Ecriture Urbaine: From Cities to Metropolises

In a historical perspective, writing about cities appears to be also writing cities themselves. Historical epoches come to life in large- and small-scale narratives that have fixated in time and space the process of becoming a metropolis every city that became worthy of a novel has been going through. The decline in populaity of literature notwithstanding, cities remain to be written if not in literary than in technical form of development reports, newspaper articles and magazine pieces that add up to a chaotic chronicle of each and every city that had made it into headlines, cover stories and video spots enough to become an urban buzzword on the lips of globe trotters. Cities become metropolises less and less because they can show absolute gains in industrial output for their status. It is the throngs of festival-, concert-, and exhibition-goers that on their way to numerous cultural events reimagine a previously planly modern city into a post-modern metropolis. This post-modern transition to metropilitan strategies of urban development is far from being problem-free. However, the rise to prominence of historical centers of capitalism and modernity has not infrequently been a disaster in the eyes of their commentators, critics and beneficiaries.

As global industries become reorganized on a previously unseen and unimaginable scale, cities around the world deem it worthy to reinvent themselves beyond the dimentions that modern urban development has made previously imperative. Cities that become assembled on the spot as World-Expo pavillions, cities that explode in every infrastructural direction from scratch, cities that shoot for cultural stars in an overnight remake of their urban landscapes, cities that challenge gravity of global trends in their race to become world centers of finance, fashion, industry, or culture. While it becomes doubtful that there will be an army of socialites, notables, experts and celebrities needed to breath social lifes into budding centers of metropolitan excellence that mushroom around the globe at the speed of skyscreapers on the shores of bay of Shanghai, the global circulation, compatibility, communication and connectivity becomes the order of the day. If each new historical game of cultural, economic, social and political accumulation was closely tied to a key metropolitan center, a leading language and a definable social class, the present global fray for instant urban celebrity is poliglot, transurban and inclusive.

People who move places in search of urban excitement, people who become part of emerging transnational trends, people who build virtual empires of cultural audacity, people who put together innovative solutions overnight, people who sail the ebbing seas of global adventure, people who throw new ideas into hyper-charged soil of unquenchable needs, people who unmoor their boats of ephemeral treasures towards bustling ports, people who lose outmoded illusions only to fall captive to brand new dreams. If Dickens' London struck the hour of the best of times and the worst of times at one and the same time of the long day of the nineteenth century, the mega-cities of tomorrow become the centripetal eye-points of the vortexes of all times that for good or bad are unstoppable in their swirl. As the scales of things of old worlds become just computation errors of new ones, the global world to come can be a community like no other. What can capture such change? A distant hair to universal expositions of yore, art biennials claim to do the impossible. Though fail they may, it is their resounding success of becoming ubiquitous that is going to be of importance to an assessment of their effects. As global trotters are joined by global franeurs, the archeology of global post-modernity waits to be written.

From Global Ethnography to Urban Ethnography

This blogging thread grows from a sense that local does not really oppose global in terms of how an ethnography of both has to be constructed to yield insights into the specificity of a given time and place. Glocalization is an unwieldy word that apparently tries to bridge the unbridgeable on terms that do not hold either for global or for local. Any concrete place, such as a city, is a combination of both local and global forces that constitute it on different scales, at different speeds, for different reasons. However, what makes me turn my attention to urban is the question of experience of globality that is always taking place within the material confines of its urban environment. What surrounds us makes certain things more available than others in imagination, action and possibilities. A situated experience of global scale is always urban to the extent that a chance for an active participation in the processes that go into its construction is involved. In this regard, one may consider suburbanisation as a form of disassembled urban experience that is displaced into previously more separated spatial and temporal scales. A broadband or a cell phone connection in a small settlement in the midst of a rural area makes it compatible with the tempo of urban and ultimately global life.

What is important for me in this blog though is a discussion of how can Proust's reflection on time, memory and space be extended towards a cultural theory and research of cities as sites of history, recollection and movement that challenge their researchers to become ethnographers of their actual experience as they seek to measure up against each other both generic and unique sides of a given city, quarter and place. It could easily boil down to that Proustian madeleine moment when one throws an anchor in a moment and place via sensations that collect into a single moment of luminous recollection the configuration of causes that have brought him or her into that moment of experience in the first place. In other words, cities become memorable not solely because we have our faculties of recollection or because we visit them, large and famous or small and overlooked, but because one succeeds in establishing channels of communication with experiences that become meaningful as causes of sensations of memory, emotion and accomplishment. Proust had his madeleine moment not merely because he had camomile tea and bisquit in his personal past, but because its recollected sensation has served for him a bridge towards the small town of Combray that he recreated for his readers in that chapter of his novelistic search for times past.

A methodological lesson I attempt to draw from this is that urban ethnography is also about the sensations that are potentially capable of creating a link between one city and another, one time and another and one narrative and another via the sensible experiences that go into their reconstruction in texts that serve as vehicles for these functions. The madeleine moment is to some extent an arbitrary moment of excitement that apparently mundane experiences can call forth through the process of documentation across time and space. Carried across languages, disciplines and sensibilities this process can possibly give rise to an urban ethnography as a genre of scholarly writing that seeks to probe what it means to experience global culture in a particular place, what it means to traverese urban spaces with a sensibility that is both local and global, what it means to probe the connections that a given moment forges with multiple pasts. Before an institutionalized discussion of globalization and its resistances starts one might want to spend a while looking at where local architectural styles take their attentive observer, recording ones routes that traverse urban sequences as visual components of city-image, assembling disparate details into illuminating constellations of stories that bring the global and the local closer together.