Urban Phantasmagorias

Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces. The book draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, which provides a critical framework through which it articulates the dynamic relationship between ideology, architecture, and everyday practices, and reassesses their impact upon individual subjectivity and agency. The woman emerges as a central subject of the book, upon whom the phantasmagoric effects of the socialist state’s modernizing agenda have an acute impact at the level of lived domesticity and everyday life. Through a focus on the lived experiences of women, the book illuminates the prismatic effect of the state’s infrastructural and legal intentions, including the ways in which these were subverted through women’s lived bodily experiences of the home. The book establishes, both theoretically and through the concrete case of the city of Bucharest, the methodological significance of Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria as an epistemological approach to a modern communist cityscape. Urban Phantasmagorias is an important contribution to scholarship in architectural history and theory, urban and gender studies, and post-socialist and Eastern European studies.

′...this is a book with an interesting thesis, and a welcome contribution to the literature. Pile has opened up a productive theoretical and empirical space for further study and exploration′ - RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group What is real about city life? Real Cities shows why it is necessary to take seriously the more imaginary, fantastic and emotional aspects of city life. Drawing inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel, Pile explores the dream-like and ghost-like experiences of the city. Such experiences are, he argues, best described as phantasmagorias. The phantasmagorias of city life, though commonplace, are far from self-evident and little understood. This book is a path-breaking exploration of urban phantasmagorias, grounded empirically in a series of unusual and exciting case studies. In this study, four substantial phantasmagorias are identified: dreams, magic, vampires and ghosts. The investigation of each phantasmagoria is developed using a wide variety of clear examples. Thus, voodoo in New York and New Orleans shows how ideas about magic are forged within cities. Meanwhile vampires reveal how specific fears about sex and death are expressed within, and circulate between, cities such as London and Singapore. Taken together, such examples build a unique picture of the diverse roles of the imaginary, fantastic and the emotional in modern city life. What is "real" about the city has radical consequences for how we think about improving city life, for all too often these are over-looked in utopian schemes for the city. Real Cities forcefully argues that an appreciation of urban phantasmagorias must be central to what is considered real about city life.

Modernity has entrusted technology with such power that it is treated as an autonomous entity, with its own manners and morals. Technological disruptions are also socially disruptive: technological failures reveal both the constituents of the technology itself and the social fabric woven by this technology. Cities are the quintessential technological arrangement, not only materially but also as a conceptual framework: the ubiquity of technology makes us think and plan cities mostly in terms of technological arrangements. Unplugging the City: The Urban Phenomenon and its Sociotechnical Controversies proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for analyzing certain urban phenomena as a technological assemblage. It demonstrates, through multiple case studies, the sociotechnical complexities involved in the stabilization and disruption of urban technological arrangements. Examples range from the urban phantasmagorias portrayed in science-fiction movies to the urban proposals of Brasilia and Masdar, from the book of bike-sharing systems to pervasive global surveillance systems. Written by Fábio Duarte and Rodrigo Firmino, based on their original research and publications, this is an essential resource for those interested in the theory and study of technology and its inextricable influence on the city.

What does the Western city at the end of the twentieth century look like? How did the modern metropolis of congestion and density turn into a posturban or even postsuburban cityscape? What are edge cities and technoburbs? How has the social composition of cities changed in the postwar era? What do gated communities tell us about social fragmentation? Is public space in the contemporary city being privatized and militarized? How can the urban self still be defined? What role does consumer aestheticism have to play in this? These and many more questions are addressed by this uniquely conceived multidisciplinary study. The Urban Condition seeks to interfere in current debates over the future and interpretation of our urban landscapes by reuniting studies of the city as a physical and material phenomenon and as a cultural and mental (arte)fact. The Ghent Urban Studies Team responsible for the writing and editing of this volume is directed by Kristiaan Versluys and Dirk De Meyer at the University of Ghent, Belgium. It is an interdisciplinary research team of young academics that further consists of Kristiaan Borret, Bart Eeckhout, Steven Jacobs, and Bart Keunen. The collective expertise of GUST ranges from architectural theory, urban planning, and art history to philosophy, literary criticism and cultural theory.

The volume assembles fresh treatments on the flâneur in literature, film and culture from a variety of angles. Its individual contributions cover established as well as previously unnoticed textual and filmic source materials in a historical perspective ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The range of topics covered demonstrates the ongoing productivity of flânerie as a viable paradigm for the artistic approach to urban culture and the continuing suitability of flânerie as an analytic category for the scholarly examination of urban representation in the arts. This productiveness also extends to the questioning, re-evaluation, and enhancement of flânerie’s theoretical foundations as they were laid down by Walter Benjamin and others. The work will be particularly relevant for students and scholars of literary studies, film studies and gender studies, as well as for theoretical approaches to flânerie as an important aspect of urban culture.

This book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes. Developing the notion of surface ethnography as a methodological approach to examining the form of cultural experience produced by urban cultural spaces, the author sheds light on the manner in which they transform cultural spectatorship, express wider political and ecological concerns and offer differing views to the ’native’ and the ’tourist’ in the construction of local history. The book also examines the decline of the idea that iconic projects can drive regeneration, in the failures and delays that can beset such undertakings. Offering a rich examination of the legacy of urban change in its most recent formulation - that of cultural regeneration - this book reveals the fragile potential of the spaces produced by contemporary ’dream houses’ and as such, will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, sociology and social theory, urban studies, cultural geography and architecture.

This book investigates the iconic architectural cultural spaces of the contemporary cityscape as engines of regeneration. Promising much to their fading locales, these spaces locate culture in the space where production once ruled in order to revitalise post-industrial urban provinces. With close attention to four sites across the UK, Urban Constellations engages with the work of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, to read these spaces and in so doing, offer a critical intervention into the theory and experience of contemporary cityscapes.

This collection of essays examines how New York and Los Angeles are depicted in noir and neo-noir films from the 1940s through the 21st century. These essays consider how the architectural sights and city sounds inform such films as Cotton Comes to Harlem, Drive, Kiss of Death, Naked City, and Nightcrawler, among others.