Full Description
This book demonstrates how city literature addresses questions of possibility. In city literature, ideas of possibility emerge primarily through two perspectives: texts may focus on what is possible for cities, and they may present the urban environment as a site of possibility for individuals or communities. The volume combines reflections on urban possibility from a range of geographical and cultural contexts—in addition to the English-speaking world, individual chapters analyse possible cities and possible urban lives in Turkey, Israel, Finland, Germany, Russia and Sweden. Moreover, by engaging with issues such as city planning, mass housing, gentrification, informal settlements and translocal identities, the book shows imaginative literature at work outlining what possibility means in cities.
Contents
1. The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing the Field, Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch.- 2. The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul, Eric Prieto.- 3. Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction, Lieven Ameel.- 4. From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity, Chen Bar-Itzhak.- 5. Donald Barthelme's Impossible Cities, Markku Salmela.- 6. 'Cartographic Ecstasy': Mapping, Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov's City Prose, Anni Lappela.- 7. Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu's The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician, Lena Mattheis.- 8. Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility, Hanna Henryson.- 9. Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Children's and Young Adult Literature, Lydia Wistisen.- 10. 'Double Vision': Viennese Refugees in New York and Back Home Again, Joshua Parker.- 11. Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image and Experience, Jason Finch.- 12. Afterword: Urban Possibilities in Times of Crisis, David Pinder.
