WELCOME
Scroll down for ideas, examples, videos, podcasts, images and prompts that I hope will inspire you as you think about your Everyday Edinburgh fieldwork for Encountering Cities.
KNOWING CITIES
Over the last 3 weeks I have introduced you to a 'conceptual toolkit' in Encountering Cities.
Through ideas and theories that examine everyday life; material cultures and materialities; and emotions, affects and more-than-representational geographies, we have examined different angles of approach to understanding the city.
We have thought about studying the city from below or from street level - embracing the messiness, noisy and sometime overwhelming ways in which cities envelop us. We've explored the more-than-human geographies of the city reflecting on how infrastructure, architecture and design shape and order urban cultures and lives. And how we share cities with non-human species. Last week we reflected on the more-than-representational geographies of cities, exploring the significance of feelings, emotions and affects for making sense of cities and urban life.
My aim has been to shift your orientation to cities a little. Hopefully some of these ideas have stuck or resonated, opening up new ways of seeing the cities you know, live in, and study.
This week we are going to be thinking about what difference this conceptual toolkit might make to how we produce and share knowledge about cities and urban life. We'll reflect on some of the challenges the ideas we've encountered pose to how we study, research and represent cities.
Researching the city from below
In the content on everyday life in the city I introduced the French social theorist Michel de Certeau. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, there is a chapter called 'Walking in the City' where de Certeau contrasts the view of New York City from the top of the World Trade Center with the view of the city that you get at street level.
This story provides a compelling metaphor for the epistemological shift that I'm asking you to make in this course.
De Certeau troubles the 'violent delight' of seeing the city from above. This 'god's eye view' of the city is detached. It sees the city a coherent whole. Something that is ordered and patterned.
This is a view of the city embraced by architects, planners, policy makers and many academics.
By contrast the city at street level is overwhelming. We're immersed in a world of noise, traffic, people, signs, bustle, smells, stuff. The city from the street involves a multi-sensory assault that is all-encompassing. It's a city that is messy, complex, multiple, and full of contradictions. This is the city most of us live in.
This week we'll be examining some of the theories, methods, practices and forms of story-telling that might help us see, know and understand the city differently.
The represented city
Twenty years ago the feminist geographer Gerry Pratt argued that in human geography research practices lagged behind changes in theoretical approaches.
She writes:
“...we have yet…to put much of our theoretical talk into research practices. Our talk may be that of poststructuralists, postcolonialists or social constructivists, but our practice continues to be that of colonising humanists” (Pratt, 2000, 639)
This week I want to examine ways in which we can make sure our research practices keep up with our theoretical talk.
I want to introduce some ways in which we might tune into and stay with the messiness, contradictions, intensities and experiences of everyday life in the city.
I want you to question what counts as knowledge of cities. I'll introduce a range of different ways of studying, knowing and representing the city arguing that these might complement what is usually accepted as academic knowledge of the city.
Along the way we move away from what Nigel Thrift (1993) once described as an enfeebled empirical tradition in urban geography.
Part of Thrift's complaint is that urban geography and urban studies relies on methods that deaden the experiences, textures, and liveliness of cities. They also tend to tune out of the background of everyday life. They miss what's happening when nothing's happening.
This page provides a pinboard of methods, approaches, theories, interventions, practices and styles of writing.
What these share is a refusal to downplay or overlook the everyday life of cities. It provides an assemblage of methods that include live methods, methods that intervene in the city and sensory methods.
It provides resources for tuning into, acknowledging and examining the routines, practices, habits, intensities and objects tat give shape to city life.
In this section I have gathered examples of different research methods that offer some ways of becoming attuned to fleetingness, messiness, contradictions and multiplicity of the city from below.
Dealing with mess in the social sciences
After Method is my favourite book on research methods. On the first page John Law shares the image below:
And in the caption he asks: 'If this is an awful mess…then would something less messy make a mess of describing it?' (Law, 2004, 1).
In After Method John Law is that social science tends to make a mess when it tries to describe things that are are complex, diffuse and messy. Social science seeks to provide simple and clear descriptions but these don't work when the thing that they are trying to describe is contradictory, incoherent and messy.
Social science methods are designed to identify and examine patterns and orders. But, Law (2004, 1) asks, if much of the (urban) world is 'vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all, then where does this leave social science?'
John Law's project is to imagine how we might remake social science so that it is 'better equipped to deal with mess, confusion and relative disorder.'
In the coming weeks, we will be joining John Law on this journey, imagining how we might experiment what research methods, analytical approaches, styles of writing, and methods for producing and sharing knowledge, to know cities differently.
And so what I hope this assemblage of methods provides resources that allow you to develop a different attunement to the city and urban life. These are methods that encourage you to take part in, and respond to, the city.
They also emphasise the importance of performativity and 'ontological politics'. Borrowing from Ann-Marie Mol's work, Law suggests that we need to understand that academic knowledge produces the realities that it seeks to understand. Research methods and modes of representation are not mirrors of the world, they are world-making projects that enact certain realities.
And if we accept these arguments about performativity and ontological politics, then there is something more at stake in our research and writing about cities. Methods, approaching, writing styles and methods for making and sharing knowledge become political. They become ways of making cities otherwise.
Invisible Cities
In 1972, Italo Calvino, an Italian journalist and writer, published Invisible Cities.
The book has gone on to become touchstone and source of inspiration for many writers and academics interested in the multiplicity, complexity, contradictions and fragmentary experiences of cities.
The structure of the book follows the structure of a conversation between the explorer, Marco Polo, and the emperor Kublai Khan who is eager to hear stories of his expanding empire.
The book is made up a series of short stories - or prose poems - that recount details of 55 cities. Each story a meditation on aspects of urban life that reflect on imagination, memory, time, death...
But the conceit of Invisible Cities is that all Marco Polo's stories are about his home city, Venice. Each story told and city conjured is actually a narrative woven by Marco Polo through the finer details of Venice.
Italo Calvino's book has become significant for writers and researchers who see cities as fragmentary and multiple. It opens up the ways in which seemingly endless stories can be spun about one city. And the ways in which the city presses down differently on each us. We all have our own many versions of cities shaped by our experiences, biographies and imaginaries.
Tune into this BBC Radio 3 programme published on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Invisible Cities to learn more about how others in geography and urban studies have been influenced by Italo Calvino's book of fragmentary urban images.
Montage and the city
We met Benjamin in lecture one, where I introduced him as a rag-picker. Someone who looked to rubbish, ruins and decay to tell stories about cities and society.
In his sprawling and unfinished project on the Paris Arcades, Walter Benjamin provides another writer who revels in the fragmentary details of everyday urban life, and refuses to acknowledge the boundaries of academic knowlege.
The Arcades Project rejects existing forms of storytelling and narrating history, replacing it with elegant notes and vignettes that gather into a picture that is endlessly modifying.
In The Arcades Project in a file on methods, Benjamin says the following about his method:
"The method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show."
Benjamin introduces the montage as a fragmentary forms of knowing that refuses a totalising story in favour of modifying pictures or impressions. And his method of gathering and assembling notes and vignettes might inspire how we research and write about cities.
The geographer Allan Pred (1995, 25) has suggestively taken up Benjamin's literary montage in his work on racism in Sweden, arguing the montage enables:
"multiple ways of knowing
and multiple sets of meaning
to allow differently situated voices to be hear
to speak to (or past) each other
as well as to the contexts from which they emerge
and to which they contribute"
THE SITUATIONISTS: WALKING AND SCANDALISING
We will not lead. We will only detonate. (Situationist Slogan)
THE SITUATIONISTS
The Situationist International was a radical artistic and political movement between 1957 and 1972.
They developed strident critiques of modern urban life arguing that cities were key sites in the reproduction of social relations of domination, alienation and control.
They sought to realise alternative cities, transcending capitalist urbanism and bring about better urban futures.
And walking was a key part of their practice.
Psychogeography
The Situationist practices of psychogeography are often described as a mode of observation that sought to scandalise.
Psychogeography involves techniques to investigate the different ambiences and zones of the city, and attend to the power relations implicit between social space and mental space in the city, and between urbanism and behaviour.
Dérive of Drift
‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences. The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness to psychogeographical effects […] from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’ (Debord, 1956, 22).
Aimless walking in the city was key to the Situationists practice. Drifting through the city allowing themselves to be drawn by things that attracting them or repelled by forces that repulsed them.
They'd navigate a city using maps from other places. They'd embark on days-long drifts intoxicated by alcohol and drugs. Getting lost in the city.
The dérive involved different kinds of walking practices that encourage ways of observing, experiencing and navigating the city against the grain. It drew attention to how capitalism had colonised everyday life.
DÉTOURNEMENT
Alongside drifting, one of the key activities developed by the Situationists was what they called détournement.
Détournement describes the often aggressive techniques the Situationists developed to challenge dominant urban meanings and representational regimes. It involved subversive diversion. Reworking. Hijacking. Detonating.
Examples of détournement can be found in the collages and maps that the Situationists produced based on their drifts through cities. In the films or comic strips they made. As well as more direct forms of action in the street through graffiti and protest.
Some resources
Sadler, S. (1998). The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pile, S. (2005). Real Cities. London: Sage. (especially chapter 1)
Pinder, D. (2005). Visions of the City. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (especially chapter 5).
Plant, S. (1992). The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London: Routledge.
UNHURRIED WALKING
AS A WAY OF OBSERVING AND EXPERIENCING THE WORLD
Extension activity
If you're interested in walking methodologies you could check out this edition of the Decoding Culture podcast that's a conversation with Les Back. The intro and outro are a bit meh but there's some really nice reflections on walking and moving between seeing and listening to the city from above and form the street.
Feminist walking
The flâneur is highly gendered, classed, and raced. The flâneur-detective assumes a privileged position as observer as he walks idly through the streets, observing without being observed himself.
Feminist writers have debated whether the flâneur could be female. Some are concerned that the flâneur is an exclusionary figure, and that women can never fully escape into invisibility because gender marks them out in a male gaze. Others want to reclaim the figure, proposing that the flâneuse might offer insights that expose how '[o]ur cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete' (Kern, 2020, 13).
The flâneuse offers an invisible history of how women have been both hypervisible and invisible in the streets of the city.
In her new book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World, Leslie Kern (2020, 8) writes:
"As a woman, my everyday experiences are deeply gendered. My gender shapes how I move through the city, how I live my life day-to-day, and the choices available to me. My gender is more than my body, but my body is the site of my lived experience, where my identity, history, and the spaces I've lived in meet and interact and write themselves on my flesh. This is the space I write form. It's the space where my experiences lead me to ask, "Why doesn't my stroller fit on the streetcar?" "Why do I have to walk an extra half mile home because the shortcut is so dangerous?" "Who will pick up my kid from camp if I get arrested at the G20 protect?" These aren't just personal questions. They get to the heart of why and how cities keep women "in their place.""
In Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London there are resonances between Laura Elkin's (2017) descriptions of walking and the sensibilities to which Benjamin alerted us:
"I walk because it confers - or restores - a feeling of placeness...I walk because, somehow, it's like reading. You're privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it's overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead.”
But the Elkin also emphasises how the flâneuse transgresses expectations and makes different claims on city:
"She voyages out, and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”
“We need the mass movements, we need people to get together and march, or even just stand in one place, not only for those in power to see what the people want, but for people who are decidedly not empowered to see you out there, and to shift, just a little bit, the pebbles of thought in their minds. The protest is not only to show the government that you disagree, but to show your fellow citizens- even the smallest ones- that official policies can and should be disagreed with. To provoke a change. To disrupt easy assumptions. You show yourself. You toss in your chips. You walk.”
EVeryday Sexism
Part of the work of the Everyday Sexism Project has been the documentation of the harassment and the normalisation of gendered violence that is part of many women's experiences of walking in the city.
Caroline Criado Perez's book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men exposes how the world is designed around norms and expectations about bodies - their size, shape and what they can do. You should consider how walking offers a way of experience, sensing and navigating the world that can help us recognise these norms and expectations, and their exclusionary effects.
Below I have assembled examples of different ways of writing presenting research that trouble what counts as knowledge of the city.
Edgelands
In their book Edgelands the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts take us on a journey through the edgelands of the British cities.
They introduce us to ignored and unnamed landscapes. Edgelands are urban wild places. Zones of inattention. They are spaces of jumbled, broken ground. They are underdeveloped and unwatched territories. Edgelands are the places where the ordered urban landscape frays into scrublands and wastelands.
Farley and Roberts are fascinated, then, by brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations, sewage farms and airport perimeters, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, ruins and guerilla ecologies.
Edgelands is a wonderful book. You should read it! And we might learn some thing from the beautiful prose and evocative writing about making and sharing knowledge of the city.
The writing transports us to Edgeland of English cities and produces a sense of being there.
Farley and Roberts also demonstrate a keen eye for the overlooked and the unloved through the stories they weave through lists, traces and fragments.
Night Haunts
Sukhdev Sandhu's book Night Haunts introduces us to work after dark in London.
In a different ways to Edgelands it introduces us to aspects of urban life that are overlooked and unloved.
Through the stories of police riding over London in helicopters (avian police), urban fox hunters, sewer workers, taxi drivers and Samaritans volunteers, Sandhu introduces us to the hidden work of the city at night.
He immerses us in the nighttime rhythms of the city when most of us are tucked up in bed.
No fixed abode
No Fixed Abode is a work of ethnofiction by the French anthropologist Marc Augé.
It is a work of fictional ethnography that follows the story of Henri. Henri is a former tax-collector and divorcee. When he's laid off he can no longer afford the rent on his apartment.
No Fixed Abode narrates Henri's strange existence on the margins in Paris. By day he walks the streets, lingers in conversation with the local shopkeepers, and sits writing in cafes, but at night he takes shelter in an abandoned house or sleeps in his car.
It's a powerful story of precocity, homelessness and the loss of identity. It's a fable about contemporary societies, and how many people are only a pay check from eviction and homelessness.
But another lesson from No Fixed Abode is how Augé troubles the boundaries of social science writing and fiction. He argues that all social science is of the order of fiction. And of his approach to ethnofiction, he writes:
‘What is ethnofiction? A narrative that evokes a social fact through the subjectivity of a particular individual. However, since this is neither autobiography nor confession, that fictional individual has to be created ‘from scratch’ or, in other words, out of the thousand and one details observed in everyday life’ (Augé, 2013, p.ii).
I Swear I Saw This
Michael Taussig shares a series of sketches from his fieldwork notebooks in I Swear I Saw This.
Taussig, as you can see from the image above, is no artist. But this book provides a wonderful example of how sketches can solicit stories to be told.
The sketch from above was made in the back of a taxi. While his taxi was passing through a tunnel in Bogotá, Taussig catches sight of a couple stitching themselves into a shelter at the side of the road.
A scene that passes in a flash is captured in a sketch and becomes a story about the displacement of peasants by conflict in Colombia and the marginal lives these displaced people live on the streets in cities like Bogotá.
I Swear I Saw This shows us how ethnographic writing can be enhanced through sketches (even bad ones!).
Taussig introduces us to the ways in which drawing and sketching can capture a duration, or the passage of time, whereas other visual methods only (like photography) only capture a snapshot.
I Swear I Saw This also illustrates how fieldnote sketches can trigger memories and become a vehicle for sharing fieldwork stories.
Savage Messiah
Savage Messiah, written by the artist and psychogeographer Laura Oldfield Ford, tells the story of London in a state of transition and rapid gentrification.
But Savage Messiah is no conventional account of gentrification. It's punk pastiche. It is angry and polemical. It makes heavy use of a cut'n'paste aesethetic that fits well with zine making.
And through her images, Laura Oldfield Ford guides us through the landscapes of East London in the run up to the Olympics, but also at a time of austerity and massive disinvestment in social housing.
She tells the stories of working class cultures that are being displaced and fragmented by urban development. She confronts us with difficult questions of who the city is for.
Experimental Geographies
In this final set of examples I want to introduce a contact zone between geography, art and activism that has taken geography in some new directions over the last 10 years.
Experimental Geographies plays on the notion that writing is performative. It knowingly works with the recognition that research practices and forms of writing produce the realities they seek to understand.
Introducing the edited collection Experimental Geography, the curator Nato Thompson writes:
"The core idea at the heart of experimental geography is that we make the world and, in turn, the world makes us".
Some examples of work in this contact zone of geography, arts practice and activism include:
Center for Urban Pedagogy
The Center for Urban Pedagogy is a non-profit organisation based in New York City that uses design and art to increase meaningful civic engagement.
The Center collaborates with designers, educators, advocates, students, and communities to make educational tools that demystify complex policy and planning issues so that more people can better participate in shaping them .
Area Chicago
AREA Chicago supports the work of people and organizations and actively gathers, produces, and shares knowledge about local culture and the world in general. They create relationships and sustain community through art, research, education, and social life.
One of AREA Chicago's projects was Notes for a People’s Atlas. This is a multi-city community mapping project that started in Chicago in 2005 and has since expanded to a number of cities. The project presents maps collected in each city along with commentary by leading thinkers dealing with art, urban space, cartography and definitions of place.
Center for Land Use Interpretation
The Center for Land Use Interpretation, based in California, run a programme of research, exhibitions and events (including various walking and bus tours) that seek to understand how the built environment reflects economic and culture in the US.
The Centre for Land Use Interpretation focused on producing and sharing knowledge about how land is apportioned, used, and perceived.
I hope this assemblage of ideas and examples inspire you for thinking differently about how we might adapt and experiment with research methods and styles of writing to attend to the overlooked and neglected aspects of the city and urban life.
In the fieldwork task on Everyday Edinburgh I'll be asking you to put the conceptual toolkit to work in your fieldwork. I'd like to see you experiment with methods and ways of communicating your understanding in the group mapping exercise and the zine.
Credits:
Created with images by Max Letek - "untitled image" • Tudor Panait - "St Pauls Church traffic lights"