Text And Image In The City

The essays in this collection discuss how the city is ‘textualized’, and address many aspects of how texts and images are written and produced in, and about, cities. They demonstrate how urban texts and images provoke reactions, in city-dwellers, visitors, civic and political actors, that, in turn, impact upon the shape of the city itself. Many kinds of urban texts – both manuscript and print – are discussed, including chapbooks, periodicals, poetry, graffiti and street-signs. The essays derive from a range of disciplines including book history, urban history, cultural history, literary studies, art history and urban planning, and explore some key questions in urban cultural history, including the relationship between text, image and the city; the function of the text or image within an urban environment; how urban texts and images have been used by those in positions of power and by those with little or no power; the ways in which urban identity and values have been reflected in ‘street literature’, graffiti and subversive texts and images; and whether theories of urban space can help us to understand the relationship between text, image and the city. As such, this volume will serve to enhance the reader’s understanding of the nature of urbanism from a historical perspective, the creation and representation of urban space, and the processes of urbanization. It investigates how the creation, distribution and consumption of urban texts and images actively affect the shaping of the city itself – a mutually constitutive process whereby text, image and city create and sustain each other.

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

The City as Photographic Text offers the first comprehensive presentation of photography on São Paulo. But more than just a study of one city’s photographic legacy, this book is a manual for how to understand and talk about Latin American photography in general. Focusing on major figures and referencing widely available books of their work, David William Foster offers a unique analysis of how photographers have contributed to our understanding of the megalopolis São Paulo has become. Eschewing a conventional historical approach, Foster explores how best to interpret visual urban life. In turn, by focusing interest on the photographic text and the ways in which it creates an interpretive meaning for the city, rather than rehearsing the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, this study provides a model for productive comment on urban photography as a project of visual meaning with important artistic attributes. As a unique entry in the inventory of scholarly writing on São Paulo, The City as Photographic Text adds to our understanding of the enormous cultural significance this city holds as a world-class urban center.

Maeda Ai was a prominent literary critic and an influential public intellectual in late-twentieth-century Japan. Text and the City is the first book of his work to appear in English. A literary and cultural critic deeply engaged with European critical thought, Maeda was a brilliant, insightful theorist of modernity for whom the city was the embodiment of modern life. He conducted a far-reaching inquiry into changing conceptions of space, temporality, and visual practices as they gave shape to the city and its inhabitants. James A. Fujii has assembled a selection of Maeda’s essays that question and explore the contours of Japanese modernity and resonate with the concerns of literary and cultural studies today. Maeda remapped the study of modern Japanese literature and culture in the 1970s and 1980s, helping to generate widespread interest in studying mass culture on the one hand and marginalized sectors of modern Japanese society on the other. These essays reveal the broad range of Maeda’s cultural criticism. Among the topics considered are Tokyo; utopias; prisons; visual media technologies including panoramas and film; the popular culture of the Edo, Meiji, and contemporary periods; maps; women’s magazines; and women writers. Integrally related to these discussions are Maeda’s readings of works of Japanese literature including Matsubara Iwagoro’s In Darkest Tokyo, Nagai Kafu’s The Fox, Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up, Kawabata Yasunari’s The Crimson Gang of Asakusa, and Narushima Ryuhoku’s short story “Useless Man.” Illuminating the infinitely rich phenomena of modernity, these essays are full of innovative, unexpected connections between cultural productions and urban life, between the text and the city.

The term ‘cityscaping’ is here introduced to characterise the creative process through which the image of the city is created and represented in various media– text, film and artefacts. It thus turns attention away from built urban spaces and onto mental images of cities. One focus is on the question of which literary, visual and acoustic means prompt their recipients’ spatial imagination; another is to inquire into the semantics and functions that are ascribed to the image of a city as constructed in various media. The examples of ancient texts and works of art, and modern literature and films, are used to elucidate the artistic potential of images of the city and the techniques by which they are semanticised. With its interdisciplinary approach, the volume for the first time makes clear how strongly mental images of urban space, both ancient and modern, have been shaped by the techniques of their representation in media.

Few recent writers have been as interested in the cross-over between texts and visual art as Italo Calvino (1923-85). Involved for most of his life in the publishing industry, he took as much interest in the visual as in the textual aspects of his own and other writers' books. In this volume twenty international Calvino experts, including Barenghi, Battistini, Belpoliti, Hofstadter, Ricci, Scarpa and others, consider the many facets of the interplay between the visual and textual in Calvino's works, from the use of colours in his fiction to the influence of cartoons, from the graphic qualities of the book covers themselves to the significance of photography and landscape in his fiction and non-fiction. The volume is appropriately illustrated with images evoked by Calvino's major texts.

Curious about the images of the city that have been evolving in the different social sciences, we did what academics often do in such a situa 1 tion: we set up a seminar on "Images of the City in the Social Sciences." From the start, we counted on the help of specialists in other fields to pursue their interests. Of the persons who agreed to participate, all but two came from the United States, and their analyses, in the main, reflect the experience of Western countries and the United States. In our formal instructions to our collaborators, we took fi>r granted that a variety of images of the city could be found or inferred in their fields of expertise. We asked them to identify these images and their functions, to explain how and why they have changed over time, and to relate these images to the distinct intellectual traditions and techniques-analytical or otherwise-in their respective fields. The definition of image was left to the judgment of the participants.

This edited collection explores the relationship between urban space, architecture and the moving image. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to film and moving image practices, the book explores the recent developments in research on film and urban landscapes, pointing towards new theoretical and methodological frameworks for discussion.