of perfection (St. Augustine’s civitas Dei). Yet both consumption and the city are Janus-faced. Consumption, for instance, bears the ineluctable traces of its own diametric opposite: a sense of climactic completion or fulfilment, for which the term “consummation” is sometimes reserved. This duality is vital to the reproductive role played by consumption: “Where it appears to consume (destroy) products, consumption only consummates their utility. Consumption destroys objects as substance the better to perpetuate this substance as universal, abstract form—hence, the better to reproduce the value code” (Baudrillard, 1981: 135). Likewise with the city. Harvey (1989b: 6) cautions that “the objectified qualities of the urban are chronically unstable,” noting that we should avoid “falling victim to unnecessary reification” (seeing the city as a frozen form, that is, divorced from its fluid, processual aspect). Harvey’s choice of adjective nonetheless implies the inevitability of some degree of reification. It implies that any contemplation of the city involves the intellectual apprehension of certain permanences. Yet there is no hyperbole involved in insisting that change is the one constant of the

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city. Far from being marked by permanence, the city is pure transience itself. We never step into the same city twice. In Virilio’s (1986: 6) terms, “there is only habitable circulation.” But if this is the case, has not the city been consumed all along? If, as Debord (1987) maintains, consumption is the city’s destiny, it has not been its constant fate. It is only in the context of the consumer society that we encounter the city as itself an opportunity for consumption: the city as consumer object. Baudrillard (1998a: 193; original emphasis) suggests that “the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption.” It is only when this idea takes hold that we may properly speak of a consumer society. Far from representing an idealist conception, as Preteceille and Terrail (1985) impute, this is a matter of concrete abstraction. In Baudrillard’s words, “Our society thinks itself and speaks itself a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything it consumes itself as consumer society” (1998a: 193; original emphasis). This is why the city is vital to the consumer society, for as Lefebvre (1991: 404) maintains, concrete abstractions “have no real existence save in and through space.” Nonetheless, this is the upshot of a process that begins, as Debord (1987) intimates, with the technical organization of consumption. In former times, “Neither eating roots nor throwing feasts was given the name ‘consuming.’ Our age is the first in which current expenditure on food and ‘prestige’ expenditure have both been termed consumption by everyone concerned” (Baudrillard, 1998a: 194). The transition from a situation where each activity was merely what it was, to one where it represented a particular instance of consumption, initially relates to developments in political economy. “Only with the advent of mercantilism, devoted to the fiscal interests of the sovereign, does the Latin derivative ‘consumption’ begin to take on real meaning” (Wyrwa, 1998: 432). As is still the case today, the recognition of something as an opportunity for taxation aids enormously in the acknowledgment of its existence and the identification of its occurrence. Yet as Baudrillard also notes, “The historic emergence of the myth of consumption in the twentieth century is radically different from the emergence of the technical concept in economic thinking or science” (1998a: 194; original emphasis) As a concept first lent consistency by political economy, consumption achieves full coherence only to the extent that it gains acceptance as an entirely natural state of affairs. The naturalization of the culturally specific is, as Barthes (1973) made us aware, the particular accomplishment of myth. Thus, when Baudrillard insists on the mythological status of consumption, he is to be taken absolutely literally. It is not merely that consumption is something in which we have come to believe and to recognize as our own, something to which we feel we belong and cannot do without. Society as a whole has acquired a consumerist form by generating an abundance of opportunities for its mythology to proliferate.

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It is under such circumstances that the city assumes its consummate form: as the space necessary for the concrete abstraction of consumption to take hold.

La Ville consommé Premature burial is an axiom of consumerism. (Vaneigem, 2001: 113) Lévi-Strauss (1963: 210) defined myth as the very opposite of poetry: “Poetry . . . cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortion; whereas the mythical value of the myth is preserved even through the worst translation.” Mythology positively benefits from the variation that accompanies its profusion—in Barthes’s (1973: 163) incisive phrase, “myth ripens because it spreads”—such that even strictly opposed forms may reinforce the same myth. For example, the entire mythology of consumption is crystallized in the idealized relation between needs and use-values, which Baudrillard (1981: 63) parodically intones as a litany—“We believe in ‘Consumption’: we believe in a real subject, motivated by needs and confronted by real objects as sources of satisfaction.” These terms retain their hallowed form even in critical discourse. Thus “Marxist analysis has contributed to the mythology (a veritable rationalist mystique) that allows the relation of the individual to objects conceived as use-values to pass for a concrete and objective—in sum, ‘natural’—relation between man’s needs and the function proper to the object” (Baudrillard, 1981: 134). As Baudrillard subsequently proposes, “Like every great myth worth its salt, the myth of “Consumption” has its discourse and its anti-discourse . . . Only the two sides taken together constitute the myth” (1998a: 195; original emphasis). This structural circularity defends against the undermining of the myth by actively incorporating its own antithesis. “In exhibiting its contradictions as the token of its truth, this universe of discourse closes itself against any other discourse which is not on its own terms” (Marcuse, 1964: 90). In other words, the mythology of consumption is founded on a purely tautological pronouncement, devised to resolve a relationship between two terms that are already defined in relation to one another. “In fact, the operation amounts to defining the subject by means of the object and the object in terms of the subject. It is a gigantic tautology of which the concept of need is the consecration” (Baudrillard, 1981: 71). Beyond their ability to complete each other, neither the self-identity of a subject endowed with needs, nor the intrinsic finality of an object replete with use-values, offers the slightest means for understanding consumption. “Every time the meaning of a discussion depends on the fundamental value of the word useful, it is possi-

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ble to affirm that the debate is necessarily warped and that the fundamental question is eluded” (Bataille, 1985a: 116; original emphasis). When Veblen (1994: 55) matter-of-factly recorded that “Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the city than in the country,” it was already apparent that needs flourish in the wake of urbanization, and hence that needs are a means to an end, and not, as they purport to be, an end in themselves. “When the whole social world becomes urbanized . . . ‘needs’ grow exponentially—not from the growth of appetite but from competition” (Baudrillard, 1998a: 65; original emphasis). If urbanization generates a limitless profusion of needs, this merely succeeds in the expansion of production, not in the expansion of satisfaction. Likewise, although the qualities of use-value are typically misrecognized as the natural properties of objects, insofar as capitalism is geared to the reproduction of value, it “abstracts from, or absents, the entire substance of use value” in the sphere of exchange (Arthur, 2001: 32). To the extent that “what has become absent . . . leaves not simply ‘nothing,’ but a ‘determinate nothing’ structured by the process that brought it about,” then “value is constituted in the exchange process by a determinate negation of use value.” At the point of exchange, and for the purposes of exchange, what is thought of as use-value ceases to be. Or, as Baudrillard prefers to put it, use-value is always already the alibi of exchange-value. As every committed shopper knows, the real use-value of consumer goods lies in the joy of purchasing them. This much is revealed by Marcovaldo, the poverty-stricken, eponymous anti-hero of Calvino’s (2001: 86) novel, as he experiences the heartbreak of wheeling an empty shopping trolley through a crowded supermarket, mimicking the activities of the throng of happy consumers: “He wanted only to experience the pleasure of pushing it around for ten minutes, displaying his purchases like everyone else.” Yet the ordinary, grassroots consumer, as Baudrillard (1998a: 195) proposes, manages to “escape the trap of reifying objects and consumption” into which those of a critical disposition fall (only to succeed in the further elaboration of the myth of consumption). The “practice of the masses very quickly had nothing (or perhaps never had anything) to do with needs,” contends Baudrillard (1983: 45). “They have turned consumption into a dimension of status and prestige . . . which surpassed use value in every way.” This fatal strategy targets the weak point of the system of consumption. Just as working to rule and rigidly sticking to the letter of the law are procedures generally guaranteed to generate chaos, consuming to rule— such as responding literally to the exhortations of advertising messages, like the protagonist of one of Litt’s (1996) Adventures in Capitalism—has a more radical capacity than either “anticonsumerist” action or the kind of “critical discourse” that merely closes the tautological consumerist circle. A “system

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is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization,” says Baudrillard (1983: 46). Hence the fatal strategy of the silent majority: “You want us to consume—OK, let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose.” Instead of strengthening the defence mechanisms of the system, inoculating it against a truly devastating critique, it might be driven, instead, to overperform—to the point where a kind of liminal reversibility takes place. Something after this fashion is suggested by one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Leonia, which invites close comparison to our contemporary urban condition. As its inhabitants indulge in a constant orgy of consumption, Calvino (1974: 114) remarks, one begins “to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.” Are things discarded because their use-value has been exhausted, or is it “today’s novelty that makes yesterday’s novelty obsolete and destined for the rubbish heap” (Bauman, 2004: 4)? “Are things thrown away because of their ugliness, or are they ugly because they have been earmarked for the tip?” (ibid., 2004: 3). Like characters in a cartoon caper, who relentlessly chase each other round in circles, repeatedly swapping (and ultimately losing) their identities as “pursuer” and “pursued,” such questions lose their meaning in the vertiginous cycle of repetition. One may say that they achieve their ecstatic state (from ek-stasis—to put out of place). “Ecstasy is the quality proper to any body that spins until all sense is lost, and then shines forth in its pure and empty form,” says Baudrillard (1990a: 9). Even so, as old things are abandoned in favor of the new, as “the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades” (Calvino, 1974: 115). Like Benjamin’s (1968) Angel of History, the citizens of Leonia discover that, “rather than preserving what they claim to love and desire, they only manage to make the rubbish permanent” (Bauman, 2004: 3). This tough, resilient residue is generated just as efficiently as any other of society’s products, if not more so. Against the fleeting attractions of consumption, therefore, the city records the rising tide of the waste produced in the process. Dubbed “junkspace” by Koolhaas (2001), this residue is subject to a virulent process of proliferation and potentialization (Steigerung).

Junk City or “the Everted Sphere of the Future”2 History has only wrenched itself from cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable. (Baudrillard, 1994: 27)

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Junkspace “means no more than perpetual renovation . . . perpetual recycling,” says Jameson (2003: 74), citing Koolhaas (2001) to this effect: “Restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, return . . . redo, respect, rent: verbs that start with re- produce Junkspace.” One could just as easily cite Tschumi (1994: 225): “dis-integrated, dis-located, dis-juncted, deconstructed, dismantled, disassociated, discontinuous, deregulated . . . de-, dis- . . . These are the prefixes of today.” Insofar as junkspace amounts to a kind of ecstatic space, there is no longer any meaningful gap between the de- and the re-, no interval capable of conferring on either prefix a stable identity. In fact, junkspace generalizes (but hence also neutralizes) that formerly covert category once reserved for false durables—for objects that retroactively confirm a transience they had previously denied. Fashion, fame, built-in obsolescence, and so on exemplify this trajectory perfectly. In a self-defining mo(ve)ment, “false durables are transferred into the realm of rubbish, that ‘third’ and culturally illegitimate category, which social pretence, having been trained to avert its eyes and studiously ‘unnotice,’ treats as non-existing” (Bauman, 1992a: 87). Yet this “non-existence” has become far too prevalent to go unnoticed any more; or perhaps our trained incapacity to take note has now ceased to operate. For Douglas (1970), the existence of dirt, waste, rubbish, or trash was a sure fire sign of an ordering system: for dirt is a form, not a substance. It is, in Lord Chesterfield’s famous dictum, “matter in the wrong place.” Yet “not everything in the wrong place is rubbish . . . The Old Master in the junk shop window may be out of place but it is certainly not rubbish,” writes Thompson (1979: 117). The boundary between true and false durables has always been permeable; the distinction between the timeless classic and what belongs on the waste tip is subject to sudden and unpredictable reversibility. Yet the emergence of junkspace signals that this boundary has been effectively breached, allowing the previously hidden qualities of rubbish to come to the fore. While rubbish may be thought of as a form, divorced from any particular content, it actually delivers us into the realm of the formless (Bataille, 1985b). As Hollier (1995: 143–144) puts it, on Bataille’s behalf, the formless “declassifies (déclasse), getting things out of order, depriving them of their proper status.” This quality, proper to junkspace, leads us away from an inevitably transient sense of permanence, towards a permanent state of transience, in which all things are deprived of their proper status. It was, perhaps, fashion that first opened the floodgates or set the tone. “Fashion is the name of transient durability,” Bauman (1992a: 85) proposes. “Fashion is powerful and overwhelming because it sports the trappings of durability—a well-nigh apodeictic ‘naturality,’ universality, acknowledged authority to exclude—while it lasts.” Rather than harboring the means of its own reproduction, however, fashion succeeds in constantly engineering

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its own disappearance. It nonetheless persists in (or through) that very discontinuity. “Fashion remains outside history,” as Barthes (1990: 296) puts it. Certainly, fashions come and go. “Every growth of a fashion drives it to its doom, because it thereby cancels out its distinctiveness,” Simmel (1997: 192) notes, identifying the mechanism responsible. Yet fashion endures because, not in spite of, the fact that it is forever condemned to mutate into something else (“white is the new black”), to ceaselessly change its spots (or stripes), etc. This logic, which once applied to a limited number of consumer objects, has become generalized to virtually every sphere. What was once the exception has become the rule. Reversing the old adage—“some (exceptional) things never die, they simply fade away”—it is increasingly the case that “all things must fade away, but nothing ever dies.” In terms of the exegesis offered by Baudrillard (1990b: 92), “what dies is annihilated in linear time, but what disappears . . . becomes an event in a cycle which may bring it back many times.” What dies is gone for good, having passed the point of no return. Its bid for immortality has been dashed, the permanence it hoped for proven transient. What disappears, however, has every chance of reappearing. Its disappearance gives us no reason to suspect that it has gone for good; it is far more likely simply to have fallen out of fashion. As Baudrillard (1993: 4) remarks, “Nothing (not even God) now disappears by coming to an end, by dying. Instead, things disappear through proliferation or contamination, by becoming saturated or transparent, because of extenuation or extermination . . . Rather than a mortal mode of disappearance, then, a fractal mode of dispersal.” “One can only arrive at a clear conception of immortality in a stable, unchanging universe,” writes Baudrillard (1994: 91). Likewise with mortality, for in a stable universe, being is a transient and, ultimately, revocable state; while ceasing to be is an event marked by its permanence and irrevocability. In a universe marked not by the finality of death, but by disappearance, it is ceasing to be that becomes a transient, revocable condition, while being has finally assumed the permanence it always prayed for. Although its bid for immortality has proved successful, however, the taste of victory is sour. For in an unstable universe, immortality loses the meaning it once had. In a world dominated by transient durability—the world dictated by the logic of fashion, the cult of celebrity, the imperatives of inbuilt obsolescence—only transience endures. As Bauman (1992a: 164) puts it, “Immortality is here—but not here to stay.” This is a truly paradoxical situation. The task that now remains is to attempt to understand its implications. For as Auster (1987: 21–22) notes, “Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself, even as it remains.”

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Urbs Fracta: The City after History Consumption . . . presents itself as the opening of a new era—the final era of achieved Utopia and the end of history. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 203) “History’s domain,” as Debord (1990: 15) astutely observed, “was the memorable, the totality of events whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. . . . In this history was the measure of genuine novelty. It is in the interests of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it.” History’s vanishing act was a remarkably simple trick for the purveyors of novelty to pull off. It was merely a matter of ensuring the kind of retrospective downgrading of prior expectations to which modern life has accustomed us only too well, of cultivating that form of resigned acquiescence to which the consumer market routinely attunes us, as a means of guaranteeing its own continuity. The pattern is a familiar and well-established one: “new, improved” goods ensure the disappearance of the old goods, and “together with ‘old’ goods disappears the memory of their unfulfilled expectations” (Bauman, 1987: 165). The project of modernity, of course, was meant to deliver us to the Promised Land; not in the next life but in this one; to build Utopia from the ground up. Modernity thus sought “legitimacy not in an original founding act but in a future to be accomplished” (Lyotard, 1992: 29). This future orientation necessarily ensured that today was always a pale and inadequate imitation of the bright new tomorrow that lay in store. If, however, the project of modernity is no more, if our belief in the future is no longer what it used to be, then as Lyotard (1992: 30) maintains, it “has not been forsaken or forgotten, but destroyed, ‘liquidated.’” Liquidation, as Lyotard spells out, is a “means of destroying the project of modernity while giving the impression of completing it.” “Indeed, we may say, ‘creating the impression of its fulfilment’ is the destruction of the modern project,” as Bauman (1992a: 164) suggests. Or, in a further emendation, one may say that it amounts to the deconstruction of the modern project. In Bauman’s words once more, “in the society that emerged at the far end of the modern era . . . the majestic yet distant immortal bliss . . . is being deconstructed” into a constant stream of smaller, less “distant,” less “lofty” satisfactions, “so that in the ecstasy of enjoyment the likeness of the ultimate perfection may dissolve and vanish from view.” In other words: this is as good as it gets. As a cacophony of advertising messages ceaselessly conspire to convince us, one can hope for nothing better when the “best ever” is already available on the supermarket shelves. As an army of lifestyle gurus repeatedly attempt to reassure us, one cannot hope for anything more, when things are as good as

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one could ever hope them to be. “But is this really what an achieved utopia looks like? . . . Yes indeed! . . . There is no other” (Baudrillard, 1988: 98). “Spectacular democracy approaches matters with great subtlety,” says Debord (1990: 34). “It can keep the original name for something secretly changed (beer, beef or philosophers). And it can just as easily change the name when the thing itself has been secretly maintained.” Creating the impression of an achieved utopia was merely a matter of declaring that the future had arrived; of announcing that the “tomorrow” that modernity had always dreamed of was finally here. Or, rather, that the bliss [the] future once promised—liberty, democracy, equality, wealth, security and what not—has (barring minor corrections still to be made, soon) arrived. No more history. No more unresolved conflicts of value. No more alternatives to what is. Tomorrow will not be distinct from today; at best (and one means best) it will bring more of the same. (Bauman, 1992a: 164) This is why Debord (1990: 11, 23) should choose to characterize “The society whose modernization has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle” in terms of, amongst other things, “an eternal present.” Similarly, coining the term “imagology” to refer to a consumerist counterpart of ideology— thereby seeking to underscore the fact that the “end of history” equates to the “end of ideology”—Kundera (1984: 129) suggests that, whereas ideology attempted to steer the course of history in one particular direction or other, in relation to a particular political orientation, “The wheels of imagology turn without having any effect on history.” The notion of “imagology” is apt, for as Kundera goes on to say, the word change “no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel, or Marx)” but, rather, “a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season”; original emphases). History, in other words, has been given over to the diktats of fashion. By the same token, the end point of history has preserved its name, but changed its meaning. Our achieved utopia may possess precious few of the properties of the utopia we once imagined—but that is because we now find ourselves in the fortunate position of no longer having to rely on the notoriously unreliable and ethereal properties of dreams to appreciate what a real utopia actually looks like. As Harvey (2000: 156) observes, The figures of “the city” and of “Utopia” have long been intertwined. . . . The Judeo-Christian tradition defined paradise as a distinctive

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place where all good souls would go after their trials and tribulations in the temporal world. All manner of metaphors followed from this; of the heavenly city, the city of God, the eternal city, and so on. If one wanted an ideal image of today’s city, therefore, one could do no better than to consider Baudrillard’s (1998b: 6) formulation of our achieved utopia: “From this point on, the problem in hand is not one of changing how life is lived, which was the maximal utopia, but one of survival, which is a kind of minimal utopia.” For all its consumerist trappings, for all its glitz and glamour, the contemporary city has become a kind of survival ground: Everyday life has begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced upon those exposed to extreme adversity. Selective apathy, emotional disengagement from others, renunciation of the past and of the future, a determination to live one day at a time—these techniques of emotional self-management, necessarily carried to extremes under extreme conditions, in more moderate form have come to shape the lives of ordinary people under the ordinary conditions of a bureaucratic society widely perceived as a far-flung system of total control. (Lasch, 1984: 57–58) As paradoxical as it may seem, consumerism represents the ultimate expression of survival—under postmodern conditions; for as Bauman (1992b: 31) suggests, “the condition of survival postmodern-style is refusal of solidarity.” A society that has privatized success, and in the same breath rendered discontent immune to collectivization, ensures that it is in no one’s interests to leave the game. In a system of strict indeterminacy, the best that one can do is to play one’s cards right—while taking succor from the knowledge that failure today does not preclude the possibility of success tomorrow. The upshot is that “our social logic . . . condemns us to luxurious and spectacular penury” (Baudrillard, 1998a: 68). Indeed, one could hardly explain the spectacular growth of consumerism were it not for its capacity to contradict in practice what it pronounces in its rhetoric. For if satisfaction really could be guaranteed, the system would have long since ground to a halt. As Debord puts it, “if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation” (1987: §44; original emphasis). The consumerist city thus fulfills the city’s long-established role as the prime locus of the contradictions of society at large. “Enriched privation” and “luxurious penury”

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are contradictions peculiar to the consumer society, made manifest as nowhere else in the city.

Instant Cities [T]he present is undefined and indefinite, the future has no reality except as present hope, and the past has no reality except as present recollection. (Borges, 1999: 74) It is sometimes imagined that our incapacity either to recall or to anticipate any alternative to our present predicament accounts for its persistence. While this is a somewhat limited hypothesis, it has the merit of highlighting the ways in which an eternally recurrent present profoundly disturbs the question of memory. There is, undoubtedly, an element of truth in the idea that ours is a society that struggles to remember, an amnesiac society, prone to forgetfulness. “When the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it is as if it did not exist,” says Debord (1990: 20). Worldhistorical events are increasingly condemned to disappear along with the media headlines; to be instantaneously consigned to the “charnel-house of images” (Baudrillard, 1994: 79). Without the time to come to terms with the past, there is little chance for memory. Yet the relentless pace at which events appear and disappear might as easily be interpreted as a sign of a society “obsessed by the desire to forget” (Kundera, 1996: 115). It is to fulfill such a desire, Kundera suggests, that our society “gives itself over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself, sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny, trembling flame of memory.” Keeping on the move, to invoke a different metaphor, has become our means of escaping the past—even if there is no particular destination towards which we are heading. However, having stepped out of history, our society also sometimes seems to be in the grip of an intense nostalgia for a lost future. Exhibiting a profound, melancholic yearning for a possibility that once was, but is no more, it struggles in vain to keep that memory alive. In another sense again, our society perhaps remembers too easily as well. “Media/police rumours acquire instantly—or at worst after three or four repetitions—the indisputable status of age-old historical evidence,” writes Debord (1990: 55). Such intense confusion over whether our society struggles—or, alternatively, desires—to remember— or, alternatively, to forget—and the sense in which the accelerated pace of society is either a symptom or a cause of such characteristics, is ramified still further—or, perhaps, accounted for—by the delegation of memory to technology.

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Whereas the city was once a palimpsest, bearing witness to its previous form in the lingering traces of its past, the advent of CCTV surveillance cameras, constantly recording the city in real time, functions as a kind of “hypertelic memory which stores all data in a constant state of instant retrievability, excluding any work of mourning, any resolution of the past” (Baudrillard, 1994: 73). There is no need for any resolution of the past when it can be replayed, instantaneously, at the touch of a button. “Paradoxically, by dint of this zealous effort forcibly to bring back into the present what we no longer even remember, we live in a world which is both without memory and without forgetting” (ibid.). If this technological capacity for total recall ensures that we are neither permitted to forget nor, therefore, afforded any opportunity to remember, this situation nonetheless presents itself as a further opportunity for consumption. Indeed, the tendency to ensure a place for the past, catering, in the absence of living memory, for all manner of “memory consumers”—to borrow Huyssen’s (2003: 19) apt phrase—is more than evident in the penchant the entrepreneurial city displays for including heritage-themed parks and centers amongst the array of up-to-the-minute visitor attractions it is obliged to possess. This appropriation of the past mirrors, as well as being designed to facilitate, the incorporation of other places within the entrepreneurial city, most evident in the heightened significance being afforded to “urban gateways” linking the city to other parts of the world. The increasing global connectivity of certain areas seems to be directly proportional to their detachment from proximate neighborhoods, such that contiguity is no guarantee of social interaction, and certainly offers no assurance of sharing in the wealth created by the city’s entrepreneurial turn. This extreme fragmentation of urban space entails that the form of the contemporary city is fast becoming something like a hypocenter or ground zero. Lefebvre (1996: 170) long ago alerted us to this “double character of the capitalist city: place of consumption and consumption of place.”

Conclusions [H]istory is taking a fantastic step backwards by building the ruins of the future. (Baudrillard, 1994: 79) Redundant spaces in capitalist towns and cities once spelt an absence of activity, particularly productive activity. Abandoned areas lay poignantly dormant, patiently biding their time, waiting to disappear. “It takes a long time for a world to vanish,” writes Auster (1987: 28–9), “much longer than you would think.” Sometimes, redundancy signaled peripheralization or

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marginalization, the consequences of rampant development and speculative investment activity elsewhere. “Building a motorway, a hypermarket or a metropolis automatically means transforming all that surrounds it into a desert,” says Baudrillard (1994: 78). Today, however, spaces are being created that are destined to be redundant from the outset, the deliberate outcome of a carnivorous urban appetite, born of a ceaseless rivalry between cities. “We build huge office spaces which are intended to remain eternally empty (the spaces, like the people, are ‘laid off ’). We put up buildings that are still-born, remnants which will never have been anything but remnants” (Baudrillard, 1994: 79). The situation perfectly encapsulates the effects of consumption upon the city. The consumer society, says Bauman (2005: 9), “casts the world and all its animate and inanimate fragments as objects of consumption: that is, objects that lose their usefulness (and so their lustre, attraction, seductive power and worth) in the course of being used.” Once used, consumer objects are designed to be discarded. Waste is the inevitable consequence of any act of consumption. Yet this residue possesses a previously unimagined durability: The perception of the order of things in present-day consumer society is a direct reversal of the perception characteristic of the now bygone society of producers. Then, it was the useful part, drawn from properly processed raw material, that was meant to be solid and lasting, while it was the redundant leftovers and rejects that were destined for instant disposal and oblivion. Now, it is the turn of the useful part to be short lived, volatile, and ephemeral, to clear the stage for the next generation of useful products. Only the waste tends to be (alas) solid and durable. ‘Solidity’ is now a synonym for ‘waste.’ (Bauman, 2005: 89) It is unsurprising that the urban environment should have taken on these characteristics. Global construction companies, bidding for major urban building contracts, are increasingly invited to tender for a total package, which includes, in addition to the construction project, the contract for the demolition of the development when the time comes around. We may expect that time to come around with increasing rapidity, and the lifespan of our most recent buildings to grow ever shorter. As the frantic cycle approaches its ecstatic climax, we may be confident that, one day soon, our cities will be demolished before they are even built. But this scenario is nowhere near fanciful enough. All those empty spaces spawned by entrepreneurial ambition and destined to remain redundant, whose residual status was permanently assured from the start—and to mundane examples,

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like office blocks, we may add such spectacular cases as the Millennium Dome—reveal that their consumption-potential was entirely exhausted in the process of their construction. Indeed, their solidity within the urban landscape is a perfect measure of their preprogrammed status as waste.

Notes 1. 2.

I am grateful to Anne Cronin, Kevin Hetherington, and Marcus Doel for comments on a previous version of this chapter. Barthelme (1996: 103).

References Arthur, Christopher J., “The Spectral Ontology of Value,” Radical Philosophy, 107 (2001), 32–42. Auster, Paul, In the Country of Last Things (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). Barthelme, Donald, Snow White (New York: Scribner, 1996). Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973). Barthes, Roland, The Fashion System, trans. M. Ward and R. Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Bataille, Georges, “The notion of expenditure,” in A. Stoekl (ed.), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985a), 116–129. Bataille, Georges, “Formless,” in A. Stoekl (ed.), Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985b), 31. Baudrillard, Jean, For a Critique of Political Economy of the Sign, trans. C. Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981). Baudrillard, Jean, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities; Or, the End of the Social and Other Essays, trans. P. Foss, J. Johnston, and P. Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Baudrillard, Jean, America, trans. C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988). Baudrillard, Jean, Fatal Strategies, trans. P. Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski; ed. J. Fleming (London: Pluto Press, 1990a). Baudrillard, Jean, Cool Memories, trans. C. Turner (London: Macmillan, 1990b). Baudrillard, Jean, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. J. Benedict (London: Verso, 1993). Baudrillard, Jean, The Illusion of the End, trans. C. Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). Baudrillard, Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. C. Turner (London: Sage, 1998a). Baudrillard, Jean, “The End of the Millennium or the Countdown,” Theory, Culture and Society, 15 (1998b), 1–9. Baudrillard, Jean, “Ephemeral and Durable,” in The Uncollected Baudrillard, ed. G. Genosko (London: Sage, 2001). Bauman, Zygmunt, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity, and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). Bauman, Zygmunt, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992a). Bauman, Zygmunt, “Survival as a Social Construct,” in M. Featherstone (ed.), Cultural Theory and Cultural Change (London: Sage, 1992b). Bauman, Zygmunt, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2005). Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn (London: Schocken, 1968). Borges, Jorge Luis, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Collected Fictions, trans. A. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver (London: Harcourt Brace, 1974). Calvino, Italo, Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City, trans. W. Weaver (London: Vintage, 2001).

 • David B. Clarke Center for Civic Innovation, The Entrepreneurial City: A How-to Handbook for Urban Innovators (New York: Manhattan Institute for Public Policy, 1999). Debord, Guy, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1987). Debord, Guy, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. M. Imrie (London: Verso, 1990). Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989a). Harvey, David, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler, 71B (1989b), 3–17. Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Hollier, Dennis, “The Use-Value of the Impossible,” in C. B. Gill (ed.), Bataille: Writing the Sacred (London: Routledge, 1995). Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Jameson, Frederic, “Future City,” New Left Review, 21 (2003), 65–79. Jessop, Bob, “The Narrative of Enterprise and the Enterprise of Narrative: Place Marketing and the Entrepreneurial City,” in T. Hall and P. Hubbard (eds), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regimes and Representations (Chichester: John Wiley, 1998). Koolhaas, Rem, “Junkspace,” in C. J. Chung, J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, and S. T. Leong (eds), Guide to Shopping, Harvard Design School Project on the City 2 (Cologne: Taschen, 2001). Kundera, Milan, Immortality, trans. P. Kussi (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). Kundera, Milan, Slowness, trans. L. Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Lasch, Christopher, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (London: Picador, 1984). Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Lefebvre, Henri, Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). Litt, Toby, Adventures in Capitalism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1996). Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–1985, trans. J. Pefanis and M. Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992). Marcuse, Herbert, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Capitalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). Preteceille, Edmond and Jean-Paul Terrail, Capitalism, Consumption and Needs, trans. S. Matthews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). Simmel, Georg, “The Philosophy of Fashion,” in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (eds), Simmel on Culture (London: Sage, 1997). Thompson, Michael, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Vaneigem, Raoul, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (London: Rebel Press, 2001). Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (New York: Dover, 1994). Virilio, Paul, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. M. Polizotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). Wyrwa, Ulrich, “Consumption and Consumer Society: A Contribution to the History of Ideas,” in S. Strasser, C. McGovern, and M. Judt (eds), Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

CHAPTER

7

Just Another Coffee! Milking the Barcelona Model, Marketing a Global Image, and the Resistance of Local Identities A N TON I O LU NA G A RC IA

In the age of global flows and mass consumption, cities have gradually become just another commodity for global tourists and visitors. As a consequence, cities have started to find ways to produce an attractive “corporate urban image” that can be easily identified and consumed by all sorts of visitors. Barcelona is one of the best examples by which an old postindustrial European city has reinvented itself to become a successful global destination for visitors of all kinds. In this chapter I will review the ways in which the city of Barcelona has been transformed and adapted to its new role in this context and the use of particular images to promote a well-defined concept of what the city was and wants to be. The so-called Barcelona Model has been used both as an example of successful urban regeneration and planning and as a model of the banalization of urban landscapes (Degen, 2003; Delgado, 2004; Muñoz, 2004; Capel, 2005). In the case of Barcelona the creation of this image involves a very powerful ideological apparatus that challenges in part the symbolic economies of the Spanish state and develops a distinctive Catalan nationalist discourse that denies the similarities with the rest of Spain and promotes a very interesting mix of local and traditional symbols with a discourse of cosmopolitanism and modernity. Eventually these ideological discourses have been able to transform the urban landscape in Barcelona. During the last 25 years, museums, street events, and public spaces have 143

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been designed in the city to emphasize Catalan heritage and identity. At the same time, Barcelona’s decision-makers have been very keen in adapting the city infrastructures to a new role as an international destination for all kinds of visitors from professional meetings to urban tourists. In the end, even commercial brands have benefited from this powerful symbolic economy of tradition and modernity, using similar ideological discourses to market their products. In this chapter I will present the relationship between government and commercial strategies in the context of the entrepreneurial city. This study suggests how the flow of ideas and strategies moves from the world of marketing to the world of urban governance and back again in a city like Barcelona. Recent urban analysis has stressed the importance of culture and cultural production in the postmodern city at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For Zukin (1995), culture is the business of cities and their main competitive edge. The creation of particular symbolic economies by urban elites allows processes of urban regeneration and gentrification that could not be easily understood without the support of the ideological strength of cultural discourses. Degen (2003) stresses this relationship between power and culture in the city in what she calls the “sensuous framing of power,” in which cultural practices and artifacts are interrelated, reinforcing each other in a specific urban location. Moreover, as McNeill and Tewdwr-Jones (2003) point out, urban elites might influence also the design of urban projects in the development of new national narratives at different territorial scales. In a moment in which the sovereignty of the nation-states has been challenged by new supranational organizations like the EU, new national narratives are on the rise, creating new symbolic economies. The example of Barcelona can shed new light on this debate on the relationship between the sphere of consumption and that of urban design and power relations. Certain commodified cultural signs that promote ideas such as cosmopolitanism, European-ness, tradition, or modernity, have also become commercial brands and vice versa. In particular, I will show how the city adopted in the late 1980s the corporate image concepts developed by one of the local financial institutions and would eventually organize urban promotion on very similar lines. On the other hand, in some cases the construction of a particular symbolic economy was also adopted to market particular products and services. In the second part of this chapter, I analyze the ways coffee shops in Barcelona have adopted a corporate image and ambiance that reinforce the city symbolic economy already reproduced in certain monuments and museums. In this chapter we will see how these elements, discourses of the city or the nation, are also part of the commercial strategies used to seduce local customers and how the role of local and regional politicians is sometimes

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similar to that of marketing managers in multinational corporations. I would like first to outline the elements that form the new image of Barcelona and then analyze their effects in the urban landscape and in marketing practices. I use the example of the dispersed coffee shop phenomenon and analyze the ways in which a commercial strategy and the city discourse merge in a city like Barcelona.

The Postmodern Image of the City in Spain: Cultural Industries and Symbolic Economies Symbolic economies are to postmodern urban analysis what political economy was to modern, industrial urban theory, putting signs in place of goods, but draining that analysis of a critical, socially engaged edge. (Miles and Miles, 2004: 54) Cities compete today to improve their position in the ranking of global urban centers (Sassen, 1991; Castells, 1996). The political and economic environment has always been a key element in urban development and growth. In some moments in history, policy-makers have also articulated a powerful discourse describing the symbolic role of a city in a particular ideological construction. This is a two-fold process. While a common local identity is created and reinforced by this symbolic economy, it also projects a differentiated image that positions itself in relation to the global market of cities and tourist destinations. This is obviously an old process, and there are innumerable examples of it in history (Lynch, 1964; Mumford, 1961; Hall, 1988, 1998) and also of its connections with the production of culture (Williams, 1973; Zukin, 1995). At present, the global forces of communication and consumption have, in particular, transformed this identity-building process. Cities are promoting themselves by transforming local monuments into symbols that create a concrete image of tradition, modernity, economic strength, or political powers that local visitors can then codify and buy as souvenirs and T-shirts. In some cases when those emblematic symbols of the city are not in good shape, local or national governments have refurbished or reinvented them to present an appropriate image of what those monuments mean to the nation or the city. This process was especially important during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. The birth of the modern nation-state favored the creation of symbolic places and monuments, and even the design of completely new cities that became important ideological tools for the construction of national identities. New sets of monumental elements like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, or the Houses of Parliament

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in London, or in some cases the transformation of old colonial spaces like the Plaza del Zocalo in Mexico City, are examples of this process. In some cases the creation of symbolic spaces favored the making of new cities such as Washington, DC, Ankara, or Brasilia to express a new political and territorial order. These ideological discourses embedded in the urban fabric are obviously related to the same political and economic forces that shape the rest of the elements that form the modern city; however, in contrast to roads, railway stations, and other types of urban infrastructure the ideological discourse attached to cities can resist and survive across different political regimens and economic cycles and become a powerful tool for local identities in resistance to global homogenization. By the end of the twentieth century, the increase in communication and information technologies had shaped a new world order, and nation-states were no longer at the center of political and economic decisions. New symbols have been raised in those cities that are becoming global metropolises (McNeill, 2005). For example, major urban centers today are shaping their landscape with the best examples of modern architecture. The Petrona Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Arc de la Défense in Paris, the Canary Wharf buildings in London, the Shanghai Tower, or the Bank of China building in Hong Kong have become not only new landmarks for those cities but also symbols of the globalization era. Architects like Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, or Santiago Calatrava, amongst others, are nowadays considered “gurus” of modern architecture, and any city that wants to have a “global image” must aspire to have an example of any of these reputed architects’ work. This process has been reproduced everywhere, even in middle-size cities, they try to have new landmarks that will place them on the map of world travelers sometimes without paying much attention to local needs. One of the best examples of this process is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Canadian architect Frank Gehry. The local and regional government of Bilbao and the Basque region in Spain wanted in the 1980s to regenerate the old industrial river banks in Bilbao and at the same time reverse the negative image of the town that was then famous for its pollution and its old steel mills. At the same time local officials and politicians wanted to add a new image of modernity to Bilbao and the Basque country to challenge the image of traditional inner-looking conservative society characterized by a very strong nationalist sentiment and stigmatized by decades of terrorism by the ETA separatist group. The new museum was part of a huge project to remodel the downtown area in Bilbao, with the regeneration of the riverbanks, a new subway system designed by British architect Norman Foster, and a new airport terminal designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, among other less emblematic projects of

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urban renewal. However, the Guggenheim has become a powerful icon not only for the city of Bilbao but also for all the Basques. In Spain in fact this process of creation of a new image for old cities has spread out all over the country over the last 20 or 30 years; cities like Madrid, Seville, and Valencia have experienced similar processes of urban renewal and regeneration (Luna-Garcia, 2003) and have moved away from the image of decadence and underdevelopment created during the dark years of the Franco dictatorship. In fact, this process was also very important at all levels of government in the Spanish context in the 1980s. The International Expo in Seville and the Olympic Games, although based in cities, were important strategies of the new regional governments of Catalonia and Andalusia and also for the Spanish government which wanted to improve its international image after entering the EU in 1986. Today, cities in Spain and elsewhere are promoting particular elements of their built heritage, or their urban landscape, as powerful symbols of the community. By doing so, cities are introducing a very clear ideological discourse placing the city in a concrete space of brands and marketing strategies, linking in some cases these new symbols with local cultural and historical traditions or breaking apart from them to show a particular image of modernity and efficiency. This broad cultural point of view of talking about cities is what certain theorists have called the after-image of the city (Resina, 2003). In certain cases tradition and modernity are combined successfully, as in Barcelona, to promote a very recognizable international image.

Marketing the Nation: The Creation of Symbolic Economies in Barcelona Barcelona has transformed its image over the last three decades since the end of the dictatorship in Spain in 1975. The construction of this image was intended to reinforce local and regional identities of the Catalans, after years of prohibition of any sign of regional identity, and also to gain a place in the world economy after the global transformations experienced during the 1970s. Barcelona is the capital, and most important city, of Catalonia, a region in Spain with its own language and a distinctive history and tradition. Barcelona was also the first Spanish city to experience the industrial revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the wealthy bourgeoisie transformed the whole city with beautiful examples of “Modernista” architecture, the Catalan version of art nouveau. Part of the wealth that allowed the industrial revolution in Barcelona and Catalonia came from trade with Spanish colonies, especially Cuba and Puerto Rico. The first industrialists were indianos, the popular

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name given to those Spaniards who had been in America and came back to invest their accumulated colonial wealth in Barcelona’s booming manufacturing industry. The indianos’ families became the sponsors of many of the Modernista architects and artists like Antoni Gaudí at the turn of the twentieth century. The capital accumulated in sugar cane plantations and also in the slave trade allowed the city of Barcelona to grow and expand economically and socially. At the same time that Barcelona was experiencing an economic outburst, a certain revival of the Catalan language and culture started to develop. The recovery of medieval festivals like the “Jocs Florals” and the recuperation of old traditions favored the rise of a Catalan cultural revival movement called Renaixença or the Catalan renaissance. Eventually, by the end of the nineteenth century, what started as merely a cultural movement had become a political movement. The same urban bourgeoisie that supported artists like Gaudi or Picasso were also involved in these regionalist approaches that in the long run became Catalanism, a nationalist movement with a good balance between the maintenance of local traditions and good international outlook. World-renowned artists such the architect Antoni Gaudí and painters like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, were living and working in the city at the turn of the twentieth century. The aspiration of the city for world recognition favored the organization of two World Fairs, one in 1888 and another in 1929. In terms of urban design the knocking down of the medieval walls in the 1860s prepared the city for new expansion and allowed the creation one of the best examples of modern urban planning by the engineer Idelfons Cerdà. The “Eixample” (enlargement) neighborhood created a very sophisticated layout of uniform housing blocks, with spaces for an equitable distribution of services, industries, and residential areas (Soria, 1999; Epps, 2001). Cerdà, inspired by the work of utopian theorists like Étienne Cabet, brought a very rational design to the new Barcelona that in turn was considered tedious and atrocious by Modernista architects of the time much more interested in recovering Catalan history and culture in the city to reinforce rising Catalan nationalist discourse. The city of this time was used to express and stress the differences of Barcelona, and the Catalans, from the rest of Spain. The old Roman walls were refurbished and exposed to emphasize the Roman past of the city, maybe because Madrid has neither such a long history nor a Roman past. Catalan nationalist architects, following the inspiration of Viollet-le-Duc in France, designed the Gothic Quarter, moving buildings from their original locations to create “medieval” spaces. At the end of the nineteenth century even the façade of the cathedral was built with the financial support of one of Barcelona’s wealthiest bankers, Manuel Girona. Barcelona had the medi-

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eval remains that proved that although it did not currently possess political independence it had been a major medieval town and the capital of a Mediterranean commercial empire under the Aragonese crown. Catalan nationalist architects at the beginning of the twentieth century such as Josep Puig i Cadafalch; Lluis Domenech i Muntaner, or even Antoni Gaudí, created certain buildings that re-created historic constructions in northern European countries (Hughes, 1992; Michonneau, 2001). The Atmeller house by Puig i Cadafalch was inspired by the traditional Gothic architecture of the Low Countries. Further north, in the same Eixample district, Puig i Cadafalch built another neogothic building: the Terrades House, also known as the casa les punxes or “the spines house,” that was clearly inspired by Nordic European Gothic architecture. On another site in the city, the main gate of the 1929 International Exposition was framed by two reproductions of the Campanile of Piazza San Marco in Venice, and the square in front of them was clearly inspired by the Piazza San Pietro in Rome. All these examples were not just products of a random historicist taste of Barcelonan architects but also a clear declaration of the European proximity of Catalan culture and society in contrast to the rest of Spain. This process was abruptly stopped by the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. After four decades of decadence between the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Franco dictatorship, Barcelona emerged as a decayed industrial city with a large and disorganized metropolitan area lacking basic infrastructure and with rising social problems in its poorest neighborhoods. The target of the new democratic government of the city was to solve all these problems and at the same time regain the confidence of citizens in their own city by building a new international image that could attract investment to the area to replace the decayed industrial sector. Some of the political actors of this process were the grandchildren of the same families that had made the Barcelona of the beginning of the century, and maintained intact their aspirations for the city (McDonogh, 1986). Barcelona has always been a powerful tool for the nationalist aspirations of Catalans, and in some cases has even been used for commercial purposes.

A Star Is Born: The Development of a Brand for Barcelona In the 1960s and 1970s, one of the strongest sectors of the Spanish economy comprised the financial institutions, although none of the major commercial or industrial banks with headquarters in Spain were located in Barcelona. Most of them were located in Madrid, near the political power of a very centralized government that found in the banking sector the best ally to fund the program of modernization and industrialization developed

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by the Franco dictatorship during the late 1950s and the 1960s. Barcelona had only several of the larger savings banks in Spain, and they concentrated on administering the savings of the middle class and the mortgages of the working class. The metropolitan growth of Barcelona and the creation of thousands of new residential areas allowed these financial institutions to gain great benefits from mortgages and small loans to the booming population of Barcelona and Catalonia. Most of this population had moved from rural areas in the south of Spain, and for some of the most traditional Catalan nationalists posed a threat to the continuity of Catalan identity and tradition, specially during a time in which any sign of Catalan identity was forbidden and even persecuted. Savings banks became one of the few ways to maintain a certain Catalan identity during the years of the dictatorship, and they were allowed to promote certain traditional Catalan festivals and events through their social and cultural foundation. Savings banks in Catalonia are called caixa or “safe box,” and are much more than just financial institutions. Traditionally, these caixes have invested part of their benefits in social infrastructure and in promoting cultural activities. Most Barcelonans have their money in one of these caixes since they feel they are solid institutions that worry about the problems of normal people and care for the protection of Catalan traditions and culture. In 1976 one of these institutions, La Caixa de Pensions per la Vellesa i d’Estalvi de Barcelona (also known as “La Caixa”), hired a new CEO, the young industrial engineer, Josep Vilarasau, who had been educated in the elite schools of Barcelona where all the “good families” sent their children (McDonogh, 1986) and had had a very successful career in several positions in government departments in Madrid and in government-owned industrial companies in different parts of Spain. Vilarasau had a very ambitious plan of modernization for La Caixa taking advantage of the solid reputation of the company to create a modern bank that could expand its activities beyond the area of Catalonia to the rest of Spain, or even beyond. For this purpose, it was decided that La Caixa needed a new corporate image that united tradition and modernity and could simplify the communication strategies of a company that needed such a close relationship with its public (Sanchís, 2001). Their intention to expand into the whole of Spanish territory also meant finding a new corporate image that could be used anywhere in Spain independently of the regional language or the cultural identity of the new Autonomous Communities created by the Spanish constitution of 1978. La Caixa’s board of directors hired in 1978 Landor Associates, an international marketing company, to find a new corporate image that would substitute the different symbols used until that moment. Walter Landor, the founder and owner of Landor Associates, had a very prestigious résumé

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with important contributions in the creation of brands and corporate images for companies such as Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Kellogg’s, Fuji Film, Alitalia, 20th Century Fox, and so on. Vilarasau knew the work of Landor for other companies in Spain, like Iberia, the Spanish airline company. A change in image like that of Iberia would strengthen the public image of La Caixa, in Catalonia and in the rest of Spain. For two years the executives of Landor Associates gathered information about the history and the characteristics of La Caixa. They found out that it was the fifth financial institution in Spain, and the largest savings bank with more than 500 offices scattered all over the territory. It had a large social branch active in education, centers for the elderly, culture, libraries, and so on. They also found out about the importance of La Caixa in supporting the arts and Catalan culture and tradition. Finally, after much deliberation, Landor proposed six different symbols that would unite all the activities of the company without using any wording, in order to avoid language problems. Among the symbols, Landor proposed the inclusion of a symbol based on a design that would be developed by the world-renowned Catalan artist Joan Miró. For Landor Associates the proposal of a Miró symbol was a turning point in the history of corporate images for financial institutions, but it was also a powerful tool as a visual representation of the company and at the same time a strong statement on the commitment of La Caixa to social issues, and also reflected their patronage of and dedication to Catalan arts and culture. Joan Miró accepted the task of designing a new painting in which the symbol of La Caixa would be inside a box, and they would use his design as the basis for a monumental tapestry (made with the collaboration of Josep Royo) that would be part of the decoration of the lobby of the new La Caixa headquarters in the Diagonal Avenue in Barcelona. The Miró design was a star with two dots, in primary colors: blue, yellow, and red. As in many other designs of Miró, the new symbol looked very simple, almost childish, like the drawing of a child in kindergarten, but it was also very powerful and unique. La Caixa rapidly adopted it in all its branches and in all its communications and it became rapidly a very strong presence in the urban landscape of cities around Spain and especially in Barcelona. In the 1980s, when the new star was getting to be known in Barcelona, the city was also involved in the regeneration of its democratic local and regional institutions after years of dictatorship. The municipality of Barcelona, like La Caixa, needed new projects and new symbols that could bring enthusiasm and build a stronger collective identity between the old residents and families of Barcelona and the new immigrant families from the rest of Spain that had arrived by their hundreds of thousands during the 1960s and 1970s. The new project became the Olympic Games and the city

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adopted symbols for the city that were also inspired by the design proposed by Landor. The image of different Barcelona campaigns and the symbol of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games were clearly inspired by the La Caixa symbol. In fact, the president of the International Olympic Committee of the time, Joan Antoni Samaranch, became also during the 1990s the president of La Caixa. Different government agencies, institutions, and private companies all over Spain have used the Miró iconography, as it merges the ideas of modernity and avant-garde with those of Spanish or Catalan identity. It has become so popular and has been used by so many cities and corporations that now the city of Barcelona has decided to abandon the use of this type of image and move to a much simpler icon, an underlined capital B. Probably the whole city has now become the icon and the name of Barcelona is the label, and it needs no label of its own. It is interesting to note how the concept of a private company became so powerful that it was eventually adopted by the whole city as the new corporate image of Barcelona. Since then Barcelona has adopted an image of cultural capital with the support of internationally known artists like Dalí, Miró, Picasso, Gaudí, and Tapies. The role of culture in the creation of symbolic economies of cities has usually been attributed to the creation of important cultural facilities, like emblematic museums, theatres, or big concert halls (Miles and Miles, 2004). In the case of Barcelona, the creation of a brand, a new symbol that linked the city with the arts and architecture, with modernity and with certain local traditions, has been a powerful tool for increasing the attractiveness of the city for local residents, visitors, and tourists alike. This new image is one that you can easily find in any upper-scale souvenir shop or department store in the city. It makes a clear distinction from any of the traditional Spanish symbols based on quite popular elements of culture like bullfighting or flamenco music, to emphasize the relationship of the city with the high arts and international artists like Gaudí or Picasso. The projects of the city have also involved all those elements that are so characteristic of other urban renewal projects: new art museums, theatres, and auditoriums. It has also involved the renewal of the old historic districts and the regeneration and gentrification of emblematic neighborhoods, and the creation of public spaces (Borja and Castells, 1997; Marshall, 2004; Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2004). However, the creation of what is now called the Barcelona model has a lot to do with the balance between the promotion and marketing of the local identity of the Barcelonans and the Catalans and the improvement and modernization of the urban landscape. The relationship between power and cultural production is quite evident

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in this example. The marketing analysis produced for Landor Associates was so powerful that it stimulated a new image for the whole city. The new symbolic economies of the city are helping to renarrate the nation and to build up a particular sense of community. Some of the spaces in which this process unfolds are also the new coffee shops that appeared in Barcelona just at the peak transformation of the city for the Olympics. Parts of the created narrative of the Catalan identity of heritage is also adopted in these new spaces of consumption. They also recreate the idea of transatlantic trade and colonial relations in completely fake spaces that nevertheless look old and full of history, just to sell some coffee. These new marketing strategies that municipalities and urban planners have adopted for the promotion of their cities are still quite recent. The case of Barcelona is an interesting example of the borrowing and exchange of ideas and symbols that go beyond marketing techniques to become important elements of identity-building processes. On other occasions the local traditions transform the forms in which private companies present their products, or transform their image. In the world of large transnational companies and of products for mass consumption some of these transformations are sometimes very subtle and also in constant transformation. This is the case of coffee cultures and coffee shops.

Coffee, Coffee Shops, and Coffee Culture in Barcelona Real cities are both material constructions, with human strengths and weaknesses, and symbolic projects developed by social representations, including affluence and technology, ethnicity, and civility, local shopping streets and television news. (Zukin, 1995: 46) In Barcelona, as in many other European cities, there have always been coffee shops, or cafeterias as they are called there. These were spaces in which customers could have coffee and cakes in a very relaxed atmosphere. In some cases, in Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain, the cafeterias might also serve some “tapas” with some light drinks. Most of these coffee shops have now disappeared, together with the fine-looking buildings that housed them. The beautiful Modernista architecture of some of these cafés in Barcelona has been completely destroyed, like the Torino Café, or has been transformed into a fast food restaurant like the Canaletas Café at the beginning of the Ramblas. A few of them are still there, although they have lost part of their beauty and ambiance, like the Café Zurich, or Café de la Opera, or Els Quatre Gats. All these spaces for the consumption of coffee were part of a long tradition in most central and southern European countries. The

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cafés became spaces of socialization in which intellectuals, artists, and politicians gathered and maintained productive debates. They were obviously public spaces but were open only to certain elites. Today, cities are promoting these fascinating images to tourists and visitors. Tourist boards suggest to visitors and travelers the opportunity of experiencing sitting in the same café that Sigmund Freud used to go to in Vienna, or the one frequented by Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, or of course the one that Picasso used to use during the few years he lived in Barcelona. These cafés are no longer a mere space of coffee consumption but have increasingly become part of the symbolic economy of these cities. The visitors coming from outside Europe are usually fascinated by these spaces in which consumption and culture merge. In part, the fascination with these types of European spaces was brought to the US as the first wave of coffee shops in major urban centers with an important European immigrant community. However, these coffee shops were very few and attracted a very small crowd until the Starbucks phenomenon exploded from the streets of Seattle, spreading all over the United States and the rest of the world in the 1980s. The history of Starbucks is now studied by business and marketing majors all over the world as one of the great retailing stories of recent time. The successful part of the story coincides in time with the years of rising benefits of the stock market during the 1980s around the new information technology (IT) companies. Ironically Starbucks, the least technological of all these companies, is one of the few that were able to overcome the financial crisis at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s and even the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001. Probably the success of Starbucks is not based on technology but it has benefited from the new information society created by those IT companies that shaped new armies of customers with a new taste for gourmet coffee. The story of Starbucks started in the early 1970s, when three academics—English teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegel, and writer Gordon Bowker—opened a store called Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice in Pikes Place Market in downtown Seattle. The three partners shared the same passion for fine coffees after spending some time in the San Francisco Bay area, where some of these shops had already emerged. One of these shops, Peet’s Coffee and Tea in Berkeley, California, and its owner Alfred Peet, a Dutch immigrant, were the main inspiration for the new Starbucks shop. Peet started a business of importing fine Arabica coffees during the 1950s and started to view coffee beans the same way winemakers of the nearby Napa Valley saw their grapes. For Peet the different types of beans and their countries of origin became important elements in the marketing of the product. He also dark-roasted his own beans the European way

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to bring out the best flavor and taught his customers how to grind them and brew them in order to have the best coffee. Peet’s aim was to teach the cultures of coffee to his customers, that then became part of an exclusive community of coffee experts. Starbucks brought the same ideas to a larger audience while maintaining the same cosmopolitan approach. The name of “Starbucks” also reflects this first inspiration: the three academic founders of the company used the name of one of the characters of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, to evoke the romantic connection with sailors, seamen, and big ships that used to be part of the life of the early coffee traders. The logo of the company also reinforces this idea with the image of a mermaid. This sophisticated coffee culture was customized rapidly for wider audiences, especially with the incorporation of marketing specialist Howard Schultz in the early 1980s. The company remained very small up to the 1980s with only four stores in the Seattle area. However, after an inspiring trip to Italy, Schultz transformed the company to become not only a place where you can buy beans of coffee and learn about their properties but also taste it in a very comfortable atmosphere. With these major changes, Schultz was able to buy the whole company from the original founders. If Peet’s introduced the importance of dark-roasting and the origins of the beans, Schultz introduced the espresso and cappuccino machines into the shop, creating a new atmosphere in which the performance of the counter worker and the espresso machine merges with the smell of different types of coffee. Starbucks favored hybrid relations between practices and artifacts that make them new symbolic spaces around coffee and coffee culture. The decoration of the interior of the shops also participated in this process, merging the original first nautical elements with Italian-inspired furniture and waiters’ outfits. Part of the success of the Starbucks story was not based on the quality of the products they sold but on all the other elements that surrounded it. Like in the case of perfume, it is not the scent but the bottle and the suggestive ideas that the perfume name produces that make customers pay for it. However, it also introduced new possibilities to the consumption of coffee. In contrast to the traditional coffee places in Europe, the Starbucks experience involved the possibility of multiple choices: different types of coffee, different types of roasting, different brews, and multiple combinations with milk, cocoa, and other flavours. Eventually the new company expanded beyond its original Seattle area to other areas in the Pacific West of the US and to Chicago. By the end of the 1980s Starbucks had over 50 outlets. During the early 1990s Schultz moved the company into a very rapid expansion, having over a thousand stores by 1996. It also moved beyond US and Canada, with stores in Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines. In 1998,

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it entered the European market by acquiring the stores of the Seattle Coffee Company in the UK. The first international expansion of Starbucks targeted spaces in which there was no previous coffee culture, where their philosophy did not need to compete against a traditional approach. However, during the last five years, Starbucks has also moved into central and southern Europe, to the same places that once inspired the creation of its first shop in Seattle. Today, Starbucks shops are ubiquitous in all major cities across the world and are usually located in strategic sites near the most important monuments and commercial strips. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Starbucks has become part of the customized global urban landscape. In 2002 the first Starbucks opened in Barcelona. Today there are several shops in the city and they are located near the major tourist destinations and in big shopping malls. In Barcelona, however, the new wave of coffee shops started long before Starbucks finally arrived in the city. In 1992 one local company opened the first Café di Francesco, in the Eixample district. It offered the same cosmopolitan approach by having for the first time in the city the option of getting coffee of different origins. Two years later Café di Roma opened their first shop, also in downtown Barcelona. Both of them have similar types of product and merge the traditional ways of drinking coffee in Spain with the new possibilities of the “global coffee culture,” so customers can now experience beans of different origins, types, and roasts. These Spanish coffee shop chains have Italian names, or in other cases names that have a certain colonial flavor, like the Café de Indias, Aromas de Dakar, or Jamaica Coffee Shop. The most interesting part of this process of appropriation of the Starbucks model is when it comes to interior decoration. Most of these spaces try to reproduce a colonial atmosphere, with furniture, counters, and tables that resemble some of the old cafés. The posters on the walls reproduce banners from the early twentieth century and the walls themselves are covered with fake bricks to give the whole space a rustic appearance. In different parts of the store appear bags and barrels with inscriptions of some of the old colonial spaces in which coffee or other products were produced: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Jamaica, the Philippines. These spaces are designed to evoke the old colonial trade, the same one experienced by the indianos who made Barcelona flourish economically during the nineteenth century. In fact, spaces similar to some of those bars are reproduced in two of the local museums: the Maritime Museum, and the Museum of National History of Catalonia. The same type of bags and the same type of furniture and decoration are reproduced in both museums to represent one of the golden ages of Catalan trade. The new coffee shops of Barcelona, therefore, reinforce the same message that appears in those local museums, stressing

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the importance of Catalonia in sailing and trading and its relations with overseas colonies.

Conclusion: Merging Commercial Strategies and Political Interests in the Production of Barcelona’s Symbolic Economies In recent decades, the icons of mass consumptions have become another element of the urban landscape of the modern city. It does not matter anymore if you are in New York, Los Angeles, Moscow, or Paris, the commercial signs of McDonald’s, Burger King, or Kentucky Fried Chicken will compete for street space with the banners of Broadway musicals like Cats or The Phantom of the Opera. The urban landscape of each international city also has the images of international hotel chains, restaurants, or clothing franchises that international travelers recognize. Urban spaces, or at least the areas of the city to which international travelers are supposed to go, are signaled clearly with easily recognizable visual codes. As any international traveler knows there are several recognizable signs in each city now that allow them to avoid language and cultural barriers, like those designed by Landor associates for La Caixa. Local hotels, restaurants, and shops are now franchises of international firms, and customers can easily find their way through the city. Those sections of modern cities that are open to tourists and other “non-local” visitors are becoming big shopping malls, with the appropriate street signs that tell you where to go and what path to follow almost in the same way they are used in airports. In the city customized for the tourist signs tell you what you should visit, what you should buy, eat, or drink, and where you have to take the picture that will confirm (as a stamp in your passport) that you have definitely been there. In fact we could easily say that in the present times airports, the symbol of the new world of flows, are increasingly becoming small-scale cities, while cities (or at least some sections of them) are becoming perfectly signaled spaces like airports. However, despite all the local support, the traveler or the tourist cannot avoid the loneliness of existence in a place with no real boundaries between his/her known landscapes and the unknown world. Each place digests cultural products imported from other places and transforms them in unique cultural landscapes. That is especially evident in the way marketing specialists adapt products to local tastes. As we have seen here with two clear examples the construction of a symbolic economy for the city produces narratives of community identity and history that are used and reproduced by government agencies and private companies alike. The dialectical relationship between local entrepreneurial forces and local political powers produces new types of artifacts and

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practices materialized in urban symbolic landscapes. These powerful ideological urban spaces are a materialization of power relations organized by local elites. In cities like Barcelona, despite global forces, the local elites are still a relatively small group of people that control the most important local companies, the leading organizations of the local civil society, and key local and regional political positions. In the case of Barcelona, we have observed how the process of the modernization of the image of one of the local financial institutions led to the creation of a completely new image for the city based on the creativity of local artists. The La Caixa logo transcended the corporation that it was intended to represent to be reproduced in a series of clone designs used by city hall, the regional government, and other public agencies, as well as other local corporations. The star of Miró is a simple design, easily recognized by tourists and visitors, but it also has a very complex meaning for local residents. That was exactly the strategy that local politicians wanted to adopt for the new image of Barcelona. During the Franco dictatorship, local identity expressions were forbidden and private speculative processes dominated discussions of urban design. In the early 1980s, with the new regional government and the democratization of local institutions, Barcelona needed to gain international credibility while recovering Catalan local identity. Companies like La Caixa had very similar interests trying to move from the local market to the national and international scale. The new logo needed to represent the “cultural” values that made La Caixa a powerful and trusted financial institution in the Barcelona area while creating an ambitious strategy of territorial expansion beyond Catalan space. The same discourse over the origins of Catalan identity that explains the potential of the creativity and genius of local entrepreneurs, and artists like Antonio Gaudí and Joan Miró, was used to romanticize the transatlantic commercial relations between Barcelona and Latin America of the nineteenth century. Local coffee shops have used the same ideological discourse to establish an idealized ambiance in local branches. In this case the political discourse has been reused for commercial practices. In turn local government agencies have also used the cultural component of these romanticized coffee shops, together with their customers, to create models of pacification by cappuccino, as Zukin points out, a process of gentrification of public space with coffee stands (Zukin, 1995; Degen, 2003). The traditional spaces in which Barcelonans used to have coffee have been transformed by the new trends imposed by global companies like Starbucks. The new reinvented coffee spaces offer the same possibilities and choices as their American counterparts but they emphasize an idealized colonial past in their décor. These spaces are fake, almost theatrical, settings that make locals and foreigners alike feel part of another time of cosmopol-

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itan travelers and adventurers rather than part of the crowd of standardized mass tourism. Barcelona’s new coffee shops are part of a wider marketing strategy, since the city has always intended to create a very precise image of a historic city to justify its nationalist aspirations and to show visitors that it is a truly European city rather than just another Spanish city. The transformation of coffee shops and coffee culture in Barcelona during the 1990s is a good example of this process of transformation of the public image of a city and the incorporation of an ideological discourse into the fabric of commercial practices. In general, we can see here how the public and private forces that create urban space reinforce each other to create a new type of hybrid symbolic economy in which urban elites and political power reinforce each other around a common discourse. The successful materialization of this process could mean that a city succeeds in the global scene or disappears in the ranking of global cities. The Barcelona model is an interesting case study not only for the design of local spaces, and the regeneration of public life, but also for its capacity to market a global image while supporting and reinforcing local identities. Moreover, what has also been crucial to Barcelona’s success has been the merging of local municipal interests and regional political agendas with local companies’ marketing strategies.

References Ajuntament de Barcelona, Barcelona progrés (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 2004). Borja, Jordi and Manuel Castells, Local y Global. La gestión de las ciudades en la era de la información (Madrid: Taurus, 1997). Capel, Horacio, El modelo Barcelona: un examen crítico (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 2005). Castells, Manuel, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Vol. I: The Rise of Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Degen, Monica, “Fighting for the Global Catwalk: Formalizing Public Life in Castlefield (Manchester) and Diluting Public Life in el Raval (Barcelona),” International Journal of Urban and Regional Planning, 27 (2003), 867–880. Delgado, Manuel, Elogi del vianant: del “model Barcelona” a la Barcelona real (Barcelona: edicions de 1984, 2004). Epps, Brad, “Modern Spaces: Building Barcelona,” in Joan Ramon Resina (ed.), Iberian Cities (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 148–197. Hall, Peter G., Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Hall, Peter G., Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). Hughes, Robert, Barcelona (London: Harvill, 1992). Luna-Garcia, Antonio, “Cities of Spain: Spanish Cities on the Edge of an Identity Breakdown,” Cities, 20 (2003), 377–428. Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964). McDonogh, Gary Gras, Good Families of Barcelona: A Social History of Power in the Industrial Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). McNeill, Donald, “Skyscraper Geography,” Progress in Human Geography, 29 (2005), 41–45. McNeill, Donald and Mark Tewdwr-Jones, “Architecture, Banal Nationalism and Re-territorialization,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Planning, 27 (2003), 738–749.

 • Antonio Luna-Garcia Marshall, Tim (ed.), Transforming Barcelona (London: Routledge, 2004). Michonneau, Stéphane, Barcelona: memòria u identitat. Monuments, commemoracions i mites (Barcelona: Eumo Editorial, 2001). Miles, Steven and Malcolm Miles, Consuming Cities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Mumford, Lewis, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1961). Muñoz, Francesc, “Paisajes banales: bienvenidos a la sociedad del espectáculo en Ignasi de Solà-Morales,” in Xavier Costa (ed.), Metrópolis (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2004). Resina, Joan Ramon, “The Concept of After-Image and the Scopic Apprehension of the City,” in Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay (eds), After-Images of the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Sanchís, Ima, Biografia d’una estrella (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 2001). Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Sokoloff, Béatrice, Barcelone ou comment refaire une ville (Montreal: Les presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1999). Soldevila, Carles, “The Art of Showing Barcelona (1929),” in Josep Miquel Sobrer (ed.), Catalonia: A Self-Portrait (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Soria, Arturo, “Introduction to Cerdà,” in Arturo Soria y Puig (ed.), Cerdà: The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization (Barcelona: Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca, 1999). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Zukin, Sharon, The Cultures of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

CHAPTER

8

Broken Links, Changing Speeds, Spatial Multiples Rewiring Douala A B D O U M A L I Q SI M ON E

Introduction: Rearranging Urban Politics Is it possible that dynamic, even if highly problematic, styles of entrepreneurship can emerge from within the wreckage of cities as we have conventionally known them? Is it possible that the very precariousness of urban life gives rise to an intensified engagement with “cityness” that carries with it important potentials for rethinking the urban everywhere? These are the questions at the heart of the following discussion. During the last decade notions of urban productivity based on maximizing the entrepreneurial capacities of cities have shifted substantially. An emphasis on clearly delineated spatial functions, regulatory systems, sectoral distinctions, and legal frameworks was considered at the core of enabling cities to generate income and thus livelihood for their residents (Hall and Hubbard, 1989; Cohen et al., 1996; Polèse, 2000). While these dimensions remain important, notions of the entrepreneurial increasingly center on the management of complex circuits of exchange and interdependency across diverse geographical spaces and scales (Macleod and Goodwin, 1999; Brenner, 2000; Amin, 2002). Here cities embody virtual forces provisionally concretized in diverse networks of varying duration, reach, and function; open-ended sites of circulation that mediate, redirect, and translate flows of information and ways of being connected to a larger world. 161

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These sensibilities are largely anchored in discourse on contemporary finance. For today financial architecture is accustomed to bundling disparate instruments—from bonds, mutual funds, debt swaps, derivatives, futures, and stocks, to currency transactions—issued in various locations and configurations as modalities of profit-taking, ownership, insurance, hedging, and investment (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997; Graham and Marvin, 2001). Through this architecture various territories, abilities, futures, and liabilities are mutually implicated, as the search for new synergies and complementarity crosses familiar sectoral lines and rates of return. The entrepreneurial dimensions of cities, in an analogous fashion, are also considered in terms of the articulation of instruments—discourses, media, mobilities, work, services, cultural practices, and infrastructure—across diverse spaces and times (Offner, 2000; Leamer and Storper, 2001; Galloway, 2004; Storper and Venables, 2004; Sassen, 2005). Even though city development strategies often appear to be a highly formulaic application of a limited set of policy instruments—focusing on premium infrastructure and services—profitability increasingly rests on how different spaces, actors, logics of accumulation, and cultural practices can be intersected. This is essentially a kind of speculation that through these intersections such spaces and actors can attain unforeseen capacities (Kesteloot and Meert, 1999; Osborne and Rose, 1999; Latham and McCormack, 2004). There are many different ways any particular setting can “do its work” and make things happen—from the almost invisible and incipient to the publicly debated. Affecting events and situations, making something happen, operates along varying modalities of recognition—as the common-sense results of media manipulation and behavioral shaping have long demonstrated. As such, interventions aiming to make cities more productive have to combine reflections on efficacy, ethics, politics, profitability, justice, and creativity all at the same time, even though these processes may be at work in and through different times. This chapter will explore several facets of the way an African city, Douala, also relies on certain practices of the virtual as a means of consolidating some kind of functional urban economic life, albeit in a very different way. For most African cities, the critical issue is the extent to which residents, without predictable means of taking care of themselves, maximize their use of all of that which the city is and might be—i.e. its spaces, inhabitants, affects, sentiments, mentalities, things, services, and discourses. This is a process which goes beyond conventional ideas about development, sustainability, local democracy, and grassroots empowerment. These conventional ideas, for example, emphasized processes of incremental development, where the provision of water, land and land security, building materials, and power was to be used as a platform on which res-

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idents were to become more effective entrepreneurs now that they could count on these basic elements. These capacities would then translate into enhanced commitments to the city—participation in its governance, protection of the environment, ensuring that children are educated, for example. The assumption was that incremental developments in space and infrastructure would give rise to diverse economic activities that would in turn incite each other into further multiplier effects. Parts of houses could become small workshops that connected to other small production units which would lead to new forms of retailing and to a more diversified residential base. Various economic and social networks would be opened up which would reinforce and expand upon further integration of a neighborhood in a particular area into a larger city. Urban governance was then to be based largely on taking what residents were doing with the spaces and resources that existed and finding ways to build regularized institutions so that new surpluses might be generated from all of these activities (Bayat, 2000; Groth and Corijn, 2005). In Africa, policies and programs that have attempted to work along these lines have lacked the resources, political commitments, and economies of scale necessary to affect a significant expansion of scope, capacity, multiplication, or networked articulation. In situations of substantial scarcity, how do residents then come to use more of the city, more of its “stuff,” more of its possibilities? Metaphors of development, incrementalism, and regularization all connote a sense of discernible temporality and order, a map of where things are likely to be going—some more or less specific destinations. While land invasions, informal settlement, irregular economic activities, and institutional circumventions are the “bread and butter” of city-making in many parts of the world, at least the policy thrust of regularization sought to accord many of these practices a certain legitimacy. It sought to bring them “on board” as a work in progress that would eventually result in many of what are accorded the status of normal, conventional urban processes—such as titling, cadastrals, formal municipal regulations, zoning procedures, and so forth. But such ordered uses of urban space, life, and resources, rehearsed either through specific symbolic orientations, regulatory practices, or mentalities, have been overwhelmed in many African urban contexts. In a series of writings on Kinshasa, Fillip Deboeck powerfully evokes situations where the imaginary has overrun the real, to the extent that a clear discernment between life and death, visible and invisible, self and other, the corporeal and the ephemeral are impossible. Here the proliferation of what is popularly referred to as mystique renders urban life, its inhabitants, and its processes increasingly uncertain, apocalyptic signs of both immanent redemption and fall, simultaneously the effacement of modernity necessary

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for Africans to find their own way and their condemnation to everlasting suffering (DeBoeck, 2005). Nothing is what it appears to be—a situation loaded with a potentially lethal ambiguity. For if nothing is chained to a stable symbolic structure then standards or rules specifying prohibitive uses of life, things, and space have limited applicability since they rely upon all these being in possession of discernible identities. A person can use materials for all kinds of things because it is not really clear exactly what she is using—a practice which avails flexibility in putting together some kind of viable life. On the other hand, the individual then takes the risk of never knowing exactly what they are getting into—children are as likely to be sorcerers as anything else, money is likely to be a mask of poison, or the city hall a crypt. In a situation where there is great uncertainty as to the status of what is being used and of those who are doing the using, yet where fuller use of the city has become compulsory, an increased emphasis is placed on mobility, on the “hit and run,” of taking what one can and not sticking around to evaluate the results, or alternatively, of being “taken into” someone else’s scheme or scenario, as a partner whose personal history, skills, or personality may or may not make them eligible to participate, but who just happens to be in a specific place at a specific time of rapid need, in a situation where few questions are to be asked. Here, the notion of circulating mobilities is extended to a practice of moving quickly and decisively through people’s lives and attempting to make things happen without the usual prerequisite assessment of whether or not certain criteria are to be met.

The Speed of Death As a way into a discussion on such practices of mobility, let us begin with a small example from Bonamoussadi (’Sadi), which is as close to a middle-class quartier as one is to find in Douala, Cameroon—a neighborhood of some 400,000, literally 10% of the city’s population. In contrast to the rest of the city, it is not an unpleasant place to live, mostly spacious and without the excessive flooding that characterizes other areas, and with a cosmopolitan community made up of residents coming from all parts of Cameroon. This is the area of civil servants, entrepreneurs, academics, and professionals—those to which historically the city has largely worked. It is also a neighborhood which has in many ways led to a resurgence of associations in the city— away from the foyers that were largely focused on ethnic-based patronage to groupings based on common generational status, such as Jeunesse de Bonamoussadi, or interest, such as students studying econonomics at Douala University, or associations of young musicians. There are now hundreds of different associations across the city, primarily composed of youth.

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African cities have a long history of associationalism, as such a practice was crucial in terms of taking people from various places and providing a context whereby they could consolidate living spaces and operations in cities which either severely restricted an African presence, provided few concrete transitional frameworks for urban life, or experienced intense periods of contestation as to the criteria entailed in the provisioning of urban opportunities. Currently, associations continue to help consolidate a more viable sense of place and endeavor to anchor people in a particular set of values, activities, development agendas, or simple tasks in areas where customary social ties are either waning or overburdened. But, importantly, such associations are motivated by a generalized sense of urgency that people should be linked to different elsewheres, that remaining in place is impossible, and that a viable life can only be made by getting out of Douala, being somewhere else. Associations thus become venues for information-sharing, resource mobilization, and accessing contacts all related to concretizing exit strategies—particularly as the costs of visas (real and fake), transport, and documents have substantially increased. Doual’art, a cultural and social development center in Douala, started a project in 2005 to try and build collaborative relationships among a select number of associations in Bonamoussadi and the popular neighborhoods of Bepanda Omnisport and Bessengué Akwa, both much more poor, dense, and dilapidated. The idea was that in order for people, and especially youth, to have an impact on the everyday politics, structures, and policies of their quartiers, as well as improving their overall life chances, they had to better understand the larger municipal contexts in which their localities were situated. A manageable start for this would be to know a few other quartiers, particulary those that were different from their own. Through various fora, cultural events, collective visits, and conjoint advocacy, a collaborative relationship has been built up with the aim of availing different quartiers to each other as multifaceted resources. Within this process youth from ’Sadi would constantly complain about the disorder of the other neighborhoods, and their inclinations to criminality, prostitution, and various insalubrities. What could these neighborhoods have to offer? Often the mode of defense on the part of associations from Bepanda and Bessengué would be to overcompensate by claiming an overarching uprightness and sense of moral convention. Just because their neighborhoods looked like slums, they themselves were not of the slums since visible impoverishment was a general condition of the city that would mask a wide range of distinctions, particularly a capacity to generate viable families or good students. Yet, in this politics of visibility, what became a particular point of anxiety amongst the participants from ’Sadi as they became more familiar with the

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other quartiers was a particular architectural dimension to their own locality. New houses were being built across quarter, as well as old ones being torn down to start over again, almost all with the façade of large white tiles, a very expensive artifact and one not particularly suited to the gritty humid climate of the city. These are the façades of the mausoleum, the tomb, and ’Sadi youth would complain that the locality was being increasingly transformed into a large cemetery. Additionally, many of the households who spent large amounts of money to thoroughly encase their premises in such white tiles had little left over to complete a functional interior, so that the insides of many houses exuded the vacancy of a tomb. This concern resonated with the popular understandings that youth from the other neighborhoods shared about Bonamoussadi. They would view such constructions as confirmation of their assumption that the economic capacity of this quartier was rooted in death, particularly the ability of residents to turn themselves into ghosts and sorcerers who could move across the city and elsewhere at will and with enormous speed, who in death had no restrictions to their mobility, and who could thus link the life situations of anyone with anyone else. That these new estates resembled large mausoleums became simply the public concretization of the dependence on death as the primary vehicle of economic accumulation. In face of this, the unanticipated liveliness emerging from poor neighborhoods that otherwise would seem to connote death could muster little countervailing power. For them, Bonamoussadi represented the power of a way of using the city unimpeded by restraint, and where residents of other quartiers could be turned into a kind of “walking dead”—slowed down, unconscious, tools of any game, and drained of self-directedness—by the dead able to fluidly cross borders of all kinds. For them the middle class is no longer that which has consolidated itself through the clear demarcations of economic specialization, labor markets, public sectors, and professional discourses, but rather by their very undermining. For most of their lives, youth in Bepanda and Bessengué of course had to circumvent apparent clarities; there is almost no formal wage labor, schools were simply a marketplace to negotiate for private lessons if one had the money, and one could not help it if certain commodities were always “falling off the truck” in front of one’s house given how bad the roads were. For these youth, the demarcations were circumvented in anticipation that they could eventually “do the right thing” and make these demarcations relevant to themselves. But now, many in the so-called middle-class area of ’Sadi have made even those aspirations irrelevant.

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Multiplying the City The anxieties expressed by many of the youth of Bonamoussadi reflect the extent to which the popular assumptions made by youth in less prosperous quartiers have been internalized. While most of the youth we work with in Bonamoussadi continue to go about their business as either students, young professionals, or entrepreneurs, they do express growing mistrust of what their neighbors and cohorts might actually be doing, particularly as the accumulation of economic capacity now has its marked “ups and downs.” Residents are making and losing money in more haphazard patterns. This undoubtedly reflects the implications of long-term economic crisis and the degree to which participation in many different kinds of wealth-creating contexts must be hedged. But because there are no ready means for popularly tracking these up and down flows, they are easily attributable to more sinister expositions. These Bonamoussadi youth worry about the vulnerability of their deliberate and diligent efforts to do the right thing. As one youth indicates, “if the feyman [trickster] wants to eat meat, well then, what we do is the real meat.” If dissimulation and sorceral manipulation has a target, then it is the very content of the steady life these youth are attempting to prepare. Those who are purportedly able to “work” the city without moral, spatial, or political impediment are going to disrupt those who have managed to put together something predictable, and not those whose daily lives are a perpetual disruption. This anxiety translates into a rendering of Bonamoussadi as not only the embodiment of middle-class urban civility but also increasingly a domain of distrust and fear, of never knowing who may be making attempts to “eat off you,” to put you in difficulty. There is never clarity as to what pacts and deals are being made, and to what extent one’s visible success may leave the person open to harm. For not only is middle-class accumulation in part predicated on greater individuation and a willingness to pursue rational choice over social obligations—thus potentially narrowing the scope of social anchorage—it is also wrapped up with a sense of expendability as competitors can take your place. When these notions are combined with the ambiguities as to who one’s potential competitors actually may be and to how they may be playing the game, defending one’s household, one’s gains, and one’s possibilities may require more intricate means. The built environment of Douala, as in most cities, includes large swathes of the dilapidated, the underutilized, and the unviable. Those able to put money into the city tend to invest in infrastructures of consumption at the periphery near new developments and in more private contexts. This leaves significant portions of a city’s restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, halls, retail outlets, and office buildings still standing but without much life.

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Figure 8.1 New Bell Cemetery, Douala (2005).

These spaces are now too expensive to accommodate the reduced purchasing power of most residents and no longer sufficiently attractive for those who do have money. They scrape by because they are usually owned outright, and capture just enough customers and special events to ward off a fatal level of indebtedness, or else because everyone involved is doing other economic activities, and the place simply hangs on as a point of reference, especially if taxes are not being paid. Yet it is possible to see resurgent signs of activity in many of these places, even if they largely remain under the radar, just out of public view. In part, the new supermarkets, restaurants, churches, lounges, and clubs that service the purchasing power of a place like Bonamoussadi are not only venues that confirm a certain economic status but are also theatres of anxiety and places of mutual witnessing whose clientele are never certain as to the nature of the witnessing taking place. How then does one operate, defend interests, maximize possibilities? If the extant urban landscape, with its multifaceted infrastructure, can be navigated with speed and dissimulation by those who can affect without being affected, then the only chance may be to construct different social effects, to confound the field, to introduce new speeds, by putting together actors that otherwise may not be connected. This is the case for both men and women. While women may still largely

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deploy a certain instrumentality through sex, the game also begins to free them from conventional roles as well, albeit in not any clearly emancipatory fashion. One Friday I had wanted to attend the weekly prayer in a mosque near the Marché Congo but had arrived too early. To pass the time I decided to take a cool drink in a hotel that once could have passed for one of the city’s better ones, but had long fallen into decline, barely accommodating anyone. As I was wandering around what was once a bar I heard a lively argument from around the corner in what was once probably a reception hall, and was surprised to see two professors whom I recognized from the Economics Faculty at the Douala University, as well as residents of Bonamoussadi outlining some map with chalk on the floor. A motley assortment of characters were gathered around, one in a faded uniform of some sort, others in worn boubous, and a few were stylish adolescents decked in seemingly brand new Converse sneakers. Some paid close attention, others wandered aimlessly in the room. The talk was about a neighborhood called Oyok, in the peripheral area of Zone Nylon, and a parish priest who had been transferred the year before from an area of Bepanda known as a stronghold of the militant political opposition. He had been supposed to give a benediction to a ceremony that was to officially open a project that had rehabilitated significant parts of the quartier’s local road and sanitation system, and several important municipal officials were to be in attendance. The talk was of several youth staging an incident in return for some documents that the professors would arrange that would allow them to attend a workshop in Libreville as a way out of the city. The incident was then supposed to prompt the priest to say three sentences at the benediction providing an opaque warning to certain contractors waiting in the wings to monopolize deliveries of various goods now made possible by the improvement in Oyok’s infrastructure. The priest would warn those gathered that the precarious situation of youth in the area would not be overcome by these new structural improvements, and that this would be reported in the press, but again in a phrasing that was to have some oblique connotation to be arranged by a typesetter whose brother was present in the room. The men in the dirty boubous apparently rented out carts that some of the local youth used to carry goods between markets and residents along the muddy paths that were the only circuits before the road was built. One of the professors was on the board of an NGO that specialized in employment creation and was hoping for a renewal of a grant, and wanted time to see if these carters could purchase a truck to make deliveries themselves. The intent was to create an impression of danger for the contractors, of some webs of connection that would both embarrass them politically and

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imply that something might happen to their business. But no one was quite sure what they were up to, what political connections they had, so they needed someone to watch who came and went from their houses. While I clearly was picking up only pieces of a transaction that had been unfolding for some time, I gathered that the man in the uniform was to replace one of the contractor’s gardeners who was to be enticed to take up with one of the young girls in sneakers. Some small task was being mapped out with proliferating ramifications and uncertain trajectories, the beginning and end of which I cannot describe for sure. But the incident made me shape subsequent inquiries in a certain way that pointed to many occasions when spaces like these were to be used as a “factory floor,” as one informant so cogently put it. For in these wasted spaces seemingly no one is paying attention, and deals can be put together that take advantage of actors with different positions and backgrounds. For despite the often uncanny abilities of those to whom special powers and mystique are attributed, the capacity to mobilize labor—wealth in people (Guyer and Belinga, 1995)—no matter the specificities of how that labor is put to work, is what continues to matter throughout much of Africa. The popular understanding of the operations of the feyman or the entrepreneur as zombie is that they move unimpeded, their navigation of the city not domesticated or shaped by its physical and social circuitries. There are no roadmarks and their locations are always determined by a kind of calculation that needs no narrative or mediation—i.e. they can always get somewhere immediately without negotiating passage or assistance of any kind. But this capacity is also viewed as predicated on that operator’s exceptionality. In other words, because others are seemingly obligated to adhere to certain conventions, travel along designated routes, conduct their lives under the gaze of various others and institutions, and make their livelihoods within tedious redundancies, they will never notice the circumventions and elisions effected by those operators travelling with speed. Instead of acting as if the urban landscape can be operationally effaced, the challenge then for those who either do not desire, or find themselves unable, to become mystique operators themselves is to multiply their connections with the various aspects of urban life. Instead of a defense being made by narrowing a field of connections, efforts are now made to expand them, make them more complex as a means of generating a capacity to “slow things down,” not to cut across textured terrain but to use the textures as a means of taking different views, of seeing different sides and thus possibilities of what is going on. Then, across these “factory floors”—themselves highly flexible spaces with oscillating “inventories” and “production processes”—a provisional sense of spatial coordination for urban actors is

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Figure 8.2 Witnessing free fall in New Deido, Douala (2005).

attained. This, as Thrift (2005) points out in a radically different context, is based on continual revisions of space and time made possible by tracking and tracing the effects that variable compositions of these assemblages, these “factories,” perform. In this way the city is multiplied, and even if certain residents of Bonamoussadi insist upon “going fast,” taking only themselves into account, other arenas can be superimposed that turn such speeds into fatal accidents. In addition to the scores of seemingly underutilized and wasted buildings, Douala is covered with small business centers equipped with the usual array of fax, phone, photocopy, telex, printing, and express mail. A cursory look at the city’s economy would make any observer hard-pressed to see how the hundreds upon hundreds of such centers could possibly sustain themselves. Most Douala residents ask the same question themselves. A popular viewpoint is that they are contexts for laundering dirty money or even, in more sinister tones, fronts for an indeed flourishing trade in body parts. Yet, as I have tried to point out, business is going on, deals are being made, and many small accomplishments—i.e. the winning of small spaces of operation—depend on intricately woven collectives. While these strings of provisional deals, alliances, complicities, and works in progress may be hammered out behind the masks of seemingly vacant hotel receptions,

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department stores, restaurants, cinemas, or depots, the parts that various actors come to play often will require the support of documents, imprimaturs, business cards, invoices, and invitations, and whether they are real or not is immaterial. Increasing amounts of labor, then, are neither formal nor informal. For in this “factory work” remuneration itself takes varying forms—from cash payments to promissory notes, barter, favors to be collected at some future time, facilitations, or shares in property. Aspirations on the part of those who know they cannot have a regular life or worry about their prospects of leaving for somewhere else gravitate toward becoming a “player” in someone’s scheme or story. If much of what Bonamoussadi residents undertake is motivated by the anxiety that their preferred “tickets” and roadmaps to success are no longer viable, then new maps have to be invented, and those who were relegated to the social class “left behind” as custodial, service, and menial labor are brought into play. The latter may know that they are eventually expendable, or that all work is short-term and freelance, and that the agenda is not theirs, but the schemes, both defensive and opportunistic, will not work unless they draw upon what they know and go where their “handlers” cannot. They know that as some kind of floating population they are the potential links among discrete stories and deals, since the parts they will play will seldom be the same—sometimes lovers, deliverers, assaulters, spies, provocateurs, sellers, manual laborers, drivers, and so forth. No one, except possibly their intimates, will know them as any one thing in particular. The preponderance of these political and economic mediations coexists with the fact that many Douala residents continue to live within a series of repeated tasks, going to work at a predictable location and pursuing predictable activities to make ends meet. On many days little is earned; for some, many weeks pass without salaries being paid. Extended family and neighborhood networks continue to provide access to resources and opportunities, even if the demands members make on each other may be increasingly difficult to fulfill. People depend on themselves and others being at the right place at the right time when something extra might become available. But the institutional supports for these regularities— whether they be a paid salary, a profession, a particular steady line of work, the conversion of familial ties into guarantees of financial support, or other forms of institutionalized social welfare—have greatly dissipated. Regularities must be “backed up” by other forms of hedging, opportunistic actions, and provisional affiliations. The new middle classes of Bonamoussadi may be motivated to engage actors and situations they barely know in efforts to elaborate some kind of basic orientation that would enable them to assess their vulnerabilities to

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the actions of co-residents. From the pool of the majority barely scraping by, the motivations to take one’s chances in what are usually opaque, highly theatrical undertakings concern the search for various “pylons” on which to anchor otherwise seemingly normative activities always on the verge of falling apart. Thus it is important to see in the processes of appropriating the “underutilized” not the dissipation of an urban modernity collapsing into an exoticism of a generalized mystique, but a practice of attempting to rebuttress the willingness to work, to be accountable, and to make a reasonable life.

The Dispersion of Markets The practices through which actors from different walks of life come together momentarily in the near-wasted domains of the city to rehearse a series of tactical interventions into events under way could be considered an extension of the spaces of deal-making that characterize the city’s identifiable markets. Markets are thick with talk, and thus with impressions, rumors, interpretations. Potential customers are always be steered towards or away from certain opportunities for not only consumption, but exchange—you do this for me, I will do this for you; I know that this is going on, do you want to come in on it? The “this” and the “it” may refer to places to live, goods to acquire, or places to work. For almost everyone in this city is looking for small advantages, more things and opportunities to acquire for less. Whether they have any sanctioned belonging there or not, hundreds of people, neither buyer nor seller, use markets every day to make something happen, to see who they might see, to take or be taken into some scheme. Given these needs, there is much room for dissimulation, much room for making things seem as if they were real when they are not, or making them real simply through the sheer mobilizing of money, interest, or support on the part of those schemed or making a scheme. The market becomes the site of such incessant jockeying, of turning transactions into an opportunity to perform more than the transaction itself. Yet markets are also viewed as places of danger and desperation. One has only to observe the frenetic auctioning of used clothes in Douala’s central market to understand the extent to which trading has become something reduced to the most minimal advantages. Although trading of various goods can be jumbled up along the streets and pathways that radiate from the official market, goods and trades remain largely sectored with the resultant mix of redundancy in stocks, shared wholesalers, the labor-intensive cultivation of steady customers, and the increasing need to tie inventories to be sold into the provision of other services often having

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nothing to do with the product on offer itself. Balancing cooperation and competition here thus becomes a more intricate matter. New Bell, like other older popular quarters such as Medina (Dakar), Treichville (Abidjan), Congo Town (Freetown), Harlem (Conakry), and Matonge (Kinshasa), for example, has a long history of the market being the intersection of a site of trade; of a plurality of influences, people, backgrounds; of information; and an arena where particular tactical responses could be worked out to the various impositions of administrative control on urban life. Those that resided in close proximity to the market tended to see their lives as thoroughly wrapped up in its operations. The market was where one took one’s chances, and to this day the residential areas that abut the central market have the lowest school attendance rates in the city. But as the market has become overcrowded and overtraded, a parasitism has grown that also translates into a valorization of a certain minimalism to existence by many youth and young adults who never shake the status of “youth.” The idea is to take what one needs and expend the minimal effort, especially since great effort is unlikely to result in very much. Traders setting up in the early morning hours are particularly vulnerable to petty theft. Not much is taken—food to eat for the day, a few other consumables that can be easily sold to cover the cost of beer or sex. The aspirations are minimal since what is to be taken must be either quickly consumed or disposed in order to stay out of trouble, as well as keep both the resentment and envy of others to a minimum. There are few apologies for the extent to which theft constitutes a daily living, and the way the market itself seems to concede to this thievery as a kind of excise tax. As more players use the market, there are more participants that slip from any effective control. As more items are smuggled from loosely controlled borders and docks or are dumped in large volumes at neoliberalized ports of call, profits are reduced for many entrepreneurs, in turn reducing the abilities to maintain adequate controls and storage. An indifference to theft escalates, but the more thieves there are, again, the smaller the takings, the lower the expectations. It is not uncommon to see middle-aged men still residing in the house of their parents, even subletting their rooms for a little cash, while sleeping by the side of the house. While these “youth” may dream about big money and pass many hours each day in utter boredom and vacuity, they take a measure of pride in the fact that they are not wasting themselves, that all remains possible because they have not headed in any particular direction, that they are patient for the arrival of the big score. They talk about others—those making dangerous crossings on flimsy boats, those whose impatience has landed them in syndicates where they have been killed for their organs, and those stuck in dead-end jobs. They

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are prepared to wait, and this preparation means that they respect nothing; everything is reduced to an equivalent value, and as such everything is available to be stolen and resold, for almost nothing. This attitude is what makes markets appear so dangerous in Douala, and accounts for the purported reluctance of many to go to them. When places like New Bell were first designated as the primary site for permanent African urban residence by the German colonial regime, they were an intense laboratory of entrepreneurship, as the convergence of peoples from different towns and villages of the exterior gave rise to new forms of collaborative effort that largely remained opaque to the scrutiny of the authorities (Scher, 2005). Artisans, traders, tailors, vulcaneers, and mechanics of all kinds helped secure an economic platform on which many households were able to secure land, build homes, and invest in a so-called modern urban future for their children. While New Bell today remains full of entrepreneurship and improvised making-do, there are simply too many making too many demands on available resources. Physical, built, and social environments are progressively eroded by overuse, by the lack of money for repair and rehabilitation, by the incessant shortcuts and improvized uses of objects, tools, and spaces, with little being replenished or renewed, and the discarded remains in plain sight. In a market area with a protracted history of countless performances, where so many have attempted to make their existence relevant to so many others, a density of actual or potential interference has become a legacy. For everything that is attempted, it is not clear just who the endeavor will implicate, and it is never certain just who has to be looked out for, who will demand a cut of the proceeds, or who will see it as their duty to remind the enterprising individual of his or her obligations. In economic sectors that have become vastly overcrowded, and thus where the need to come up with something new is incumbent upon anyone who wants to emerge from the crowd and eke out a little bit of profit, improvisation stands out like an ambulance on a choked highway, where everyone subsequently tries to follow the path-breaking move. Again, under such conditions, it is difficult to make plans, to project into the future, to pace oneself with a series of advancing steps geared to some overarching objective, particularly when the state, at all levels, no longer cares what happens, and where politics is itself the pursuit of parasitism. What we can see, then, is the configuration of dangers from above and below, the proliferation of certain practices of eating associated with highly divergent class backgrounds and capacities for accumulation. Situated between the opacity of neoliberal spectrality, where the supposed friction-free borderless movements of the new middle-class accumulators pursue invisible trades of all kinds, and the highly visible “eating off ” the

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market as a specific concrete urban site through hundreds of nearly imperceptible daily thefts, is a perfusion of the market across different spaces of everyday living. Almost any place can now assume the position of market. But without interests in consolidating any particular of these sites as an ongoing market, the regulations and transactions are largely made up as they go along. Frames that would define a church as a church, a roadside restaurant as a restaurant, a pharmacy as a pharmacy, and so forth hold and do not hold at the same time as these sites and others become occasions to identify potential collaborators, trade various services, and implant information and rumor. All are launching pads for finding ways to make active and concrete use of something which one does not possess or know. On the surface, a sense of dynamism seems to intensify in the residential quartiers more removed from the central market, such as New Deido or Casamondo. Here, the semblance of initiative must be maintained, whether it is in the pursuit of education, trade, or a more long-term and consistent involvement in the income-generating schemes of others. It is also in these neighborhoods where the effort to get out, to work elsewhere, is the most intense—a project which increasingly requires greater levels of dissimulation, networking, and greased palms. So even in these neighborhoods the market is not far behind. The evidence is displayed even in the many initiatives youth undertake to motivate a sense of creative resourcefulness and community development. One such effort undertaken in New Deido during July 2005 used a local private school for a week-long exhibition of crafts, inventions, business plans, achievement certificates, artworks, cartoons, writings, video productions, diplomas, photographs, fashion, visas, and travel documents generated by youth in the neighborhood. It was a veritable archive of expression and documentation that in its momentary and centralized compilation was almost expected to act as a repository of dreams that could launch everyone’s discrete initiatives into a different plane of orbit. It was a kind of collective talisman that could concretize the strivings of neighborhood youth. Here again is the market’s dream of agglomeration, of putting diverse things and actors in connection with each other, where each can rub off onto the other some newfound capacities or possibilities. This exhibition was in turn capped off in a night-long talent show, where groups of children donned a variety of different garb to show off their abilities to play a wide range of different roles and styles. Whether it is that of the devotee in full religious garb or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, the rapper, the businessmen, or the soldier for hire, the role itself did not matter as much as the facility to change gears and be ready to pursue any angle, all gathered in sight of the other. After all, for most, everyday life approximates emergency conditions, and if one does not want to retreat

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to the minimal parasitism of many in New Bell’s zones of facile theft, then one has to be prepared to try almost anything outside of the order or logics in which they are presented, to keep all possibilities close at hand, each in some “democratic” relation with the other.

Cat-and-Mouse Mimesis The everyday practices through which many residents of Douala seek to extend their opportunities through weaving together diverse scenarios and actors in ways where each comes to implicate the other is, in many respects, similar to those employed by the state to reproduce its hold upon vital social processes. In Cameroon, the state clearly has its visible face, weighted down with the cumbersome machinery of ceremony, decree, and convocation. But it has also substantially withdrawn from its definitional responsibilities—i.e. to maintain the integrity of sectors, borders, private–public distinctions (Roitman, 2005)—and therefore operates in ways that largely remain opaque even to most state actors, in a system where the less the head of state does and the more he is absent, the more powerful he seems to become. The overwhelming impression is one of inertia, where the preservation of an image of political stability is secured through the regime’s highly visible practice of seeming to involve as many actors as possible in matters of policy- and decision-making. As such, few decisions are actually made. Everyone thus becomes convinced that invisible forces are behind any significant endeavor. For most citizens it is not clear how anything happens, and in the rampant expansion of the sense that things are not what they appear to be, there is little confidence in any form of mediation which would enable residents to have a working sense that specific actions they undertake are likely to produce certain results (Takougang and Krieger, 1998; Forje, 1999). Thus there are hundreds of accounts of how the ruling party is able to penetrate into the smallest stories, manipulating the smallest of scenarios so as to cultivate the widespread impression that a person can never be sure whether their immediate positions and actions inadvertently place them in some “line of fire,” where they can no longer exert any control over how their lives will be interpreted. Residents of Douala continue to live across and upon proliferating frontiers where the interpenetration of the rural and the urban, the mystic and the quotidian, the sacred and profane have long required intricate navigation. Added to these is the more direct and intimate impact of various exteriorities demanding increasing amounts of resources and time so as to keep Douala as a circumscribed urban area afloat. As residents and state apparatus mirror each other in the ways they attempt to implicate themselves

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in as many lives and scenarios as possible and maximize the potential implications of any action or collaboration, the extent to which this architecture of seizing and being seized intensifies carceral or transformative possibilities remains undecidable. For despite the vastly discrepant degrees of power deployed, this game is perhaps the only one available for the populace to keep the state off guard as it keeps them off guard. The seeming antediluvian inertia of state authority, where everything becomes an interminable work in progress, is maintained only by the capacity of Cameroon’s ruling regime to act as the arbiter of a powerful sorcery. It has the resources to stage elaborate theatrical performances at the most arbitrarily chosen local level, and upends any reliable sense of calculation and anticipation. The response participates in a common, yet at the same time radically differentiated, instability. The promise of a city yet to come exists beside a more proficient form of capture. For in a game where clear concepts of transformation are no longer available, and even the most seemingly radical realignments are simulated by the state itself, the priority is to keep things open. We may know who is ruling whom, but what is affected by that rule and how is much less certain, so much so that it is not clear to what extent the state articulates its own paralysis.

Conclusion Physical markets remain important to African cities as a concrete place for the buying and selling of the goods and services that sustain urban populations. It is often thought that there is little else in the way of the economic in African cities besides these markets, and that more and more urban space is being turned into extensions of the market, with little in the way of other forms of productivity. While this may be indeed the case, yet there is more to the entrepreneurial in urban Africa, and much of it centers on the incessant repiecing of the most elemental facets of urban life—talk, gesture, movement, signs, sound, and affect—into highly speculative interventions in transactions of all kinds. These are chances taken on the ability to steer the course of events and, importantly, to ensure that people, no matter how much money and power they have, can continue to be made available to be affected. It is about retaining the possibility to keep things open, to take chances on the most minimal of possibilities, knowing that most of the maps that once may have pointed to clear steps to success are no longer relevant. The progressive impoverishment and deindustrialization of these cities, coupled with the enormous demands made upon urban space, engender a reliance on the sheer density of inhabitants, actions, and associational possibilities to produce an urban life falling largely outside of any available conceptual language to understand it or governance frameworks

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to regulate it. While these cities are in reality no less connected to a larger urban world, they convey the sense of being off the map—marginalized from the “real” global urban world. Yet they are increasingly becoming the locus of their own versions of immaterial economies, where the focus on the “secondhand,” on piracy, repair, conversion, and improvisational reassemblage of cannibalized objects and information, creates a specific sensate urban experience. The residents of Bonamoussadi piece together deals and actors of all kinds. They turn people they do not know and have little basis for having a relationship with into a scattershot “archipelago of possibilities,” but have no basis really to direct the proceedings. This is the case even if cash is being distributed, since there is nothing they have to really hold the pieces together. Instead, they must demonstrate a willingness to be possessed. Pheng Cheah (1999) has referred to this possession as a being open to instrumentalities that come from the outside and take hold of a people in such a way that enables them to recognize their coming into existence but, at the same time, steers them away from those selves that are nascently recognized. The ability to act decisively is to know that any self-consolidation is provisional and becomes something else as soon as it is exercised. As Cheah says, these efforts may “always be perhaps too late because unless we resolve to act immediately, we will never know if it is indeed too late for us to act, for our actions to make a difference, for them to alter the condition of existence” (1999: 242). Cities throughout Africa are yet to come, as their residents have to live their lives thickening the spaces between all of the failed promises and aspirations that urban life was supposed to bring and the proliferation of death that could easily and comprehensively colonize urban space with the profusion of mystique and the inversions of any viable anchorage in the real. While this may look like a prolonged biding of time, a resounding spinning of wheels, the subsequent ruts and impressions, the carvings, wounds, and adornments registered on streets, infrastructure, and bodies, embrace the seeds of new cities as well as the finitude of old ones.

References Amin, Ash, “Spatialities of Globalisation,” Environment and Planning A, 34 (2002), 385–399. Bayat, Asef, “From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’: Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South,” International Sociology, 15 (2000), 533–557. Brenner, Neil, “The Urban Question as a Scale Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban Theory and the Politics of Scale,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24 (2000), 323–360. Cheah, Pheng, “Spectral Nationality: The Living On [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization,” boundary 2, 26 (1999), 225–252. Cohen, Michael et al. (eds), Preparing for the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996).

 • AbdouMaliq Simone DeBoeck, Fillip, “The Apocalyptic Interlude: Revealing Death in Kinshasa,” African Studies Review, 48 (2005), 11–31. Forje, John, “The Politics of Democratization, Ethnicity and Management in Africa, with Experience from Cameroon,” in UNESCO (ed.), Anthropology of Africa and the Challenge of the Third Millennium (Paris: Ethno-Net Publications, 1999). Available at http://www.ethnonet-africa. org/pubs/p95forje2.htm. Galloway, Anne, “Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City,” Cultural Studies, 18 (2004), 384–408. Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructure, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Groth, Jacqueline and Eric Corijn, “Reclaiming Urbanity: Indeterminate Spaces, Informal Actors and Urban Agenda Setting,” Urban Studies, 42 (2005), 503–526. Guyer, Jane and S. M. Eno Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History, 36 (1995), 91–120. Hall, Tim and Phil Hubbard (eds), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime, Representation (Chichester: Wiley, 1989). Kesteloot, Christian and Henk Meert, “Informal Spaces: The Geography of Informal Economic Activities in Brussels,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 23 (1999), 231–251. Latham, Alan and Derek McCormack, “Moving Cities: Rethinking the Materialities of Urban Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography, 28 (2004), 701–724. Leamer, Edward and Michael Storper, “The Economic Geography of the Internet Age,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 8450, August 2001. Leyshon, Andrew and Nigel Thrift, Money/Space: Geographies of Monetary Transformation (London: Routledge, 1997). Macleod, Gavin and Mark Goodwin, “Reconstructing an Urban and Regional Economy: On the State, Politics, Scale, and Explanation,” Political Geography, 18 (1999), 697–730. Offner, Jean-Marc, “Territorial Deregulation: Local Authorities at Risk from the Technical Networks,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24 (2000), 165–182. Osborne, Thomas and Nikolas Rose, “Governing Cities: Notes on the Spatialisation of Virtue,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 17 (1999), 737–760. Polèse, Mario, “Learning from Each Other: Policy Choices and the Social Sustainability of Cities,” in Mario Polèse and Richard Stren (eds), The Social Sustainability of Cities: Diversity and the Management of Change (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Roitman, Janet, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2005). Sassen, Saskia, “Electronic Markets and Activist Networks: The Weight of Social Logics in Digital Formations,” in Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen (eds), Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2005). Scher, Lyn, “History, the Nation-State, and Alternative Narratives: An Example from Colonial Douala,” African Studies Review, 48 (2005), 89–108. Storper, Michael and Anthony Venables, “Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy,” Journal of Economic Geography, 4 (2004), 351–370. Takougang, Joseph and Milton Krieger (eds), An African State and Society in the 1990s: Cameroon at the Crossroads (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Thrift, Nigel, “Movement Space: The Changing Domain of Thinking Arising from the Development of New Forms of Spatial Awareness,” Economy and Society, 22 (2005), 582–604.

CHAPTER

9

Consuming the Night Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Youth Culture1 M A R IA I S A B E L M E N DE S DE A L M E I DA

Contemporary Spatialities Space and subjectivity are two categories that, in the way they have developed, may direct us towards an understanding of a crucial moment in the reconfiguration of the present symbolic economy of cities. Space and time, in their relationship to place, are also categories prone to significant revisions when inscribed within the entrepreneurial context of cities and their new networks of the production of sociability and signification. In these new urban grammars it has been equally possible to verify the dismantling of the traditional borders between the civic and the entrepreneurial dimensions of cities, when approached within a larger symbolic economy (see Hetherington, in this volume). The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the impact the redesign, alteration, and transformation of urban space have had on the production of sociability among groups of urban middle-class youths in the city of Rio de Janeiro. This will lead us into the larger context of trying to understand the development of a new metropolitan nomadism (Canevacci, 1999; Bauman, 2001) and the points of contrast it raises with the mechanisms of sedentarization and localization associated with cities. “Nowadays we are all moving.” With this statement the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points towards one of the most pressing aspects of the contemporary social and subjective landscape: the renewal of “nomadism.” It means that: 181

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there are no longer “natural borders” or obvious places to hold. Whenever we may be in a given moment, we cannot ignore that we could be somewhere else, and thus there is increasingly less reason to be in any specific place. (Bauman, 1999: 85) Bauman’s statement will be the guiding line of our reflection on the spatial practices and subjective flows that cross the present scenery of metropolises, especially where they concern urban youth culture. To help us on the conceptual path of this analysis, we must highlight first and foremost how much we owe to the seminal work of Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” and to its diagnosis of dislocation in the relationship between time and space as a cause of contemporary restlessness. If “[t]he present epoch would be above all the epoch of space” (Foucault, 1984: 752),2 the new spatial regime is constituted around a series of transformations which caused social production of space to substitute for physical location. Foucault, however, is not merely interested in pointing out the centrality of space, but rather that its flexibility in the present leads to experiencing a “practical desanctification of space” (Foucault, 1984: 754), as has occurred with the issue of time in modernity. From this interest, Foucault reflects on the places “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other places, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate” (Foucault, 1984: 756). Those sites would be “different” from the ordinary cultural sites in which we live, and Foucault proposes calling them heterotopia, in order to differentiate them from utopian sites. The constituent of the singular character of heterotopian sites, their “otherness,” is the relationship of difference they establish with other sites, producing thus a destabilization of spatial relationships around social and discursive practices. Since its introduction by Foucault, the concept of heterotopia has been used by different authors, especially in the scope of youth cultures, always in reference to identity formations and acts of resistance linked to “alternative” sites. Kevin Hetherington is one of the authors who best interprets this relational dimension of heterotopian spaces (1997). Accordingly he suggests that no space can be constantly described as a heterotopia, as they have multiple and variable significations for social agents, depending on the specific situation of the latter. Besides, they are not a priori concerned with resistance or order, albeit they may be connected to one or the other insofar as they involve the establishment of alternative modes of organization. We agree with his formulation: “it is this heterogeneous combination of materialness, social practices, and located events and what they represent in opposition to other spaces that allow us to call them heterotopian” (Hether-

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ington, 1997: 8). Likewise, heterotopias involve new spatial modes of social interaction and discourse—in a word, sociability. However, we disagree that heterotopian spaces may be defined merely by a difference of representation around “alternative” forms of spatial organization. Heterotopias are fundamentally defined by spatializing practices, at once concrete and symbolic, and are not necessarily localized; they are not always conditioned by ideological variables or resistance movements. From a conceptual point of view, the well-known differentiation between space and place proposed by Michel de Certeau, as well as his definition of space as practiced place, is strategic in our reasoning. Unlike place, space does not have the characters of unity and stability. Alternatively, “there is space whenever one considers vectors of direction, speed measures and the variable of time.” In this sense, space is composed of intersections of mobile elements, either bodies or fragments, that are “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.” Space, therefore, “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities” (de Certeau, 2000: 202). Following from what has been suggested by Foucault and de Certeau, our argument is turned towards the contemporary movements of rewriting space, considering the results as both contingent and a result of historical practices, beyond the static coordinates that define the order of places. In particular, it is a matter of thinking at once on space and on time, considering both as products of interrelations: once overcome the hypothesis that space and time are mutually exclusive categories, once admitted that space is composed by a multitude of histories, one perceives that nothing could be at once more ordered and more chaotic than space, with all its unexpected juxtapositions and involuntary emerging effects. (Massey, 2000: 231) The complex set of space–time alterations, together with the analytical circumstances that allow us to apprehend the idea of the night as a fundamentally spatial category, cannot avoid sending us towards a stricter analysis of the transformations of the metropolitan form, in its polycentrism—diffusing and proliferating in multiple directions—and in its polyphony—where new kinds of cultures, strongly pluralized and fragmented, scatter and transit (Canevacci, 1999:131). The French architect and philosopher Paul Virilio also offers us a key reading of the present. This rests upon the idea that mass media organize the “world” around the production and the diffusion of information and images whose principle is the distance–speed binomial, or, more precisely,

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the dissolution of distances as a function of accelerative processes. The originality of this approach resides in its consideration of time as the privileged vector of the new spatial configuration, responsible for the destabilization of appearances and modes of experience. As with all other aspects of objective reality, urban space is composed and decomposed by systems of traffic and transmission of images and information, dissolving thus the main axes of reference that oriented the city experience in the past, both in historical and symbolical terms (with the decline of centrality and axiality) and in geometrical terms (with the devaluation of the old partition of physical dimensions). It means that the teletopology dissolves the urban form: “a space unit without a time unit, the city disappears then into the heterogeneity of the temporal regime of advanced technologies” (Virilio, 1993: 11). In the contemporary “overexposed” city, the “trajectivity,” a constitutive element of social experiences minimized by previous forms of urban organization due to their option for sedentariness, is freed. Could these modes of circulation, specific to the contemporary world, be the object of an anthropological enquiry? Might youth culture illustrate some of this? These are our questions. The present is constituted by a set of transformations that produces a form of cultural experience qualitatively different from that which characterized the developments of modernity. According to the French anthropologist Marc Augé, so-called hypermodernity would be characterized by acceleration throughout the scales of social and subjective experience. While the challenge of modernity seems to have been a reflection about the experience of time, in hypermodernity “[w]e have to relearn to think about space” (Augé, 2001: 37), as the change in spatiality is the active principle of the figures of excess that author mentions. Concretely, the spatial regime characteristic of contemporaneity implies changes of scale that are concretely translated into notable physical modifications, as urban concentrations, mass migrations, and, especially, the multiplication of places of transit or passing Augé will call non-places. However, Canevacci criticizes this sociologically negative conception of the non-place and affirms that Augé would not have understood that “the new metropolis is society-less: therefore it is placeless” (Canevacci, 1999: 133). Besides, the popularization of virtual technologies introduces mobility into all planes of experience. As Virilio reminds us, “the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitely supplanted that of the place” (Virilio, 1993: 53). It is, therefore, a matter of thinking about the patterns of sociability and the subjected architectures generated around this accelerated dislocation. In this context, the analytical challenge would be the search for resources adequate to investigate the consequences of this mutation, as well as the confrontation with “the theoretical challenge of

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innovating concepts adequate to the new forms of visual communication” (Canevacci, 1999: 135). A successful attempt at meeting this challenge has been made by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1990). According to Appadurai, it is not possible to analyze the contemporary social and subjective configurations without a “wide sociology of dislocation” (Appadurai, 1990: 35), as both electronic media and diverse migratory movements have introduced a new order of instability into subjective and social formations. He proposes thinking of cultural forms in the contemporary world as fundamentally “fractal”—that is, endowed with “non-Euclidian regularities, structures, and borders” (Appadurai, 1990: 46). Thus the defining character of the present is “neither the objective quality of the places, nor the measurable quantity of movement—nor something that would be only in spirit—but the mode of specialization, the way of being in space, of living in space” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997b: 190). This new regime of spatialization of the subjective and social experiences, structured around dislocation rather than fixedness, has led us to investigate trajectivity as a fundamental component of urban youth cultures.

Consuming the Entrepreneurial Rio Today: Setting the Scene Most leisure and urban-circulation activities studied and reported here happen in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. This is the beach area, where the greater concentration of income is found and which is the backbone of the tourism trade in Rio. We must also mention the context of violence installed in the city in the last few years, due to the massive dissemination of drug-dealing in Rio’s favelas, and the resulting frame of permanent tension in the state police forces and their forms of intervention and control. In this sense, the South Zone of the city shares a geographic area with favela-sprawl areas and situations of violence and fear that, in a certain way, have been jeopardizing the circuits of consumption and leisure of the youth population in question. The question of public security, in a certain way, intersects with the imaginary of these universes of urban consumption, wherein nighttime entrepreneurs have had their businesses threatened and the very traditional tourist position of the city has increasingly been hollowed out. The geography of Rio nighttime, steered by the golden youth of the seaside town, is sometimes extended beyond the South Zone neighborhoods, reaching, for instance, the old historical downtown region, as in the neighborhood of Lapa or the parties in enormous Shoreside warehouses, in the harbor area. Those spaces have been undergoing a strong period of revitalization, or gentrification, due to their discovery by the youth, their

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inclusion in the routes of leisure, and the consequent redevelopment of commercial investments. There the taste for a kind of reappropriation of popular traditions is highlighted by the retrofitting of old houses, whose façades are preserved in order to house bars, restaurants, and concert halls that cater to the youth styles that reinvent aspects of samba and bohemian leisure while embracing all kinds of convivial gathering: from electronic music to rock, through the new interpreters of maracatu and chorinho. The city administration exerts itself to go with the flow, dispatching a police presence that may ensure the modicum of safety without which dislocation would become impossible. When questioned about the changes in the nightlife of Rio, Cariocas over forty years old complain about the loss of a paradise, of an innocence that still lives in their memories of the 1960s and the bossa nova. The nomad generation, globalized in its music styles and tastes and its ceaseless circulation, rides on the edge of the odds of being robbed or mugged, or at least of their predictability. They never venture beyond the areas controlled by the police. The actual policies of leisure and cultural consumption are basically focused on the preservation of the tourist appeal of the city, with public safety as their axis. The youth cultures of dislocation left their hothouses of guarded buildings, turning into a performance of the consumption of the spaces between shopping malls, nightclubs, bohemian neighborhoods, and 24/7 gas stations, floodlit and guarded by micro CCTV cameras, private security, or the police. When they dare further, attending “raves” or “unusual” spaces, they depend on the infrastructure advertised on their fliers: surveillance, comfort, and parking. There is, therefore, a basic conditioning that results from the commercial planning of the night and its new architects, the entertainment events. Usually bankrolled by big brands of liquor or cell phone providers, the spaces of middle-class nighttime leisure have a certain safety due to their financing, which invests in its contact with its preferential public. The government and the entrepreneurs, as well as the tourism market in general, support and (try to) ensure the principles of safety that allow the persistence of the circuits of “nomadism” as yet another modality of consumption in the city, while refusing to take any responsibility for their limitations and cravings.

Inhabiting the Trajectory: The Warriors of the Night Throughout two years, we have been in contact with groups of middle-class youth in the city of Rio de Janeiro that changed the profile of nocturnal leisure and transformed “the night” into a fundamentally spatial category.

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Inscribed in this new spatial register, the night becomes a circuit that crosses different places, like parties, nightclubs, shopping malls, movie theaters, and convenience stores and snack bars adjacent to 24/7 gas stations. This map of the night also comprehends uncommon fragments of urban spaces, such as the “doorways” of places or events in the fashion world, as well as stairways, parts of streets and traffic islands strategically located on the traveling paths of the city. When inserted in the circuit of fun, those places are reimagined both in their functions and in their meanings. Mobility became thus the distinctive trace of the nocturnal occupation of the city. Consequently, the night—in English, as the native expression goes—can only be adequately constructed as an object of reflection (Schlör, 1998) when it is understood as a network of simultaneous trajectories. Those trajectories are delineated by crowds of youths who make of dislocation an end unto itself. Such a set of behavioral and discursive practices produces the Rio night as a dynamic spatiality in which diverse modes of circulation have substituted the previous importance of agglomerations around specific places. These new regimes of experience, besides subverting the coordination of urban space, also generate unheard-of identity and subjective processes. The main claims of our argument are precisely turned towards these contemporary movements involved in the rewriting of space, as well as the subjective formations linked to it. Who are these urban nomads? This category involves not simply a rigid sociological classification based on either age or socioeconomic indicators, but rather a slice of the youth universe, whose profile is determined by the place they occupy in the cartography of the night. The “warriors of the night” comprehend the group classified in cultural studies as mainstream, in opposition to the underground or alternative subcultural universes: middle-class youths who attend the good schools in town, are patrons of the fashionable nightclubs or gyms, are seen in the hippest tracts of the beach, and often spread over other parts of town that have been incorporated into the circuit of fun. Our research has thus focused on that section of the young universe that attends the night. Some 95% of our informers were between 15 and 19 years old and, in occupational terms, were either high-school seniors or undergraduate students in the first years of college. An increasingly large number of researchers have been interested in the spatial practices of youth and in how public space has been deconstructed as “adult” space. Different researches have demonstrated that the circulation spaces of cities such as streets, parks, and shopping malls have been occupied by youth in an explicit or implicit form of resistance. The same may be said about the appropriation of mass media and virtual technologies that start to reveal unheard-of combinations of leisure and transgression.

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In this chapter the emphasis will be on the consideration of youth as active cultural agents, approaching not only their spatial experiences but also the subjective diagram constructed around a new geographical sensibility understood in its larger sense.

The Night: New Cartographies of Occupation of Urban Space Saturday, 11 p.m. A gas station near Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon (Rio de Janeiro, South Zone) is the stage of an intense traffic of people. Cars coming and going and people entering and leaving the convenience store could be mistaken for mere mundane scenes in the nightly routine of the city. After all, a gas station is, in principle, a place of traffic. For the observer who is attentive to the new cartographies of nightly Rio, however, the scenery is especially revealing: the gas station is one of the favorite spots of middle-class youth in their nightly circulation of parties and nightclubs in town. This is where the patrons of these environments set their dates and prepare themselves, by the consumption of snacks and beverages, before leaving for the “night.” On weekends, the so-called “pre-night” at the gas station starts around 9 p.m., when a great number of young people gather, seeking contacts and information on the best nightly options in town. Filled with lively groups, many cars—usually expensive cars of market-valued brands and models—are parked on the forecourt, altering the spatial configuration of the place. Doors and luggage compartments are kept open in order to ease access to the seats and produce the loud music. One feels that the gas station has become an open-air lounge in which the permanence is brief but intense. This environment is fluidly composed of different groups that succeed one another until close to 6 a.m., when the last remnants meet for the “post-night,” before the always-delayed moment of going back home. Whoever remains in place, watching the frenetic rhythm of group formation and dispersion, understands why José Machado Pais said, “youth now live in the skies, migrating like birds” (Machado Pais, 2000: 220). The rhizomic thread linking the “warriors of the night”—as these youths are known—extrapolates the material contents of the gas station. Through the compulsive use of cell phones, individuals, and groups scattered around town keep in permanent touch, forming a true network of simultaneous communications. Inside moving cars, in the small clusters of people formed at the gas station, at doorways, and, as we will see later, even inside nightclubs, the cell phone is a fundamental instrument “for the use of nomads who have to be ‘permanently in touch’” (Bauman, 2001: 148). “Cell phones are not meant to chat on, but to find one another with. It’s something on the spot, instantaneous.” One of the young people interviewed at the gas

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station points to the strategic role of the cell phone in the context of the “pre-night”: The gas station business is more like a warm-up for the pre-night. Guys calling around, spending some time before getting there. With a cell phone it’s easy. The gas station is more like a place to go with the gang. Like, the guys drink, whatever. Then someone calls and asks, “Hey, where are you people?” “We’re here in Leblon, we’ll get going at this or that time.” “Cool.” We leave and meet there. Quick snacks such as hamburgers, hotdogs, and French fries are avidly consumed, as well as alcoholic beverages such as beer and Ice-brand drinks. The favorite option, however, is gummy, an instant alcoholic drink prepared on the spot with vodka, fruit-flavored powdered juice, and, sometimes, ice or water, already consecrated as the “typical” drink of the “night” patrons. The strategic stop at the convenience store also allows the youths to stack in something essential for an evening that will probably be marked by many French kisses: Halls brand candies, preferably cherry-flavored. Tobacco is present, but does not dominate the ambiance; drug use is sporadic, and can be said to be almost nonexistent. We must remember that the same youths patronize gyms during the day. Although the care with their bodies does not properly make them a “healthy generation,” its effects are felt in the relative moderation—when compared with other segments of youth—with which they consume tobacco, drugs, and even alcohol. People either arrive in groups in one or several cars or are formed on the spot as the gas station is one of the favorite meeting points of the gang. All groups, however, seem to be submitted to an identical logic of expansion that incorporates new elements, incessantly remaking its initial configuration. Mobility is so great some cars do not even park there, merely reducing their speed so that their occupants can enjoy the liveliness of the place while moving, waving at acquaintances, or simply checking up who is there. At the gas station, though, the majority is formed into small groups of five or six members usually organized along gender lines. In spite of the occurrence of some mixed groups, boys and girls tend to group themselves and locate differently in space. It is already possible to verify that gender interaction seems to occur through the mediation of the group, as we will see later. The chat inside each group is lively, centering on the question that drew all of them there: “What is the good one tonight?” Everywhere, the interaction is marked by interrupted discourses, intense gestures, and frenetic laughing structured around a common variable: having fun with friends, what is called zoação. The permanent circulation and the ceaseless

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Figure 9.1 Traffic islands: spaces for youth gathering and sociability.

trade of looks and stares lead the small groups into some relationships and anticipate the flirting mood that characterizes the universe of nightclubs. The “pre-night,” however, is not limited to the gas station. Juice bars and fast-food restaurants such as Bob’s and McDonald’s also serve as meeting points for the moving youth. People also agglomerate around bars and restaurants, and at the gates of strategically placed condos. Sometimes the presence of a hotdog stand, popularly called podrão—the big rotten one—is enough to make unusual places, such as the traffic islands between the lanes of heavy-traffic South Zone streets, into hotspots. Street vendors are also tuned in to that circuit and try to accompany as far as possible the moving crowds, selling drinks—from water to caipirinha—and quick snacks. We tried to approach a second group of youths as Diego and his friends, with whom we had been talking previously, had quickly left us to approach a group of four laughing girls who had just left the convenience store. We could observe from a distance that Diego succeeded in “scoring” one of the girls, a fact stridently celebrated by his friends. Meanwhile, we tried to establish contact with another youth, Maurício, 19 years old, commenting on the agglomeration we had witnessed the previous night in front of a fast-food restaurant. As an answer to our comments, the young man told us a true experience he and his friends had lived: We got there [at Bob’s Burger], we ate, everybody drank a bit; it was

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overcrowded with parked cars, not a parking space left. All kinds of very loud music, different songs coming from different cars. It looked like a party; it was just like a nightclub, except for the lights. Then we went to the Sister Moon, in São Conrado, we drove by, there was a huge crowd at the door. We went to three other nightclubs that night, and in the end we decided to go to my place and play cards, when it was already 3:30 in the morning. We then asked, divided between curiosity and disbelief, whether Maurício had in fact enjoyed that evening, that seemed to us to have been at least somewhat curious. His answer was emphatic, though: I had a great time. I didn’t get into any place. And we just kept moving from one place to another, checking out if there was one that wasn’t too crowded so we could get in and enjoy it. And when it was four o’clock in the morning we went like: “Hey, guys, it’s over.” Then we kept playing cards until eight o’clock in the morning. But we really enjoyed the night, because we went out, we were in three different cars. Just in my car there were eight of us. Places of transit such as gas stations and their convenience stores have thus become interactive settings for the meetings and leisure of new assemblages, always leading to a rewriting of space. One may have a hamburger by the end of the evening with one’s friends, after the nightclub or before it. Nevertheless, more than sating hunger, they intensify the fruition of togetherness, of playing together, of the temporary sticking together of the group before new dislocations occur. From the same movement in which the evening is defined as practiced spatiality, is derived the perception of its decisive condition of trajectivity and the statement of the dimension of flow and “inhabited” process. The youths ceaselessly circulate between places but they do not have them as references of an arrival. Statements that would allow us to find circumstances of fixation, sedentariness, and “rest” along the trajectory are hard to find. As the youths ceaselessly dislocate throughout the night, occupying several places that work as points of alternation in their trajectories, they eventually create interactive spaces in the transit and passage zones: aporetic, intermediate, interstitial. The space of the night, therefore, is a space of flows, not of places. This character explains, for instance, what makes an unusual environment such as the gas station so interesting. We can state that the systematic character and speed with which these dislocations are made effective point towards the nomadic character of the researched youth universe. This nomadism is translated in a set of spatial

 • Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida

practices that transform the night into an “urban multipolar rhizome” that is, a trans-spatial experience in which the circuit is constituted by simultaneous, albeit not exclusionary, trajectories between all fashionable events and places. As in the adage of Pascal, quoted by Bauman, we may say that the night is “a strange circle whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere (or, who knows, exactly the opposite)” (Bauman, 1999: 85). Hazard and unpredictability are inscribed as privileged dimensions of the smooth space in which, therefore, creation and performance are not only possible, but also necessary. The very surface modulates around trajectories, in such a way that changes of direction transform space itself, as in the case of nomads. As summarized by the Portuguese anthropologist José Machado Pais, the smooth space confers great amplitude to affections, emotions, sounds, and continuous movement. The substance of this space is its strength, its intensity. This is why smooth space is a kind of rhythmically-elaborated mosaic. Above all, this is a space open to individual trajectories. All trajectories seem possible here, at least in imagination. (Machado Pais, 2000: 225) “Let’s go to the night? Then we drive in front of a bunch of nightclubs and see what is up, what is crowded, and we get in, ya know?” Thus disposed, Maurício and his group of friends, which by that time (midnight) already counted nearly twelve young men, distributed in three cars, decide to leave. The roadmap, though, is ruled by occasionalism, as demonstrated by the deposition of a 19-year-old girl we interviewed at the door of one of the nightclubs: It depends on the day. Like, someone says: “Ah! What’s up tonight?” Hey! What’s the best party? “Hey! There’s a great party going on there, huh?” The party that’s most talked about, the party people say is the best, it depends on the day. There is no way you can know before the time. It depends on the day. On such-and-such day there’ll be such-and-such a party. And there we go! The choice of points around which the trajectory of the group will be drawn is occasional and depends on the “movement of people,” which can only be verified in loco. As it is still “early,” the convoy leaves towards Barra da Tijuca, implying that the first stop will be at the nightclub located in one of the main shopping malls of that neighborhood. According to what could be gathered from the scattered conversations, the goal is “to meet the crowd,” in that case gym colleagues who agreed to go there. We go with the convoy. The intense movement of cars still attracts our

Consuming the Night • 

attention, as well as the mood of fun and flirting that colors the streets. On the way, many phone calls and the strategic stop at a fast-food restaurant to meet another gang. It is also the occasion to buy cold water to make gummy, which starts to be consumed and distributed there. After roaming for nearly forty minutes on the spot, the group makes a series of phone calls and decides to migrate to Leblon, sure that the nightclub is not “crowded.” The evaluation is based on the movement at the doorway, but information provided by friends over the cell phone is also fundamental. As one of the youths we interviewed that night stated, this behavior is recurring: when something goes wrong, when the nightclub sucks or the party is a drag, we call each other: “Where the fuck are you?” Everybody is usually together, but it’s, like, when we split, right? “Hey, where are you?” “Hey, I don’t know where I am, I don’t know.” The group, though, does not seem disappointed. Flirting is in the air, and when kisses happen they are collectively celebrated. The initial configuration of the group is also altered by the inclusion of new members and the exclusion of others, who left for other “nights.” The gym gang was not found, and it does not seem to matter. What matters is that the crowd keeps rolling. This is the fundamental principle of nomadic territoriality. It was already 1:30 a.m. when we “landed” at another nightclub in Leblon. The scenery is different, as the inner patio of the mall sharply differs from the intense movement of vehicles at the South Zone of the city. From far away, it was already possible to notice the agglomeration around the place, as a great traffic jam spreads on the main streets leading to the nightclub. Traffic jams generated by these agglomerations, especially on weekends, are already a routine, attracting the attention of the press and the neighbors’ associations. It would be a mistake, though, to think that our young informers would regret the option made and consider turning around. Open windows, a drink in one hand and a cell phone in the other, the empathy with the crowd is immediate. Everywhere, the gang is met with a gestural semiotics that includes looks of recognition, giggles, and dialogues that will not go much farther then the very celebration of the meeting: “Hi!” “Everything’s all right?” “I don’t know what!” Parking is not easy. A long way still separates us from the effective entrance into the nightclub. The intense red glare of the lamps that decorate the façade contrasts with the basic tonalities of the clothes. The headlights that go on and off mix with public lighting, giving the ambiance a diffuse and interrupted luminosity and anticipating the strobe lights of dance floors. The visual impact of the lights against the darkness of the city leaves no doubts: we are at the “night”! It is not enough, though, to draw out the

 • Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida

Figure 9.2 Redesigning spaces: the doorway as the place for getting together and having fun.

Consuming the Night • 

fliers, wait in long gender-organized lines, be allowed in by security personnel and door people, and, eventually, reach the inside of the nightclub. We immediately notice that “the doorway” is the stage of intense fruition in itself: another unusual space reconfigured by the urban nomads. Nomadic life is intermezzo. In the universe of the nightclub, there are zones that are previously established as striated. These zones, in turn, suffer recodification processes towards the creation of smooth spaces, “marked by ephemeral traits that dislocate and vanish” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997b: 190). Among these spaces, the doorway deserves special attention. Its central “striational” function is to connect inside and outside, providing the subjects a clear representation of the limits of either area. It is therefore possible to enjoy the night at the doorway of a certain place, without necessarily entering that space. The door is then seen as an inter-place of dislocation, an interstitial zone producing new patterns of sociability, meetings, observation, and fruition. “To stay there with one’s friends is basic, always happens.” The striated treatment of that space remains, now superimposed on its smooth and volatile dimension, in which are recombined mechanisms ruled by other modalities of interaction, by other configurations of intensity and distinct logics of being in space. One may say that new places have their origins in the non-places (Augé, 2001) conferring on the primacy of interactivity of the youths the unquestionable command in the new regime of signification and intelligibility of these areas. This systematic occupation of doorways has already been noticed by club owners and event promoters. It is not possible, though, to associate the phenomenon with a mere lack of either money or will to enter different places in the same night. The growing appraisal of that space altered event-organization strategies, as explained Adriano, who works in a famous model agency that is constantly requested in nocturnal events: The doorway is, shall we say, the key to the house. [It is so because] the doorway must always be crowded, you understand? It must always be crowded, because even though the place may be crowded inside, with great vibes, if the doorway is empty many people won’t stay, because they think that inside it’s like it is outside. So there are many nightclubs that keep people at the door, letting them in slowly, to get a bigger crowd. Particularly when the nightclub opens out directly onto the street, because people who are driving by usually slow down, and if they see it’s empty they keep going. Now if there is lots of people at the door, just talking, they think: Let’s stop here a moment to check it out. So in a nightclub the door is what matters. If the door people work well and keep it crowded, the nightclub will always be cool.

 • Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida

The resignification of the doorway space is expressed by the disassembly of its primary border-tracing function and its redesign as a physical basis for the agglomeration of youths who find private axes of sociability there. That is, the doorway is able to become a nocturnal event in itself, reaching its fullness within the scope of its own ambit. We cannot forget that the primary determination of the nomad is effectively that he occupies and holds a smooth space, subverting its conventional forms of occupation. It was past 2 a.m. when we eventually decided to enter the nightclub proper. We arrived at the main space of the nightclub around 2:30 a.m.— “the hour of the desperate,” according to one of our informers. The comment refers to the fact that at that time the “war” has reached its apogee. After an exercise in general scouting of the place, we left towards the main room of the nightclub, where the dance floor is located. When we entered it we immediately noticed that the spatial logic of this kind of environment has been subverted. While the circulation spaces around the dance floor are occupied by frantically moving groups and couples “making out,” the center of the dance floor remains empty. Through the dry-ice curtain and with our visions blurred by the strobe lights, we noticed several groups of boys and girls distributed around that empty space. There seems to be a centrifugal force propelling them towards the borders. Even if dancing is, in principle, the raison d’être of this space, it is not in its function that the youths have their fun. We cannot refrain from establishing a parallel with the spaces said to be “alternative,” in which the agglomerations are formed around the music. Here taste seems not to be an issue: the DJ plays the hits of the hour. The present style is hip-hop with a few elements of techno. Some months ago it was (Brazilian) funk and, before that, forró. It is impossible to stop. To inhabit the uninterrupted flow and trajectory means not only to provide places with a moving and always-contingent ownership, but also to alter their signification registers. The dance floors, the area that corresponds to the division between those and the limits of the table area, both sets of toilets, the stairways, the entrance corridors, and the side halls: all is exponentially redimensioned around the movement of circulation. Such points acquire the “immaterial” consistency of permanent trajectivity. Dance floors morph into strategic areas for ceaseless eye movement, in decentralized observation foci whose vanishing points are absent. The moving bodies are “located” agents of “other”-capture and leave no doubt about the affective dimension of the nomadic war machine. Toilets for men and women, stairways, corridors, entry halls, upper and lower planes of nightclubs reactualize themselves as passageways, ceaseless passageways, in a kind of merciless frenzy of circulation that grinds and deconstitutes its own coordinates. These spaces, therefore, inscribe themselves not as an end unto themselves, but as points of alternation in the “gaseous” construc-

Consuming the Night • 

tion of interactive networks that gravitate nonstop. One may even dance on the dance floors, use the toilets, rest on stairways, or sit at the tables. Nevertheless, the sum total of these acts in their appearance of spatial occupation subsumes another logic that overcomes it, provoking a significant change in the regimes of representation of spaces as flow, circulation, or trajectivity. We finally leave the premises at 4:30 a.m., to close the night at the same gas station from which the convoy left. On the way, though, one decides to stop by the doorway of a nightclub in the same neighborhood. On the cell phone, we are told that the group intends to meet with the gym gang. We decide to go with them. By the nightclub doorway, though, the cars just slow down. “The crowd” gets in the cars, meets, and leaves towards the “post-night” at the gas station. Around 5 a.m., the kids arrive at the fast-food restaurant. Everybody is a little bit drunk, but they do not show any tiredness. While they consume their burgers and sodas, the impressions of the night, which is not over yet, mix with the plans for the next one and the ceaseless postponement of the drive back home. By that time, it is hard to know whether we are in the “post-” or the “pre-night,” but the fact is that the “night” ends with the light of dawn and the same question that triggered the previous marathon: “what is the good one tonight?” While we consume a hotdog, we remember the paradox of nomadism enunciated by Toynbee: “the nomads are those who do not move,” perhaps because they refuse to abandon the trajectory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997a: 52). “Night as in evening or night as the night?” The answer given by one of the youths interviewed, to the question “What is the night for you?” that we repeated countless times throughout the research, makes the “smooth” occupation of leisure spaces in town evident. We immediately perceive that the spatial poetry constructed around the doorway broadens its effects and its resemantization properties to other environments, providing them a heterotopic character, to use the Foucaldian expression. The conventional meanings and functions they had are eventually subsumed into the logic of fun ruled by the play with one’s friends. The “night” category, with its modulations “pre-” and “post-,” seems to be larger than the universe that is merely referred to music-, dance-, nightclub-, and partying-associated nocturnal leisure, incorporating into its circuit places that, in principle, would be destined for other kinds of occupation. In an interview in a famous shopping mall at Barra da Tijuca, a comical debate between Rafaela, Maria, and Beatriz, youths between 16 and 17 years old who live in the neighborhood, brings some light onto this interesting construction of “the night” as a differentiated spatiotemporal configuration beyond the immediate opposition of “night” and “day,”

 • Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida

incorporating into nocturnal leisure some activities that would, in principle, be organized around other variables: Rafaela: Hey! The night is like, it’s kind of like when there’s a party, a disco, like you know, some place like that. To have fun by night is the night. Like, well, that’s what I think. Maria: Kind of like not staying home, you get it? To go out with friends to do something, I don’t know, going to a shopping mall, something. That’s the night! Rafaela intervenes: A mall is not the night. What a trip! What are you talking about! Maria answers: Oh, but it is, man. As long as you don’t stay at home! Beatriz (agreeing with Rafaela): It’s not the night! Rafaela is emphatic: Of course not! The night is partying! The night is partying! Maria defends herself: Ah! OK, then! So what you’re gonna do in the night? You go to the movies. Beatriz: The night is a show, a party, a disco! Rafaela (laughing at Maria’s answer): What are you talking about, “Going to the movies is the night!?!” In this segment of youth, the night seems to be the leading principle of all leisure activities, superimposing itself on other spaces, like the beach, for instance. Everything apparently can be incorporated into this circuit, and “socializing” appears as a qualifier that can be applied even to events and spaces not directly connected with dancing and nocturnal leisure. Movie theaters, for instance, are equally inscribed as points disconnected by the trajectories in flow that resignify them. Young people occupy the theaters, chat, use them as food courts, caterwaul, laugh out loud, gesture, use cell phones, talk among themselves through these gadgets. Several complaints by unaware customers have been broadcast by the media. This spatial practice makes the act of watching the film almost a merely accidental circumstance. Shopping malls are also inhabited around these circuits, occupied by the swirl, redesigned in their dimensions, which are primarily directed to the circulation of offers and demands of consumption. There is the “striated” space of consumption, of shops alongside corridors, of immediate commercial evocation. Shops, corridors, and food courts melt away their definite contours, transforming into parts of rhizomic assemblages that are improvized and imagined in each sequence. What the youths consume there is their own interactivity. Even the traditional Rio space of the beach has been the object of dif-

Consuming the Night • 

ferentiated practices that have altered its configuration, incorporating it into the circuit of the night. Perhaps we are witnessing the inversion of the logic enunciated by a famous entrepreneur who has been working in the Rio night for 30 years: “the disco is a nightly beach.” On what concerns the universe researched, we can doubtlessly say that the beach is becoming a daytime “night.” It is not an accident that one of the tendencies of the high summer is precisely the organization of parties on the beach. Here is how one of the youths we interviewed describes the beach as a part of the circuit of the night: “Guys go there [referring to the beach] to find out about the night. It’s there we get to know about the nights, right there on the beach.” If there are still doubts about the points that may be occupied around the dynamics of nocturnal leisure, the youths are unanimous on what makes “the good night”: cool places with beautiful people. Thus “the nice place is to be with your friends, to have fun with your friends, on the edge, without screwing up. If you are with your friends, who you like, anywhere is a cool place.” Mobility becomes thus the main characteristic of the Rio night, transforming nocturnal leisure into a trans-spatial experience, as the logic of “socializing” is unlocalized. It is a mistake, though, to think that nomadism does not involve territoriality. After all, “the nomad distributes himself on a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, and holds that space, and there resides his territorial principle” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997a: 52).

Notes 1.

2.

This article belongs to a larger research project on space and subjectivity in contemporary youth cultures, produced in the Centro de Estudos Sociais Aplicados of the Candido Mendes University, that became the book Noites Nômades (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Rocco, 2003) which I co-authored with Kátia de Almeida Tracy. I am very grateful to João Francisco de Lemos for his precious help in the fieldwork on Rio and its entrepreneurial aspects. This and all other translations into English are my own.

References Appadurai, Arjun, “Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India,” in Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds), Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge/Paris: Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990). Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Augé, Marc, Não-lugares: Introdução a uma Antropologia da Supermodernidade, 2nd edition (São Paulo: Papirus, 2001). Bauman, Zygmunt, Globalização: As Conseqüências Humanas (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1999). Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernidade Líquida (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2001). Canevacci, Massimo, “Diversidade Nômade e Mutação Cultural,” in Rafael Santos and Azoilda Loretto Trindade (eds), Multiculturalismo: Mil e Uma Faces da Escola (Rio de Janeiro: DP & A, 1999). de Certeau, Michel, A Invenção do Cotidiano. 1. Artes de Fazer, 5th edition (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2000).

 • Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, “Introdução: Rizoma,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (eds), Mil Platôs: Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia, Vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1995a). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, “587 a.C.—Sobre alguns regimes de signos,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (eds), Mil Platôs: Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia, Vol. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1995b). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, “1227—Tratado de nomadologia: a máquina de guerra,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (eds), Mil Platôs: Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia, Vol. 5 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1997a). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, “1440—O liso e o estriado,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (eds), Mil Platôs: Capitalismo e Esquizofrenia, Vol. 5 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1997b). Foucault, Michel, “Des Espaces autres,” in Dits et Écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). Hetherington, Kevin, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Hetherington, Kevin, Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics (London: Sage/TCS, 1998). Machado Pais, José, “Transition and Youth Cultures: Forms and Performances,” International Social Sciences Journal, Special Issue: Youth in Transition, 164 (2000), 219–232. Marcus, George, “Past, Present and Emergent Identities: Requirements for Ethnographies of Late Twentieth-Century Modernity Worldwide,” in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (eds), Modernity and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Massey, Doreen, “Travelling Thoughts,” in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberger, and Angela McRobbie (eds), Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London and New York: Verso, 2000). Schlör, Joachim, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London, 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). Valentine, Gill, Tracey Skelton, and Deborah Chambers, “Cool Places: An Introduction to Youth and Youth Cultures,” in Tracey Skelton and Gill Valentine (eds), Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Virilio, Paul, O Espaço Crítico e as Perspectivas do Tempo Real (Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1993).

CHAPTER

10

Contesting the Night as a Space for Consumption in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico PAT R IA ROM Á N  V E L Á Z Q U E Z

The Spanish colonial architecture and layout of Old San Juan, with its cobbled, hilly, and narrow streets, dominates the social imaginary and identity of the city (see Figure 10.1). Surrounded by a military fort to the north and a cruise ship port to the south, Old San Juan is a busy commercial, tourist, and residential peninsula. Most of the residential area is concentrated in the north, with the exception of the bars and restaurants located in San Sebastián Street. The center is dominated by commerce (jewelry, souvenir, and handicraft shops; fast-food chains, cafeterias, restaurants, and clothes shops), while the port in the south offers a gateway to the Caribbean. Old San Juan’s colonial heritage—its great fort, old architecture, lively commercial and residential center—barely registered in the 1970s when the urban center showed all the signs of neglect (which are still evident in certain areas; see Figure 10.2). A strategy to revitalize Old San Juan was formulated by the Institute of Culture in the mid-1980s, culminating in the publication of a study in 1991. This revitalization proposal did not recognize Old San Juan as a place suitable for nocturnal urban strolling or just “hanging out” at night. People overflowing from the bars into the streets were considered by the new inhabitants of the city as “foreign and in conflict with the Historic 201

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

Figure 10.1 A typical street in Old San Juan.

Figure 10.2 Signs of the old.

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

Center.”1 The evening in Old San Juan was perceived as a problematic time that needed attention. The vision for the city excluded the idea of people strolling around or loitering at night in public spaces unless regulated by the state. Attempts by local government to control nighttime urban consumption are not new; however, the ways in which this have been enforced has varied enormously. Fears about violence, darkness, and large social groups congregating at night have preoccupied local government and this anxiety has been used to justify the implementation and enforcement of public-order acts and codes of public behavior. Focusing on San Juan, this chapter will consider the impact that this regulation can have on urban consumption practices, particularly when these regulations relate to attempts to reinvent a place as a heritage city. I will explore this theme via an analysis of the Municipal Code of Public Order for Old San Juan, implemented in November 1997. This Code was issued to address the level of nighttime noise and alcohol consumption and was concerned with controlling what the municipal authority considered to be the inappropriate behavior of young people in the streets of the Old City. These issues had been addressed in the past through the implementation of local orders. However, none were effective and people still congregated in the plazas and streets of the Old City. The Code was controversial not only because it attempted to outline and enforce a correct way of behaving in the Old City, but also due to the way in which it was implemented. The urban ambiance that had been created by groups of young people congregating in the plazas and the streets while strolling from one bar to another became dominated by the presence of heavily armed police in the streets. And the Code has a wider significance within Puerto Rico. What started as a municipal policy introduced by the mayor of San Juan was later instituted as a national policy for urban centers when Mayor Sila María Calderón became governor of the island in 2000. Taking the nocturnal scenario of Old San Juan as the backdrop, I will highlight how this Code illuminates the contradictions embedded in the regulation of urban consumption activities at night.

A Caribbean City: From Fort to Cruise Ship Port The establishment of Old San Juan in its current location dates back to 1521, not long after the Spanish conquest of the island in 1492. It is one of a group of Antillean cities founded by the Europeans during the colonization period, all exhibiting similar characteristics, architecture, and layout.2 Given its geographical location, Old San Juan soon became of strategic significance for the defence of the island at a time when the Spanish, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and French were trying to gain control of new territories in the

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

Americas. By the end of the sixteenth century, the role of Old San Juan as a defense bastion was already established, and the Fort of Santa Catalina (La Fortaleza) and the Castillo San Felipe (El Morro) were constructed.3 The following two centuries saw the consolidation of Old San Juan as a military fort with the construction of Castillo San Cristobal. Some of the structures and layout that characterize the city were also evident by this time, and given that its territorial extension is about 40 square miles, its growth and topography are very much determined by its geographical contours. Spain’s interest in Old San Juan focused chiefly on its strategic position as a defense fort, and not in developing its economic potential. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Old San Juan strengthened its economic activity, establishing banks and financial institutions. The Spanish-American war ended Spain’s domination over the Americas with the handover of Cuba and Puerto Rico to the United States in 1898. The institutional development of Old San Juan grew at a pace during the first two decades of the twentieth century (under United States administration). However, the economic development of Old San Juan was slow. Not only was it overpopulated but most of the population lived in poverty.4 The population of Old San Juan grew steadily up until the 1940s, when a sharp decline in population was registered. The decline of Old San Juan, most apparent in the abandonment and general degeneration of its structures, continued throughout most of the twentieth century. By the 1970s, Old San Juan was displaying all the signs of a highly neglected urban center whose population had declined significantly. Those that remained were mainly the poor who were housed in public accommodation. The population drifted from 14,002 in 1960 to 6,110 residents in 1970 (–56.4%), with a further reduction to 4,364 in 1980 (–28.6%). The 1980s experienced the least change in population, with a reduction of only 1.3% to 4,309 inhabitants in 1990. Despite efforts to regenerate the area in the 1990s, the trend of decreasing population continued. By 2000, the population of Old San Juan was 3,846 (a reduction of 10.8%).5 The regeneration and gentrification of the area first began towards the end of the 1970s and in the beginning of the 1980s, with an influx of the upper and middle classes into the area. Throughout the 1990s a demographic change was registered: single households of a younger generation with education above high school and white-collar workers came to outnumber poorer family households.6 Real-estate companies and new businesses swiftly moved into the area and property prices increased considerably during the last two decades of the twentieth century.7 Tourism increased sharply. This was due primarily to the improvement of the ports, allowing larger ships to dock and thus generating extra movement of passengers in and out of the peninsula.8 The price of residential and com-

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

mercial property and the cost of maintaining the character of what has been declared a conservation area have contributed to the social and economic gentrification of Old San Juan.9 The strategy to revitalize Old San Juan acknowledged that the demographic change in the town, most evident between the 1980s and 1990, had an impact upon social interaction in public spaces. It proposed that the limited use of public squares for social interaction and activities amongst its residents were contributing to the general feeling that Old San Juan was a deserted and insecure area, particularly at night. While the bars and pubs attracted a great number of people on weekend nights, these were considered by residents as foreign and at odds with the ambiance and ethos of the historic center. The revitalization strategy for Old San Juan proposed to address these issues by promoting activities and revitalizing areas in the north side of the city, activities that would stimulate the circulation of residents and tourists, while eliminating those that were considered out of place in the historic center. The biggest project was the development of the port area in the south to include a big chain hotel, restaurants, a casino, commercial space, and parking spaces. The revitalization initiative for the 1990s also included improved illumination of the city at night, provision of public transport, parking, trolley buses to access the city from the parking spaces, control of vehicular access to the city on weekend nights, revitalization of squares, and the building of a new square commemorating the fifth centenary of the discovery of the Americas: the Ballajá Court. So, similar to other Caribbean cities, Old San Juan’s most recent major investment and revenue derives from its status as a tourist destination. Indeed, the presence of the forts in the north side of the peninsula, declared a heritage site by the United Nations, is all that remains of Old San Juan’s significance as a military fort. Despite the apparent success of the revitalization strategy—evident in the newly refurbished properties, the area’s economic growth, and its success as a tourist destination—a recent study concluded that not only is the decreasing size of the population still a problem in San Juan, but that this population is becoming more economically homogeneous.10 A new strategy to rehabilitate Old San Juan now seeks to encourage a diverse population that would guarantee the mixed use of its public spaces again.

The Night, Cities, and Consumption Worldwide, cities are reinventing themselves as sites of consumption and leisure (Zukin, 1998). The neglect of many urban centers and the redevelopment strategies of the 1980s resulted in the rebirth of cities as centers of consumer-led activities. The role of local government has changed to

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

accommodate this, shifting from a management of social welfare to a new form of entrepreneurialism that promotes urban regeneration in partnership with private capital (Harvey, 1989). One consequence is that the city appears as an object of consumption and as a place in which to experience a particular lifestyle: Gentrification, cultural innovation, and physical up-grading of the urban environment . . . consumer attractions . . . and entertainment . . . have all become much more prominent facets of strategies of urban regeneration. Above all, the city has to appear as an innovative, exciting, creative, and safe place to live or visit, to play and consume in. (ibid., 1989: 9) Many cities are thus marketed and sold as a particular type of consumer product just as place-marketing has begun to play a crucial role in the way in which a city promotes itself in terms of its competitive advantage. It is not uncommon to find a great number of cities turning to tourism due to its potential for economic growth (Ward, 1998; Fainstein and Judd, 1999). In this context the city is sold as a place that is sufficiently attractive to persuade place users, principally understood as visitors and investors, to part with their money. The place is packaged and sold as a commodity. Its multiple social and cultural meanings are selectively appropriated and repackaged to create a more attractive place image in which any problems are played down. (Ward, 1998: 1) Thus a city that builds on tourism promotes itself as a “dreamscape of visual consumption” (Zukin, 1991: 221), as an attractive place to visit because of its architecture, buildings, history, culture, and events. The city is turned into an object (a collage of images) that can be easily condensed into a souvenir and therefore possessed and owned (Fainstein and Judd, 1999). In the revitalization plans for Old San Juan, architectural heritage has played a significant part in the place image sought for the city, one in which nocturnal life is controlled by the state and in which social divisions, though present, are kept out of sight. This place image has relied heavily on exploiting architectural heritage for the purposes of tourism with the particular aim of attracting certain types of visitor. In packaging and promoting a place image for cities, local governments often promote a particular type of consumption in order to attract a type of consumer who will contribute to the economic rather than social value of the location (Rogers and Coaffee, 2005). In this sense, then,

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

city-centre renewal is increasingly changing the wider normative concept of “publicness” underpinning the city centre according to the preferences of particular commerce-friendly activities and demographics. . . . The single-minded design concepts of use that underpin these developments leave little room for the re-interpretation and re-appropriation of public space by “other” demographics with a different set of use-values even within a clean, safe, and accessible public environment. (ibid.: 324) Promoting a set of values based on purchasing and acquisition rather than social interaction comes together with policies aimed at regulating consumer activities. These policies actively discriminate against those other consumers of the city—those perceived as antisocial, contributing neither to the aesthetics nor the economic growth of the city. Youth groups are one of those other consumer groups, often portrayed by government authorities as a polluting presence and a potential threat to public order (Valentine, Skelton, and Chambers, 1998). This discrimination is all the more evident when considering the temporal dimension to consumer activities within urban environments. With the redevelopment strategies of the 1980s came the reinvention of cities in which the nighttime economy, previously a marginal zone, became central to some modern European cities (Hobbs et al., 2000; Thomas and Bromley, 2000; Chatterton and Hollands, 2002). Local governments have acknowledged that the development of a late-night economy is an integral part of the general economic life of the city. These concerns, however, do not go unchallenged and can lead to tensions and contradictions in the implementation of urban regulatory devices and cultural policy in cities. A focus on the night highlights these contradictions in which attempts to encourage nighttime economies coexist with tighter social control of individuals at night. The nighttime economy is highly regulated such that antisocial behavior is tightly defined and strictly policed (Chatterton and Hollands, 2002). Creating a balance between the different interests and activities involved in urban life (entertainment, leisure, work, production, and residence) poses a challenge to local governments in their attempts to respond to these competing demands, which are particularly acute in the regulation of nighttime activities. The night as a zone of consumption evokes both temporal and spatial dimensions: it highlights the contradictions that result from promoting a vigorous nightlife and accentuates questions about who is included in and excluded from consuming the city at night.

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

Nights in Old San Juan: Before the Code Going to Old San Juan at night during the weekends, in particular to the Plaza San José or San Sebastián Street, “to see what is going on,” was one of the main activities that best described the use of the urban space in this city. (Silva, 1997: 70)11 This is how the nights of Old San Juan were described a few months before the Code was implemented and it is this image—the street and its plaza as a place to hang out—that remained popular amongst those who participated in its nightlife. It was this image that the authorities sought to change. San Sebastián Street and its square, the Plaza San José, on the north side of the city were the main areas for nocturnal strolling and congregation. Most bars were basic, small, and hot. They quickly became crowded and patrons would tend to buy a drink and take it out onto the pavement. Groups of friends, couples, and individuals would wander along the street or just hang out in the square. Those aged between 17 and 21 congregated in the square, while those in their late 20s and 30s would do so further along the street. The character of the bars and the music played from the juke boxes changed accordingly. During weekend nights, the square provided a space in which teenagers could meet their friends, flirt, smoke, drink, or just look and be looked at. Prohibited by age from entry to discotheques or clubs, this group with little or no income used the square as a cheap place of entertainment. Some were involved in illicit practices like smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol under the age of 18 (Silva, 1997). These practices of congregating and consuming alcohol in the streets at night were not in harmony with the revitalization strategy and with the image that the authorities sought for Old San Juan as a colonial heritage city. The Code of Public Order for Old San Juan attempted to control these urban nocturnal practices,12 while complementing the revitalization strategy for the city.

The Municipal Order: A Code of Public Order The Municipal Code of Public Order was significant not only because it changed consumption practices and the character of nightlife in this part of the city by excluding certain groups, but also for the assumptions about urban aesthetics and class judgments that informed this measure. The Code can be understood in relation to a politics of a “hard hand against crime,” the slogan that has been used in relation to the enforcement of the law and the policing of drug-related crime by the central government of Puerto

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

Rico since it came to power in 1992. This slogan was used to justify the invasion of public housing and other poor neighborhoods by the military police, who entered these sites in military tanks, helicopters, and motorbikes. The policy of “hard hand” or zero tolerance that was taken up by the local municipal authority of San Juan was imported from the United States, where it had been implemented in various cities. In Puerto Rico— not a state, but an incorporated territory of the United States—approaches to policing are influenced by those of the United States. The Municipal Code of Public Order for Old San Juan stands as an example of an approach that was subsequently adopted elsewhere when similar codes were implemented in two other urban centers of the greater San Juan area: Río Piedras and Santurce.13 All of these areas have been the focus of revitalization strategies. The codes are elements within a municipal campaign which seeks to build an image of the greater area of San Juan as a vibrant yet harmonious place. Hence, although my discussion is confined to the Code of Public Order for Old San Juan, which was the first to be implemented, it became a model that continues to be applied in other parts of the San Juan metropolitan area and on the island in general. The municipal order14 was approved by the Municipal Assembly on August 29, 1997 and implemented during November of the same year. A high-profile media advertising campaign and a period of advice to the public preceded the implementation of what became the Municipal Code of Public Order for Old San Juan.15 The Code was justified by reference to three basic criteria: the defense of historic and architectural patrimony, the need to guarantee order, and the need to guarantee security. The Code intended to regulate the level of noise and the sales of alcohol in the streets of the Old City. However, it was the defense of the historic and architectural heritage that was used as a primary justification to regulate the use of public urban space during the night. The first two articles of the Code made reference to the “immense historical value” of Old San Juan as an ideal place to “enjoy the social and cultural ambiance that its urban surroundings and architectonic beauty stimulate.” For this reason, “we are all obliged to protect and preserve it for the enjoyment of this and future generations.” The third article made direct reference to the issue of security by boldly stating that “Old San Juan at night has turned into a dangerous area.” Security had been an issue that different local and central governments had tried to address using a variety of measures. However, it is the presence of fear during the night that I wish to highlight as it is during this time that security is identified as a particular problem. The fourth article establishes a direct relationship between the consumption of alcoholic drink and violations of public order. These are identified as “congregations, the use of bottles as projectiles to attack the forces of public order, and the use of

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

sound systems at high volume during early hours of the morning.” The next article offers a description of the “excessive noises” coming from the bars and cars. It is thus the “responsibility of the Municipality of San Juan to guarantee a safe environment . . . as well as guaranteeing. . . a peaceful and tranquil coexistence.” In parallel to these Municipal responsibilities there is a recognition that all citizens have the right “to enjoy in Old San Juan activities proper to this historic, tourist, residential, and commercial zone.” Thus the Code set out to establish that “The Mayor of the Municipality of Old San Juan would develop a broad campaign to advise the community and youth in particular about the value of the historical patrimony of Old San Juan” (1997: 2). The concern for the historical value of the city takes a particular emphasis in relation to the night. The sound of young people talking, laughing, and listening to pop music from cars or portable stereos (perceived as “noise”), and collective alcohol consumption on the street, are considered to be inappropriate activities in an area now defined as a historic zone. These activities are not in keeping with the visual representations of the city which the council sought to promote: “Old San Juan’s urban surroundings and architectonic beauty provide the perfect ambiance to enjoy its social and cultural heritage” (1997: 1). The adjective proper in the phrase “proper activities for this zone” and the emphasis on “civility” suggests an elitist view about the behavior deemed suitable for the changing city of Old San Juan. Towards the end of the document, the reader is reminded of the group at whom this Code is directed, and for whom it had the greatest impact: youth. The local government justified its policies with arguments about order, noise, and security in order to limit the movement and presence of youth in the city. The Municipality sought to establish control over the urban space by imposing norms and regulations regarding the use of various open spaces in the city. The Municipality sought to appeal to the new middle-class, professional residents by excluding youth from participating in the consumption of the nocturnal city. However, it was the implementation of the Code that was most controversial.

Incongruent Relationship: Historic San Juan, Youth, and the Nocturnal Street The Code was directed at youth who congregated in the squares and streets of the Old City during the night: San Sebastián Street and its Plaza San José were heavily targeted by the police. The preservation of the historic city, and what the authorities called the “disorder” provoked by youth during the night, were presented as the main reason for excluding youth from participating in the consumption of Old San Juan. The activities of young

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

people, portrayed here as disorderly, did not coincide with the place image that was being created for the historic city. It is, after all, the defense of the historic and architectural heritage of Old San Juan that remained a priority for the municipal authority and the primary justification for implementing the Code. However, it can be argued from a more inclusive perspective that the presence of youth enriches urban spaces by diversifying the identities associated with the place. This was the case previously in Old San Juan, specifically in the Plaza San José and in San Sebastián Street, which for years had been characterized by the congregation of young people during weekend nights. The youth groups that participated in this site maintained Old San Juan’s long-established identity as a vibrant nocturnal city. The different youth groups that participated in these place-based activities have continually transformed the identity of the Plaza according to the latest fashions and musical trends, from rock, nueva trova, and salsa in the 1970s, to rap, reggae, and reggaeton during the 1980s and into the 1990s. But as I do not wish to present a romanticized, nostalgic image of the city, it is important to acknowledge incidents that occurred during the 1970s and 1980s that led the city to acquire a reputation for violence, a characteristic which fed into popular fears and various media representations (in newspapers, novels, dramas, and songs). Registered in the collective memory were disturbances that resulted in streets covered in broken bottles and wounded people (Silva, 1997). This is the image that was mythologized in some salsa songs of the 1970s and one that was often recalled and used by the Municipality of San Juan to justify such strict measures. Members of later youth groups tend to reject such memories of violence, believing them to be very specific conflicts between youth groups that occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s that are no longer relevant. The image of Old San Juan as a violent place during the night is refuted by those who argue that a more accurate description would be bohemian rather than violent. Yet representations of the city as both bohemian and violent have been used by the Municipality to justify the need for the Code and to create a place image that is presumed to be in harmony with the existing colonial architecture. In doing so the Municipality was trying to capture and promote the texture and sense of the city, while trying to control nighttime gatherings in open public places. Take, for example, the following text of a newspaper advertisement: Old San Juan is in its time. Its people, ambiance, and history are alive. So are its colors and textures; its magic and poetry. Old San Juan has its own time and value. And this is its moment. Share its bohemian nights and coexist in harmony. Take with pride

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

its color, tradition, and character. Thousands of people come from all over to know it, because it is unique. You have it here, enjoy it. You are part of Old San Juan. Enjoy yourself. For a more ordered city. A city for all. Old San Juan is at its peak. Provide it with life!16 This advert makes reference to a collective memory of San Juan as a historic city, to its magic and its bohemian nights. It uses a language of inclusion more than exclusion, but only if you are willing to enjoy it with “respect, joy, and responsibility,”17 as is pointed out in another advert issued in the same series. According to the mayor, “We are maintaining the city as open but with order, dignity, and respect.”18 This advertisement suggests that during the night Old San Juan is lived in a disorderly bohemian fashion, and it invites us to participate in the city’s tradition and character. The value judgments about order and control in the Code appeared at the same time as such images of the night. The advertisements published in the national press emphasized the perceived incongruity between nighttime consumption, youth, and historic heritage. The logo for the campaign promoted an ideal of the harmony between day and night by representing a dark side with stars and a bright side with the image of the sun. Immediately below this image lies the logo of the campaign: “Old San Juan, city for all.” This image, somehow metaphorical, suggests making day of the night, so that San Juan could be a city for all. This Code was accompanied by an education campaign directed at young people which implied that youth and the city’s historical heritage had an uneasy relationship. The adverts broadcast on local radio stations used the voices of young people interacting and giving advice to other youngsters about the historic value of San Juan and about the proper use of its squares. Advice booths, staffed by young people, were located in those squares of the historic city in which youth congregated during the nights. These booths, with loudspeakers repeating the advertisements used for the campaign, were providing advice and distributing leaflets outlining the dispositions required by the new Code. Allan E. Charlotten,19 legal advisor to the mayor on culture, education, security, recreation, and sports, commented that “San Juan was out of control during the night.” He recognized that “the public that visit San Juan during the day and night are different.” During the day, “San Juan depends on tourism” and for this reason we needed “to establish an Order that took into account these differences.” According to Charlotten, the disposition to prohibit the sale of alcohol in glass containers during the day was not justified because “the public was different.” Even though Charlotten did not go further in describing the differences between these two publics, Illeana

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

Rivera Gómez, then special advisor to the mayor, provided some insight into these differences. She20 commented that the Code was not introduced with the intention of forcing youth to abandon the city, although that was one of its consequences. The intention was to establish some measures to regulate the conduct of youth and merchants (business owners), “so that San Juan could be enjoyed with order and discipline.” She explained that “the purpose was for all to enjoy San Juan, but in an appropriate way.” Embedded here is the image of a colonial city preserved for the tourist or visitor, to be looked at and enjoyed as prescribed by the municipality—with order and discipline. Positions against and in favor of the Code emerged as soon as it had been introduced. Those against nighttime consumption activities, including the owners of the newly refurbished residential properties, expressed their favorable view of the Code. Those in favor of urban nightlife, usually visitors to the city, opposed the generalized view about youth and their improper use of the streets and plazas. For those who opposed the pleasures associated with urban night life, the night appeared as a metaphor of the improper, this time characterized by the unlimited consumption of alcohol, noise made by people enjoying themselves, or music emanating from the cars and bars. But this time it was accompanied by a middle-class concern with moderation and restraint. Rivera mentioned that “at weekends . . . youth consumed alcohol, showed uninhibited conduct, damaged property, ran over the vehicles, and were behaving in a way that verged on being disorderly.” The Code, for one of its defenders, produced “less conglomerations during the weekends, [and] a calmer ambiance can be noticed, consonant with the historic city of Old San Juan.”21 Regarding noise levels, Rivera mentioned that after the implementation of the Code, “a more tranquil city is noticeable, unnecessary noises were reduced, creating the ambiance of order and discipline that was being looked for.” And David Ortiz Angleró, member of the Assessment Committee, commented that “what the Order implicitly establishes is the protection of the city and the vibration” provoked by “those youths’ activities that have the characteristic of a great sound system.” He continued: You are witnesses of what happened in front of San José Church— drunken lads of about 18 to 25 years pissing in the church in front of young girls and in front of everyone. In the Cathedral bottles and cans of beers appeared. The Order aims to protect the city.22 It was arguments like these that were used to justify the policy without offering alternatives that would allow the presence and coexistence of different youth groups in the city. A central anxiety conveyed by the Code concerned the visibility of youth

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

and focused not on the consumption of alcohol per se, but on its consumption in public spaces. The street as a site for young people to wander, meet, and congregate became a prohibited space. The behavior of young people was considered incompatible with the Municipality’s construction of a new orderly and disciplined identity for Old San Juan. But those in favor of allowing the consumption of alcohol and music-making in the streets and squares expressed their anger against the Code. The voices of youth groups were the strongest. An article published in the university newspaper, Diálogo, started by pointing out that “the new municipal measures will transform the nocturnal gatherings in Old San Juan.”23 Again, a nostalgic image of the bohemian atmosphere of Old San Juan was called upon, an identity that remains in the collective memory of many Puerto Ricans, but this time to oppose the Code. Another voice against the Code pointed out that “measures should be taken to ensure that they are valid for all of its citizens, not only for specific sectors either determined by age or origin.”24 In these quotations it is evident that youth groups felt excluded and frustrated that their participation and consumption in the city would be limited to enclosed spaces. In an article published in Claridad (1997), a weekly socialist newspaper, the news reporter starts by pointing out that Old San Juan is not the same any longer. During the night it is desolate, as if no one is interested in it anymore. On Fridays and Saturdays, the San José square is inhabited by “Impacto” Police Forces: big, strong, and intimidating men. Those who every now and then still wander around there say that they don’t feel inclined to stay with the “Impacto” police standing there. “It is not that we are going to do something bad, but feeling constantly observed by someone so big standing there invigilating me, it is just not my idea of enjoyment,” said Sandra, lawful Sanjuanera since the 1980s. Those others who still visit Old San Juan are inside the bars because it is there where the new public-order law captures them; they can’t drink a beer in the square, not even in a plastic glass, it can’t be done, it can’t be done, it can’t be done. Everything has to be done surrounded by cement. Now without trees, benches, Ponce de León’s statue, or anything: cement, heat, cigarette smoke . . . and if you don’t like it, go home, and there you can do whatever you want (unless you live in Old San Juan).25 This quote makes reference to the prohibited street, establishing a distinction between the street as an open public space and the street as a regulated and oppressive prohibited space. It also presents the disparity between young people and the historic colonial ambiance and subsequent scenario dominated by a heavily armed police force.

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

Those in favor of the Code believed that it was not exclusive, but occasionally acknowledged that this was a consequence of its implementation. For example, Ortiz Angleró said, “if the Order had been constituted as an educational process rather than a punitive one, I believe that youth would have not excluded themselves from the city.” This comment is important as it acknowledges that the presence of heavily armed police in the streets contributed to youth feeling excluded from the city. It also highlights one of the contradictions involved in the introduction and implementation of regulations to control the manner in which consumption occurs in the city at night. It draws attention to the contested character and unintended consequences of attempts to regulate city life. The implementation of the Code of Public Order was not a matter of simply regulating the level of noise and consumption of alcohol, but a way of establishing control over youth’s consumption in, and of, the nocturnal street. The street as the center of nightlife in the colonial city was presented by government leaders as a terrain of conflict. For the youths who participated in the performance of the nocturnal city, the street was the most suitable place to enjoy the pleasures of nightlife.

Nights after the Code The immediate impact of the Code could be observed in the deserted streets and plazas (see Figures 10.3 and 10.4). Within two years, the bars and cafés, once continually open to the street, had been superseded by newly enclosed, air-conditioned drinking establishments and refurbished restaurants. The price of alcohol and food increased. As a result, the type of consumer also changed. Old San Juan at night has now come to attract a type of person who consumes in an orderly and disciplined way inside restaurants, clubs, and bars, rather than one who uses the bars and restaurants directly in conjunction with the adjoining public spaces. The spontaneous and occasionally carnivalesque aspects to San Juan’s evening street life have been superseded by more closely controlled and organized festivals and cultural events. The revitalization plans for the city have sought to encourage daytime consumption for local and foreign tourists, local commerce (jewelry and souvenir shops, restaurants, bars, clothing shops, banking) and highlight San Juan’s significance as a center of governance (the Old City is home to the governor’s residence, the mayor’s office, numerous government offices and the Senate and Chamber house). Access to the city during weekend nights is regulated by roadblocks controlled by armed police; only those with parking permits or taxis are allowed to enter the city. The practice of consuming in the street has been replaced by a spectacle

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

Figure 10.3 Plaza San José, Old San Juan.

of consumption in order to fit a highly regulated place image of the regenerated Old City. Visitors are encouraged to consume what is on offer rather than make their own entertainment (for example, by spontaneously playing musical instruments in public places). Public spaces are prescribed only for uses deemed appropriate by the state. Preserving marketable representations of a picturesque, preserved colonial city that is attractive for the new, professional middle-class residents and visiting tourists (mainly those who briefly stop in the city as a cruise ship destination) is the state’s primary concern. Nearly ten years after the introduction of the Code, consumption activities such as concerts, nights of folklore, and open cinema and gallery nights, are organized and regulated by the local municipality. These activities aim to encourage the required orderly and disciplined approach to nighttime consumption sought by the Municipality. For example, gallery nights scheduled on the first Tuesday of every month (excluding the summer months—June and July), from 6 to 9 p.m. provide an opportunity for people to gather in San Sebastián Street after the galleries have closed. In the past, prior to the introduction of the Code, artisans would lay their crafts along the pavement of the street and people would just wander around, often with a beer in their hand. Artisans have subsequently been displaced to the nearby Ballajá Court. Those who, against

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico • 

Figure 10.4 San Sebastián Street, Old San Juan.

 • Patria Román-Velázquez

the municipal authority’s wishes, have placed their displays in San José Square have not been provided with electricity, as a measure to discourage their use of this space.26 Artisans have responded by gathering in the square with their battery-operated torches. The ever-popular festival of San Sebastián Street, held once a year at the beginning of January, is now highly controlled by the Municipality. Strict regulation of the movement of people in the city is imposed during the festivities by clearly demarcating areas in which alcohol consumption is allowed outside the bars. The lights of the municipal police patrolling the area and the presence of heavily armed police during these festivities have been a constant feature at night, reminding the consumer that the Code of Public Order is still in place. Old San Juan has come to be regulated, reconfigured, and represented as a place where heritage is central to the identity of the city. The place image sought for Old San Juan privileges its past as a historical object or artifact isolated from the practices that have allowed for its transformation and dynamism. In Old San Juan, nighttime entertainment is not forbidden. It is, however, prescribed according to highly normative values and under constant surveillance by the police.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Estudio de revitalización integral del Centro Histórico de San Juan, San Juan, Puerto Rico (1991). All translations from Spanish are my own, unless otherwise noted. www.oficinadigital.com/fun/sanjuan2006. El Morro continued to be transformed up until the eighteenth century. Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Estudio de revitalización integral del Centro Histórico de San Juan, San Juan, Puerto Rico (1991). Oficina de Planificación y Ordenación Territorial, Plan de Revitalización de Zona Antigua e Histórica del Casco de San Juan, Municipio Autónomo de San Juan, Puerto Rico (2005). The percentage of families under poverty levels for Old San Juan in 1990 was 56% of the total population, decreasing to 38% by 2000. Equally the percentage of people over 25 years of age with university degrees increased from 32% in 1990 to 45% in 2000 (ibid.). While in 1990 70% of the property was in the value-range of less than US$50,000, by 2000 this had reduced to only 1%. By 2000, 40% of the property was in the price range of between US$100,000 and US$199,999. By 1990 no property was above US$300,000 in value, this had increased sharply by 2000, with 14% of property costing between US$300,000 and US$499,999 and another 5% in the range of half a million to one million US dollars (ibid.). By 2006 more than 28 cruise ships used the port, transporting an average of 1.3 million passengers every year (ibid.). Ibid. Oficina de Planificación y Ordenación Territorial, Plan de Rehabilitación de Zona Antigua Histórica del Casco de San Juan, Municipio Autónomo de San Juan (2005). This study finished in April 1997 and is one of the few accounts of urban consumption in the Old City. Other accounts include literary texts by local writers (such as Ana Lydia Vega) and the occasional newspaper article. The consumption of classified drugs is prohibited by law for any citizen independent of their age. The consumption of alcohol by people under 18 is also prohibited by national laws. Laws that regulated certain behaviors and consumption practices in the city were already in place.

Old San Juan, Puerto Rico •  13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

The metropolitan area of San Juan has four urban centers: Old San Juan, Río Piedras, Condado, and Santurce. A copy of this document can be obtained from the mayor’s office, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Order was to go through a probationary period of six months in which public hearings would take place and in which an assessment committee was to provide monthly reports on the progress of the newly established Code. The committee consisted of two police colonels, the president of the chamber of commerce, three residents, two business representatives, and two university students. Advert published in local newspaper, El Nuevo Día, September 3, 1997, 79. My translation of the original text published in Spanish. Advert published in local newspaper, El Vocero, September 24, 1997, 33. My translation of the original text published in Spanish. Quoted in El Nuevo Día, August 13, 1997, 8. Original text in Spanish, my translation. Quotes by Lcdo. Allan E. Charlotten are taken from personal interview conducted on March 2, 1999. All interviews for this research were conducted in Spanish, and all are my translations of the original version. Quotes by Lcda. Illeana Rivera Gómez are taken from a personal interview conducted on September 16, 1998. Letter sent to the Evaluation Committee. I was not granted access to the letters received by the committee, the fragment that appears here was read out by Lcda. Illeana Rivera during the interview session. All quotes from Mr. David Ortiz Angleró from personal interview conducted on December 2, 1998. Efraín Santiago y Maritza Pérez, “Mano dura contra el joven?” Diálogo, Entre Estudiantes section, September 1997, 8. José F. Colón López, “Contra toque de queda,” letter sent to El Vocero, Voces del Pueblo section, September 3, 1997, 6. Mari Mari Narváez, “Lucha de clases 86° prueba,” Claridad, November 28–December 4, 1997, 9. Observations and informal conversations with artisans, August 2005.

References Chatterton, P. and R. Hollands, “Theorising Urban Playscapes: Producing, Regulating and Consuming Youthful Nightlife City Spaces,” Urban Studies, 39 (2002), 95–116. Fainstein, S. and D. R. Judd, “Global Forces, Local Strategies and Urban Tourism,” in D. R. Judd and S. S. Fainstein (eds), The Tourist City (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). Harvey, D., “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler, 71B (1989), 3–17. Hobbs, D., S. Lister, P. Hadfield, S. Winlow, and S. Hall, “Receiving Shadows: Governance and Liminality in the Night-time Economy,” British Journal of Sociology, 51 (2000), 701–717. Miles, S. and M. Miles, Consuming Cities (England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Rogers, P. and J. Coaffee, “Moral Panics and Urban Renaissance: Policy, Tactics and Youth in Public Space,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 9 (2005), 321–340. Silva, Lily D., “Uso de espacios urbanos. Los jóvenes en la plaza San José del Viejo San Juan las noches de los fines de semana,” MA thesis, School of Public Communication, University of Puerto Rico, 1997. Skelton, T. and G. Valentine (eds), Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Thomas, C. J. and R. D. F. Bromley, “City-centre Revitalisation: Problems of Fragmentation and Fear in the Evening and Night-Time City,” Urban Studies, 37 (2000), 1403–1429. Valentine, G., T. Skelton, and D. Chambers, “Cool Places: An Introduction to Youth and Youth Cultures,” in T. Skelton and G. Valentine (eds), Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 1–32.

 • Patria Román-Velázquez Ward, S., Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850–2000 (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 1998). Zukin, S., “Urban Lifestyles: Diversity and Standardisation in Spaces of Consumption,” Urban Studies, 35 (1998), 825–839. Zukin, S., Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

CHAPTER

11

“The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country” Harbin’s Architectural Inheritance Y U K I KO KO G A 1

At the official ceremony on September 2, 1997 to celebrate the restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral, an ornate Byzantine-style cathedral completed by the Russians in 1932, Mayor Wang Guangdao underlined the cultural and economic benefits expected from the project: “The restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral inspired the people in Harbin, raised the level of our culture, let the whole of China and foreign friends know Harbin, and opened a way for faster economic development” (Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 40). The restoration of St. Sophia was the culmination of the Harbin municipal government’s attempt to turn the city’s colonial-era structures into tourist attractions by restoring and granting them landmark status. These restored structures are said to signify civilization (wenming) and culture (wenhua), words used repeatedly by local officials, whose policy revolved around the discourse of wenming (civilization). Billboards in the streets of Harbin proudly state: “We build architectural civilization—Harbin Municipal Government Urban Planning Bureau.” Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China, is, like many other northeastern cities in the rustbelt, struggling with a high unemployment rate and the resulting social unrest, and trying to reposition itself in the global economy. “Now, the property/capital (zichan) of St. Sophia Cathedral belongs to Harbin,” proudly declared the mayor in his speech (Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 40). As if to fully realize the dual meaning of the Chinese term zichan, which refers to property and capital, the wenming discourse allows the city 221

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government to turn its early twentieth-century architectural inheritance into capital. Observing reform-era China of the 1990s, in which the discourse of wenming replaced that of class struggle, Ann Anagnost shows how the wenming discourse allows the party-state to become a “pedagogical state” and exert control over the newly emerging market (Anagnost, 1997). Anagnost lays out three meanings contained in the term wenming: modernization (xiandaihua), Westernization (xifanghua), and civilization (wenming), which refers to the glorious past that China once possessed as one of the oldest civilizations in the world (Anagnost, 1997: 75). The term wenming’s original usage was the last of these (with the character wen referring to written tradition, culture, or refinement, and the ming character referring to brightness, clarity, or openness) but came to mean modernization and Westernization in the late nineteenth century (Anagnost, 1997: 80–85). In reform-era China, wenming has resurged as an organizing principle, a semiotic fulcrum for leveraging the past, at the same time as it represents “a discourse of lack, referring to the failure of the Chinese people to embody international standards of modernity, civility, and discipline” (Anagnost, 1997: 76). The discourse of wenming provides legitimacy for the party-state to be a pedagogical state, preparing the “backward” (luohou), “uncultured” (meiyou wenhua) peasant population for the global market (Anagnost, 1997: 75–97). In a speech made at a fund-raising meeting on June 13, 1997, Yue Yuquan, the deputy mayor of Harbin and the director of the St. Sophia Cathedral restoration project, emphasized that the purpose of the project was to raise the level of civilization in Harbin: Building a civilized city is a centuries long process, and is a necessary direction to take if Harbin is to flourish. Building a civilized city requires a combination of material and spiritual civilization, both of which will mutually influence each other to raise their levels of achievement. The restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral . . . will increase the civilizational awareness and public ethics among the citizens, and turn this area into a showcase of Harbin’s efforts to build a civilized city. (Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 50–51) This sort of deployment of the wenming discourse, as Anagnost points out, conveys to its audience that the burst of productive energies during the reform era “cannot be allowed to signify the economy as a zone of autonomous action but must be harnessed by the party for its self-representation” (Anagnost, 1997: 95). As China’s commitment to the global economy deepens, however, we see that the story does not end here. A close look at the case of Harbin dem-

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onstrates how the wenming discourse and what Anagnost calls “civilizing practices” by the party-state have produced unexpected excess. This chapter explores this excess in the form of a politics of inheritance as the government seeks to turn its architectural inheritance into cultural and market capital. By tracing moments of tension in historical interpretations, we see how the recent preservation policy set in motion a complicated play between official attempts to control the city’s legacy and the dynamics of secrets and their betrayal contained in the very process of inheritance that undermines the party-state. As Jacques Derrida points out, inheritance is more than a simple transfer of capital from one generation to another; secrets inherent in inheritance open up a possibility of betrayal. What one inherits is opaque, with layers of histories written on it, yet one has no choice but to inherit (Derrida, 1994). Derrida alludes to a threefold usage of the term betrayal which illuminates the logic of inheritance. One usage is the conventional meaning of betrayal as an act of treason and disloyalty. The second refers to the act of revealing, disclosing, showing or exhibiting. The third refers to the act of disclosing or revealing what should be kept secret. Owing to the multiplicity of the past that inheritance embodies, displaying inheritance could result in an act of disloyalty and denunciation by revealing what is supposed to be unseen. What the case of historical preservation in Harbin illustrates is the tension brought forth by the play of these three workings of betrayal contained within its architectural inheritance. Capitalizing on inheritance by exposing what has long been invisible through restoration is accompanied by an unexpected excess that disturbs long-held narratives of the past. Two buildings stand as ciphers for the city’s contentious past and symbols of its consumer-oriented present: the physically restored St. Sophia Cathedral and the publicly rehabilitated St. Nicholas Church, a beloved central Russian Orthodox church destroyed in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution. The so-called historians’ debate around Harbin’s historical origin sets the stage here for a discussion of the restoration of St. Sophia and the flourishing nostalgia industry of “Old Harbin” (lao Haerbin), and the resurrection of St. Nicholas Church and repressed memories of the Cultural Revolution. The case of Harbin demonstrates a transformation that is at once distinctive and similar to the experience of other Chinese cities as they reinvent their pasts to reposition themselves in the global economy.2 The production of a marketable past has illuminated what can be called postcolonialism as China’s unconscious. Traveling in Northeast China never fails to make one aware of its colonial history. Many cities have museums or historical sites that illustrate the “era of colonialism” (zhimin zhuyi shidai). In large cities, major historical sites are turned into historical

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museums. Their exhibitions are quite elaborate, and are frequented by students on school excursions, as they are designated as “patriotic education bases” (aiguo jiaoyu jidi). They portray the Japanese atrocities committed during the war with brutal graphics, followed by the illustration of the Chinese Communist Party’s brave anticolonial struggle and eventual victory. It is, therefore, rather perplexing to observe how postcolonial analyses play a relatively marginal role in examining contemporary China.3 Through her careful reading of the major texts of postwar China studies in the United States, Tani Barlow (1993) shows the curious absence of colonialism in the literature. She argues that Cold War discourse erased colonialism in English-language China studies and urges bringing postcolonial critiques to the study of China (Barlow, 1993: 251). Since her article was published in 1993, the field has observed an increased interest in the study of China in relation to colonialism. While there is now much scholarly work on colonialism and China, there is far less that uses postcolonialism as an analytical device for examining contemporary China.4 When postcolonial frameworks are used, they tend to emphasize the conceptual and gloss over the material legacies of colonialism. Contemporary analyses of China’s postcoloniality are often linked to China’s redefined pursuit of modernity within a global economy and are framed as an expression of deferred postcolonial desires.5 Building upon these works, the case examined here further complicates the picture by illustrating how China’s postcoloniality plays out in both materiality and psychology and how the intersection of these elements produces effects beyond state control. Within this dynamic, the interpretation and the meaning attached to “colonialism” itself changes. The tentative status of postcoloniality in China studies in the US has its counterpart in China. Indeed, the absence of a postcolonial discourse in contemporary Chinese scholarship is even more surprising, given the fact that the Chinese narration of the nation originates in its anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles.6 This absence does not derive from the erasure of colonialism that Barlow finds in her examination of the US scholarship. Colonialism is very much present in the Chinese narration of its own history of “the era of colonialism” (zhimin zhuyi shiqi), and anticolonialist rhetoric is omnipresent in contemporary China in school textbooks, films, and historical relics. Yet the narration of China’s history after the victory over Japan simultaneously reveals and disguises the burdens of its colonial past by displacing them onto the present. The discourse of the New China marks 1949, the birth year of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as its zero hour, marking a clear discontinuity with the past.7 In this discourse, colonialism appears as one of China’s cultural relics, frozen in time in a demarcated space of historical sites, and its situations stay closely guarded by the party-state (Watson, 1994; Clausen and Thøgersen, 1995: 199–217).

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As a result, contemporary China finds both omnipresent colonial traces and their erasure. In the case of Harbin, the narrations of the city’s history after 1949 simultaneously reveal and disguise colonialism, displaying a warped erasure of its postcoloniality. What the restoration project in Harbin sets in motion is a postcolonial awareness, a process which ultimately questions the legitimacy of the party-state. This chapter is a story of resilient yet oft-unarticulated postcolonial conditions in China which have resurfaced in new guises as a result of recent urban reconfigurations in the midst of China’s mad rush to the market.

“The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country”: Harbin’s Colonial Inheritance Following the opening ceremony and media coverage of St. Sophia Cathedral and the Harbin Architecture Art Centre in 1997, the municipal government started planning for a gala celebration of Harbin’s centenary the following year with numerous ceremonies, publications, and sales of commemorative gold plates. But the government canceled all the events at the last minute under pressure from a gathering chorus opposing a “colonialist historical perspective” (zhimin zhuyi lishiguan). This awkward incident for the city government emerged from the so-called historians’ debate, really a series of linked debates that started in 1992 among local intellectuals in anticipation of the centenary celebration in 1998. The debate concerns two issues which revolve around the disputed origin of the city: (1) the birth year of the city and (2) the condition of Harbin before the arrival of the Russians in 1898. The initial debate was carried in the major local daily newspaper Xinwanbao [New Evening News], which published 14 essays from April to June 1992 under the series title “City Origin Debate,” written mostly by academics at universities of the provincial or city academy of social sciences. The essays illuminate the core tension, which continues today. Wang Yulang, one of the most vocal critics of the colonialist historical perspective, traces the origin of Harbin to the Jin Dynasty (1115–1234 AD) (Wang Yulang, 1992a; 1992b). He rejects Harbin’s colonial origin by claiming the city’s civilization predated the Russian arrival. Against this view, Wang Dexin cautiously differentiates the archeological origin of the city (chengshi qiyuan) from the city’s origin (chengshi jiyuan), and claims the primacy of the latter, concluding that “there is no doubt that the construction of the [Russian-built] Chinese Eastern Railway is considered the historical incident that marks the origin of the city” (Wang Dexin, 1992a). In a subsequent essay published three days later, however, he cautiously preempts certain criticism by stating: “Any one of the historical moments

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that embody invasion and colonialism, such as signing for the construction of the railroad, cannot be the origin of the city, since that is not what proud Chinese would be willing to accept” (Wang Dexin, 1992b). To avoid any date that resonates with imperialism, he diplomatically suggests January 1, 1900 as the birthday of Harbin. Dogged by critiques of a “colonial historical view” the opponents reached a tentative consensus in December 1994 and agreed to set the origin of Harbin in 1898, when the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway began (Feng, 1994; Lu, 1994; Yu, 1994). Yet the sensitive question of colonial inheritance again found forceful voices.8 Sociologist Shang Zhifa strongly objected to recognizing 1898 as the origin of the city by asking: “Should all the colonial cities in the world that were constructed after colonial invasions commemorate the moment of oppression?” (Yuan, 1996). In private conversation, a prominent local intellectual used the example of Columbus to point out that it would be inappropriate to mark the date of Columbus’ discovery of America as the origin of America. He asked, “then what do the Maya think of such an historical interpretation?” He continued to explain: “It is not true that the arrival of the Russian ship started Harbin. The city was built by the Chinese, who laid bricks one by one . . . To think that the city was born when the Russians arrived is a colonialist perspective, and that is why I cannot agree with this view.” According to some of the debate participants, opponents of the 1898 consensus brought the issue to the local Security Bureau while the preparation for the citywide centenary celebration was under way. The Bureau took the issue to the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Beijing, and a high level directive came back to Harbin to cancel the celebration. Despite the appearance of open debate in the media, the government decision to cancel the centenary commemoration immediately resulted in self-censorship. The local newspapers refused to publish articles advocating 1898 as the date of the city’s origin and some writers even faced the threat of arrest by the Security Bureau. Yet the debate continued and the fall of 2003 witnessed another wave of heated discussion. In the midst of this renewed debate, one of the most vocal advocates of 1898 disappeared without a trace, and his main opponent was suddenly transferred to a university in another city. People were reluctant to talk about this mysterious incident, and many indicated to me that I had better not stick my nose into this matter. Repeated eruptions of the historians’ debate over the past decade signal the volatile nature of coming to terms with the city’s colonial inheritance. The ambiguous place of colonialism in Harbin’s history is highlighted by a cityscape that maintains unambiguous traces of foreign forces. Once called the “Paris of the East” in the first half of the twentieth century, Harbin cityscape still appears more European than Chinese with its elegant

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Figure 11.1 The Modern Hotel on Central Avenue. The hotel was once the center of social life in Old Harbin. People used to comment that “the fashion in Paris flies to Harbin in two weeks.”

art nouveau architecture and numerous other Western-style colonial structures (Figure 11.1). Many locals proudly and fondly describe the urban space of Harbin as exotic (yiguo qingdiao—the atmosphere of a foreign country). Likewise, local travel guidebooks highlight Harbin’s exotic cityscape with glossy photographs of Western architecture. Postcards of these structures abound, and colonial-era structures dominate the visual composition of the city. In addition to its prominent art nouveau buildings, the city space presents itself as a visual bricolage of Renaissance, Baroque, Classical Revival, Romanesque, Judaic, Byzantine, Russian, “Chinese Baroque,”9 Eclectic, and Modern styles from the period, as well as sober socialist style buildings from the 1970s and 1980s, 1990s mirrored glass and steel monoliths which embody the “modern” ideology of the Beijing government, and the more recent, so-called “European-style” (oufeng) buildings that echo motifs of colonial buildings. With the historical preservation policy that started in 1996, the Harbin municipal government has turned once purposefully neglected and dustcovered symbols of colonialism into part of Harbin’s historical heritage rather than demolish them.10 The interest in tourism is not merely ancillary to the economy. This freezing northern city in China’s declining rustbelt

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suffers from high unemployment owing to the privatization of state-run heavy industries, and cash revenue from tourism and related employment opportunities is a matter of survival.11 Although media coverage of social unrest remains prohibited by the authorities, numerous protests by unemployed workers are part of the everyday scene.12 It is in this context that the preservation policy has been eagerly promoted by the government as a way of transforming its colonial inheritance into profit-generating touristic capital. The most concrete result of the conversion of the colonial past into a tourist attraction is the influx of visitors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Russia. The famous January ice festival and European atmosphere beckons Chinese from the wealthy south, while Japanese tourists purchase tour packages to this “former Manchurian” city and “discover” a modern city that is simultaneously a historical artifact. The once vibrant societies of White Russians and Russian Jews in the first half of the twentieth century are now replaced by poor Russians from Siberia, hawking military binoculars and army watches in street markets to buy their daily meal in this city of plentiful commodities, while well-to-do Russian tourists come from all over to admire the Russian-style architecture of the previous fin de siècle. The city of Harbin acknowledges the tourists’ gaze, and seeks to recreate cosmopolitanism through large projects and small gestures, such as bilingual (Chinese and English) plaques on protected colonial architecture that describe the brief history of each building in positive terms. Yet, the trace of the West so undeniably inscribed in Harbin’s urban space is notably absent from official historical narratives of the city under Mao (Gao et al., 1998). It is as if the West suddenly disappeared from sight after the Liberation in 1949 until the historical preservation policy in the 1990s unearthed what had long been invisible to the locals.13 This discursive disappearance of colonial traces was part of the government’s long-standing attempt to construct a history of the Chinese vis-à-vis “foreigners,” and went hand in hand with the “disappearance” of ethnic groups.14 Through this process of fixing Harbin within the master-narrative of Maoist nationstate building, the local government avoided highlighting Harbin’s “exotic atmosphere” (yiguo qingdiao). The ideology that produced such invisibility is now being challenged both by internal and external pressures. Historical preservation projects oriented toward tourism are often criticized for reproducing the colonial gaze. Concerning the visual consumption of history in Hong Kong, Ackbar Abbas argues that the preservation of colonial architecture reduces historical memory to kitsch “by aestheticizing them out of existence” (Abbas, 1997: 65–69). As a result, historical sight substitutes for the disappearance of historical site. Such a critique speaks to the situation in Harbin, where the preservation project celebrates the

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element of cosmopolitanism that accompanied colonialism, and effaces the suffering of imperial aggression. Although this critique is apposite, spatial politics in Harbin presents a more complex dynamic beneath the façade of aestheticized colonial space.

The Restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral and Old Harbin Nostalgia One of the most heralded events in the recent history of the city was the resurrection of St. Sophia Cathedral, built by the Russians between 1907 and 1932 (Figure 11.2). Although the cathedral’s sturdy structure withstood its intended destruction during the Cultural Revolution, its empty hull became a warehouse for a nearby state-run department store, its windows were bricked up and saplings grew from the roof.15 Prefabricated concrete high-rises boxed the church in on all four sides, coming within yards of its walls, making the cathedral inaccessible and invisible from the street. For decades it remained the invisible center of the city, surrounded by decorative material stalls, an auto body shop, a pen factory, and apartments for city government employees, until the Beijing government designated the cathedral a national cultural heritage site in 1996 as part of a nationwide campaign to protect historical sites. This prompted a newspaper article about the “hidden” cathedral that ignited donations from locals to restore the church (Zheng et al., 1997). Local corporations, individual businesses as well as workers from nearby department stores donated money to restore the cathedral and renovate the square (Li Debin, 1998: 263). A total of 12,000,000 yuan (approximately US $1.5 million) was eventually assembled (Liu and Zheng, 1997), and the cathedral regained its visibility in 1997. The change was dramatic—the surrounding buildings were torn down, a new “Harbin Architecture Square” conspicuously highlighted the cathedral with a huge new fountain at its entrance, and the opening celebrations were suitably spectacular. With this municipal government decision, the European-looking space was assigned a new meaning as the embodiment of culture and art and was re-presented to the public as the proud heritage of the city. As Wang Guangdao, then the mayor of Harbin, repeatedly pointed out, “the purpose of historical preservation of St. Sophia Cathedral is to restore the architecture unique to Harbin and turn it into a tourist destination” (Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 98). Travel guidebooks to Harbin present the cathedral on their cover pages, proclaiming the city’s exotic atmosphere. The cathedral houses the Harbin Architecture Art Centre and, along with the restored nearby Central Avenue, now presents itself as the center and symbol of the city, bustling with locals and tourists alike, signifying “civilization, culture, and art” (Li Debin, 1998: 262).

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Figure 11.2 The restored St. Sophia Cathedral is now the face of the city. The Cathedral and its surrounding Harbin Architecture Square have become a popular place for both locals and visitors.

Inside the renovated Cathedral is an important photography exhibit portraying Harbin in the early twentieth century as an extremely cosmopolitan city, a time when it was remarked “the fashion in Paris flies to Harbin in two weeks” (Nishizawa, 1996: 32). The exhibit, which remains popular years

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after its opening, traces the development of Harbin from the late nineteenth century, when the Russians started to build railroads, to the early 1940s. Over 300 photographs are arranged around two scale models in the center of the exhibition. One is St. Nicholas Church, the central Orthodox Church in Harbin destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and the other is St. Sophia Cathedral. By placing St. Nicholas Church at the center of the exhibit accompanied by a mournful textual commentary on its destruction, its absence sends a strong message to visitors. The caption for the old photograph of St. Nicholas reads: “The scale of the church was magnificent, and its exquisite architectural details were world renowned. It was built in a Russian style, typical wooden well casting structures with steeples. It was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.” One’s eyes then shift to the enlarged photographs with descriptive captions covering all walls, twisting through small alcoves as the history of Harbin unfolds. Brand-new reproductions of Orthodox icons look down at the visitor, in mocking contrast to the battered ceiling of the cathedral, its faded frescos and peeling paint evoking the days before restoration. The sources of the pictures demonstrate not only how cosmopolitan this city once was but also the unusual nature of this exhibit in light of the official narrative of the colonial past: many of these pictures are in the form of old postcards proudly produced by Russians and Japanese in several languages (commonly in Russian, Japanese, and English) in their attempt to show off their modern monuments. Most postcards show monumental buildings and boulevards with printed captions that portray the city as cosmopolitan, grand, and modern. The tone of the exhibition is nostalgic for the era affectionately referred to as “Old Harbin” (lao Haerbin), typified by the evocation in the preface to the exhibition (in both Chinese and English): “Old pictures are true records of what happened, and they provide accurate answers to unsettled issues in history . . . Leaping over time and space, here we have reproduced her ethos and beauty.”16 After a long description of the cosmopolitan past, the preface reminds the viewer in a few brief sentences to remember the difficult years under the Russians and Japanese.17 Then it closes by encouraging the visitors to interpret and ponder the messages contained within the exhibition. The tone is significantly different from other historical museums in the city, such as the Heilongjiang Province Museum, the Northeast Martyr Memorial Museum, and the Japanese Army Unit 731 Museum, where the stated goal of the exhibitions is to educate the public in anti-imperial discourse and call attention to past tragedies and atrocities. The exhibition is organized into three sections with introductory descriptions: “The Early Days of the City: The End of the Nineteenth Century,” “The Old View of the City: The Penetration of Western Culture,” and “Quotidian Vignettes: The Early Twentieth Century.” The first section attempts to

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capture the role of the Chinese community in constructing Harbin as a city. Many photos show one-storey buildings in Fujiadian, the Chinese district populated predominantly by migrant construction workers from Shangdong Province. The second section demonstrates the influence of Western culture on the city’s architecture, claiming that the variations and numbers of Harbin architectural styles are unique in the world. The captions for the photographs, in Chinese only, state the original name of the building, year built, the name of the architect if known, and the current name of the building with a brief description of the style. Some captions mention that the buildings were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The last section depicts Western culture in the daily life of Harbin in the early twentieth century. The accompanying text positively points out how “the liberal thought that came along with the Western culture lashed out against the corrupted feudal social elements.”18 The exhibition closes with a strong tone of celebration of the cosmopolitanism that existed in Old Harbin. To those used to historical museums in China, the tone of the exhibit is quite unusual, and probably contributes to its sustained popularity compared with other historical museums in the city, which are nearly empty. I found no lack of echoes of the nostalgic sentiment of the photography exhibition among local intellectuals. Dinner-table conversation with local historians often revolved around contrasting Old Harbin, which they praise for its openness, diversity, and culturally rich life, to Harbin today, which they feel constrains their intellectual pursuits and cultural life in general. One historian in his mid-40s, known in local intellectual circles for being very careful about what he says in public, spoke eagerly about how cosmopolitan and multicultural Harbin once was: Can you believe that in the 1920s there were more than one hundred foreign language newspapers in this city? Diverse cultures really flourished in Harbin at that time. Yet look at Harbin today. We are so closed, provincial, and backward. And the intellectual culture is dead. We cannot say what we want to say, you see. Then, after listening to my conversation with his teenage daughter at the dinner table, he murmured: “With kids like her you really get what they are thinking about. We [adults] think twice or three times before speaking out loud about anything.” As a historian of Harbin, Old Harbin for him is a mirror through which he articulates what is lacking today. Nostalgia for Old Harbin is a displaced form of social criticism of contemporary Harbin, which many historians feel is lacking cosmopolitan openness, the value the city once embraced. Another intellectual put it more bluntly, describing how nostalgia for

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Old Harbin reflects the deeply felt and widely shared resentment toward the Chinese Communist Party among common people in Harbin: Without the presence of the resentment towards the current government, there wouldn’t be nostalgia (huaijiu) for Old Harbin. The sudden flourishing of the Old Harbin industry in recent years speaks of such bitterness among common people here. Those elderly people I chat with when I exercise in the park in the morning gnash their teeth in rage and are bitterly angry with the Communist Party (yaoya qiechi tongtong hen Gongchandang), mainly because of political corruption. Of course, Chinese society experienced serious problems at other times in the past, especially during the Cultural Revolution. But now people are very bitter because some are milking the open market policy while many others are left behind and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. When everybody was poor, it was much easier to accept the authorities. But now that people see the wealth, which is distributed quite unevenly, they cannot but feel resentful at the Party. Yet, criticism of the Party by local intellectuals is rarely stated explicitly in their published works, despite the fact that these intellectuals, over numerous meals we shared, openly and eagerly expressed their views to me, a researcher from abroad, whom they considered a safe audience for their frustrations. Among the few exceptions to this intellectual silence in the public realm are Zeng Yizhi, a senior journalist of the local newspaper, Heilongjiang ribao [Heilongjiang Daily], and Ji Fenghui, a local historian at the Heilongjiang Province Archive. Zeng Yizhi contributes weekly fullpage feature articles under the series title, “Cheng yu ren” [“The city and the people”] in Heilongjiang Daily. Through unfolding human dramas surrounding historical architecture, her strong nostalgia for Old Harbin is redirected to criticizing the current government for its injustice, political corruption, and what she sees as modernization without serious consideration for Harbin’s rich historical inheritance.19 Her articles receive immediate and passionate responses from the readers. “The municipal government doesn’t like me,” she said breaking into a big laugh: Because they know I’m not afraid of criticizing what they are doing. These days when I try to call up the government, they just hang up when they recognize my voice. But I receive a lot of phone calls and letters from my readers, who support and encourage me with great enthusiasm . . . I want the people in Harbin to be aware of what they are losing in this rapid urban transformation. The historical preservation policy is limited to superficial preservation of certain areas

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without real understanding of the history of Harbin. Harbin was once an extremely culturally rich society. It was very diverse and of different nationalities and cultures, something we should emulate now to create new Harbin. I want to bring out these stories buried beneath the rapid urban reconfiguration. With a sincere tone of respect, many intellectuals in Harbin use almost identical phrases to describe this energetic, petite woman in her mid-40s with an open smile that brightens up several square feet around her: “She is a person with a very strong sense of justice, and she is not afraid of the authorities.” She treasures remainders from Old Harbin, and was very eager to take me along on her journalistic excursions to trace and capture moments of the disappearing past—from neglected architectural jewels that did not receive preservation status, to celebrating Russian Orthodox Easter with the last living Russians from the Old Harbin era. For her these remainders are not merely testimony of the Harbin that once was but hope for Harbin’s future. Xenophobia (paiwai zhuyi), often found within the municipal government despite its stated policy goal to turn Harbin into a “major international economic city of Northeast China,” is a source of frustration for many historians of Harbin, which in turn makes Old Harbin look rosier to their eyes than it might have been. The local historian Ji Fenghui, also in his mid-40s, is another vocal critic of government xenophobia through his nostalgic accounts of Old Harbin. Writing on the encounter between Harbin and the West in the early twentieth century in his book, Huashuo Haerbin [Talk about Harbin], Ji highlights positive Western influences on Old Harbin (Ji, 2002a). He claims that Western civilization destroyed feudalism in China while “normalizing” Chinese perspectives by bringing in such concepts as democracy, humanity, freedom, and the rule of law. As a result of this encounter, Ji argues, Harbin developed a “uniquely tolerant and peaceful attitude” (Ji, 2002a: 101). He goes on to claim “in the face of rising nationalism around the world, citizens of Harbin did not have strong exclusionist sentiments or mass movements against foreigners” (Ji, 2002a: 101). His embracing of Old Harbin as an open-minded, cosmopolitan city is in turn used to criticize post-Liberation Communist discourse in China, which revolves around anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspectives. He writes: Since the Liberation, historians of Harbin produced a considerable amount of work on exposing the imperialists’ invasion and praising people’s anti-imperialist struggles. This is entirely accurate and necessary; however, it only captures one aspect of Chinese and foreign relations in Harbin. The fact that the Chinese and Western people

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built friendships and together constructed and developed Harbin is also an important aspect of Chinese and foreign relations in Harbin. (Ji, 2002a: 103)20 He argues that the post-Liberation discourse, which he sees mired in political struggles, fails to capture certain aspects of capitalism beyond imperialist invasion: In the academy in Harbin, studies of Harbin from the perspectives of modern social development and political struggles are plentiful. Yet perspectives considering cultural development remain weak. As a result, the study of Harbin’s historical development tends to be subsumed by the theoretical restraints set by political struggles. In this process, they emphasize the brutal invasion by capitalism while omitting another aspect of capitalism, which is pervasive. And this aspect influenced Harbin greatly. (Ji, 2002a: 105) Despite his blunt and bold written critiques, Ji is a nervous man, and belongs to the same generation as Zeng Yizhi and other influential historians of Harbin—the first college graduating class after the Cultural Revolution— and he experienced the underground democracy movement in 1981. “Many people got arrested, but I escaped from being busted because I wasn’t one of the big guys in the movement,” he recalled of his youth. “I’m not interested in radical change any longer. Rather, I’d like to gradually change the ways in which people think about history through my writings.” He wants to “slowly and quietly brainwash his readers” so that “they can see alternative narratives of history to the official one.” This is what he calls “dixia faxin”—underground activity in the bright daylight—while securing political protection by cultivating networks of personal connections (guanxi).21 I was wondering why his book did not bear his name anywhere except on the library information page, as if to hide himself from the public. The book has the appearance of a volume edited by a group of people. Ji explained to me that these people are the protective umbrella (baohusan) in case the content of the book upsets the authorities. I paid 1,000 yuan [approximately US $120, about half of his monthly salary and more than what average workers in Harbin make monthly] to ask this politically influential person to provide calligraphy for the title of the book and to sign the preface. It works this way in China. I almost got arrested by the Security Bureau with my first book because I didn’t do this.

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Then he proudly flipped through some pages of his book to show how he slipped in a bold critique of the party among his otherwise nostalgic and anecdotal accounts of Old Harbin. As Ji indicated, public criticism of the authorities, especially by prominent intellectuals, remains dangerous terrain. When I spoke with the director of the Japanese Unit 731 Museum, located on the site of the infamous Japanese Unit 731 human experimental laboratory on the outskirts of Harbin, I mentioned that nostalgia for Old Harbin could be interpreted as displaced social criticism. To this, the director, who had held a high government position before taking this job, reacted alarmingly: “Who gave you that idea, tell me the name of the person who told you this!” My reply that it was something I thought could be the case calmed him down immediately, but he pressed the point that it was not at all the case in Harbin. As his secretary was taking detailed notes of our conversation throughout our meeting, I asked him at the end of our talk if I could have a copy of these notes for accurate recounting of our discussion. After lengthy deliberation he rejected my request. This example illustrates the stakes with which the historians who organized the Old Harbin photography exhibit are playing. Although a drama of its own making, the making-visible of the colonial heritage in the cityscape indeed brought turmoil within the Harbin municipal government. After previewing the photography exhibit, one high government official complained that the exhibit had too many pictures of Western structures. His utterance echoed concerns for the “colonialist historical view” expressed in the historians’ debate, and anticipated the embarrassing cancellation of the centenary celebration in 1998.22 In St. Sophia today, in addition to the photography exhibit of Old Harbin, there is a separate underground exhibit of the present and the future of Harbin, added in 2001 together with an exhibit of religious artifacts recently unearthed in the crypt. Almost hidden down a dark staircase in the dimly lit basement with its odor of cool concrete, visitors are greeted by an illuminated scale model of the future of Harbin: a city of skyscrapers, apartment blocks, and highways. The exhibit consists of three parts, and the first section, entitled “Historical Cultural City,” displays enlarged pictures of colonial structures, both present and absent, the former in color, the latter in black and white. The main part of the exhibit is the last two sections, which illustrate the urban renewal and historical preservation in the past ten years. The preface to this Chinese-language exhibit is reminiscent of the political turmoil surrounding the celebration of Harbin’s centenary in 1998. It reads: Historically, Harbin was once part of the Jin Dynasty, the birthplace of the Qing Dynasty. With the construction of the Russian Chinese Eastern Railway and the influence of the two world wars, Harbin

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became crossroads of foreign trade in the early twentieth century. Tens of thousands of foreigners settled in this well-known international trading city and constructed a large number of Western-style buildings, which defined the characteristics of the city . . . The origin of the city is left intentionally vague. As a gesture toward the criticism of the colonialist historical perspective, the origin of Harbin is sought in the Jin Dynasty. Yet the birth of Harbin as a modern city is marked by the advent of the Russians in 1898, as the following explanation for the section “The Development Process” clearly states: “The construction of the Russian Chinese Eastern Railway in 1898 transformed a small fishing village into a modern city.” Here, Harbin’s supposed civilization before the Russians is reduced to a small fishing village, an issue hotly debated in the historians’ debate. Then, in the following section on the “development process” of Harbin, instead of tracing the development of the city after 1949, visitors walk past panel after panel of enlarged pictures of factories, bridges, highways, skyscrapers, and apartments built in the late 1990s to demonstrate how modernized Harbin has become. The scale model in the center of Harbin’s future shimmers like Shanghai, the clear winner in new capitalist China. The missing “development process” of the city between 1949 to the mid1990s ironically corresponds to the sudden disappearance of the “West” in historical writings of this period. Even more ironic, the absence of photographic representations from this period anywhere in this exhibit—except for the ghostly apparition of memories of the Cultural Revolution in the old photography exhibit upstairs and the few black and white photographs of destroyed colonial structures in the section on the “historical cultural city”—corresponds to the absent history of this period. No photography, no history. It is as if the historical narrative of the city bypasses communist China, connecting cosmopolitan Old Harbin directly to the present-day Harbin of economic spectacles. This connection was clearly made by the mayor in his speech celebrating the renovated cathedral. Referring to the photography exhibition in the cathedral, the mayor drew a striking link between Old Harbin, which he described as an open city (kaifang de chengshi) and contemporary Harbin under the open economic policy (Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 41). Terms such as “openness,” “level of culture,” and “economic development” all amount to the idea that Harbin architectural culture would achieve “the synthesis of cityscape and the open economic policy” (Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 41). The discourse of wenming is deployed repeatedly as an ideological device for the Communist government to control the meaning of the “West” set loose by the preservation policies.

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Colonial structures are renewed as an aesthetic category embodying culture and civilization. Because the discourse of wenming embraces the aesthetic element of the architectural heritage from the colonial era, it simultaneously reveals a past whose history was repressed under the Mao era, and itself represses the new politics of inheritance and the history of the postwar era. One sees such layers of repressive politics not only in the narrative of the Old Harbin photography exhibition, but also in speeches by other officials at the ceremony celebrating the project’s completion. While the mayor briefly mentioned colonial violence in his speech,23 all the other officials displaced the sensitive issue of colonialism with the seemingly less controversial issue of religion by arguing the appropriateness of putting religious architecture under historical preservation.24 The anti-imperialist discourse, omnipresent under the Mao era when the authorities repressed the presence of the West, is now reduced to the issue of religion, covering what it means to elevate such a material witness to imperialism as St. Sophia to the city’s most prominent symbol. The discourse of wenming has also penetrated the local population. Local residents of Harbin, when asked about their unique heritage, talk about colonial structures in the language of aesthetics. They regard them as art while discounting their colonial symbolic meaning. “Culture is culture,” or “Art is art,” is the often-heard response to the question of whether certain objects represent the colonial domination of Harbin. Most of all, people are proud of their newly restored beauty. As soon as locals found out that I was not from Harbin they would ask, “have you seen St. Sophia yet?” “What do you think?” they asked eagerly, and were very satisfied to hear my praise. A Japanese woman told me that her taxi driver, upon finding out that she was a visitor from Japan, insisted that he drive her around St. Sophia before sending her to a hotel and circled around the cathedral as if to show off his baby. Yet Harbin’s historical preservation policy has a double face, for the other face of preservation is the relentless demolition of old structures and neighborhoods that do not fall within the preservation policy. In the rush to urban renewal, historic buildings disappear overnight, while those selected receive princely revitalization through structural and cosmetic renovation. Highrises replace old structures, drastically shifting Harbin’s skyline from early twentieth-century curved lines of cupolas to late-modern boxy fortresses shooting up toward the sky. More recently constructed luxury buildings now echo motifs of colonial structures, creating what they call “European-style” architecture. Harbin’s nouveau riche purchase grand luxury condominiums in these full service, European-style buildings with modern amenities. Yet the majority of the population is stuck between historical preservation and the newly available “modern life” (xiandai shenghuo). Most live in gray, rusty, multi-storey Communist-style walk-up buildings

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built in the 1970s and 1980s. Concrete walls are cracked and stained, dimly lit hallway lights flicker if they work at all, and many apartments do not have baths. The supply of water and electricity is never reliable, and the fundamental shortage of these resources makes their allocation a political matter, subject to political corruption.25 In the impoverished district of Daowai, which was once Fujiadian in Old Harbin, a shantytown spreads along the river. Shacks are built with patchworks of cinder blocks, pieces of wood, cardboard, or whatever is available to shield residents from the elements. Patched up cardboard ceilings barely protect inhabitants from the harsh winters, where temperatures regularly drop to 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Unemployed middle-aged men and women with expressionless faces and sunken eyes stand on dusty unpaved street corners with handwritten cardboard signs hanging from their necks, which read “plumbing,” “welding,” or “mechanic,” hoping to get a day’s labor. In downtown Harbin, many men and women in ragged and faded clothes line up on sidewalks to sell roasted sunflower seeds and pine nuts from dusty baskets. They are the unemployed, most likely from privatized state-run companies, who receive a monthly subsidy of 200 yuan (approximately US $75 and about a quarter of what average workers make in Harbin) from the city for selling these goods on the streets. It is in this socio-economic context that the effectiveness of the wenming discourse exceeds the prescribed disciplinary power of the party-state through its civilizing practices. What we observe in Harbin is how the wenming discourse, which is a discourse of lack as well as that of transformation, slips into another discourse of lack: nostalgia for cosmopolitan Old Harbin. The government-endorsed wenming discourse has taken the form of nostalgia for Old Harbin, and this sense of loss is used to criticize the current government.26 Here, we are talking about a sense of loss without first-hand experience—the majority of Harbin’s population never experienced Old Harbin. Hence their sense of loss is of something already lost before their time, an imagined loss that took place long ago. Despite its imaginary nature, however, the sense of loss is exacerbated by the disappearing physical landscape of Old Harbin through urban renewal. The urban space is what turns an imaginary loss into a real sense of loss, bridging the loss in the past to the present. The reappearance of Old Harbin through historical preservation policy and the disappearance of Old Harbin through urban renewal make nostalgia for Old Harbin an authentic experience. Hence in Harbin, nostalgia emerges across a spatial lag, which translates a supposed temporal lag—a mechanism behind nostalgia (Ivy, 1995: 95)—into visibility and tactility in the everyday. While the government’s intent to turn Harbin’s architectural inheritance into capital did increase revenues from tourism and invigorate the real estate market, the

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proliferation of Old Harbin nostalgia as a result of the preservation policy has produced more than money. Old Harbin nostalgia has articulated a lack in the present, and, as a result, become a displaced forum for criticizing the party-state vis-à-vis the image of cosmopolitan Old Harbin.

The Resurrection of St. Nicholas Church The simultaneous workings of the wenming discourse—legitimizing the pedagogical party-state in the reform era as well as generating nostalgia for cosmopolitan Old Harbin as a displaced form of social criticism—bracket the Mao era. It is as if the embrace of the city’s architectural inheritance effaces the lived experience of this period. Yet the logic of inheritance has not let the city capitalize on its inheritance without paying interest on its debt. In the process of excising the Mao era, the preservation policy and Old Harbin nostalgia have unexpectedly revealed the violence of the Cultural Revolution. The same policy that exalts some colonial structures highlights the absence of others. This newly recognized lack is supplemented by various forms of reproductions such as the scale model of St. Nicholas Church within St. Sophia, and enlarged photographs of other structures destroyed during the Cultural Revolution with captions plainly stating the historical fact. One of the byproducts of the sudden public interest in Old Harbin in the 1990s is the first public appearance of a set of four photographs that capture the very moment of destruction of the St. Nicholas Church by the Red Guard in 1966. In 2000, Xinwanbao [New Evening News] published a special issue portraying 100 years of Harbin with over 100 photographs. Although primarily focused on Old Harbin before Liberation, unlike the St. Sophia Cathedral photography exhibit that stops in the 1940s, this special issue covers the era after 1949. The early development of Harbin is traced with numerous colonial structures, quite similar to the photo exhibit in St. Sophia Cathedral, but the section on Old Harbin is followed by four striking black and white photographs of St. Nicholas Church and its ruins in 1966 (Figure 11.3). In the first picture, St. Nicholas stands draped with banners and slogans held by men occupying the structure while onlookers surround the church. The white banners dangling from railings of the Church remind one of a traditional funeral scene, which was, in a sense, to follow a moment later. The second picture shows a close up of the cupola with two young men climbing down from the very top where they had placed a national flag and a Red Guard flag beneath it. In the next picture the cupola lies on the ground as if dead, with flushed faces of young Red Guard members clearly shown. The last shot captures a triumphant funeral march with the cupola in the back of a shiny black truck guarded by students with shining eyes.

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(Photo 3)

(Photo 4)

(Photo 6)

Figure 11.3 The destruction of St. Nicholas Church in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution (photos by Wan Jiyao).

These pictures, taken by the photo journalist Wan Jiyao for Heilongjiang Daily, had been hidden deep in his closet for more than 30 years. They are the only remaining photographic traces of the 1966 incident except for those possibly hidden and locked in the city archive. Wan managed to hide

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his film, while the authorities destroyed the pictures that his colleague took from the same spot. The violence that these pictures evoke in this otherwise nostalgic and celebratory special issue is almost anachronistic. Time is out of joint, but for a reason. In his discussion on Japan’s war responsibility, philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya points out that chronology (chronos + logos: logic of time) is a force behind turning forgetting into normalcy, while anachronism (ana + chronos: movement against time’s order) works against the logic of forgetting (Takahashi, 1999: 64–74).27 Anachronism is what comes back when the logic of forgetting starts to dominate people’s mind, and it demands that the work of mourning be finished. One wonders if these photographs signal the return of the repressed after more than three decades of collectively suppressing memories of the Cultural Revolution. As many have observed, Cultural Revolution nostalgia emerged in 1990s China, with the proliferation of Cultural Revolution theme restaurants (slightly upgraded versions of peasant food surrounded by décor full of reproduced slogans and posters from the era), the publication of memoirs and photography books, and online chat groups to name a few examples (G. Yang, 2003; 2005; Davies, 2005; Hubbert, 2005; Yue, 2005). Yet a closer look at these nostalgic phenomena shows how the proliferation of certain forms of Cultural Revolution memories predominantly function to mourn the present. What is mourned through their nostalgic recalling of the era is not the Cultural Revolution per se but the social relationships under strain as a result of China’s rapid transformation in the last decade. Even in its nostalgic appearance, the Cultural Revolution is constantly displaced without being actually signified. As a result, it hardly becomes the object of mourning. Guobin Yang, for instance, demonstrates how the recent proliferation of Cultural Revolution nostalgia among ordinary people and former Red Guards, especially in cyberspace, is a form of protest for the recent drastic socioeconomic change in which this generation feels left behind (G. Yang, 2003; 2005). Likewise, through his analysis of the production and consumption of a widely popular publication, Zhiqing lao zhaopian [Zhiqing Old Photos] (Xue and Zhang, 1998), which nostalgically illustrates the daily life of sent-down educated youth (zhiqing) during the Cultural Revolution, David J. Davies shows how these photos evoke present-day difficulties and struggles of the former zhiqing generation in the reform era (Davies, 2005). He points out that the zhiqing photos are “future-oriented photography” for they “were not taken for memorial value, but attempted to capture . . . images of the desired future” (Davies, 2005: 106). The young faces captured in these pictures are almost uniformly beaming with youthful hope, a strong sense of fulfillment, and a knowing sense of direction. Some are taken among themselves in a group, some with local peasants, and most with a backdrop of

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a raw and harsh natural environment. As Davies sums up, in “future-oriented photography,” individuals became abstract props such as workers and peasants in this idealized social order (Davies, 2005: 106–108). In contrast, the four pictures of the destruction of St. Nicholas Church in Harbin were taken with a journalist’s instinct to capture the present. Wan Jiyao was attending a conference in the International Hotel facing St. Nicholas Church when the Red Guard started to surround the church. His location provided a perfect vantage point from which to observe the unfolding of this historical event, and instinctively he and his colleague from the newspaper started taking pictures from the window. Unlike “future-oriented photography,” these four pictures mercilessly lift the veil of socialist utopian imagery. The feelings of anachronism and anxiety that these four grotesque photographs evoke derive from the concrete individuality betrayed in these pictures. At the same time, in their exposure of individuality, the photos also convey a sense of collective loss. Whether you were the former Red Guard on the cupola or one of the onlookers surrounding the church, the indisputable loss of the physical body of the city’s symbolic landscape is something they can safely share in mourning. In Harbin, the proliferation of the Old Harbin nostalgia has vastly overshadowed the Cultural Revolution nostalgia. Instead of the Cultural Revolution nostalgia, what I sensed strongly and widely is a persistent desire to remain silent about the Cultural Revolution. Many intellectuals I encountered had been “sent down” either to Harbin or its surrounding areas and settled in the city after the Cultural Revolution. Most of them talk reluctantly and briefly about their experiences without giving specificities. In their narratives, proper names are absent except for categorical nouns. One professor, who was recounting vivid accounts of wartime and its aftermath, paused with a clear sign of hesitation on his face when I asked him about the local situation during the Cultural Revolution. After a deep silence, he finally opened his mouth: “talking about that era is really difficult and tricky because people from all sides now have to work together as colleagues. Not to talk about it is a way to conduct our daily life without bringing up unnecessary memories of who did what.” Only in complete silence about the past can they work and live together as a former student on top of the cupola or an apprehensive onlooker. Despite official acknowledgment that the Cultural Revolution was a mistake, its critique remains strictly controlled by both the government and individuals themselves, who are afraid of conjuring up unnecessary ghosts. As a result, memories of horror remain fragmented and knowledge of its scale unavailable to most individuals beyond their own experiences. Yet for the Cultural Revolution generation, now in charge of every aspect of socio-political life in Harbin, wounds from the “ten years of turmoil,” as it

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is often referred to, are more tangible than those from the 14-year Japanese occupation, whose effects they experienced indirectly. The absent colonial structures thus potentially become a site for collective mourning for an unsharable past. Among highly stylized photographic memories of the city during the Cultural Revolution, mostly in the form of Mao portraits, shots of Red Guards marching in uniform, or portraits of youths posing in idealized socialist moments, the re-presentation of the death of St. Nicholas Church provides a site for mourning. Despite general unwillingness to talk about the Cultural Revolution, many people openly and mournfully expressed their regrets at the loss of St. Nicholas. A native Harbinite in his late 60s told me while showing me his collection of old pictures of Harbin, including a black and white photograph of St. Nicholas: After the Cultural Revolution, sometime in the early 1980s, when Wang Huacheng was the mayor of Harbin, many people in the US told him that they would be willing to donate money to rebuild St. Nicholas Church . . . Even nowadays, people ask me to lend them this old picture of St. Nicholas, mostly for planning to rebuild the church. For instance, one architecture professor called me to send him a clear picture of the church in its early days . . . Poster-size blow-up photographs of St. Nicholas became available in the market in the 1950s, which many people bought, including myself . . . Now I feel that the church shouldn’t be rebuilt, since that would make us feel regretful. Our generation grew up with the sound of the bell from the church . . . This deeply held anxious desire to rebuild St. Nicholas has found an ironic medium for reconciliation, at least temporarily, in Harbin’s famous ice festival. Every year, a life-size St. Nicholas Church is meticulously resurrected with bricks of ice and lit up in dreamy pastel colors as one of the main pieces of ice sculpture to greet the locals as well as visitors from around the world. In its resurrection with electric cosmetics to highlight its beauty, St. Nicholas Church stands not as the victim of the Cultural Revolution but as the embodiment of the glorious Old Harbin and Harbin’s future. Its ephemeral yet grand presence in this favorite winter festivity epitomizes the simmering longing for its origin unencumbered by the official discourse. Hence St. Nicholas Church has become what Marilyn Ivy calls “a memorial marker, a monument to an absence, to a loss that must be perpetually recovered” (Ivy, 1995: 95, emphasis original). Yet the loss itself is constantly displaced by the recovery of something else. Anxiety and anticipation for the resurrection of St. Nicholas Church conjures up the Cultural Revolution, while its resurrection signifies Harbin’s lost glory. As if to console the ghost, there was an unofficial offer recently by one of

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the former students photographed on the cupola, now a man of fortune in Hong Kong, to rebuild St. Nicholas, although the city government declined his offer. Hence the people in Harbin continue to walk around the graveyard of St. Nicholas, now called Red Flag Square, blemished by what many describe as “one of the ugliest” structures in the city. In the center of a huge rotary bustling with people, cyclists, buses, and cars crossing and circling all in a mad rush, galvanized iron sheets form the ceiling and air ducts for a three-storey underground shopping mall on the site of the church.28 Covered with dust and exhaust, its functional existence, devoid of any gesture to aesthetic pleasure, is more noticeable than ever in contrast to the virtual resurrections of St. Nicholas Church taking place all across the city. The rehabilitation of St. Nicholas Church as the embodiment of both glorious Old Harbin and the embarrassment of the Cultural Revolution (as the fallen idol) hints at the “return” of the absent Mao era.29 Unfamiliarity is bestowed rather on the Mao era and the party-state as its embodiment — that is, China’s supposed national origin instead of colonial Harbin. What is foreign, or what is frightening, and what is full of secrets, is the Mao era, while the supposedly foreign Old Harbin, with its “atmosphere of a foreign country,” is perceived as home-like and accorded the status of authentic origin.30

Inheritance and Betrayal Despite the government’s attempt to assert Chinese Harbin in the multivolume publication of the history of Harbin accompanying the uncelebrated centenary in 1998 (Duan and Ji, 1998; Gao et al., 1998; Li Debin, 1998; Zhang, 1998), the historical preservation policy has highlighted Harbin’s unique postcoloniality, which is most notably observed in recent historiographical practices by local intellectuals as an integral part of the proliferating Old Harbin nostalgia. In analyzing the historiography in the late 1980s Harbin, Søren Clausen and Stig Thøgersen observed that history-writing had become rewriting history for the purpose of asserting Chineseness in a city full of memories of imperialism: “Contemporary historiography in Harbin is by necessity a rewriting with the purpose of writing China and the Chinese back into the history and establishing a proper and dignified role for them in this City of Many Masters” (Clausen and Thøgersen, 1995: xii–xiii, emphasis original). More than a decade has passed since their observations of this renewed interest in local history, which showed shifting historiographical practices among local historians toward a more forceful assertion of Chineseness. Government-sponsored history continues to revolve around anticolonial discourse, as the multi-volume publication demonstrates.31 But if one looks at other forms of historical writing, many of which fall under the category

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of coffee table books produced by professional historians, their nostalgic tone indicates the emergence of a different type of writing practice.32 In their efforts to highlight multicultural Old Harbin, references to colonial violence and exploitation have receded in their narratives. Their nostalgic accounts primarily revolve around Harbin’s rich social history, highlighting the image of a colonial-yet-cosmopolitan Harbin.33 The imperialism portrayed in these historical narratives is quite different from the anti-imperial discourse. Recent historical writings on “colonial” Harbin work to undo the image of “Chinese” Harbin. Furthermore, these writings actually reveal a certain absence of imperialist violence in the description of colonial Old Harbin. For instance, in the introduction to Dongfang xiao Bali [Paris of the East], a coffee table book with glossy pages with artistic shots of colonial architecture, the author/photographer only briefly hints at imperialism and moves quickly to describe how cosmopolitan the city once was: . . . after the Tsarist Russia robbed China of the right to develop the railway, Harbin developed around the Chinese Eastern Railway. In the early twentieth century, Russia, England, Japan, Czechoslovakia etc. opened up general consulates in Harbin, and Germany, France, Italy etc. opened up consulates, and within fifty years Harbin developed rapidly into a very unique international metropolis. (Song, 2001: 3) These new historiographical practices thus demonstrate a significant shift in their manifestation of postcoloniality from the form of asserting Chineseness that Clausen and Thøgersen observed in the late 1980s. Also unique about the recent resurfacing of postcolonial Harbin is how Old Harbin is connected to the city’s future. Within this new discourse of cosmopolitan Harbin, the colonial past is no longer contained within the demarcated space of pre-history before Mao. Rather, as symbolized by the reborn St. Sophia, Old Harbin provides the vital legacy and promise for Harbin’s future success in the global economy. It is a belatedly acknowledged postcolonial consciousness in a new guise, posing a potential threat to the founding myth of the Chinese Communist Party. As the resurrection of St. Nicholas Church epitomizes, the newly found yet twisted postcoloniality has made many locals acknowledge how uncanny the Mao era seems, and uncomfortably raises questions about the party-state. In her analysis of nostalgia for historic St. Petersburg in 1990s Russia, which curiously resembles Old Harbin nostalgia, Svetlana Boym observes the inside-out sensations evoked through this nostalgia: “For many local residents, the historic St. Petersburg façades have become the private architecture of their dreams; exteriors were internalized and appear more intimate than their actual impoverished interiors” (Boym, 2001: 130).

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Façades of colonial Harbin architecture also hide dilapidated interiors, the material trace of the communist Harbin with its grey cracked walls, divided rooms, and multiple households living in what was once a single-family unit. What has become intimate and familiar to the locals is the foreign looking exterior, while the interior—the lived experience of the Mao era— is seen with great suspicion. It is as if the restoration of Western-style structures has resulted in effacing the Mao era, reversing the effacement of the West during the Mao era. With Old Harbin nostalgia, people’s desire for attaining “modern life” (xiandai shenghuo) often takes what seems like a pro-Western outlook by locating authenticity in the colonial era architecture. It should be emphasized that the anti-imperialist discourse is not just government propaganda: for most locals, Japanese colonial violence persists as trans-generational pain, whether directly or indirectly experienced. Yet most locals do not seem to find a contradiction in harboring Old Harbin nostalgia, which clearly undermines colonial violence, since, after all, Old Harbin is their own. Most of all, the politics of inheritance in Harbin demonstrates how a deep, unarticulated postcolonial consciousness remains in this city, dominated by visible traces of its colonial past. Much deeper, more textured and complex than the official discourse of anti-imperialism, or passionate and deep-rooted hatred for the Japanese, postcoloniality is now resurfacing from Chinese society’s unconsciousness and has taken a form of something intimate and seductive yet dangerous. The government and citizens alike in Harbin are facing this delicate coupling of desire and disavowal that many postcolonial societies have dealt with, and that most in China were shielded from until recently. This crossroads of postsocialism and postcolonialism signals the opening of a new chapter in Harbin’s history.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

This chapter is part of a larger project entitled “The Double Inheritance: The Afterlife of Colonial Modernity in the Cities of Former ‘Manchuria,’” which took place in China and Japan between February 2002 and May 2004. The field research was facilitated by grants from the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program. I would like to thank Jonathan Bach, Ruchi Chaturvedi, Myron Cohen, Nicholas Dirks, Carol Gluck, Harry Harootunian, Krista Hegburg, Marilyn Ivy, Rosalind Morris, Beth Povinelli, Jordan Sand, Mark Swislocki, Stig Thøgersen, Tak Watanabe, Guobin Yang, Madeleine H. Zelin, Karin Zitzewitz, and the two editors of this volume for their comments. Any errors are mine alone. In some cases in the following text I have altered names and identifying details of individuals to protect their identity. All the translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. See, for instance, Chen et al., 2001; Logan, 2001; Friedmann, 2005. Arif Dirlik provides a concise overview of the term postcolonialism (Dirlik, 1994: 332). He mentions three prominent uses of the term: (a) “as a literal description of conditions in the formerly colonial societies”; (b) “as a description of a global condition after the period of colonialism”; and (c) “as a description of a discourse on the above-named conditions that is

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

informed by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of those conditions.” In the case of China, it is difficult to generalize about postcolonial conditions, since some regions experienced the forces of imperialism more intensely than others. Northeast China is one of the regions most affected, first by the Russian expansion of railways and then by the Japanese-built Manchukuo in the first half of the twentieth century. Most postcolonial analyses come from studies of Hong Kong and Taiwan, which were subject to long-term direct foreign rules (see, for example, Abbas, 1997; Ching, 2000), while China’s experience with imperial forces is often described as “semicolonial” (Shih, 2001). Comparing the role of colonialism in shaping the narrative of the nation in India and China, Prasenjit Duara observes that the lack of postcoloniality in China stems from a relative lack of a colonial mindset among Chinese (Duara, 1995: 224). This, he argues, derives from the fact that the influence of imperialism in China was contained within political and economic spheres while the cultural domain remained relatively free of it. Duara speculates on how this might be different in Northeast China, which experienced the Japanese direct rule. The case of Harbin examined here demonstrates that the seeming lack of postcoloniality is itself a product of postcolonial conditions. The configuration of postcolonial politics makes postcoloniality present or absent in relation to how its colonial history becomes pronounced or muted as a referent for nation-building. The seeming absence of postcolonialism in China does not necessarily lead to the absence of postcolonial conditions in China. Rather, the invisibility of postcolonialism itself attests to the presence of postcoloniality in China. The opposing impulses reveal and reaffirm the colonial past as the past frozen in time, and disguise its present colonial legacies in the rhetoric of new campaigns such as wenming (civilization) in the attempt to build a modern nation suitable for the age of globalization. Ann Anagnost (1997) analyzes the discourse of civility (wenming), which has become central to China’s national imaginary in the post-Mao era. She shows the colonial and postcolonial implications of this discourse, in which, for instance, Japan serves as a mimetic Other in China’s national imaginary through wenming. Through her observation of silk factory workers in Hanzhou, Lisa Rofel (1999) locates the project of modernity in reform-era China within a framework of long and deferred postcolonial desires. Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang (2004) problematizes such postcolonial desires, which she calls “postcolonial complex.” In her study of Chinese cinema, Rey Chow (1995) argues that cinema provides a site for postcolonial processes of intercultural translation. For her, it is a space where postmodernity and postcoloniality converge. It is where visuality, which attained centrality in shaping modernity and colonialism, has reshaped postmodernity and postcoloniality. In 1999, Wang Yuechuan, a literature professor at the prestigious Beijing University, introduced postcolonialism to the Chinese academia (Wang Yuechuan, 1999). His book presents the concept of postcolonialism as part of Western theory, yet acknowledges its potential usefulness in thinking about China in the present reform era when the nation has to face the question of cultural encounters. Marking 1949 as China’s zero hour is emphasized in school education as well. A nationally used junior high textbook on Chinese history, for example, divides the book into two sections, modern China and contemporary China. The former covers anticolonial struggles during the period between 1927 and 1949 under Guomindang and Japanese rule, and the latter covers the period after the establishment of the PRC (see Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe lishi shi, 2002). In 2006–2007 the municipal government of Shanghai introduced experimental history textbooks, which present a drastically different historical perspective by locating China within a global context. The time may not be distant when the nationwide history textbooks follow suit. Thomas Lahusen offers a detailed analysis of a parallel discussion that took place within the internal government publication, Haerbin shizhi [Harbin City Gazetteer], around the same time as this public discussion (Lahusen, 1998). “Chinese Baroque” style buildings cover most of the Daowai district, the old Chinese district of Fujiadian in Old Harbin. These were built by Chinese construction workers, who worked for foreigners in downtown Harbin, through imitation of Western-style buildings. Many of them resemble Baroque style architecture, yet a close look reveals that detailed motifs were taken from materials familiar to their daily life. For Chinese Baroque architecture in Harbin, see Nishizawa, 1996: 38–42.

“The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country” •  10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

This contrasts sharply with Korea, where the former Japanese colonial headquarters building in Seoul was demolished in the mid-1990s after a long debate (see Hashiya, 1995). For the privatization of the state-run heavy industry in northeast China, see Kemen, 2004. For the recent surge of protests in Northeast China, see Lee, 2000; Weston, 2002. Upon the commencement of the restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral in downtown Harbin, a local newspaper front page article sensationally reported how this beauty had long been “invisible” from the streets (Zheng et al., 1997). For the construction of “Chinese” history with the expense of silencing non-Han ethnic groups, see Clausen and Thøgersen, 1995: 215–216. The government publication on the restoration of St. Sophia Cathedral explains that the cathedral became a target of destruction during the Cultural Revolution because it embodied “culture” (Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 135). My translation. It reads: “Glancing back at history, Harbin was originally the headquarters for the Imperial Russian invasion of China and later housed an exile community of White Russians. From the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, and from the puppet government controlled by the Japanese colonists to the periods before Liberation, Harbin experienced decades of social upheaval. During these years, invasion and resistance persisted, and oppression and struggle never ceased.” From the introduction to section three, “Quotidian Vignettes: The Early Twentieth Century.” Some of her articles were compiled into a book (Zeng, 2003). “I had to make some changes to make my writing less edgy to be able to publish it at Heilongjiang renmin Press, but the tone of the book retains my voice,” she commented on her own book. See also Ji, 1996: 328. For guanxi, see M. Yang, 1994. In a society in which losing face is more than just an embarrassment, the cancellation was not a light-hearted decision to make. Other cities in northeast China, which share similar historical trajectories to Harbin, carefully watched the unfolding of the political drama. After a close examination of the case in Harbin, the city of Dalian decided to forego its plan to celebrate its centenary in 1999. The mayor justified the city’s decision to preserve a material witness to imperialism: “This way, we have attained cultural dignity and a break point for patriotic education and economic development. Some claimed that the cathedral was a material witness to imperialist invasion, and I also feel that it is a reasonable argument. But what is more important is to sum up history [zongjie lishi], develop oneself, and bring Harbin a new spiritual power” (see Haerbinshi jianzhu weiyuanhui, 1997: 40). Contrary to what Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang observes in rural southeast China, where religion plays a key element in spatial politics (M. Yang, 2004), diverse religious practices are an integral part of daily rhythms of the life in Harbin. Not all religious structures were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and those remaining edifices now house ardent worshippers. For instance, along the Dongdazhijie street, which stretches east from the Red Flag Square (where St. Nicholas Church used to be), lies a Catholic church, a Protestant church, and a Ukrainian Russian Orthodox church, all next to one another. On weekends, the Protestant church becomes packed with worshippers, while a small number of Russian and Chinese with Russian ancestries gather quietly in the Orthodox church. If you walk farther down the street, you will find a Buddhist temple next to a Confucian temple. In the center of the Daowai district (former Fujiadian in Old Harbin) stands a beautiful mosque, which offers a serene communal living space for the Muslim population in the city. A few blocks down stands a Protestant church, which is always lively with more than 100 ethnic Korean Chinese packed in this small space, cheerfully singing carols. This building was originally a synagogue in the early part of the twentieth century, and, although they put a wooden cross in front of the building, the remaining Star of David motif speaks of its former life. The general distrust for the government exacerbated the sense of panic and circulation of rumors when Harbin suffered the stoppage of its water supply in November 2005 as a result of a chemical factory explosion along the Songhua River, which became heavily polluted with toxic benzene. As Susan Stewart puts it, “[n]ostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past

 • Yukiko Koga

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack . . . nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality” (Stewart, 1993: 23). Here, Takahashi is alluding to Derrida’s work on mourning (see Derrida, 1994). The destruction of St. Nicholas during the Cultural Revolution was followed by the construction of a “Working Class Cultural Revolution” memorial, which gained a nickname “ice candy tower” as it was in the shape of Harbin’s famous ice candy. This political memorial, on which Lin Biao inscribed “Always keep in mind,” was hurriedly destroyed overnight and replaced by a small hill covered with trees and flowers upon Zhou Enlai’s visit to Harbin in 1972. This small hill, which Harbinites nicknamed “big grave,” was later covered with metal sheets that were part of the roof for the three-storey underground shopping mall (see Ji, 2002b). It may not be a distant future when the Mao-era disappears from the official discourse much more bluntly than what we have seen in Harbin. The New York Times recently reported on the absence of Mao in the new history textbook, which was experimentally introduced in Fall 2007 in Shanghai. The article describes a drastic change in the portrayal of history: “Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once—in a chapter on etiquette” (see Kahn, 2006). Derrida wrote: “The most familiar becomes the most disquieting. The economic or egological home or the oikos, the nearby, the familiar, the domestic, or even the national (heimlich) frightens itself. It feels itself occupied, in the proper secret (Geheimnis) of its inside, by what is most strange, distant, threatening” (Derrida, 1994: 144–145). Derrida, of course, is alluding to Freud’s essay on the uncanny. Freud illuminates the presence of seemingly opposing meanings, familiarity, and unfamiliarity, contained within the term “uncanny.” In discussing how the linguistic usage of das Heimliche [homely] and das Unheimliche converge, Freud explains that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (Freud, 1955: 241). It should be noted, however, that these volumes portray Harbin in the 1920s as a very cosmopolitan city and claim that in recent years it has regained its past glories, drawing a link between the pre-1949 past and the present. We can see the institutional constraints in choosing the “right” discourse here, since some of the authors of these volumes are among the intellectuals who are behind the nostalgia industry. The 1920s was an ambiguous period in terms of political control of Harbin. Despite the official reversion of sovereignty to the Chinese as a result of the Russian Revolution that led to fragmentation of the Russian society, so-called warlords staked various claims while collaborating with foreign forces. As James H. Carter observes, “‘Chinese’ rule in Harbin was a changeable patchwork of regional authorities rather than a centralized state bureaucracy” (Carter, 2002: 79). Chinese workers remained exploited by foreigners, as Chong-sik Lee describes: “The Chinese workers were severely discriminated against by both the Japanese- and Russian-operated industries, the pay of a Chinese worker being not one-tenth that of a Japanese” (Lee, 1983: 71). In one of the major protests that took place in 1928, students, workers, and merchant groups marched through the streets of Harbin by carrying “banners and placards that read ‘Down with Japanese Imperialism!’ and ‘Down with Warlords!’” (Carter, 2002: 172). The ensuing production of nostalgia took the form of historical publications, multilingual glossy books, photo exhibits, and newspaper series devoting columns to Old Harbin, all of which sought to portray Old Harbin as a uniquely cosmopolitan and culturally rich city in an era of turmoil and strong exclusionist sentiments. Part of the photography exhibition was turned into a book form in three languages (Chinese, English, and Japanese), nostalgically illustrating the glorious days of the city on glossy pages (Li Shuxiao, 2000). Local newspapers frequently publish articles on the remainders of Old Harbin in the city. The most popular and influential of all is a weekly full-page series, “The City and the People” by Zeng Yizhi, a senior journalist for Heilongjiang Daily. It was later turned into a book (Zeng, 2003). The Heilongjiang Province Academy of Social Science recently held an extensive photography exhibit entitled “Jews in Harbin,” a bilingual (Chinese and English) book version of which followed the exhibition (Qu and Li, 2003). Details of daily life in Harbin are vividly described in Ji, 2002a.

“The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country” •  33.

Recent works by Western scholars interrogate the assumption of “colonial” Harbin. David Wolff (1999) poses this question by exploring the unique form of colonialism that Tsarist Russia adopted in shaping its colonial desire in the Far East. Despite the appearance of Russian colonial Harbin to casual observers at that time, what Wolff describes as “liberal” colonial policy created a multi-ethnic society where integration rather than exclusion became the name of the game. James H. Carter (2002), through his analysis of Chinese materials, shows how Harbin after the Russian Revolution in 1917 became the playground for the bubbling Chinese nationalism of all sorts, all aimed at creating a Chinese Harbin through modernization efforts in cooperation with foreigners in the city. The eventual clash and fragmentation among Chinese nationalists resulted in some factions even collaborating with the Japanese in promoting a new form of nationalism called Manchukuo (Carter, 2002: 7).

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 • Yukiko Koga Ivy, Marilyn, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Ji Fenghui, Haerbin xungen [The Roots of Harbin] (Harbin, China: Haerbin chubanshe, 1996). Ji Fenghui, Huashuo Haerbin [Talk about Harbin] (Harbin, China: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2002a). Ji Fenghui, “Chengshi guangchang” [“City square”], Heilongjiang chenbao [Heilongjiang Morning News] (Harbin, China), May 8, 2002b. Kahn, Joseph, “Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books,” The New York Times, September 1, 2006, A1 and A6. Kemen, Antoine, “Shenyang, Privatisation in the Vanguard of Chinese Socialism,” in Béatrice Hibou (ed.), Privatizing the State (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Lahusen, Thomas, “A Place Called Harbin: Reflections on a Centennial,” The China Quarterly 154 (June 1998), 400–410. Lee, Ching Kwan, “The ‘Revenge of History’: Collective Memories and Labor Protests in Northeastern China,” Ethnography, 1 (2) (2000), 217–237. Lee, Chong-sik, Revolutionary Struggle in Manchuria: Chinese Communism and Soviet Interest, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983). Li Debin, Lishi huimou: ershi shiji de Haerbin [Glancing Back at History: Twentieth-Century Harbin] Vol. 3 (Harbin, China: Haerbin chubanshe, 1998). Li Shuxiao (ed.), Haerbin jiuying [Old Photos of Harbin] (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 2000). Liu Jingsong and Zheng Min, “‘Suofeiya’ bu hui wangji: Haerbin Suofeiya Jiaotang Guangchang zonghe zhengzhi zhuiji” [“Unforgettable ‘Sophia’: a follow-up report on the comprehensive renewal of Harbin St. Sophia Cathedral Square”], Shenghuobao [Life Daily] (Harbin, China), September 7, 1997. Logan, John (ed.), The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Lu Xiangdong, “Hashi zhaokai Haerbin chengshi jiyuan lunzhenghui” [“Harbin city organizes Harbin city origin conference”], Shenghuobao [Life Daily] (Harbin, China), December 14, 1994. Nishizawa Yasuhiko, “Manshū” toshi monogatari: Harubin, Dairen, Shinyō, Chōshun [The Tales of “Manchurian” Cities: Harbin, Dalian, Shenyang, Changchun] (Tokyo: Kawaide shobō shinsha, 1996). Qu Wei and Li Xuxiao (eds.), Youtairen zai Haerbin [The Jews in Harbin] (Beijing: Shehui kexue xenxian chubanshe, 2003). Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe lishi shi (ed.), Jiu nian yiwu jiaoyu san nianzhi chuji zhongxue jiaokeshu: Zhongguo lishi [Elementary Level Junior High Textbook for the Nine-Year Compulsory Education: Chinese History] (Beijing: Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002). Rofel, Lisa, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Shih, Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). Song Hongyan, Donghang xiao Bali [Paris of the East] (Harbin, China: Heilongjiang kexue jishu chubanshe, 2001). Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Takahashi Tetsuya, Sengo sekinin ron [On Postwar Responsibility] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999). Wang Dexin, “Haerbin de chengshi qiyuan yu chengshi jiyuan (1)” [“The origin of the city and the historical beginning of the city of Harbin (1)”], Xinwanbao [New Evening News] (Harbin, China), April 10, 1992a. Wang Dexin, “Haerbin de chengshi qiyuan yu chengshi jiyuan (2)” [“The origin of the city and the historical beginning of the city of Harbin (2)”], Xinwanbao [New Evening News] (Harbin, China), April 13, 1992b. Wang Yulang, “Du ‘Haerbin chengshi jiyuan de qisuan shijian’” [“Reading the ‘historical origin of Harbin’”], Xinwanbao [New Evening News] (Harbin, China), April 3, 1992a. Wang Yulang, “Zaidu ‘Haerbin chengshi jiyuan de qisuan shijian’” [“Re-reading the ‘historical origin of Harbin”], Xinwanbao [New Evening News] (Harbin, China), April 6, 1992b.

“The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country” •  Wang Yuechuan, Houzhiminzhuyi yu xinlishizhuyi wenlun [Literary Theory of Postcolonialism and New Historicism] (Jinan, China: Shandong jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999). Watson, Rubie S., “Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism: An Introduction,” in Rubie S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), 1–20. Weston, Timothy B., “‘Learn from Daqing’: More Dark Clouds for Workers in State-Owned Enterprises,” Journal of Contemporary China, 11 (33) (2002), 721–734. Wolff, David, To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Xue Yanwen and Zhang Xueshan (eds.), Zhiqing lao zhaopian [Zhiqing Old Photos] (Tianjin, China: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1998). Yang, Guobin, “China’s Zhiqing Generation: Nostalgia, Identity, and Cultural Resistance in the 1990s,” Modern China, 29 (3) (July 2003), 267–296. Yang, Guobin, “Days of Old Are Not Puffs of Smoke: Three Hypotheses on Collective Memories of the Cultural Revolution,” The China Review, 5 (2) (Fall 2005), 13–41. Yang, Mayfair Mei-Hui, Gifts, Favors and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Yang, Mayfair Mei-Hui, “Spatial Struggles: Postcolonial Complex, State Disenchantment, and Popular Reappropriation of Space in Rural Southeast China,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 63 (3) (August 2004), 719–755. Yu Wenxiu, “Sheng cheng xuezhe yantao Haerbin jianchengri” [“Experts discuss Harbin’s birthday”], Heilongjiang chenbao [Heilongjiang Morning News] (Harbin, China), December 14, 1994. Yuan Xiaoguang, “Haerbin, natian shi nide shengri” [“Harbin, when is your birthday?”], Shenghuobao [Life Daily] (Harbin, China), March 17, 1996. Yue, Ming-Bao, “Nostalgia for the Future: Cultural Revolution Memory in Two Transnational Chinese Narratives,” The China Review, 5 (2) (Fall 2005), 43–63. Zeng Yizhi, Cheng yu ren: Haerbin gushi [The City and the People: Stories of Harbin] (Harbin, China: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 2003). Zhang Fushan, Lishi huimou: Haerbin shihua [Glancing Back at History: A Narrative History of Harbin] (Harbin, China: Haerbin chubanshe, 1998). Zheng Min, Wen Ting, and Liu Jingsong, “Ta fang sheng Suofeiya dajiaotang” [“Investigation of St. Sophia Cathedral”], Shenghuobao [Life Daily] (Harbin, China), January 5, 1997.

CHAPTER

12

Liverpool’s Rialto A Ghost in the City of Culture GLEN MCIVER

Introduction: Contradictory Spaces This chapter sets out to think critically about attempts to remodel and recast city spaces with the type of widescale public–private initiative which has become a characteristic feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century urban redevelopment. In Liverpool this initiative is hinged around the assumption of the city’s role as European City of Culture in 2008. The perspective I adopt has been informed by a consideration of one of those anomalous spaces, those derelict and abandoned, or semi-abandoned, sites which have come to be seen as modern “ruins” and which seem to “blight the landscape” of the contemporary city. The particular “ruin” which has caught my attention, Liverpool’s Rialto, does not even exist in any palpable form anymore; however, it continues to form a tenuous and strangely ambiguous presence in the landscape. Built in 1927 and destroyed by fire in the Toxteth riots of 1981 the lingering presence of this disappeared space speaks of the past in ways which are both complex and disturbing. This remembered ruin certainly calls into question some of the more bullish and simplistic notions about the city’s possible remodeled future. In a general way ruined zones—whether they be a disused department store, office block, pub, theatre, nightclub or, in my own particular area of interest, an empty and boarded up cinema—disrupt attempts to create a 255

 • Glen McIver

sense of a tidy and smooth contemporary urban space. Large-scale urban redevelopments of the type currently being conducted in Liverpool are often designed to erase these “scars,” most commonly by a process of obliteration (demolition). However, I would wish to argue that this attempt to erase the ragged physical evidence of the recent past is not necessarily benign; in fact, whether organized formally by a process of massive redevelopment, or informally by a process of piecemeal demolition and rebuild, it can be seen as constituting a way of “erasing the evidence” of our own recent history. The erasure of so many of the material structures associated with our recent past is a powerful but also potentially dangerous gesture. It is powerful in the way that it would have us reconstitute our everyday lived experience by a process of large-scale and integrated structural redesign. It is dangerous in the way that it attempts to do this by effectively rewriting the past. In effect this is an attempt, as with any historical rewrite, to misrepresent the present. Despite all this effort, however, these eradicated sites can return in rather weird ways, even after the material structure has vanished, so to speak, to “haunt” us. Their “weak” presence can be powerfully disturbing. Using ideas about urban space developed by Henri Lefebvre (1991), Walter Benjamin (1999), and others, and referring to the work of Avery Gordon (1997), I wish to explore the idea that the disruptive and “haunted” spaces that constitute the “modern ruin” disturb because their existence has the effect of calling into question the viability of contemporary paradigms. These paradigms, patterns of work and leisure, of culture and consumption begin to look insecure in the presence of the ruin, particularly when we try to project these patterns into the future. As we move through what are for whatever reason currently “viable” urban spaces, these “other spaces” remain lurking around the fringes of our imaginative landscape. Their very visible and tactile presence, occasionally right in the middle of the most developed and sophisticated of urban sites, is a testimony to the existence of other lives, of other experiences and aspirations, all of which were highly valued in their time but which are now, for whatever reason, redundant. The spaces remain but the spaces are empty: without people, without activity. In cities dependent on the creation of comfortable and dynamic dream-spaces these desolate voids represent the spaces of nightmare. With their disruptive presence they speak to us of lives lived-out, of hopes only partially fulfilled, of abandonment and decay. If our awareness of these sites, however, can help us to maintain a sense of our own “otherness” in a world which is being rewritten for us and to maintain some critical distance from the great contemporary “modernizing” project, then their “haunting” presence in the landscape should perhaps be welcomed. In any case, I would argue, it cannot be avoided.

Liverpool’s Rialto • 

These thoughts stem partly from my own interest in that group of particular sites which have had, for me and for others, a strangely “haunting” presence in late twentieth-century urban spaces: the wide array of disused cinemas which used to occupy so many of our towns and cities. There are less of them around now, but some of them are still there. These sites, once so attractive and central to popular culture, quickly outlived their “cultural moment” and then remained as an awkward presence in the very urban sites which they had helped to modernize. I have been looking at, and thinking about, the cinemas of my hometown Liverpool, and in particular a very interesting and pioneering cinema complex built in the 1920s in what was once my local district, Toxteth. This cinema, Liverpool’s Rialto, erased, or rather razed to the ground, in the Toxteth riots of 1981, remains, rather curiously, a strong presence in the city’s cultural memory. Ideas about the fate of this site give pause for thought about the role that buildings play in people’s lives and about the ways in which these intertwine with social, cultural, and political developments. It also gives pause for thought about the ways in which culture and cultural activity can become the focus for both aspiration and disappointment. At a time when there is much excitement about the forthcoming assumption of the mantle of European City of Culture by Liverpool in 2008, the fate of the “Rialto” could be a timely reminder of the dissonant role that spaces of culture can play. Far from being spaces of reconciliation and quiet consumption, as envisaged by ministers of culture everywhere, spaces of leisure, spaces of culture may be better conceived as, to use Lefebvre’s phrase, “the very epitome of contradictory space” (Lefebvre, 1991: 385). For Lefebvre these are spaces that promise much, but in the end can deliver very little. This could be one reason why such spaces, particularly once they are abandoned, exert such a powerfully haunting presence: it is in these “spaces of leisure” that some of the primary contradictions of the social structure reveal themselves.

“Liverpool’s New Toy” In common with many of the first wave of purpose-built cinemas, Liverpool’s Rialto was built by local entrepreneurs. The building was, however, much more than a simply a cinema. Integrated within the site was a large ballroom, a café, and, flanked along the outside, twelve “luxury shops.” This pioneering “leisure complex” was envisioned and initially financed by a small group of local businessmen who had already established interests in music halls and cinemas in the Liverpool and Chester areas. Opened in 1927 and designed by local Liverpool architects Gray and Evans, the site rapidly became one of the landmarks of the city. Toxteth at the time of the Rialto’s construction was a mixed area in terms of its social makeup. There

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remained the grand houses, the schools, and the churches of the area’s once highly prosperous shipping and trading classes. On the other hand, behind this façade, with its mansions and its boulevards, further towards the river there lay the densely constructed and densely populated neighborhoods of the docklands area, with their own characteristic, and characteristically divided, working-class identities. In terms of its design the Rialto building could be seen as being placed midway between the architectural style of earlier city-center cinemas which were clearly indebted to a repertoire of theatrical prototypes, and the very contrasting style of the later “modern” suburban cinemas of the 1930s. The Rialto is a good example of the style of cinema which immediately preceded these modern “super-cinemas” of the 1930s; that is, if such a wildly eclectic “style” could be called a style at all. Known as “atmospheric” cinemas, this first wave of purpose-built “super-cinemas” of the immediate pre- and post-World War I period, including those of the 1920s, which appeared in many cities in both Europe and the USA, shared a common sense of stylistic freedom. An important element in these buildings was the spectacular use of colored lighting and other architectural features (often including painted murals) to create an “outside-in” effect. The ceiling might resemble the midnight sky over a Spanish hacienda, for example, or the interior of the building might represent a Moorish townscape at dusk, or look “out” onto an alpine landscape or a simulation of a woodland scene. These buildings drew on a wide range of exotic sources: Islamic imagery, Roman-style columns and friezes, Aztec temples, Spanish haciendas, Greek and Roman temples, Egyptian tombs. Many of them were a highly impure mix with elements from various periods and various locations jumbled together in often dizzying fashion. Coupled with an emphasis on “new technology,” air-conditioning, central heating, efficient ticketing, and giant projection screens, these silent-movie palaces combined ancient and modern in a cocky, self-assertive, and often highly ironic way. There is a sense of “it’s our time now” about the wholesale plundering of architectural styles and their recontextualization within the space of the cinema. The net effect of this combination of time and place, of simulation and pastiche, of technological “atmospherics” and of elements of strikingly rich material luxury, was to produce a sense of something genuinely new. Liverpool’s Rialto is remembered partly because it enshrined all of these aspects of the style of this period in a dramatic way. When it opened to the public on October 7, 1927 the Liverpool Echo was ecstatic: If one should receive from a Rajah or a Prince of Persia an invitation to visit his palace, one might be excused immediate dreams of opu-

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lence. One does not receive such invitations, but Liverpool now has a centre with what one might call the Baghdad touch. Tonight is opened in Liverpool to the public for the first time what must be one of the most luxurious places of entertainment in Britain. The interior of the new Rialto cinema at Princes Road corner is staggering. The article continued: “New York, Paris, and London have already created this kind of cinema gorgeousness and this Liverpool experiment is claimed to be the best in this country. The promoters consider it the most sumptuous cinema theatre in the kingdom.” What makes the Rialto special, and for me especially interesting as a site, is that, as the Echo put it, “The cinema itself is but a portion of the place.” At the front of the building, the curved entrance with its white marble paving, its fluted columns faced in white tiles, and its broad central dome was flanked by two towers each with their own copper dome. At ground level the entrance was flanked by “luxury” shops numbering twelve in all, six on each side of the corner frontage. The building also featured a “garden café” and a large ballroom with a sprung floor. This was, as the Liverpool Daily Post of October 8, 1927 put it in a headline, the “Cinema as Social Centre,” a project defined for the Post by the “courageous optimism of its promoters.” Looked at from a contemporary point of view it resembles an almost visionary project—a proto-urban entertainment complex. The site was unified around a particular luxurious style; great efforts were made to develop and sustain an “atmosphere” in which the design and décor took an integral part. As the Echo’s account of the opening night has it, “(this is) so much more a theatre than one usually takes a cinema to be. The theatre-cinema is as large and as lofty as a down town theatre.” It continues: There is also a ballroom set amid scenes of Venice, equipped with a floor that glistens like a nut-brown lake. The café, a separate apartment with its flower bedecked balcony and wall paintings of the beautiful Wye valley revives memories of the famous Ulro’s Leicester Square; and the lounge has an Aladdin-like bizarre decoration. The main entrance admits everywhere and the atmosphere of richness is encountered at once. One may attend the ballroom, dance and have refreshment; or enter the cinema and from there take tea in the café, or one can remain in the cinema for pictures and music. The Daily Post described the ground floor waiting room where “six hundred ticket holders can sit.” This shared the impressive décor of the remainder of

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the building, which “has been most richly embellished with what has been described as ‘soaring oblongs of luminous colour and glittering lines’ . . . everywhere [it continued] the eye is caught by silver and orange, soft pastel shades, floriate mosaics and highly decorative panels.” The Echo was more than enthusiastic about some of the most remarkable schemes of decoration ever achieved in a modern building. The effect [in the cinema] is of a vast apartment draped in gold, the keynote being struck by the drop curtain, which, under the glow of the footlights, gleams as if beaten out of the precious metal; in harmony of color, decorated with gigantic spearlike shafts shooting upwards and great panels in darkly jeweled hues, the walls swing backwards to meet the balcony beneath which the shadows are lighted discreetly by immense “moth”-like lanterns clinging closely to the ceiling. Who were the human “moths” who would have been drawn to this lantern-like building? There is a clue in the description of the interior as resembling a “vast apartment” and also of the café as resembling “an apartment.” When the Rialto was built this was an area that was changing its identity, people were moving in and living either in newly purpose-built flats or in older houses which were being subdivided. This was an area that could have been regarded as “upwardly mobile.” Ackroyd comments that there were “40,000 households within a one-mile radius” and that the area had a “rapidly increasing population” in the 1920s (Ackroyd, 2002: 118). An indication that this area might have been regarded as “up and coming” is the fact that in its opening year evening dress was obligatory for the regular Friday night “residents night” in the ballroom. It is unlikely, however, that the Rialto was intended to appeal only to a local clientele. In common with other buildings of this generation it was positioned at a nodal point for public transport. The cinema was placed at a major crossroads. Early publicity for the venue stresses that it is only a “penny car ride from town,” in other words a penny tram ride from the city’s central entertainment district. For residents on the south side of the city, of course, the building is situated on the way into town and the building is strategically and highly visibly placed at the junction of two main routes. As a speculative build the site seems have been particularly well thought through. As the Daily Post commented, “. . . should this very ornate centre of amusement . . . have only a local patronage, the courageous optimism of its promoters would seem to be justifiable. But it seems likely that the whole city will claim it delightedly.” The building seems to be characterized by a kind of jazz-age optimism,

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and crucial to this is the incorporation of music and dance within the fabric of the structure. The Rialto Ballroom was described in its publicity as the “acme of perfection and refinement. Exclusive lighting effects and the finest parquetry floor in the country.” This was a floor which responded to the collective movements of the dancers as they moved around, the “nut-brown lake” of the Echo’s opening-night account. The dancing took place from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. and the music was provided by Billie Cotton’s London Savannah Band. In 1927 this would have all seemed very much up to date. To dance to a version of “jazz” in a brand-new venue like the Rialto Ballroom placed the building’s users at the very cutting edge of popular culture. Billie Cotton’s offstage activity as a race-car driver must also have confirmed the sense that this was something both daring and exciting. This was “where it is at,” not just in the Liverpool of its day but, as in the contemporary sense, it was “where it is at,” globally. There were venues like this developing in many major cities across the developed world. One can gain something of a sense of the momentum here, reading these early accounts. There is a sense of excitement about the direction of cultural change, about the kind of future that the building can offer its users: with its combination of features the Rialto gives its users the chance to “live the dream.”

Living the Dream One way to understand the impact of a place like the Rialto is to locate cinema-going within a broad matrix of cultural change. The site itself seems to boldly affirm new paradigms in the way that it establishes the connections between different activities. New music and dance styles link with the cinema, the cinema links with the café and the shops, the shops link to the street. One should perhaps place the cinema at the center of all this. It has been argued that cinemas were the emblematic sites of modernity within the twentieth-century city (for example see Charney and Schwartz, 1995; Branson, 2000). For the popular audience, cinema-going, as has been shown by Annette Khun, was, for many people in the 1920s and 1930s, the “main attraction” around which everything else revolved (Khun, 2002: 212). This experience was both imaginative and embodied: it involved the creation of a huge range of new texts and placed those texts within new, lived, contexts. Broadly speaking it was associated with an emerging culture loosely defined around new practices of spectatorship and consumption and new types of collective and individual experience. In all of this, “location, architecture, interior design and finally the cinema apparatus itself: all are of a piece” (Khun, 2002: 146). This is something both complex and profound; one has the sense that the cinema has had a similar

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kind of combined effect in “modernizing” social space during the twentieth century as that which Walter Benjamin argued the Arcades had in the Paris of the nineteenth century. The effects are multilayered and connect up with society at every level. Lefebvre’s notions of “monumental space” might be useful in this regard. Lefebvre speaks of a type of “monumental space” developed by societies, typically in the nineteenth century, to commemorate, re-enforce, and make visible in a concrete form the norms of the social order. Monumental space is traditionally associated with the state and with public functions. Public squares and gardens with statuary, triumphal arches, or places of assembly grouped together with galleries, law courts, and libraries (as for example the area around Liverpool’s St. George’s Hall), act as a kind of “social condenser” by constructing and articulating the key features of the social hierarchy. “Monumental space offered to each member of society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage . . . The monument effected a consensus, and this is in the strongest sense of the term, rendering it practical and concrete” (Lefebvre, 1991: 270). Perhaps it could be argued that in the fluid world of the early twentieth century, in their unofficial, disorganized and opportunistic way, cinemas may have represented a different form of monumental space. Monumental space is always dynamic and interactive. This new type of monumental space, rather than making a simple reaffirmation of an existing order, could be understood as something which allowed a reorganization of social space. Shaped by emerging practices and paradigms linked to large-scale commercialized leisure activities, this new type of monumental space is porous and accessible. It is about inclusion and involvement; it is about leisure, consumption, and play—all available at an affordable price. Within these spaces things are moving. Considering the possible impact of all this it is amazing how little detailed research has been done in this area. Until relatively recently academic studies of film-going seem to have taken very little account of the popular audience. This makes it difficult to reconstruct the sense of what a place like the Rialto meant to people in practice; the issue has not really been thought about in any detail and it certainly has not been recorded. However, new work in the field of “audience studies” is beginning to emerge. Of particular relevance here is Annette Khun’s work, based around interviews with British 1930s cinema-goers and published in 2002 as An Everyday Magic. Khun’s work explores recently recorded recollections of the first ever “cinema-going generation.” This work is extremely interesting, but the memories she discusses have been processed by time. These accounts, because they are filtered by memory, both reveal and conceal things about this earlier period.

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It is helpful that there are some sources which date closer to the events and which perhaps provide more of a sense of the vitality of the cinema-going experience. These are provided by early studies of cinema audiences. The methodology used for these studies yields up some powerful material which is open to new types of interpretation. My own interest in this area was partly prompted by reading J. P. Mayer’s attempts to develop a sociology of British cinema audiences published in the 1940s. Working around a format developed by the earlier Payne studies in America, Mayer reproduces, verbatim, responses to questionnaires issued to cinema-goers of the period. These firsthand accounts, often (as with the Payne research) published verbatim, provide an amazingly fresh insight into the kind of feelings people had about films and film-going at the time. The often youthful correspondents demonstrate unexpected shifts of register, for example: “I have imitated many things from the films but my hair has suffered. Yes suffered. I used to bleach it when in the bathroom” (Mayer, 1948: 59—15-year-old schoolboy who used hair dye to imitate the appearance of different stars). Or again: “friends have said that I have several of Bing Crosby’s vocal and facial expressions, when I croon, and this is possibly because I have made a study of him” (Mayer, 1948: 129—young female correspondent). There is much more in this vein. Evidence like this demonstrates how cinemas, in their heyday, provided not just a place for fantasy, but a place which stimulates the attempt to “live the dream” in everyday life. In their own way these naive and often very revealing accounts provide evidence for the way in which cinemas provided a space for, in Richard Maltby’s words, “an exploration of self, of other, of difference” (Maltby, 1995: 20). Also, importantly, these spaces provided for the kind of public “social dreaming” which Benjamin saw in the Arcades (1999). I will return to Benjamin later, but for the moment the point needs to be made that the “dreaming” did not simply take place inside people’s heads, it was not simply imaginative; thanks to the nature of the buildings themselves it also took on an experiential material form, it moved into the area of embodied social practice. Khun applies Foucault’s notion of “heterotopia” to the cinema, arguing that these “real spaces” are also spaces in which “the real arrangements that can be found in a society are at one and the same time represented, challenged and overturned” (Foucault in Khun, 2002: 141). Near the home, but at the same time placed some distance from it, these buildings, particularly the up-to-date luxurious ones like the Rialto, offered physical access to a new range of experiences which helped to embody, and gain a sense of access into, the wider world of imagination represented on the screen. As so many cinema-goers of the 1930s, the peak period of cinema attendance in the UK, confess, it was not the films that attracted the audience, it was the cinema. It was the kind of processes, activities, and experiences that

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the physical and imaginative space of the cinema had to offer that had the appeal. These things relate to the everyday but they are attractive also by way of contrast with the everyday. As Stephen J. Ross has shown in his account of cinema-going in America in this period, “although aristocratic pretensions graced the theatres’ walls and interiors, democracy ruled at the book office” (Ross, 2002: 72). Within the new type of luxury cinema being built in the 1920s there was a blurring of class boundaries taking place. For lower-income groups the cinemas created a world in which a temporary shift in status might take effect. Ross quotes a contemporary source which claimed that in the space of the cinema “men who worked hard all day in subordinate capacities and women escaping for a few hours the bondage of stoves and diapers . . . might for a change be subordinated to” (ibid.: 74). It is wrong to dismiss this experience simply as an illusion. People were not simply dreaming. Things were shifting both socially and materially. Liverpool’s Rialto was typical of the new-style cinemas in that it was located not in the traditional central entertainment district of the city but away from the city center and out towards the suburbs. The cinemas were thus moving towards the emerging middle classes, as well as vice versa. Cinema-going becomes emblematic of an emerging middle-class lifestyle— to use Siegfried Kracauer’s rather cruel phrase of (interestingly for us) 1927, “The Little Shop Girls Go to the Movies” (Kracauer, 1995: 291). Kracauer’s “little shop girl,” depicted as a new social type, is a member of an emerging lower-middle class tied to the newer service industries. In Kracauer’s analysis cinema-going is essentially an individualized and isolated activity; the cinema is a place for compensatory fantasy and a symptom of social and emotional deprivation. In contrast to this, however, and perhaps more accurately, the Rialto, in its early advertising, depicts itself as a place of sociability. In early press advertisements it is stressed that “Everybody is talking” Rialto. “All the wise Rialtoize.” “Arrange to meet your friends” in the “Garden Café and Grill,” it is suggested, “Before visiting the theatre or Ballroom.” The impression here is of a new form of sociability, of a group rather than a solitary activity, of an actual experience of new types of material consumption rather than a withdrawal into imaginary ones. “Liverpool’s New Toy,” to quote one contemporary description of the Rialto, was there to be used. This is the promise of the place. The “bargain,” if you like, which was on offer to the consumer. Utopia is not just something which can be lived on screen, it is possible to live it here and now. With its cinema, its café, and its ballroom and with the twelve outward-facing luxury shops, one would feel that this was a formula which could hardly fail. However, the unfortunate fact is that it did fail. People may have continued to use the building

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in various ways during its lifetime but as a long-term project it was not simply a failure, it was a spectacular failure. One of the tragedies of the site is that within the city it could almost be said to have become a signification of things going wrong, of a past which is there to haunt us in all sorts of ways. As a cultural emblem it has become a haunted space and perhaps one that an emerging City of Culture would do well to remember. One of the reasons for the emblematic failure may be that the “cultural offer” of the site was so quickly withdrawn.

The Presence of Ruins: Haunting and Cultural Memory In the short term, of course, what happened to the Rialto was the Depression. The building was a speculation, as with the City of Culture, predicated on continuing and spreading prosperity, and what happened was the reverse. Merseyside was hit hard by the crash of 1929. Film-going in Liverpool continued to be popular in the 1930s, but “living the dream” must have seemed more and more difficult. As one of Annette Khun’s correspondents said, looking back on this period, you thought you could dance like Fred Astaire “but you couldn’t” (Khun, 2002: 185). The transition from screen to offscreen was not so easy. In the long run the Rialto shared the fate of many similar spaces. Cinemas, once so busy and popular, once the hub of excitement, pleasure, and perceived to be impressive indicators of cultural change (“progress”), became abandoned sites within a comparatively short space of time. Huge economic and population shifts took place following World War II. There was a general collapse in cinema audiences and the buildings were gradually abandoned and closed down. The empty shells, occasionally adapted to other less impressive uses, lingered on as rather uncomfortable reminders of what once was and also, perhaps, of what might have been. My own memories of the Rialto, a site which I often passed but never actually visited when growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s, are of a site in decay. Eventually abandoned altogether as a “leisure facility” in 1964, the building ended its days as a large emporium for secondhand goods. It is very significant that for Walter Benjamin the bric-a-brac store, with its chance miscellany of leftover and worn items, became a potent symbol of the workings of capitalism (1999). He speaks of the change in the Arcade from a being a place of splendor to a place of decay. The secondhand store in the decayed site of fashionable consumption becomes the archetype of the shifting processes of commodification. One dream is replaced by another, one site is replaced by another, and the temptation is for people to try and keep moving along, always being drawn to the newer more attractive sites of consumption, abandoning the outworn, the over-familiar and the shabby. This,

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however, is possible only if you have the means to do so. For those left abandoned living close to these outworn locations the dream is followed by a rude awakening. In Benjamin’s words, the experience of the Arcade changes from something unconsciously absorbed to “something consciously penetrated” (Benjamin, 1999: 207). The “collective” awakens from its dream to an awareness of disappointed hopes, and there is a sense of both betrayal and loss. For those left holding the broken fragments of the dream there is no escape. The people can feel “remaindered” along with the goods. In Liverpool it was not just the Rialto that was left abandoned and “used” as capitalism moved along, it was the whole locale. The once thriving docklands area became progressively abandoned as the twentieth century moved on. The riots which destroyed the building were not simply “race riots,” they were the protest of the have-nots against the system which had made them that way. The Rialto, which in its later days hung over Toxteth like a temple of decayed dreams, a symbol of exclusion rather than one of inclusion, would soon be the natural target of a generation whose experience, in the Liverpool of the 1970s and 1980s, was one of almost continuous economic and environmental decline. The riots, which were the most serious seen in mainland Britain during the late twentieth century, attempted to destroy Benjamin’s secondhand store and all that it stood for. Benjamin’s analysis perhaps explains why the Rialto had such emblematic power: the site haunted its locale. Being haunted is not particularly comfortable. As Edensor has said, “Hauntings rupture temporality, inconveniently bringing forth energies which have supposedly been extinguished and forgotten” (Edensor, 2001: 42). Ruins, according to Edensor (quoting Buck-Morss) “symbolize the fragility of the social order” (ibid.: 44). “In the ruins, master narratives of history as progress decompose into the tense confabulations of a continuously remembered past that hits the present like a nervous shock” (K. Stewart quoted in Edensor, 2001: 43). Edensor, referring again to Stewart, contrasts the impact of the ruin with the packaged experiences of “museum history”: “In the ruin that remembers, history and place, culture and nature converge in a tactile image that conveys not a picture-perfect enactment of ‘living pasts’ but the allegorical re-presentation of remembered loss itself ” (K. Stewart quoted in ibid.: 49). These are discomforting spaces; the discomfort is not simply simply visual, it is “felt.” Tim Dant’s recent work within the field of material culture is relevant and helps to explain something of the power of these sites. Dant looks at tools, and how these are used in the workplace, as a means of examining the nature of the interface between people and things, the links between human mentation and the material world. The “tool” implies a field of action, a technique embedded within a material practice. The tool implies a person and an activity. In a way the tool “hails” us with its presence and

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implies, or “calls for,” its apprehension and use. Broken tools, or the tools which are no longer needed, “identify themselves with a quality of unreadiness-to-hand as they become conspicuous and stand in the way of the work proceeding” (Dant, 2005: 88). In a similar way redundant buildings like the Rialto “call out” for use in a disruptive way, they stand in the way of new work, the “broken toy” in the playroom implies its own ghosts. These lost users as well as lost uses still “hail” us, but we do not want to be addressed by them anymore. We would like them out of the way, we do not like seeing them, even if these ghosts happen to be our own former selves. Khun’s work on “cultural memory” is relevant here, too. When analyzing the recollections of 1930s cinema-goers the memory of cinema-going is often linked with a sense of unsatisfied desire. In a moving section of the book correspondents speak of “a yearning for things which are out of reach” (Khun, 2002: 130); people wanted life to be so much better and for a time, in the space of the cinema it was, in a way, so much better, but in the long run this did not play out. There is a sense of missed opportunity, there was a desire for a “better and more beautiful self ” but, looking back, “the dreams and the hopes may have been strong, but if you did not understand it then, you certainly do now, that opportunities for fulfilling them were limited” (Khun, 2002: 232). Heathcote has remarked that boarded-up cinemas in places we do not even know can conjure up a strong sense of “nostalgia.” “Often we feel nostalgia for cinemas that were never even part of our lives” (Heathcote, 2001: 7). Perhaps what Heathcote is feeling is not a nostalgia for a particular past, it is a “nostalgia” for a future that, along with Khun’s correspondents, we never really had. For the residents of the semi-ruined docklands areas of Liverpool this sense of abandonment and dissatisfaction was intensified by a more general and profound sense of exclusion and decay. It’s important to note that there is something that is both complex and ambivalent going on here. In her important study Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon comments that it is the haunted space which allows us to recover a profound sense of the complexity of experience. It allows us to recover a sense of the “complex personhood” of others, and of “the shape and force of lost hands”; the “lost hands” are those of the generality of people whose lives and experiences are so often written out of history (Gordon, 1997: 3–6). These experiences include both hope and disappointment, they include bitterness and regret. There is a complex mix of aspiration and desire, of reflection and experience. It is one of the characteristics of “contradictory space” that even in its ruined state a building like the Rialto conveys, if only in memory, elements of its former attraction. People’s mixed feelings about the site were epitomized by a letter which appeared in the Liverpool Echo on the weekend of

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July 11–12, 1981, the weekend immediately following the riots. This “star” letter was an item sent in by David Moore of Stockport, “an ex-patriate from Toxteth.” The piece was introduced by a short comment from the author: “I left Liverpool in 1960. Seeing the events of the past few days on TV and in the Press has affected me greatly. Things which were comfortably held in trust in my memory have been destroyed, yet the frustrations which are being voiced are also part of my memories from so long ago. I have written it down—as a poem.” Under the bold heading “Rialto . . . a part of my past” the poem begins: They’ve burned down the poor old Rialto, The place where just after the war, With me mam and me dad and the seat was tipped up I seen me first film, I was four. They’re looting the heart from me memories, Along Upper Parliament Street . . . It continues: I remember the trams on the boulevard, Rattling down from the park, And the way the driver would curse us For shoving bricks in the rails for a lark. I remember the joy when I got out of it, To make me own way through me life, And I pity the ones what got left behind With all of the pain and the strife I remember when I went home one day, Taking me kids for a treat But they’d pulled down our homes to throw up new slums They’d even abolished our street I don’t really blame them in Toxteth, They’ve got their backs to the wall, But to burn down the poor old Rialto. God: Is nothing sacred at all? Although it may on the surface look like it, this is not really a poem of simple nostalgia. For this author the destruction of the building equates

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to the destruction of a site of memory. The writer expresses a sympathy for the anger of the residents of Toxteth, whom he has “left behind” in their “ruined” area. There is a sense of guilt here perhaps, as well as a sense of loss. The tension in the piece is caused by the conflict between this sense of sympathy for the rioters and the sense of dismay caused by the destruction of this particular building. Although it is linked with childhood memories this is not simply a poem about a lost childhood; the loss of the Rialto represents a greater loss—the loss of a “sacred” site. Perhaps this is why if you were to visit Toxteth today and to head for the location that once held the cinema you will find another “Rialto” constructed in its place. The uncomfortable void left by the building was eventually filled with a replacement Rialto, which apes some elements of the style and structure of the previous building with its prominent dome. This new Rialto is a multi-agency center. Police, Social Services, housing officers, and community groups all share the same building. Clearly there was a sense that “rebuilding the Rialto” was making some kind of gesture towards the future, that reconfiguring the building would help, somehow, to reconfigure the local community. However, there is a telling contrast between this “Neighbourhood Management Centre” and the former building—the cinema, dance hall, and café, with its “twelve luxury shops.” The new Rialto makes a very different “offer” to the local community. However “user friendly” it might seem, for me there is something quite bleak about it. There is something particularly poignant about the former building’s promise of a more open and better future now that the building itself has disappeared.

Conclusion Much has been made both locally and nationally of Liverpool’s assumption of the title of European City of Culture in 2008. According to Tessa Jowell, culture secretary in the Labour government of 2003 and quoted on the current (2006) Capital of Culture website, “Liverpool will become a cultural beacon of the world.” The site goes on to claim that “2008 is the rocket fuel that is propelling Liverpool’s economy, and solid foundations have now been laid for its ongoing transformation into a world-class city . . . now alongside its proud past, Liverpool has a bright future as a modern, cosmopolitan and premier European city with a world-beating reputation.” The rhetoric is familiar. The notion of an abstracted “culture,” with its “modernizing” influences and its “cosmopolitan” overtones, somehow becomes the catalyst around which both physical and economic transformations of a locality are expected to take place. Public and private funds are expected to combine to revivify the largely moribund core of an inner-city

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area around the creation of new leisure and living spaces. It is all very optimistic. Things are starting to happen in the city. The city center has become a buzz of road-drills, lofty cranes, yellow hard hats and, much to the bemusement of the locals, a maze of redirected traffic. A large-scale programme of rebuilding and redesign of sections of the city center (alongside the already partially refurbished central docklands area) is taking place. Property values are moving up and the aptly named “Culture Company” is working hard on a programme intended to provide a long-term build-up of events leading to its climax in 2008. The impact of the whole of this is lined up to be studied by a “major collaborative research programme” involving two of the city’s three universities. With the director of the programme claiming that the Liverpool scheme is “the most prestigious culture-defined urban regeneration programme in Europe,” and that this is “a very exciting time for Liverpool,” “culture” has become the cloak for a kind of corporate optimism walking tall in the city (Capital of Culture, 2006). The city has a rather strange physical feel as it moves through this current period of change. As one section of the city is tidied up and redeveloped other sections seem to be experiencing a process of accelerated abandonment and decay. There is a sense of chaos and disruption. As the city refocuses itself around the docklands area, parts of the older city center, including areas around the once prestigious Bond Street-style London Road and close to the city’s main station in Lime Street, are looking increasingly ragged. Two former cinemas adjacent to the station are looking particularly forlorn. One is the city’s first purpose-built cinema, the Futurist (1912), and the other is the impressively art-deco ABC cinema (1931). These now empty spaces are, along with the still active Empire Theatre, just about all that is left of the once-thriving entertainment center of the city: the zone around the once world-famous (or notorious) Lime Street. One would imagine that these spaces would be earmarked for redevelopment, but as it stands one of the main gateways to the city is haunted, not to say blighted, by these more than obvious “blots” of decay: two very dead-looking cinemas. In a very obvious way these cinemas, and the spaces around them, mirror the fate of Liverpool’s Rialto. At a time when there is much excitement about the forthcoming assumption of the mantle of European City of Culture by Liverpool in 2008 the fate of the “Rialto” and the current rough-hewn appearance of these former cinemas could be a timely reminder of the dissonant role that spaces of culture can play, particularly when they become abandoned sites. I wish to return, at this point, to Lefebvre. Writing in particular about the emerging “zones of leisure” which were developing in the 1950s and 1960s around the Mediterranean area, Lefebvre commented:

Liverpool’s Rialto • 

In and through the space of leisure, a pedagogy of space and time is beginning to take shape . . . the space of leisure tends . . . to surmount divisions: the division between social and mental, the division between sensory and intellectual, and also the division between the everyday and the out of the ordinary (festival) . . . This space further reveals where the vulnerable areas and potential breaking-points are . . . (Lefebvre, 1991: 385) As mentioned before, for Lefebvre this is the space that is “as prodigal of monstrosities as of promises (that it cannot keep)” (ibid.), the space of leisure is inherently “contradictory.” When we look at Liverpool’s Rialto it is clear that, in a small scale, all this holds true. Smaller-scale leisure zones, spaces of leisure, of which cinemas were a prime example, were a characteristic feature of urban life in the late part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. These sites were predicated on an imagined future prosperity, on a future cultural life that would revolve around increasing leisure and the chance to “live the dream” within already established urban areas. In actuality all of this was hugely disrupted by depression, by war, and then by large-scale relocation and economic change. In the empty “donuts” of abandoned city centers and elsewhere the sites themselves came to symbolize the fragility and impermanence of the social order. As new-style corporate entrepreneurs attempt to redevelop, to “Mediterraneanize” large sections of the city center, we would do well to recall what the ghosts of these earlier sites might be trying to tell us. These are warning us not so much to “be careful what you wish for” as to “be careful what you encourage other people to wish for.” The ghosts of the Rialto may yet come back to haunt us.

References Ackroyd, Harold, Picture Palaces of Liverpool (Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 2002). Acland, Charles, “Haunted Spaces: Montreal’s Rue Ste Catherine and Its Cinema Spaces,” Screen, 44 (2003), 133–153. Albrecht, Donald, Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986). Atwell, David, Cathedrals of the Movies (London: The Architectural Press, 1980). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Branson, Gill, Cinema and Cultural Modernity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000). Butsch, Robert, The Making of American Audiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Capital of Culture website: http://www.liverpool08.com/AboutLiverpool/index.asp (2006). Charney, Leo and Vanessa Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Dant, Tim, Materiality and Society (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2005). Edensor, Tim, “Haunting in the Ruins: Matter and Immateriality,” Space and Culture, 11/12 (2001), 42–51.

 • Glen McIver Gilloch, Graeme, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). Gordon, Avery, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997). Hall, Ben, Best Remaining Seats (New York: Bramhall House, 1961). Heathcote, Edwin, Cinema Builders (Chichester: John Wiley, 2001). Jones, D. Caradog, The Social Survey of Merseyside (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1932). Khun, Annette, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: Tauris, 2002). King, Constance and Harold King, The Two Nations: The Life and Work of the Liverpool University Settlement and Its Associated Institutions 1906–1937 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938). Kracauer, Siegfried, The Mass Ornament (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Maltby, Richard, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Mayer, J. P., Sociology of Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1946). Mayer, J. P., British Cinemas and their Audiences (London: Faber and Faber, 1948). Merseyside Socialist Research Group, Genuinely Seeking Work: Mass Unemployment on Merseyside in the 1930s (Birkenhead: Birkenhead Press, 1992). Nashaw, David, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Ross, Steven (ed.), Movies and American Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Samuel, Raphael, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994). Sharp, Dennis, Picture Palaces and Other Buildings for the Movies (London: Hugh Evelyn, 1969). Stamp, Shelley, Movie-Struck Girls (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Walton, John and James Walvin (eds), Leisure in Britain 1780–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).

CHAPTER

13

The Time of the Entrepreneurial City Museum, Heritage, and Kairos1 K E V I N H E T H E R I N G TON

Disappeared as existing, durable as written. They must be written in order not to forget that they were forgotten as existing. Such is the metamorphosis of the remainder into a trace. Trace: the nothingness of the existent is transformed into the being of the non-existent. Jean-François Lyotard (1997: 170–171)

Holes in the Wall On a visit to Berlin for a conference in 1995, a few years after the Berlin Wall came down, I found myself staying in the newly developed Hilton Hotel in what was previously part of communist East Berlin near Friedrichstrasse. All around the hotel were office buildings and warehouses still pockmarked with bullet and shell holes left over from the Battle of Berlin in 1945. No real attempt at that time had been made to tidy them up, though there was a very concerted attempt under way to tidy away the remains of the Berlin Wall (on ghosts, haunting, and the forgetting of urban history in Germany see Ladd, 1998; Huyssen, 2003; Till, 2005; Macdonald, 2006). Building after building was the same: warehouses, apartment blocks, and offices. Only the recently renovated important corporate offices in the district had been dressed as part of the major reconstruction and entrepreneurial development that was then gathering pace within the city, designated as the capital of a re-united Germany (see Cochrane and Jonas, 1999; Till, 2005). There was no sense that this was a part of any deliberate memorial to the past, no obvious plaque, nothing I could find in the nearby museum. It is 273

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possible that they had been left deliberately by the Communist regime as a reminder to East German residents of the war and the struggles it represented. If so, this was not obvious to the strolling tourist. Certainly the impression they left was that it seemed simply that the East German regime had never got around to clearing away this remaining legacy from the war. Berlin lived through another (divided) history after 1945, one where other events took precedence over the Battle of Berlin and the scars it left on the urban landscape (such as the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate and the new symbolism they took on after the construction of the wall in 1961) (see Ladd, 1998). These marks raised for me questions of time and space. We know that cities are palimpsests: spaces made up of different histories that are layered together in complex ways (Vidler, 1996; Gordon, 1997; de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol, 1998; Ladd, 1998; Degen and Hetherington, 2001; Pile, 2005; Till, 2005). At different times and for different people selected parts of that complex story can be important while other parts are little more than part of the background scene. We make sense of the cities we live in selectively through complex understandings based on our own experiences, memories, and associations, as well as through recognition of broader stories of city, region, and nation. Urbanists have long known this, often celebrating the ways in which the little stories, the lived experiences, family lives, the half forgotten places, subaltern position, and the overlooked character of the ordinary life of cities is often more important than the grander, more planned versions of history (see for example Jacobs, 1961; Ward, 1977; de Certeau, 1984; Benjamin, 2002; Coverley, 2006). They have known too that that experience in the modern metropolis is fragmented and distracted (see Simmel, 1971; Benjamin, 1973a; 1985a; Clark, 1984; Frisby, 1985; Agamben, 1993) and that that impacts on how people relate to their environment. The relationship between lived space, memory, and the representation of history is, then, a complex one played out across these convoluted layers of the city (see Benjamin, 1973b; 1999; 2002; Lefebvre, 1991; Huyssen, 1995; 2003). But this is more than a matter of saying that there are different ways of seeing the space of the city through the prism of history; those holes in the wall cast their mark on the experience of time itself. I was born after the war, had never lived in Berlin, had never studied it seriously, and only had a vague knowledge of the details of the history of the end of World War II, based mostly on popular films, books I read at school, and television documentaries. And yet those marks on the wall were evocative to me as a first-time visitor, they spoke a language I could understand even if at the time I did not know which language that was. In part, they brought back childhood memories of the postwar years. The popular culture of boys growing up in Britain in the 1970s was still marked by the

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events of World War II: films, comics, playground games, and so on. Yet the resonance was not only with seemingly trivial bits of my own memory but with a feeling of somehow having stumbled across history that presented itself as real and live in an unexpected way in the here and now. Here was the language of resonance and opportunity and the possibility of an opening onto another time—a moment, in this case, of recognition and acknowledgment that somehow reordered the subjective time of the now (see Derrida, 1994; Nowotny, 1994). While bringing back into view a moment in history, those bullet holes also stand, significantly, somewhat outside of history as it is understood in terms of a chronology and the crystallization of a linear flow of event into a narrative. In such a manner they have the power to resonate with the present in ways that produce a mild shock—perhaps more a fold than a tear—and an unsettling of the daily habit of the city, even for the tourist—especially when that present is so marked by the building work associated with the regeneration of Berlin and images of its present. What those holes in the wall revealed to me at that moment when the Berlin skyline was so thick with cranes and newly rising office blocks was that all this was happening seemingly in spite of the past. Suddenly the past was there like an unsettling ghost in a world that was moving full tilt towards an idea of the future in which the past was going to be little more than a packaged spectacle within the present, “There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day” (Benjamin, 1985b: 231). Those bullet holes acted like the ghosts that Benjamin speaks of here; signals that spoke of another time disjointed from the narrative flow of events that unfolded as history and which are often imposed on cities through their development. They were a juxtaposed fragment of a more crucial time, a precipitous time, seemingly disposed of but in fact only brushed aside; a moment that needed to be heard now as an absent presence of what had been and what ought to be remembered in the context of the stripping away and disposal of the past that often goes with the process of regeneration (see Huyssen, 1995; Gordon, 1997; Till, 2005; Van der Hoorn, 2005; Macdonald, 2006). All this raises the question of how this cultural forgetting gets done. In this chapter I want to address the issues raised by such urban encounters with the materiality of other times in the context of the entrepreneurial city, of which the heritage industry and the museum—two institutions concerned with the representation of the past—have become an important feature (see Hewison, 1987; Dicks, 2003; Degen, 2003). I want to consider how materialities that are somehow out of time can speak of time itself in ways that call on us to evaluate our own present and its sense of place in the “flow” of history.

 • Kevin Hetherington

We need to put this issue in context. It has become common to think of capitalist regeneration producing empty, similar, non-places of simultaneous time (see Nowotny, 1994; Augé, 1995) or of creating a memorial to the past that engages, in that process of memorialization, in the act of cultural forgetting (Huyssen, 1995; 2003; Benjamin, 1999; Maleuvre, 1999). It does both. What is new in this is that in the entrepreneurial city of place-marketing and competition, of spectacles and consuming, of public–private partnerships, these processes are associated as much with culture industry functions and entertainment as they are with the practices of governance and civic responsibility. In one perspective, supermodernity produces a spectacle of time as something static, universal, and unchanging—governed by the global rhythms of the now of the capitalist economy. In the other, more emphasis is placed on how the past becomes a memorial and a resource within a city in its competition for resources. What the bullet holes and other ghostly traces in a city reveal is another time altogether and a potentially different perspective of both past and present. I am speaking here of time as Kairos rather than Chronos and of the relationship between that time and the space of the city that these times intersect with. In exploring this often overlooked conception of time I will take my lead from Benjamin, in whose essays and fragmentary writings we find the fullest and most developed sense of the importance of kairological time within social theory (1973b; 1999; 2002). What kairological time stands in tension with, in particular, in the spaces of the entrepreneurial cities of the last 20 years, is the constitution of heritage and conservation practices found within regeneration and their presentation as spectacle and through a spatialized time associated with that in particular (Debord, 1977).2 The impact that the nonlinearity of kairological time can have on the prevailing sense of history and space within the development of the city is important when we think about the issues of image and memory, or trace and spectacle. I want, therefore, to explore what we might call the current “museumification” of the city—in relation to this issue of Kairos time—the time of the moment. Above all, this raises questions about how we think of the time and space of the city and the voices that occupy it and speak to us from the past, in the present, through the changing urban fabric. It also provides a broader perspective on the question of stasis and change.

A Time to Gather Stones Together The idea of two different qualities of time described by the concepts of Chronos and Kairos goes back to the ancient Greeks. The latter is associated with the figure of opportunity, notably in ethics and rhetoric, and also later came to inform Christian theology around ideas associated with Christ’s

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arrival on Earth (Tillich, 1951). But this is not just a concept of arcane or theological interest. Part of the temporal order, and yet the figure for the recognition of the opportunity for change that stands somewhat outside it, Kairos resonates also with our current philosophical interest in the event and the dual conditions of stasis and change (Foucault, 1974; Deleuze, 1993; Badiou, 2001; 2005) as well as with the blank (Serres, 1991; Hetherington and Lee, 2000). Notably, the issue of Kairos also figures prominently in Benjamin’s understanding of history, memory, and the significance of dialectical images in bringing about recognition of the true character of the present (1973b; 1999; 2002; see also Lindroos, 1998). It is this latter usage that I want to explore a little here as Benjamin has quite a lot to tell us not only about Kairos and history but also about urban space. The time of European modernity, especially shaped by the cultural influence of Newtonian scientific ideas about measurement, is recognized as time as Chronos. This has become hegemonic to Western cultural sensibilities—most explicitly through linear temporal notions of time associated with the discourse of improvement, development, and progress that has been with us since the mid-eighteenth century (see Adam, 1990; Borst, 1993). Modern chronological time, clock time, has become, as Smith points out, little more than a quantitative measure of duration (2002: 47). In the Western world our modern sense of time has become serial, linear, and narrative, but this was not always the case (see Koselleck, 2004). The idea of Kairos has its origins, then, in a quite different and ancient context, with the Greeks who associated it with the ideas of “right-time” and “right-measure” that are somewhat missing from, or submerged within, this modern culture (see Kinneavey, 1986; Sipiora and Baumlin, 2002; Smith, 2002). It was deployed then in a variety of contexts including rhetoric and ethics to try and identify the importance of the precipitous moment when a best effect could be achieved. In each case Kairos signified the idea of a right time for something—“a time to . . .” in order to achieve the best effect or realize an opportunity. Kairos also signified the idea of a good time for something to happen or be said. Taken up by most of the philosophers of note from Isocrates onward, Kairos came to be aligned with the idea of effectiveness in action: the right time, the proper time, the crucial moment, when the time for something is ripe, and so on (see Sipiora and Baumlin, 2002). Kairos does not suggest the negation of Chronos, rather the former complicates the latter around the question of events, folds, interruptions, moments of crisis, and times for change, and around the relationship between stasis and change that come to be seen through its lens as a single condition rather than as competing opposites (see Hetherington and Lee, 2000). As John Smith puts it, whereas Chronos can be seen as a quantitative

 • Kevin Hetherington

measure of time, Kairos is qualitative and distinctive and relates to the issue of position within a sequence rather than to the ordering of a sequence itself. Kairos asks the question “at what time?” and in particular “at what right time?” in ways that challenge some of the common assumptions of chronological time as a natural and unchanging sequence (Smith 2002: 47). In Western understandings of modernity, Kairos might not only be associated with the idea of opportunity but also, in its most complete form, with the idea of revolution (see Arendt, 1990). Rather than a universal measure of time, Kairos, therefore, relates to the disrupting event, the moment when something different is revealed, the opportunity or the occasion when something can happen with a significant effect. Benjamin’s work is profoundly infused throughout with this sense of Kairos, as is seen most prominently in texts like One Way Street (1985a) and “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” (2002), but it is in his late work such as the unfinished Arcades Project (1999) and most especially in his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1973b) that he presents a more direct account of the significance of creating textual images of the past to resonate with the present situation in a kairological manner. Kia Lindroos’ close reading (1998) of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History text gives us the best account we have of the importance of the issue of Kairos for Benjamin and the constitution of image-spaces that derive from it (see also Weigel, 1996). Significant, she suggests, to Benjamin’s treatment of history is his concern with singular temporalities—moments—that are out of recognized chronological sequence. The Arcade after Hausmannization in Paris in the 1860s is perhaps the key kairological motif in his work overall, and the montage of fragments and quotes that he brought together with little commentary around it, is the way he planned to present an image-space of it. By the 1930s the arcade is a space out of time; it is of the past and yet resonates with the present in a way that challenges the chronological idea of progress that he sees as a dominant cultural expression within consumer societies. But it is one amongst many such images in Benjamin’s work. The effect that comes from reading the idea of Kairos into Benjamin’s work is that it focuses on the importance of how images that emerge from the past, coming into contact with the present, create a challenge to the experience of the chronological flow of time as it is lived and history as it is understood. In doing this, Benjamin believes, they create the opportunity for redeeming the present from capitalism. While much has been made of Benjamin’s complex methodology, his construction of dialectical images, his emphasis on shock and on the creation of a new, redemptive mode of experience that comes through an encounter with them (see Wolin, 1982; Frisby, 1985; Buck-Morss, 1989; Agamben, 1993; Cohen, 1995; Weigel, 1996; Tiedemann, 1999), less has yet been made of the centrality of the

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understanding of time as Kairos to his work (although see Lindroos, 1998). Much has been made, most notably through readings of his Arcades Project, of seeing history as a phantasmagoria of progress, of his ability to recognize the skilled ways in which distracted audiences/consumers can see through this intervention of the image-as-shock, but less has been made of the centrality of the idea of Kairos to these issues. In his Arcades Project and other spatial writings, Benjamin seeks out the haunting language of the image within urban consumer culture that has been suppressed by the modern emphasis on chronological understandings of the relationship between the present and the past. Such an image, constituted typically through montage, is a means of revealing, for Benjamin, an encounter with a moment out of time that is somehow fortuitous for humanity because that moment is not submerged within capitalism’s phantasmagoria of progress. For Benjamin, that kairological moment can be encountered in images from the past in a variety of different urban media: text, photograph, architecture, and the material culture of a particular time. Bullet holes in a wall in a city undergoing major redevelopment in which the image of a bright future is presented are perhaps one example. For Benjamin, these kairological images come together with the dominant motifs of the present (often expressed through the chronological idea of progress or regeneration/rebirth) as image-spaces that create a potentially new experience of time in the now (see Weigel, 1996; Lindroos, 1998). The relationship that such an image-space has with the now is constituted through what he calls “dialectics at a standstill” or “dialectical images.” These kairological image-spaces are inherently monadological in character in Benjamin’s work (1985c; 1999). As such, different times are not ordered in a sequence but are crystallized in a single moment (the now) in ways that stall and challenge the sense of time as directional flow and continuity. He sees the task of dialectics at a standstill as a monadological expression, rather than a discursive one, that brings the image out of time from the past into contact with the present such that they form a constellation in which the phantasmagoria of history as chronology (especially as progress) is ruptured. The term that Benjamin associates with this effect certainly draws on the idea of Kairos but the word he more typically uses to understand this moment of the now is Jetztzeit (see Lindroos, 1998). Throughout his work Benjamin is interested in how the past experienced as a moment out of time can disrupt the present and bring to it a new and potentially redemptive insight that changes the character of experience (Erlebnis). Through his aphoristic, allegorical, and montage styles of writing he seeks to create textual images that produce a constellation that contains different moments of time as a monad—as a single yet complex and challenging image to the idea of the temporal flow of events (see

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Buck-Morss, 1989; Lindroos, 1998; Kwa, 2002). What he adds to that conception, drawing as it does on the shock effect of unusual juxtapositions that he derives from Surrealism, and involuntary memories that are revealed at unexpected moments that he gets from Proust (see Cohen, 1995), is to conflate this with the Jewish theological concern with the idea of the possibility of redemption in the material world with the coming of the Messiah (Erlösung). As Lindroos suggests (1998: 44), Benjamin’s concept of redemption in the here and now is expressed as Jetztzeit. This combines ideas associated with Kairos with this Jewish tradition of Erlösung. The kairological, in this approach, is conceived as a time of destiny, whereas Erlösung is associated with the disruptive event caused by the Messiah’s arrival in the chronological world of linear time and duration. In part, the proletariat assumes this role in Benjamin’s analysis. But only in part—there is more than a trace of the messianic in his ideas about redeeming history. This is clearly not the place to try and develop a discussion of such theological themes in Benjamin’s work and it is a secular understanding of Kairos rather than Jetztzeit that really interests me here. For our purposes we can suggest that in this more limited sense Benjamin is aiming at a critique of the progress story found in both liberal and Marxist approaches to history and which he believes can be found through our encounters with the material world of capitalism that surrounds us as well as in the various texts and images associated with that world (writings, adverts, fashions, signs, logos, and so on). Only when they are brought back out of the past into a constellation with the present do they show reality as an eternal recurrence of the ever-same form of the commodity. For Benjamin, this is phantasmagoric in its effect—fetishistic—though today we more commonly speak of this as spectacle, but the condition is the same and Kairos, for Benjamin, in the context of capitalist society, is the enemy of the commodity’s presentation of time as quality when really it is only a measurable moment of quantity. What he seeks through the image-space of Kairos is an awakening from this temporal phantasmagoria/spectacle that the commodity displays through the creation of disruptive images that open up a new form of experience in which the moment ceases to just be a fragment of dislocated, fetishized, modern experience (Erlebnis). The experience of the kairological moment offers a connection with other times and provides, Benjamin believes, the source for a richer form of understanding than capitalism allows for. It should be apparent that the bullet holes I mention in the context of a regenerating Berlin act as such an image by introducing a moment of Kairos—reminding the rebuilders of a past that has not gone away. It is the temporalization of history that Benjamin seeks to arrest through his introduction of the idea of Kairos and the dislocating and revelatory

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event. In his view, both liberal and Marxist historiography have established their understandings of history on this chronological temporalization and he seeks to challenge that through a more monadological understanding of the event that dislocates the temporal flow. Benjamin believes that only through a recognition and an awakening to the shock effects of these moments of Kairos, presented as image-spaces, can a new and enriched form of (socialist) experience emerge. What has changed since Benjamin’s time is that capitalist social relations no longer rely so heavily on an ideology of progress as they once did. Instead, as Helga Nowotny has pointed out, it is the ideology of simultaneity that has become hegemonic within “postmodern” capitalist societies where the experience of the same time across the globe is more in tune with the workings of global markets and flows of capital (1994). This is not a completed or a uniform process that is felt evenly everywhere. Old attitudes still prevail in some places and new ones are not always automatically taken up. However, it is becoming clear that the trend is away from an orientation to the future and towards the present. Notwithstanding this shift in emphasis, this ideology of time still produces a version of the past as chronology and is still susceptible to the disruptive moment that Benjamin addresses.

Spectacle, Heritage, and the City Along with the commodity culture of capitalist society, the urban plan, its architecture, and the development of towns and cities also express this chronological and progressive sense of time. Benjamin’s Arcades were intended to show that. Our own time has become a little less confident and a little more reflexive about ideas of progress and of moving away from the past than in Benjamin’s day. Indeed, the concern with the traumatic past (post-Holocaust), the emergence of a conservation movement, and the development of a heritage industry associated with tourist practices are all testament to that. If in the past concerns existed within capitalist societies to shape the future and to attain some degree of control over the image of it, in our culture of simultaneous time it is shaping the past that has become our preoccupation. The main concern has become that of heritage. Museums are a major part of this process (see Hetherington, 2007b). Benjamin was aware of this even in the 1930s before these developments had really taken hold of cities. So too, we might add, was Debord in his analysis (1977) of consumer societies as characterized by social relations mediated by spectacle. Now without its flaws (see Hetherington, 2007a), he applied the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism, first developed by Marx to apply to the sphere of production, more broadly to consumer society under the rubric of the term “spectacle” (1977). Spectacle in this

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sense is not about how things are viewed but about how social relations get mediated by forms of appearance. A spectacle is a set of social relations in which power is mediated by the presentation of images. Noteworthy in Debord’s analysis of spectacle is the suggestion that a key feature of it is the spatialization of time. The idea that the flow of time is arrested in the spectacular presentation of a time-space as simultaneity does not do away with a chronological sense of time altogether, just with its future-driven orientation. For Debord it replaces the true experience of history with one mediated by fetish images of history (heritage). As early as the 1950s Debord singles out the planning, zoning, and regeneration of cities after the war as taking on this character (see Knabb, 1989). Much like Benjamin, he provides us with an analysis history that looks at the relationship between modes of production and the prevailing forms of social time. Some of this is already well known from leading historians on the relationship between feudalism and the conception of cyclical time. It is when we get to what he says about the prevailing conditions of globalization that is also the time of the entrepreneurial city (Harvey, 1989; Zukin, 1995) that his analysis becomes particularly interesting. Time in a global economy, he suggests, is made universal and this is seen as an important feature of spectacle: With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is gathered under the development of this time. But this history, which is everywhere simultaneously the same, is still only the refusal within history of history itself. What appears the world over as the same day is the time of economic production cut into equal abstract fragments. Unified irreversible time is the time of the world market, and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle. (Debord, 1977: #145) Debord goes on to analyze this spectacular time in terms of false consciousness. For Debord lived time is historical, whereas spectacular time is spatial. This is something that chimes with Benjamin’s analysis—not surprisingly as both apply the question of commodity fetishism to consumer societies as a basis for their analysis (see Hetherington, 2007a). Where we might criticize this approach (especially in Debord), is that it tends to assume a singular and universal response by subjects—to assume they all experience this time in the same way. However, this is far from the case. As Nowotny (1994) has pointed out we all of us experience a multitude of often conflicting “proper-times” that are subjective and personal in character just as they are also shaped socially. Just as people did not live progress in the past in a uniform way, so now do they not live simultaneity. Indeed many social

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conflicts—influenced by both left- and right-wing ideologies—might be analyzed as conflicts over a disjuncture between the actual lived experience of time in relation to the dominant ideological thrust of social time and its impact in shaping a changing society. What people live is a culture that is shaped by such ideologies that variously conform to and conflict with their own subjective experiences of time. This spatializing of time as a static image of the present involves creating an image of the past that provides a sense of authentic origin and justification for present hopes. In the form of heritage this has become a key part of the story of the present that would seem to be a characteristic of the entrepreneurial city. Whereas in the past it might have been the spectacle of a palace, monument, or memorial—or a building whose architecture referenced the importance of the past (neoclassicism)—that took on this spatializing role with regard to the presentation of the temporal in the city, more often today it is associated with the culture industries—most notably with the heritage industry and the practice of conserving or restoring the past and turning it into some form of paying entertainment complex (see Wright, 1985; Hewison, 1987; Dicks, 2003). This process has become known as museumification, signifying both the importance and the changing role of the museum function in conserving and presenting the past as spectacle in the context of the entrepreneurial city (on the new museology see Vergo, 1989). The analysis of the museum function as a space of memorializing the past (spatializing it as spectacle) is something that has been developed in recent arguments surrounding the modern institution of the museum (see Asendorf, 1993; Huyssen, 1995, 2003; Maleuvre, 1999; Dicks, 2003). Maleuvre, for example, has argued that the museum be seen as engaged in the construction of the past through the idea of memorial (spatializing bourgeois time as eternal). He argues that the idea of the museum in bourgeois culture was based on trying to make that class identity and culture appear timeless and enduring through the construction of a space of monumental time (1999: 56 ff ). The Benjaminian theme that underpins Maleuvre’s analysis is that memorialization is seen as a form of cultural forgetting—a space in which time as Kairos is rendered absent. In effect, the past becomes a spectacle for the bourgeoisie’s sense of history. What Benjamin and Maleuvre after him see in the museum is not a space of living culture in which the past is somehow brought alive but a dead, static history of eternal recurrence that is fetishized as real and universal for the bourgeois subject. They argue that lived history disappears in such a space (see also Augé, 1995). Since Benjamin’s time, however, the self-confidence of the bourgeois museum has been eroded somewhat. A visit to a museum today will often

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show that a singular and uncritical sense of nation, community, or empire is not so commonly on display—the subaltern’s position, and his or her history, have begun to receive recognition. Nor too will there always be an emphasis on treasures, high art, and iconic items of civilization—social history and popular culture have made their entrance as well, as much through enactments of the past in reconstructed heritage sites and open-air museums and visitor attractions as in more conventional museum displays. This more modest approach is indicative of a society that has shifted its focus on the future to one on the present. While it is still possible to find museums with row upon row of artifacts on display with little explanation, what has largely disappeared is the construction of the viewer as a knowledgeable connoisseur able to appreciate them—entertainment, spectacle, and consumption are now more commonly what museums are about and they require some kind of simple storytelling. But this does not undermine the museum as an institution. The museum position and its way of telling the time through the processes of heritage presentation and museumification have spilled out from the museum building and become a means of spatializing time as a form of spectacle within the city as a whole. There are a number of key ways in which the contemporary museum now addresses time and history—some of them relating to how a museum interacts with the wider city environment and others to what goes on within museum and heritage displays: • • •

through their position within the regeneration strategies of cities; by treating artifacts as an index; and by focusing on a discourse of trauma.

Urban Regeneration Strategies and Museums Museums have been used to develop or regenerate cities for a long time (see Willett, 1967; Miles, 1997). What has changed in the last couple of decades has been their strategic position within discourses of heritage and regeneration that are now used to promote and develop cities. Since the nineteenth century museums have typically been used to boost the symbolic economies of cities, notably through ideas about civic pride and urban prestige (Zukin, 1995). Prestige endowment of a city by the wealthy or by a charitable foundation or institution to a city is a longstanding approach from which the public has often benefited. What has changed more recently has been the increasing importance that museums, along with galleries and other exhibition spaces, have for the redevelopment of the city through entrepreneurial public–private partnerships (around issues of funding, architecture competitions, and emphasis on visitability and access).

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As Zukin points out, the symbolic economy is now multiple rather than singular, involving a series of ways in which a place’s cultural symbols are expressed through capitalist practices (1995: 3). She suggests that this has taken three forms that impact on how a place comes to be represented: (i) the look of a place established over time, (ii) civic and philanthropic investment in a city such as in parks and museums in order to promote a sense of the public good, and (iii) profit-driven investments by private-sector “place entrepreneurs” engaged in speculative activity (ibid.: 7–8). This last role used to be the preserve of real-estate developers, corporate organizations, and venture capitalists as “place entrepreneurs” (see Molotch, 1976). But more recently we have seen an increasing involvement in the public sector in the entrepreneurial symbolic economy of cities. Zukin’s second and third elements of the symbolic economy have been blurred as a consequence and that blurring is the basis of the kind of urban spectacle that is now presented by the museum and heritage industries. Increasingly museums, whether national or local, have had to become entrepreneurial in their outlook and have had to learn from the broader heritage and tourism industries to do that. Sponsorship of temporary exhibitions by private interests, funding for gallery redevelopment from lottery revenues, treating the visitors as individualized customers, and relying on income from things like cafés and shops have seen an embrace of the consumer culture in a world that was once removed from it. Above all, a run-down area will often be redeveloped around some kind of cultural quarter that will be anchored on a museum, heritage center or gallery (see Degen, 2003; Dicks, 2003; Hetherington, 2007b). Ruins are nonsimultaneous—they are of the past. To make them part of the present requires that they be tidied up and be made to work within present concerns—typically those influenced by the workings of a consumer culture. Central to this move within the entrepreneurial city has been the place of heritage. Boosting urban economies not only leads to the development of new business, real-estate and service-sector and culture-industry institutions, but also to the drawing in of stories about the past and to regenerating and presenting that past in order to facilitate the development of the symbolic economy (see Miles, 1997; Dicks, 2003). In some cases, such as the Central Court area of the British Museum, major existing museums have been refitted or redeveloped in order to attract more visitors, to raise the profile of the museum and the city in which it is located. In other cases, the Guggenheim in Bilbao being the most famous, a new museum has been built on the designs of an internationally acclaimed architect (Gehry) in order to help boot the image of the city and improve its chances of raising both public and private money for urban redevelopment. There are many other cases in towns and cities of varying sizes—Urbis and the Imperial

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War Museum in regenerated Manchester, for example (see Hetherington, 2007b). Hosting internationally important temporary exhibitions is another route to raising the profile of the museum (see Lai, 2004). Most of all, though, it is the deployment of the curatorial function of the museum in preserving and developing its heritage and using that in place-image and branding strategies to attract visitors, jobs, and investment that is now key to the development of entrepreneurial cities. The renovation of old buildings or districts—such as warehousing, waterfront developments, ports, old industrial buildings, canals, sites associated with important historical events—have all undergone such treatment (see Degen, 2003). Under the sign of progress they might simply have been done away with, but under the sign of simultaneity they have to be included. City museums have opened up, heritage trails and signage have been used to create routes of historical interest through cities, and exhibition spaces have been developed, and the desire to be accessible and to provide a service to the (imagined) community, as well as to conserve the past of their town or city, has become a prominent feature of such urban development. In Britain just about every town in the country has seen such developments. The old declining, deindustrialized image of cities like Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds is being transformed by these processes—sometimes by local authorities, sometimes by private development companies, and often by both in partnership. These regeneration schemes are often combined with consumer-culture services: cafés and bars, restaurants, leisure facilities, hotels, urban entertainment complexes, and so on. The past is packaged as spectacle in this process; memories are transformed into quotes on display boards or interactive videos that can be activated at the touch of a button. The one thing there is seemingly no place for is dereliction; there is no space for the ruin (see Edensor, 2001; 2005), and little space for the materiality that reflects the moment out of time—unless it is deliberately packaged as such or if a point about how the past continues to haunt us needs to be made. What is forgotten—in effect—is the possibility of Kairos, the possibility that the past might speak in untoward ways that challenge our sense of the present and cause us to reflect on our world, its economic situation, its ethics and its politics. Everything is packaged within the combined discourses of heritage and regeneration. The idea that we are custodians of the past and that it is up to us to pass it on to future generations has always been a guiding principle behind the idea of the museum and remains so here. But what if the past does not want to be curated? Perhaps, as Benjamin recognized, it can speak to us in other ways that are more challenging and more important for how we not only think about the now but also about the future. Passing on ruins and detritus to future generations, failing to

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conserve elements from the past—allowing them to be remembered only as an absent presence—might be more important to future generations than passing on conserved elements of that past, all packaged up within the driving concerns of the capitalist symbolic economy in the present. Memories and their material expressions that are untoward and involuntary, that conjure up the ghosts of the past in unsettling ways, are perhaps as important to providing a rich sense of the past, if not more so, than those that are recorded, archived, and displayed. In truth, of course, museums cannot conserve everything. Many things do still get lost or forgotten. They have neither the money nor the space to save everything they want. But that is typically seen as an irresolvable problem rather than an opportunity. The possibility of the kairological rupture remains in the contemporary city but what it has to fight against is not simply the practice of conserving but the spectacle of conserving—the presentation of urban spaces as conserved spaces, as an ideology that permeates everything even if this is not always followed up in practice.

Artifacts as an Index The inability to collect or conserve everything is a reality for all museums, even the best funded. Most museums house collections far bigger than can be accommodated in their display areas. Many items—often collected in the past in a rather arbitrary manner through purchases, bequests, idiosyncratic curatorial interest, a concern with the fashions and tastes of the day—have been replaced in the last few years in many museums by more systematic and auditable collections. De-accessioning, getting rid of things, is not unheard-of. Typically now there has to be a policy-driven reason as to why a museum might want to have something in its collection. It has to defend the idea that it can both conserve for posterity and be relevant to social issues of the present in so doing. What has come to matter most is that artifacts should have interesting stories attached to them—they should have a present social context that the museum wishes to address, make visible, through its displays. In the past the most important story attached to an artifact that mattered to the museum was provenance. That has not disappeared but other stories have become equally important: the position of a nation within global change, an artifact that is indicative of an important event, something that will allow the story of the museum’s often culturally diverse locality to be told. Artifacts that tell minority, marginalized, or subaltern stories will now be just as important as the big stories of civilization and empire. So too will providing accessible stories to a diverse audience with a range of backgrounds and different levels of educational attainment. It is not uncommon

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in many British museums to feel that one is paying a visit to key stages in the national curriculum when visiting, as a story that fits in with that is often on display to children as a key section of the museum audience. In effect, museum artifacts are increasingly less important in their own right because of their intrinsic aesthetic or craft qualities. Rather it is their ability to act as a connotative index that allow stories to be told that matters. These stories are invariably simple and if not spectacular in themselves then spectacularized in their mode of presentation. In the past it was mainly just important, iconic artifacts that acted in this way, most other items were just examples within collections. Now anything and everything can be an index and the variety of stories museums try to tell has broadened. The kairological event is not only out of time, it is typically nonindexical too. Yet within such indexing practices it is only encountered when different, sometimes counter-hegemonic, stories manage to leak out through artifacts, where they tell different stories to those imagined by museums (see Hetherington, 1997), where new interpretations cast artifacts in a different light, where audience reception differs fundamentally from a museum interpretation. For example, issues of slavery, of Colonialism, of illegal or dubious acquisition, of rightful ownership, that were not an issue when such items were acquired can index themselves through the change of circumstance in ways that unsettle and bring the dubious past into contact with the present. Unless of course the museum is now indexing that story itself (see below).

Discourse of Trauma Since the 1980s traumatic and overlooked “subaltern” pasts have come to have increasing prominence within museum spaces. Museums across the Western world are now saturated with what the cultural critic Andreas Huyssen has called a discourse of trauma that seems to place the traumatic event center stage. Starting with trying to acknowledge and recognize the unrepresentable aporia in historical narratives of civilization and progress that is the Holocaust and then moving on to such dark historical events associated across the world with slavery, apartheid, Aboriginal dispossession, colonial and imperial exploitation, and the “terrorism” of oppressive nation-states means that heritage, the past, is no longer seen in museums as a happy, unproblematic singular narrative that can be told from the viewpoint of the unmarked subject. Subaltern histories of minorities, of women, of the oppressed, of the losers in history, now have to be acknowledged too in the context of recognizing a diverse and multicultural audience. Rightly so. But as Huyssen points out, in doing this in the context of the museum’s longstanding traditions of conservation and in trying to address present

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concerns (a growing acknowledgment of guilt, for example), such acknowledgment often leads more to a form of amnesia rather than to true cultural recognition. There is, in general, in this discourse a desire for smoothing over the traumatic past, often with the effect of disposing of its lessons in the desire to make it visible and to acknowledge it within narrative conventions. There is a difference between the representation of trauma and its untoward kairological presentation. Indeed, trauma is perhaps one of the key vehicles of Kairos (see Gordon, 1997), and it takes on a performative rather than a representational register. Yet the revenant language that it speaks is often represented out of existence in the process of curating and collecting the traumatic past and putting it on display within a recognizable narrative; its haunting quality is turned from a performative register—an event—into just another form of representation as spectacle, another story told with artifacts that act not as things in themselves but as indices not only to the events of the story they are telling but also to the museum’s story of performing a culture of accountability in times of a pervasive politics of recognition. Those bullet holes presented the past in conjunction with the present as a shock of recognition precisely because they had not been curated and had not been made a part of some heritage trail within the city. No one should deny that such trauma stories should be there in the museum. Conservative critics, such as those engaged in the so-called history wars surrounding the traumatic historical narratives now told by the National Museum of Australia, would have us go back to a time of master narratives and master–slave stories where the strong, white, male voice is the only one allowed legitimate place in the space of the museum and the history book, and that must be resisted. However, there is a danger in the overemphasis in dealing with the past as traumatic or forgotten or overlooked through spectacular and indexing re-presentational devices about their past that museums create a situation in which the performative kairological utterance, as opposed to the representational picture, is silenced. That, then, is the real question that has to be raised relative to the museum exploring the relationship with the past and present through representational narrative and the nonrepresentational or performative event. Too often the event, the encounter with the past that we might chance upon as we walk or drive through a city, is forgotten or curated out of existence (packaged) and time is turned from a series of varying and contradictory rhythms into the single, linear narrative of history—the telling of “then” in the “now” rather than the palimpsest of different nows. The kairological is that which is outside of time, index, and trauma but which is itself temporal and often traumatic—but in a figural rather than a discursive manner.

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Conclusion There is a long tradition of cultural criticism of the space of the museum that perhaps begins with Antoine Quatremère de Quincy’s distaste for the post-revolutionary Louvre of the 1820s and its decontextualizing and desacralizing of art brought about by the museum practice of removing it from the sacred spaces it was originally produced for and placing it in a secular space instead, and runs through to Maurice Blanchot’s lamenting (1997) of the lack of acknowledgment of the absence of absence within André Malraux’s famous celebration of the museum as a totality of representational presence in his idea of the musée imaginaire in 1947. We find it too in critiques of the museum as a space of universality and memorial (Asendorf, 1993; Benjamin, 1999; Maleuvre, 1999) and of false or partial images of the past presented by the so-called heritage industry (see Wright, 1985; Hewison, 1987; Samuel, 1994). We would, perhaps, agree most with Blanchot’s position and also with Benjamin’s—that the museum, museumification, is ever as much a space of death and fossilization and of ghosts of history as it is of curation and conservation, even if it might not have such an heroic sense of itself now as it did a century ago. It is a space of death because it seeks to ignore or to eliminate the possibility of the figural qualities of Kairos and the character of time that they convey. It is the museum and the heritage center as a spectacle of the space of time, and its relationship to the entrepreneurial city and its emphasis on heritage as something that is consumed, that matter here. But these issues cannot be separated. Different stories leak out through the city’s narrativized spaces of spectacle, stories that sometimes go unseen by the authors of this space. If there is a place for the museum—as part of the experience of the city and our encounter with its past—it is not as the sole guardian of that past that is then told to us through a story. We have to be able to find our own bullet holes, our own indices of another past, rather than be told where they are and what they tell us about the past: The museum is in no way made up of immutable afterlives and the eternal dead. Statues move; we know this, just as Baudelaire was frightened to see unreal images subject to a surprising development. With each decisive work of art, all others shudder and some succumb, a death that is the resurrection of tomorrow; and this movement is in appearance infinite, for if, as Schiller said, “what lives immortally in song must die in life,” what this immortality maintains, conveys, and sustains is this death itself become work and negative creation. (Blanchot, 1997: 18–19)

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The kairological figure or image-space is the vehicle of such negative creation. It is through them that remainders get turned into traces that can not only unsettle but also affect us. Museums in the contemporary urban situation fear the loss of the uncurated, the unindexed and the unnarrativized past and generally overcompensate by telling smooth rather than rough-edged stories of their subject and their location. They do so in a world of commercial pressures where they have to be economically viable and accessible and promotional of place images. Yet in being fearful of ghosts, museums and museumification make themselves susceptible to them, to the event of the past meeting with us in the present in ways that change our perception of that past, the present, and our future. To acknowledge that, to recognize that that is perhaps closer to our appreciation of the past in our daily lives, where traumas, involuntary memories, and half-remembered events rear up unexpectedly, rather than to try and deny it through the presentation of heritage as a shared experience with no troubles and to explore instead what happens when one lets the uncanny find its voice, when the non-place of the museum becomes the living place of performance—that is perhaps what we should ask museums to do. We should ask them to question what they understand by regeneration and their position within its spectacle of spatialized time, and to reinvestigate what they have to tell us about history rather than heritage. Of significance to all this is that the past that we assume to be a separate time from our own is not always so. The past, such as in the bullet holes encountered, has a way of leaking out in unstratified ways and rearticulating what the city has to say to us through our encounters and our experience of it. All around us in every city we are surrounded by the remains of the past that confronts us in unexpected and untoward ways. Not every city can claim to have experienced traumatic and historically significant events of the order of those that took place in Berlin during the twentieth century— many of those encounters will be mundane, their effects subtle rather than dramatic—but all have their stories to tell and their forgotten traces of the past that have just been left there unclaimed: things like the bullet holes that are evocative of a time gone and bring us into the memory of its presence, the sudden appearances of things we have not noticed before even though we might have walked that way for years, likewise the sudden disappearances of the familiar, can evoke a sense of absence or lack. The city sometimes affords the opportunity to enter a different temporal register: a time of ghosts, of the uncanny, the untoward, the absent—the right time for an opportunity for a different and altered perspective to be revealed for our own subjective proper-times to become aligned with the time of history.

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Notes 1. 2.

I would like to thank Nick Bingham, Nigel Clark, Anne Cronin, Steve Hinchliffe, Simon Hutta, and Matthew Kurtz for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. While I cite Debord’s work here and discuss the issue of spectacle that he introduces I do not do so uncritically. Debord has some interesting things to say about the relationship between time, space, and spectacle but his overall project is flawed in its conceptions of subjectivity, fetish manipulation, and reception (see Hetherington, 2007a).

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Contributors

David B. Clarke is Professor of Human Geography and Director of the Centre for Urban Theory at Swansea University. He is author of The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City, co-editor of The Consumption Reader, and editor of The Cinematic City. His current work focuses on cinematic space, on value theory, and on urban solutions. Email: [email protected] Anne M. Cronin is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, UK. She is the author of Advertising and Consumer Citizenship: Gender, Images and Rights (Routledge, 2000) and Advertising Myths: The Strange Half-Lives of Images and Commodities (Routledge, 2004). She is currently working on urban space and outdoor advertising, and on the shifting nature of market relations, representation, and spatiality. Email: [email protected] Miriam Greenberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World. She is currently doing comparative studies on the role of urban space and representation in times of neoliberal restructuring. Email: [email protected] Kevin Hetherington is Professor of Geography at the Open University. He works on issues of spatiality, consumption, museums, and material culture. He is co-editor of the journal Museum and Society. His books include The Badlands of Modernity (Routledge, 1997), Expressions of Identity (Sage/TCS, 1998), and Capitalism’s Eye (Routledge, 2007). Email: [email protected] 295

 • Contributors

Yukiko Koga is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her current project traces the afterlife of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo in contemporary Northeast Chinese cities by exploring how postcolonial and postimperial processes of coming to terms with the past are articulated in sites of urban renewal and economic interactions. Email: [email protected] Justine Lloyd is Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney. She was most recently an Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney, working on a book on the history of women’s radio programming in Australia and Canada. She has taught Australian, cultural, and media studies in Australia and Poland. She is also a member of the ARC’s Cultural Research Network and is developing a collaborative research program on the technologies of listening. Email: [email protected] Antonio Luna-Garcia is a Lecturer in the Humanities Department at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona. He is also the academic coordinator of the International Study Abroad Programs at the UPF and participates in the Metropolis in Architecture and Urban Culture master’s program organized at the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. He is currently working in two different areas: on the relationship between orientalism and nationalism in the travel narratives of Catalan authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, and relation between the symbolic economies of cities and the urban renewal policies. Email: [email protected] Glen McIver is a Lecturer at Wirral Metropolitan College and Course Leader for the BA Cultural Studies Programme. He is currently working further on memories of cinema-going, cinema spaces, and patterns of consumption and urban development in twentieth-century Liverpool. Email: [email protected] Adrian Mackenzie is based in the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University, UK, and he researches in the area of technology, science, and culture. He has published books on technology—Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Continuum, 2002), Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (Peter Lang, 2006)—and articles on media, science, and culture. He has been working on the cultural life of wireless networks looking at how artists, activists, development projects, and community groups are making alternative or competing communication infrastructures, and published quite widely in this area. He has also been working on digital video, particularly focusing on video codecs and the increasing mobility of video materials. Email: [email protected]

Contributors • 

Maria Isabel Mendes de Almeida is Vice Provost in charge of Research and Graduate Studies and the Director of the Center for Applied Social Studies at the Candido Mendes University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is also Associate Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro—PUC. Among her works are Masculin, Feminin: The Unresolved Tension (1996) and Nomadic Nights: Space and Subjectivity in Contemporary Youth Cultures (2003). She is presently finishing a research project addressing the use of synthetic substances and the electronic music scene in youth cultures. Email: [email protected] Patria Román-Velázquez is a Lecturer in the Sociology Department at City University, London, UK. She is the author of The Making of Latin London: Salsa Music, Place and Identity, and of numerous journal articles. Her main research interests include theories of globalization, place, and identity. She continues to do research about Latin Americans in London. Email: [email protected] Mimi Sheller is Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Swarthmore College. She is also Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, and co-editor of the journal Mobilities. She is the author of Consuming the Caribbean (2003) and Democracy after Slavery (2000), and co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (2003), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (2004), and Mobile Technologies of the City (2006). She has recently completed a book entitled Citizenship from Below: Caribbean Freedom and Embodied Agency, and is currently working on two projects, one on Caribbean mobilities, and the other on the global aluminum industry and the making of modernity. Email: [email protected] AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with particular interest in emerging forms of social and economic intersection across diverse trajectories of change for cities in the global South. Simone is presently Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand. Key publications include In Whose Image: Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (University of Chicago Press, 1994) and For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities (Duke University Press, 2004). Email: [email protected]

Picture credits

Chapter 1: Greenberg Figure 1.1 courtesy of Ronald Reagan Library. Figure 1.2 courtesy of NYC & Company. Figure 1.3 courtesy of New York Times/Doug Mills. Figure 1.4 courtesy of Reuters/Henry Ray Abrams. Chapter 2: Lloyd All figures courtesy of Sophie Tatlow, Deuce Design. Chapter 3: Cronin Figures 3.1 and 3.2 courtesy of “Moose” (Paul Curtis) of Symbollix Ltd. Chapter 10: Román-Velázquez All figures courtesy of Marisol Gomez-Mouakad, September 2006 (www. hormigacinema.com). Chapter 11: Koga Figure 11.3 courtesy of Wan Jiyao.

298

Index

Abbas, Ackbar 228 Ackroyd, Harold 260 Adventures in Capitalism (Litt) 131–132 advertising 10–11; graffiti and 80–82; outdoor and graffiti 65–70; ownership and 70 African cities; associationalism 165; elements of urban life 162–164; promises of urban life 179; see also Douala Aguilar, Richard 36 “Always Turned On” (Sheller) 107–124 Amin, Ash 77, 85 Anagnost, Ann 222–223 anticapitalist movement 2 Appadurai, Arjun 185 architecture: “broken” 267; Modernista 148 art: Barcelona’s identity 151–152; entrepreneurial creativity 78–80; public 80 Association for a Better New York (ABNY) 24, 25, 27, 30 Atlantic City 11; casino capitalism 107–110; historical perspective of 110–14; regeneration by gambling 113–124; “The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country” (Koga) 221–247 Augé, Marc 184 Auster, Paul 134, 139

Australia 288–289; urban restructuring 48–50; see also Sydney Badcock, Blair 48 Baldwin, Jerry 154 Banksy 65 Barcelona 12; cafeterias and Starbucks 153–157; Catalan culture of 147–149; La Caixa symbol 149–152, 157–158; local and global landscape 143–145; Starbucks in 158–159 Barlow, Tani 224 Barthes, Roland; culture and myth 129; on fashion 134; image repertoires 88, 89, 102 Bartlett, Dan 35 Bataille, Georges 12; economic excess 107, 110, 124; general economy 108 Baudrillard, Jean 12, 14; achieved utopia 137; on consumption 127–128, 129, 130–132, 139–140; on durability 134; the ephemeral 128 Bauman, Zygmunt 12; on consumption 140; fashion and durability 133–134; nomadism 182–183 Beame, Abraham 19, 25, 28 Benjamin, Walter 14, 15, 256; Angel of History 132; Arcades Project 12, 262, 263, 265–266, 278–279; commodity fetishism 281–282; ghostly signals

299

 • Index 275; historical time and 9; imagespace of Kairos 277–281, 290; One Way Street 278; redemption/ Erlösung 279, 280; Theses on the Philosophy of History 278; wish images 11, 74, 81 Berger, John: Ways of Seeing 60 Berlin 2; ghostly bullet holes 273–276, 291 Best, Curwen 69 Big Brother television programme 67 Bilbao: Basque identity 146–147 Blanchot, Maurice 290 Bloomberg, Michael 19, 21, 28, 30; brand management 32 Bondi, Liz 52–53 Borges, Jorge Luis 138 Botting, Fred 108 Bowker, Gordon 154 Boym, Svetlana 246 Brady, Tony (Kayze) 76 Britain; museums 285–286 “Broken Links, Changing Speeds, Spatial Multiples” (Simone) 161–179 Bush, George W. 38; conservative shift 21; New York City and 34–35, 35, 38 Cabet, Étienne 148 Calatrava, Santiago 146 Calderón, Sila María 203 Calvino, Italo: Invisible Cities 132; Marcovaldo 131 CambridgeMatrix 89 Canby, Vincent 24 Canevacci, Massimo 184–185 capitalism: advertising and 69; commodity fetishism 8; creative destruction 128; image crises and 19–20; neoliberal 1; not a closed system 81; paradoxical space and 74–75; representation and 6 Catalfamo, David 32 Catalonia see Barcelona Center for Civic Innovation 128 Cerdá, Idelfons 148 Certeau, Michel de 183 Charlotten, Allan E. 212–213 Cheah, Pheng 179 Cheung, Humphrey 94 China: Communist Party, narrative of 14; Cultural Revolution 240–245; postcolonial marketing 223–225;

wenming/civilization discourse 221–223, 240 cinemas: cultural impact of 261–265; present Liverpool 270–271 Claridad newspaper 214 Clarke, David B. 11–12; “The Ruins of the Future” 127–141 class: gender and 62; gentrification and 52–54 Clausen, Søren 245, 246 Coaffee, J. 206–207 communication see information technology; media community: wireless connection 96–98 competitive projects 1, 2 “Consuming the Night” (Mendes de Almeida) 181–199 consumption: communication technology 89–90; consumer culture 2, 3–4, 12; excessive 107, 110, 117; ideological discourse and 144–145; Lefebvre on double character of 47; metabolism of cities 127–130; myth and 128–132; night life and 205–207; waste and 139–141 Cotton, Billie 261 Crawford, Margaret 123–124 Creative Industries Mapping Document (UK) 79 creativity and innovation: entrepreneurialism 81; urban paradoxes of 78–80 Cronin, Anne M. 10–11; “Urban Space and Entrepreneurial Property Relations” 65–82 culture: creative industries 79–80; graffiti as resistance 74–78; high and popular 3–4; jammings 2; resistance 66; symbolic economy and 4 Curtis, Paul (Moose) 66 Cybriwsky, Roman 72 Daily News 32–33 Dant, Tim 266–267 Death Wish (film) 24 Deboeck, Fillip 163 Debord, Guy 12, 14, 127; on consumption 129; on history 135, 136, 138; on privation 137; spectacle in global capitalism 281–282; theory of spectacle 8–9 Degen, Monica 144

Index •  Deleuze, Gilles 185, 195, 199 Derrida, Jacques 14, 65, 73, 74; logic of inheritance 223; representation 82 Deuce Design 56, 58 Doctoroff, Dan 32 Domenech i Muntaner, Lluis 149 “Domesticity as the Dangerous Supplement of Liberalism” (Williams) 61 Domosh, Mona 52–53 Douala: anxieties and working 167–173; associationalism 165; Bonamoussadi quarter 164–167; elements of urban life 162–163; entrepreneurship 12–13; feyman and the dead 166, 170; markets 173–177, 178–179; state authority 177–178 Douglas, Mary 133 Dubai 123 Dvir, Ron 80 Ebb, Fred 38 economics see capitalism; consumption; entrepreneurial cities; global economy; symbolic economy Edensor, Tim 266 Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) 30, 31–32 entrepreneurial cities: resistance to 10–11 entrepreneurial city 1; capacity for 161–164; capitalism and 6; creativity and innovation 78–80, 81; cultural capital 223; Douala 12–13; gambling and 11, 108–109; local residents and 38–39; nighttime leisure 186; wireless networks and 86–87 ethnicity and race: urban workers 121 European City of Culture 1, 2; Liverpool 15, 255 experience: dislocation from space 181–185 fashion: transient durability 133–134 finance: Barcelona’s La Caixa 149–152; capacity for entrepreneurship 162; central government and 3; local resources 1–2, 3; NYC’s crisis 21–25 Flesh and Stone (Sennett) 87 Flickenger, Rob 90, 94 Florida, Richard 78 Fort Apache the Bronx (film) 24 Foster, Norman 146

Foucault, Michel: “Of Other Spaces” 182 Franco, General Francisco 147, 149, 150 gambling 11: Atlantic City and 107–110; regeneration of Atlantic City 113–124 Gaudí, Antoni 148, 158 Gehry, Frank 146, 285 gender: class and 62; economic activities 53; new stereotypes 51; see also women “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” (Goux) 108–110 gentrification 2; Old San Juan 204–205 Ghostly Matters (Gordon) 267 Gilder, George 108, 114 Girona, Manuel 148 Giuliani, Rudoph 30 Glaser, Milton 32 global economy 9; coffee houses 12; division of labor 3; rise of Starbucks 154–157; unified time as spectacle 281–282 Glover, Keith 55 Gordon, Avery 256; Ghostly Matters 267 Goux, Jean-Joseph 114; “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism” 108–110 governance: criticism through history 231–236; forms of 1; graffiti as resistance 74–78; Harvey’s four issues of 3; local authorities xii graffiti 10–11; communication of resistance 68; exclusion/inclusion 70–73; relation to advertising 65–70, 80–82 Graham, Steven 91 Greenberg, Miriam: branding NY 9–10; “Marketing the City in Crisis” 19–39 Guattari, Félix 185, 195, 199 Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao 146–147, 285 Halsey, Mark 69–70 Hannigan, John 115 Hansen, Mark B. N. 87, 88 Harbin 14; colonial heritage 225–229, 239–240, 245–247; communist ideology 237–238; contended history 225–226, 236–237, 245–247; criticism in nostalgia 231–240, 246–247; Cultural Revolution and 240–245;

 • Index restoration of churches 14, 221–222, 223, 225, 229–231, 236, 240–245 Harrah, Bill 121 Harvey, David 78, 101; four issues of governance 3; unnecessary reification 128–129; on urban regeneration 206; utopia and cities 136–137 Hayles, N. Katherine 87 Hearn, Tim 99 Heathcote, Edwin 267 Heilongjiang Daily 233 heritage 2; discourse of trauma 288–289; logic of inheritance 223; Old San Juan and public order 215–218; separate from history 7–8; urban regeneration and 15; see also history; museums Hetherington, Kevin 8, 15, 182; “The Time of the Entrepreneurial City” 273–291 Hewitt & Jordan 78 history: the arrival of tomorrow 135–138; as criticism of present 231–236, 246–247; as Kairos 8, 15, 276–281, 286, 290–291 Hive Networks 98 Hollier, Dennis 133 “Home Alone: Selling New Domestic Spaces” (Lloyd) 45–63 Hong Kong Bank of China 146 Hubbard, Phil 86 Hung,Wu 70 Huyssen, Andreas 15, 139, 288–289 identity: symbolic economy 145–147 image 5; the brand 10; branding 12; crises in 19–20; image-space of Kairos 278–279; marketing and 6; networked cities 87–92; repertoire 11, 88–92, 102; see also marketing industrialization: Barcelona 147–148; deindustrialization 5; Liverpool and 15; see also service sector information technology 11; CCTV cameras 88, 91, 139; connection for inhabitants 96–98; critical services 98–102; experience of separation and 92–93; images of networked cities 87–92; network image 102–103; rise of wireless networks 85–87; topology of networks 94–96; types of 87–88 Invisible Cities (Calvino) 132

Iraq 34 Jacobsen, Matthew 111 Ji Fenghui 233–236 Johnson, Lesley 62 “Just Another Coffee!” (Luna-Garcia) 143–159 Kander, John 38 Kenny, K. 55 Kerry, John 36 Koch, Ed 38 Koga, Yukiko 8, 14, 15; “The Atmosphere of a Foreign Country” 221–247 Koolhaas, Rem 12; junkspace 132–133 Koselleck, Reinhart 15 Kracauer, Siegfried 264 Kuala Lumpur; Petrona Towers 146 Kuhn, Annette 261, 263, 265, 267; An Everyday Magic 262 Kundera, Milan 136 Kunstler, James 114 labor: international division of 3 Lachmann, Richard 69 Landor, Walter 150–151, 152, 153 Lasch, Christopher 137 Lash, Scott 87 Lauretis, Teresa de 73–75, 81 Lefebvre, Henri 55, 256; contradictory space 257; double character of consumption 47; monumental space 262; representations of space 47; zones of leisure 270–271 Leslie, D. 51 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 130 Ley, David 72 Lindroos, Kia 280 Litt, Toby: Adventures in Capitalism 131–132 Liverpool: cinema and cultural change 261, 264–265; as City of Culture 255, 256, 265, 269; construction of the Rialto 257–261; culture and Rialto cinema 14–15; disappeared spaces 14–15; emblematic power of Rialto 265–271; haunting spaces of 255–256; Toxteth riots 266, 268–269 Liverpool Daily Post 259–260 Liverpool Echo 258–259, 260, 261, 267–268 “Liverpool’s Rialto” (McIver) 255–271 Lloyd, Justine 10; “Home Alone” 45–63

Index •  London: Canary Wharf/Canada Tower 146; Wireless London 98, 99–100 Lumina development; lifestyle of women 54–61 Luna-Garcia, Antonio 12; “Just Another Coffee!” 143–159 Lury, Celia 9 Lyotard, Jean-François 135 Macao: gambling and 123 McCarthy, Anna 66 McDowell, Linda 52, 60 Machado Pais, José 188, 192 McIver, Glen 8, 14–15; “Liverpool’s Rialto” 255–271 Mackenzie, Adrian 11; “Stars, Meshes, Grids” 85–103 McNeill, Donald 144 Maleuvre, Didier 283 Maloney, William 34 Malraux, André 290 Maltby, Richard 263 Manchester: graffiti in 70–73; Imperial War Museum 285–286; knowledge capital 79; tidying up challenge 77 Manchester City Art Gallery 76, 80 Manchester Urbis museum 76, 80, 285 Mao Zedong 228, 238, 245 Marcovaldo (Calvino) 131 marketing: branding image and economy 19–20; forms of representation 6; New York City 26–28, 30–33; urban women’s lifestyles 47–48 “Marketing the City in Crisis” (Greenberg) 19–39 Marshall, Alton 24 Marvin, Simon 91 Marxism 280–281 Massey, Doreen 183 Mayer, J. P. 263 Mean Streets (film) 23 media 2; gender of consumers 51; New York City and 22; NYC’s Counter-Convention 36–38; spatial configuration 183–184 memory 5; Liverpool 15; material traces in cities 6 Mendes de Almeida, Maria Isabel 13; “Consuming the Night” 181–199 Meriton 50 Midnight Cowboy (film) 23 Milken, Michael 121

Miró, Joan 148; La Caixa 151, 157–158 Mitchell, William J. 90–91, 91 Molotch, Harvey 4–5 Moore, David 268 museums: artifacts 287–288; spatializing time 282–284; urban regeneration and image 284–287 narratives xii; China and 14; discourse of trauma 288–289 nation-states: identities 145–146; local finances and xii; as public benefactor 5 New York City: bicentennial celebrations 25; branding of 9–10; the CounterConvention 36–38; Democratic Convention (1976) 25; “Fear City” campaign 25–26; financial crisis of 21–25; fiscal crisis in 1970s 21; I♥NY rebranding 26–28; image crises of 21, 23–24; “New York, New York” song 38; recovery of 38–39; Republican National Convention 29–30, 32, 33–38; September 11 attacks xi, 21, 28–33; transformation of 2 New York City Partnership (NYCP) 27–28, 29, 30 New York magazine 24, 25 night life: consumption 205–207; in Old San Juan 201–218; public order and 207–218; in Rio 185–199 Nowotny, Helga 7, 281–282 Old San Juan; history of 203–204; postcolonial 201–203; public order code 203, 208–218; renewal strategies 201, 203, 204–205 Olympic Games 1, 2; Barcelona 147, 151–153 One Way Street (Benjamin) 278 Ortiz Angleró, David 213, 215 Our House 55 Paris: Arc de la Défense 146 Parker, Robert E. 115 Pasher, Edna 80 Pataki, George 30 Peet, Alfred 154–155 Philadelphia, Wireless 100–101 Picasso, Pablo 148, 154 “place entrepreneurs” 4–5 Planned Parenthood 37, 37 postcolonialism: colonial gaze 228;

 • Index Douala 175; marketing heritage of 223–225; narrative of trauma 288–289; Old San Juan 211–212; transforming spaces 146 postmodernism 4 Preteceille, Edmond 129 Priest, Julian 97–98 private and public spheres xii, 5; domesticity 60–61; night life and 206–207 property: exclusion and graffiti 70–73; gentrification and values 204–205; graffiti and 76 Puig i Cadafalch, Josep 149 Quante, Wolfgang 23 Quincy, Antoine Quatremère de 290 Reagan, Ronald 21; New York City and 27–28, 29; shift in social policy 22 Reimer, S. 51 representation: construction of cities 153; Lefebvre on 47; marketing 6; nonrepresentational accounts 5–6; see also image Rio de Janeiro: nighttime economy of 13; young nomads of the night 185–199 Rivera Gómez, Illeana 212–213 Rockefeller, David 28 Rogers, P. 206–207 Román-Velázquez, Patria 13–14; “Contesting the Nights as Space for Consumption in Old San Juan” 201–218 Rose, Gillian 81; paradoxical spaces 73–74, 77 Ross, Stephen J. 264 Rudin, Lewis 24–25; “The Ruins of the Future” (Clarke) 127–141 Saddam Hussein 34 Samaranch, Joan Antoni 152 San Juan: creation of image 13–14 Schiller, J. C. F. von 290 Schultz, Howard 155 Scrymgour, Trudi 55 semiotics 5 Sennett, Richard: experience of separation 93; Flesh and Stone 87; image repertoire 88, 89, 102 service sector: deindustrialization and 5; governance and 3; information

networks and 98–102; in New York City 22 sex workers 54 Shalit, Ruth 28 Shang Zhifa 226 Shanghai Tower 146 Sheller, Mimi 11; “Always Turned On” 107–124 Shifflet (D. K.) & Associates 31 Siegel, Zev 154 Silva, Lily D. 208 Simmel, Georges 134 Simon, Bryant 110–113 Simone, AbdouMaliq 12–13; “Broken Links, Changing Speeds, Spatial Multiples” 161–179 Smith, John 278 Smith, Neil 51–52 Snellgrove, Andrew 99 social space: communication technology and 92–93 Song Hongyan 246 Sontag, Susan 68 space: dislocation of experience 181–185; domestic 10, 61–63; graffiti and exclusion 70–73; junkspace 132–133; nomads of the nights 185–199; paradoxical 73–78 Spain: identity-building 145–147 spectacle 5; Debord on 8–9; forms of representation 6; unified global capitalism 281–282 Starbucks 12; in Barcelona 156–157, 158–159; history of 154–156 “Stars, Meshes, Grids” (Mackenzie) 85–103 Stewart, K. 266 Stewart, Susan 69; graffiti and property 72 Sydney 10; changing urban paradigm 47–51; gentrification and class 46, 51–54; Lumina Woman 54–61 Sydney Morning Herald 54–55, 57; apartment ads 45–46 symbolic economy xi, 1–2; appearance and place-myths 4; branding and identity 12; cultural forms 4; ideological discourse of 144–145; museums and 285; past and present 6–7; “place entrepreneurs” 4–5 symbolic landscapes: Barcelona 157–158 Symbollix 66–68, 71

Index •  Taipei: WiFi grid 85 Tatlow, Sophie 55 Teraille, Jean-Paul 129 Tewdwr-Jones, Mark 144 Theses on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin) 278 Thøgersen, Stig 245, 246 Thompson, Michael 133 Thrift, Nigel 6, 77, 85, 171 time: as Kairos 15; unified irreversible 9; see also heritage; history “The Time of the Entrepreneurial City” (Hetherington) 273–291 Toronto: wireless network 100 tourism: colonial capital 227–279; New York City 38–39; New York’s image 24; post-9/11 New York 33–34; urban transformation and 2–3 Tropos Networks 100 Trump, Donald 114, 120, 121 Tschumi, Bernard 133 Union Carbide 23 United States: war in Iraq 34 urban regeneration: dramatic transformations 2; gentrification in Sydney 51–54; growth and reinvention xii; museums and 284–287; slum clearance 54; strategic initiatives 4; through gambling 113–124 “Urban Space and Entrepreneurial Property Relations” (Cronin) 65–82 urban texts 5–6 utopia: cinema and 264 Vaneigem, Raoul 130

Veblen, Thorsten 131 Vilarasau, Josep 150 Virilio, Paul 129, 183, 184 Wall Street Journal: post-9/11 rebranding 30–31 Wang Dexin 225 Wang Guangdao 221, 229 Wang Huacheng 244 Wang Yuland 225 Ward, S. 206 Ways of Seeing (Berger) 60 Whyte, Robert 50 Whyte, William H. 23 Williams, Joan: “Domesticity as the Dangerous Supplement of Liberalism” 61 Williams, Raymond 91 Wilson, Scott 108 women: domestic space 10, 61–63; new urban image of 47–48; selling homes and 45–47; Sydney’s Lumina Woman 54–61; urban image of 61–63 Wynn, Steve 121 Xinwanbao newspaper 225 Yankelovich, Skelly, and White 27 Young, Alison 69–70 Yue Yuquan 222 Zeng Yizhi 233–234, 235 Zukin, Sharon 144, 285; cities and aesthetics 80; gentrification 158; material and symbolic 153; visual consumption 206