The issue of the urban ...
Authors: Johnson Laurie , Kulperger Shelly 
Published: October 2020

The release of the Urban issue of M/C a journal of media and culture is particularly timely. This same month, the United Nations General Assembly is hosting the World Urban Forum [http://www.unhabitat.org], designated as an advisory body to support implementation of the Habitat Agenda and to meet the Millennium Development goal of improving living conditions of slum dwellers throughout the globe. Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, promotes the forum by asking us to imagine a world without slums, replaced with productive and inclusive cities that meet the needs of all their citizens, rich and poor alike (Guardian Weekly, 11 April).
The focus of the World Urban Forum might serve to remind us that what characterises a particular use of space as urban is not its status as a built environment but the degree to which its habitudes facilitate a lived environment. It is the experience rather than the artefact which constitutes the urban. To put the same point in a rather more banal way, it is not the street but the motion of the pedestrians, commuters upon the street that marks out the trajectories and shapes of urban life.
Yet there is also in Tibaijuka's sales pitch for the World Urban Forum a fundamental contradiction that cannot be ignored here. The vision of cities meeting the needs of all citizens seems to invert the ancient logic of civitas, the city appropriate to the needs of its inhabitants, because this vision is blinkered against the economies of scale (and the scale of economics) from which urbanisation proceeds. Rich and poor alike: there is a suggestion here that class or wealth precedes the formulation of needs that a city may be developed to accommodate, as if class structures are not bound up in the lines of demarcation and divisions of space separating the good side of the tracks from the bad.
Being able to imagine a world without slums, without resorting to utopian idealisations, requires a realistic acceptance that citizenship and the city emerge togetherthe latter is not built from scratch to meet the needs of a pre-existing citizenry. The urban might indeed be usefully thought of as the site of emergence for both the city and its citizenry, the mode of becoming-civic. Thus, it is important to keep in mind the specificity of the urban experience and to account for this experience, in some sense, on its own terms.
Once upon a time, it was fashionable to define the city in opposition to the country. Of course, there is something to be said for this kind of differentiation. A quick drive from Brisbane out through the western suburbs and onwards toward the Darling Downs may remind the traveller of how different from each other the city and the country really are: they look different, they smell different, they seem to function at different rates and on different timescales. Yet we may wonder if the inhabitant of an apartment block in New York ever conceives of her life in terms of its difference from that of the farmer whose agrarian lifestyle she has never encountered. Life in the city is not experienced in terms of something other than city life. Life in the city simply is life in the city.
Just as the emphasis on practised and lived space directs our attention to the everyday and the mundane, sites of banality that Benjamin once insisted were crucial sites of political and cultural importance, the attempts of urban theorists to capture the quotidian result in a series of impasses including high/low and theory/practice antinomies. If we are still caught in residual thinking in which, as Lefebvre remarked, a city of nightmares is only countered by a city of dreams, then we are still a far cry away from appreciating the complexities and contradictions of lived and practised urban space.
We are even further away from--perhaps too far above--addressing the plight of the slum dweller that the World Urban Forum urges we must. Caught within a theory-practice fold, a desire to plan the utopian quest must always be tempered by a cautious approach. Looking back to modernity's plans and some of the disasters of urban planning, we recognise a continual catapaulting of the urban into the realm of danger and chaos. Importantly, these realms unfold in such a way that they encompass both the level of individual experience and global processes. Indeed, as these words were being written, an explosion in a tower in New York sent shudders through the population: was this another terrorist attack?
The types of experiences defining urban life have undergone a major transformation in the last six months, a paradigm shift of sorts, collapsing the range of possible urban experiences into the discourse of terror and the political (and economic) ends it serves. The World Urban Forum represents another way in which the paradigm of the urban is being redefined on a global scale, although the mechanisms of change it institutes will no doubt be more gradual, and we might wonder whether they will be anywhere near as effective.
The urban issue
Fresh on the heels of the 'fear' issue of M/C, this 'urban' issue again raises the politics of fear. The city is perhaps the prime scene and space of fear. Vocabularies of fear produce and generate the meanings in which the city is lived. It might be politically motivated then to claim the city's deemed disorder as liveable. Indeed, many of the contributions to this issue seem to address issues of representing the urban: how do we mark out this terrain for ourselves. As our feature article by Gerard Goggin suggests, the boundaries of the city are a slippery signifier upon which to place any demarcation of urban experience. Divisions such as city and country, urban and suburban, collapse under the weight of the sprawl of human movements and settlements that might more accurately be represented by the concept of the con-urban.
While the boundaries of the city are indeed slippery, one of its common limits has been placed at the sub-urban. In Re-writing Suburbia, Emily Bullock brings that often rejected space to bear on considerations of the urban. Tying the suburban to dreams of home ownership and to dreams of nationness, Bullock finds in Suneeta Peres da Costa's recent novel Homework a textual space that subverts the suburban Australian dream without re-invigorating the urban-suburban binary.
The limits of how we define urban life are also tested by the question of scale, between the level of individual experience and global paradigm shifts, for example. One way of working through this issue is suggested by David Prater and Sarah Miller, who focus on the paradox of considering the privatised, physically disengaged human behaviour of internet use undertaken within the public space of the internet cafe. Their analysis of this practice points us towards implications for thinking about notions of the public and private in the contemporary city.
Chris McConville also examines the limits of the urban via the relationship between what we might conventionally consider to be urban and that which is urbane. Using a reading of some of the classic private detective figures, McConville demonstrates that in the imaginative realm of popular fiction, a figure such as the detective type provides us with many of the images we use to construct representations of our own cityscapes. The link between imagined and real experiences through the medium of popular fiction also crosses over into class and gender constructions, just as the built environment feeds back into the detective fiction genre as one of its conventional parameters.
Perhaps it is only inevitable that the politics of fear and the shaping of what Mike Davis calls defensible space characterises so much of urban living and scheming. Coming from an urban planning background, Simon Bennett theorises Brisbane urban planners' inculcation of safety principles and locates this practice in longstanding imaginative and discursive productions of the urban from a number of quarters. The desire to make safe, Bennett argues, banishes from the city the imaginative spur it might otherwise contain and depletes community networks. The city becomes merely a place to which we commute: unliveable but economically functional.
Liveability is also at issue in John Scannell's contribution. In his tracing of the graffiti artist's tracing of the American city, Scannell reveals a reappropriation of urban space by those relegated to the urban squalor and left behind in the great American post-war suburban exodus. But, for the graffiti artist, like the underground dweller, urban decay becomes a site of potential and promise: the city as a liveable and intimately habitable space that the graffiti artist inscribes and practices as her own.
Life underground, or below the radar of conventional analysis, also interests our next two contributions. Jason Wilson looks to the often overlooked space of the arcade, likening it to modernity's cinematic and spectator spaces. Finding in the game player another urban fringe dweller, Wilson tracks the liminal spatiality of arcades and its practitioners who, he shows, resist the pastoral longings and projections of the game player to a backstreet urban scene.
From a more literal perspective, Marise Williams puts the ethics of de Certeau's down below wandersmänner to work to consider the potential offered for those city dwellers who chose to live, quite literally, underground. In her reading of Colum McCann's This Side of Brightness, Williams suggests that a world without slums might potentially amount to a flattened world without difference. But the difficulty resides in the way these spaces are demarcated and bound up in increasingly calcified class lines that the poststructuralist move towards down below and proclamation of the street--to use an explicitly urban metaphor--might be said to efface in imagining the choice to slum (something one does for kicks) as an option available to all.
Aaron Darrell is not interested so much in down below as he is with underneath. As he documents the pivotal cultural and colonising role the museum had maintained in ordering urban space and policies of heritage and history, he questions whose history find its way into Sydney's Hyde Park Barracks Musuem. He then invites us to consider what happens when an unexpected, surfaced over history appears and is reclaimed within the discursive and framing apparatus of the institution.
Writing the city as he traverses it, Felix Cheong discusses the imaginative spur the city has long provided poets. In a Poet's Sense of the City, Cheong writes about a city in which life in the city can be nothing but. Lacking the props and boundaries of country and suburban, Singapore as city-state fascinates Cheong's poetic insider, yet distanced, perspective. Using the poet's eye, Linda Neil's Sunflowers complicates postmodern pleasurable choices on offer for the mobile flaneuse in a fictive piece that sweeps our readers along its own Mrs. Dallowayesque promenade of Sydney, art, depression and sunflowers.
The role of creativity in shaping the production of urban spaces is central to Nityanand Deckha's article on the Cool Britannia phenomenon. Deckha's analysis of BritSpaceTM demonstrates the ephemeral nature of such productions, yet also suggests that creativity lends to such productions their capacity for re-production. The disparate components of the creative quartercopy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture--combine to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on existing spaces.
The urban is thus a potentially limitless site for expression, even as the confines of the prevailing discourses attempt to limit its scale. City life has been heralded and promoted recently as the space of sex and freedom, despite the dominance of fear in constructions of the urban. Emma Felton takes this dilemma on board in a review of feminist urban theorists and frames her reading of the safe (but risqué) city locally and personally and wonders what delights the city holds for women in the past and for future generations. Felton's reflection on the changing face of the city for women is crucial especially when the city is still related to female sexuality, a metaphorical tendency Felton reveals in a collection of urban commentators and theorists.

Links

http://www.unhabitat.org/

Citation reference for this article
MLA Style

Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php>.

Chicago Style

Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley, "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php> ([your date of access]).

APA Style

Johnson, Laurie and Kulperger, Shelley. (2002) Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/editorial.php> ([your date of access]).