Full Description
This volume seeks to address questions of urban crisis from an interdisciplinary perspective that foregrounds the particular roles that literature and the creative arts play in both conceptualizing and addressing the multiple challenges facing cities. Noting that the successive crises of recent years (from the 2008 recession to COVID-19) seem to have put an end to the triumphalist tone of much urban writing in the 1990s, this book argues that the current historical moment calls for a different kind of urban discourse, focused on reassessment and regrouping. This edited collection features a variety of different approaches, including close readings of literary works, interviews, essays in cultural and architectural history, and sociological, ethnographic, and urban planning studies. These chapters explore a range of challenges currently faced by cities, and foreground the search for solutions.
Contents
Part 1: Three Core Concerns: Crisis, Scale, Resilience.- 1. Introduction: Cities Under Stress.- 2. The Scale of the City.- 3. Urban Resilience: Disruptive discourse or more of the same for cities?.- Part 2: Environmental Crisis and Urban Resilience.- 4. A Conversation with Stephanie Saulter: Adaptation and Resilience in the Multicultural Sci-Fi City.- 5. Writing the multispecies city: Urban birds and urban poetry in the era of environmental crisis.- 6. Hope as Action in Albert Camus's The Plague.- Part 3: Migration and the city.- 7. Role of the Outsider. Literary Representations of the 21st Century European Refugee Crisis in Contemporary Greek Literature.- 8. The Transient, The Temporary, and The Resilient: Investigations of Cultural Representations within Dubai.- 9. From Hometown to the Home of the Armenian Patriarchate: Hagop Mıntzuri and Megerdich Margossian in Istanbul.- Part 4: Material and political infrastructures.- 10. Post-Victorian Tremors: Urban Mobilities in Virginia Woolf's The Years.- 11. Tracking the Urban Crisis: The Photographic Memoirs of Michigan Central Station.- 12. Assenting Literary Journalism: Reporting Hong Kong's 2019 Crisis.- Part 5: Translating Urban Forms.- 13. Shaping Your Own "Satin Island" and Urban Identity in the Great Report of Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (2015).- 14. Translating Venice: Reading a Translated City in Translation.- 15. In search of America: Indigeneity and Landscape in LA's textile-block houses.- 16. The Story of Catherine Ségurane: Tourism, Nationalism, and Identity Crisis in Nice (1800-1860).- 17. The Man at the Window: Framing, Ways of Seeing, and Urban Crisis in Ian McEwan's Saturday.- Part 6: The Struggle for Urban Inclusion.- 18. French Cities under Stress: Two Decades of Banlieue Narratives engaging with the Urban.- 19. Bohemians Treading Water: Housing precarity and the New Copenhagen in Jonas.- 20. Resisting Erasure, and Reclaiming Queer Space: The Urban Crisis of Male Prostitution in Oswald and Hirschfeld's Anders als die Andern.- 21. Delhi: The Contestation of Survival Between The City And Its People.- Part 7: Models of Resilience and Resistance.- 22. The Irony of Virtue Among Street Children in Amma Darko's Faceless and Chris Abani's Graceland.- 23. Co-Creation Using Street Art in Cities under Stress in Mexico and Britain.- 24. Fire's Urban Conditions in Nabarun Bhattacharya's Harbart.- 25. Epilogue.
