Urban Ethos Research Articles

Spatializing the Musicking Of an Expressive Urban Imagination: A Trans-Cultural Evaluation of the Early-Modern Rock Music of Bengal

The technological reproduction of the imaginary has always reflected a polarization in urban consciousness, considering the city as the urban ‘body’—which retains a space for contemporary imaginations. Rock music of the American 60s radiates exactly such urban consciousness by constantly experimenting with lyrics, sounds, images and celebrations, which continually harmonize with the changing industrial and technocratic city structures. This paper explores a progressive cultural synthesis between the American and the early-modern rock music of Bengal. The city of Kolkata in West Bengal has always been repleted with a vibrant ‘representational space’ with a high rate of western-music consumption since the late 1970s, thus reflecting western urban ethos into the Indian urban imagination through modern Bengali rock music. Lefebvre (1974) suggests that the potential for genuine social change is possible only through the city as practised rather than the city as planned; on this note, this paper analyzes how the Indian urban imagination negotiated with the everyday urban experience of distant musical and cultural behaviours through ‘musicking’ by producing a musically reflective space where thought, feelings and different moods are crafted and performed. Further, how, in the age of technical reproduction, rock music produces a ‘counter-space’ by projecting urban ethos, which acts as an exegetic tool for the symptomatic reading of any expressive culture, and makes the city claim its spatial identity.

Data cities and astrospatial architecture: An urban ethos from electromagnetic fluxes

Light remains the origin and sustenance of all forms of life on Earth—but human living is being transformed by ingenious applications of astrospatial technologies that were devised to fly to other planets. This century’s networked architectures of semiconductors, satellites, scanners and sensors manipulate diverse electromagnetic frequencies to convert light into unprecedented formats and contents of data that are destined to inform most human behaviours in future. Telematics and informatics are taking our civilisation far beyond the milieu of modernism enabled by Edison’s 1879 demonstration of electric incandescence, and the transmillennial ‘digital age’ underpinned by portable computers and mobile telephony.

After the Empire: Narratives of Haunting in the Postcolonial Spectropolis

This paper explores instances of spectral uncanny in the postcolonial urban ethos through the stories of three legendary haunted houses in Kolkata. It attempts a literary-cultural reading of the colonial “spectres” both as embodied presence and as memories entrenched in physical or material spaces of the metropolis. It considers whether the ghastly in the built environment of the city can work as a historical supplement to interpret Calcutta’s transition from the colonial to postcolonial modernity through the windows of nostalgia, trauma and other memories, haunted by various temporalities. Inhabiting the interstities between “here” and “now” and “there” and “then,” in their hauntings the past returns with a surplus of meaning. It can never be the same past once experienced, as it is always already altered by the concerns of the present. This paper on urban haunting is premised on a textual reading of a body of documented narratives on the most widely-recognized haunted mansions from colonial Calcutta, now listed under heritage property. Situating these haunted houses as the loci of alternative stories, this paper envisages the city as a dynamic narrative space that continually defines itself by re-enacting its memories through repeated differential hauntings.

‘Our city of love and of slaughter’: Berlin klezmer and the politics of place

ABSTRACTAlthough it claims little historical connection to klezmer music or Yiddish culture, the city of Berlin has hosted one of the most dynamic klezmer scenes of the past 20 years. This article analyses ways that place has been made to function as a meaningful unit in the music and lyrics of several artists living and working in Berlin, localising the transnational klezmer revival discourse by rooting the city in their music. Building on Adam Krims’ theory of ‘urban ethos’, I explore how the contemporary city is emplaced in its klezmer music, arguing that these processes of signification allow us to hear contrasting articulations of Berlin. The native Berliners ?Shmaltz! frame their city as an escapist gateway, the American songwriter Daniel Kahn sees a site of painfully unresolved history and the internationalist Knoblauch Klezmer band locate Berlin as an embodiment of playfully multilingual performativity.

Tokyo Typologies: The Unconventional Urban Ethos of Multiplicity, Vibrancy, Complexity+Liveability ( breakout presentation )

Background Tokyo is one of the planet’s largest, most complex and most successful cities. With a population exceeding that of Canada, the Tokyo Metropolitan Region embraces a rich array of features key to a well-crafted, well-designed and highly-functioning city. Consistently Tokyo ranks among the world’s top cities, based on a wide array of metrics/measures. From a world-class multi-modal transportation system and vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods to walkable streets and planning innovations, Tokyo demonstrates how an urban centre can be colossal and complex while proving demonstrably dynamic, accessible and livable. For those looking from outside Tokyo proves a paradox – massive in size, and incomprehensible in scope while functioning at high levels, running smoothly and being relatively free from serious problems. Amenity is high, crime is low, efficiency is unprecedented, design is pervasive and a sense of community is ubiquitous. Tokyo’s success is worth critical examination, not only to cull out reasons for achievement but also to better grasp facets of the city than contribute to its Gestalt. An approach overarching the research critically considers the vehicle of ‘urban typology’. Description Using typology as a lens for investigation, the work imaginatively identifies/delineates unique typologies that define, shape and characterize Tokyo’s rich fabric. Case studies embrace conventional awareness of typology while charting new ground in conceiving exceptionally Japanese types. Creative typologies include: Gate-Threshold; Spiritual Spark; Arcade Street; Optimize Leftovers; Extreme Parking; Koban; Palimpsest Remnants; Folded + Compressed; Thin Landscapes; Vending Ethos; and Love Zones. Lessons|Implications The approach taken to Tokyo Typologies is original, bold and in keeping with the pulse, energy and uniqueness of this leading global city. The author invokes an existing holistic framework for design + planning to better illuminate compelling reasons for Tokyo’s ongoing progress despite intense pressures on economic, environmental, social, cultural & spiritual fronts. An understanding of the potency of these exceptional typologies in relation to walkability and liveability proves paramount and enlightening. Application of findings, beyond Tokyo, is postulated.

Rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink

One of the most pervasive aspects of Delhi’s post-liberalization psychopathology has been everyday violence against women. The city’s rape culture was given an exceptionally sharp global focus after the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Recent Hindi cinema has begun to engage with some aspects of the capital’s misogynist urban ethos. In this paper, I look at how the Delhi subgenre of the “multiplex film” has engaged with rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety through a close textual and discursive analysis of two recent films—NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) and Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016). Specifically, I identify how the December 16 “trigger event” and Delhi’s notorious misogyny are finding newer modes of representation through the interplay of genre and exhibition space. In what ways do these films position and imagine the “multiplex viewer”? New engagements with the figure of the consuming middle-class woman and the public discourses that surround her sexual safety and navigation of space have taken a central position in understanding the present urban psychosis of the capital. I suggest that these films and the forms of spectatorial identification that they privilege are intricately linked to the gendered spatial politics of the multiplex.

Book review: <i>The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement</i>

Ayona Datta’s book works at the interstices of at least three significant bodies of literature in the social sciences. The first is a wealth of recent writing that has sought to theorize citizenship, class and exclusion in the informal city through ethnographic accounts of occupancies, insurgencies, stealthy advances, collective action and the politics of the urban poor (e.g., Bayat, 1997; Simone, 2004; Benjamin, 2008; Tarlo, 2003; Roy, 2003). The second is a body of literature on urban violence, focused largely on political, religious or communal mobilizations and their gendered dimensions (e.g., Hansen, 2001; Das, 2007). Third, a body of anthropological work has explored how law, development and the state operate to shape the subjectivities of everyday life in subaltern communities (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Li, 2007; Appadurai, 2001). Despite its rich referentiality, this book uncovers and illuminates a productive terrain of questions and relations that have remained underexplored in these bodies of literature. The book yields a plausible mapping of the ways that the structural violence embedded in the rule of law converges with the machineries of urban development to produce effects of insidious, intimate violence within the neighborhoods and homes of a squatter settlement. The material for this analysis is drawn from Datta’s ethnographic work in an illegal “camp” of squatters established in 1976 on the edges of a resettlement colony that she pseudo-names “Lakshmipur” in southern New Delhi. The book is framed around the “founding violence” of the right to property guaranteed as a fundamental right by the Indian Constitution, not matched by a similar guarantee for the right to shelter. Backed by the “maintaining violence” of interpretation, administration and enforcement by various arms of the state – police, judiciary and bureaucracy – this legal structure positions squatters permanently on the wrong side of the law. Thus, the category of the “illegal settlement” is produced by a complicity between the fetishism of property rights in law and the state’s upholding of property-based social relations under the rubric of a “rule of law”. The first part of the book sketches this backdrop, deploying a textured analysis of the violence of law, urban development and planning. It explores their structures, affiliations, categories and gaps in shaping the terrain of shelter rights in Indian cities. It outlines the disjuncture within law, between the Constitution and the state, and within the Constitution, between its enshrinement of property rights on the one hand and its channeling of entitlements to development resources via cultural identities of caste, tribe and religion on the other. Urban working-class squatters, rendered illegal by one part of the law, stake claims to justice via constitutional categories as lower caste or minority subjects. The book situates itself in a problematic of an emerging “culture of legality” in Indian cities, inaugurated by a moment of rupture in 2000, when the Almitra Patel judgement reflected a new convergence of law and judicial pronouncement, building up into what Derrida calls the “force of law”. This conjunctural moment reversed the precedent that had previously established shelter as a basic human right connected to the right to life. It served to criminalize squatting as trespassing and dismantled the state’s obligation to resettle evicted squatters. Datta’s central argument is that illegal urban settlements are also caught up in this culture of legalism. The shifts in the judicial and urban social ethos represented by the Almitra Patel judgement made legality, as distinct from formality or security, a central idiom in the way that settlements of the urban poor define themselves and are perceived by the state.

Towns and cities. A commentary on ‘performing towns’

In this paper, Axel Christophersen does three important things. First, he addresses the way in which the inhabitants of premodern cities created an urban ethos through their cumulative daily actions. Second, he provides the opportunity to address a long-standing definitional challenge in the study of cities by examining what it means to undergo a process of ‘urbanization’. Finally, he focuses our attention on medieval Scandinavia as a region that has had a considerable amount of archaeological research but with which many readers may not be familiar compared to other historical periods in Europe.

Local identities, identification and incorporation of Albanian immigrants in Florence

In this paper, the concepts of city as context, locality and incorporation are applied to the case of Albanian immigrants in Florence. To date, most research on the incorporation of immigrants and its relationship to space is based on the city or the inter-relations between the nation-state and city as contexts where incorporation takes place. The findings of this study show that the relationship between locality and the incorporation of immigrants is multi-dimensional. First, although findings support the role of the urban ethos in immigrants' incorporation, the city is not a homogeneous entity and should not be equated with locality where immigrants' incorporation is concerned. The importance of locality within the city is highlighted by the role played by the qualities of space and aesthetics in immigrants' incorporation and identification. Also, more attention should be paid to intergenerational perceptions of space, as the data show that different generations have different ‘cognitive geographies’ and varying perceptions of space and appreciations of cosmopolitanism, seen here in relation to locality. These aspects should be seen in relation to the historical, structural and cultural particularities of the city as a key context of incorporation, without ignoring the national-level politics of immigration and integration.

Defiant laughter: humour and the aesthetics of place in late 19th century Montmartre

Humour was at the core of the spatial imaginary of the emerging French avant-garde of the 1880s. But what was the specific role of different forms of humour in their attempts to re-imagine urban place and community? In this article I develop a non-representational historical geography of the aesthetics of place in fin-de-siècle Montmartre. The article analyses how Montmartre artists used humour in order to inject new life and vitality into the urban environment. The ambivalence of humour made it a powerful device through which to experiment with creating a novel experience of place and stylizing an affirmative urban ethos. Two modes of humour in particular were predominant: irony and pantomime buffoonery. Through irony, they attempted to create an experience of place that encompassed the contradictory and fugitive nature of the modern city. In buffoonery, they found a way of affirming the city’s potential at the same time as remaining alive to its suffering and violence. In combination, this urban ethos can be theorized as a form of ‘affirmative pessimism’.

Music and Urban Geography (review)

and Urban Geography. By Adam Krims. New York: Routledge, 2007. [xli, 203 p. ISBN-10 0415970113; ISBN-13 9780415970112. $95.] Illustra tions, music examples, bibliographic references, index. In and Urban Geography, Adam Krims explores the many ways that music and cities act upon one another now that the economic and cultural realities of globalization are literally reshaping the international urban landscape. Throughout the book, he challenges the common musicological posturing that music of a localized place is independent of, and therefore resistant to, the market forces of mainstream capitalist culture. Furthermore, Krims indicates the musicological necessity to more closely examine the cross marketing of classical music, and demands a reconsideration of the role of Adorno's thought in cultural musicology. Finally, he suggests that spatial explanations of popular musics in particular may provide valuable tools with to interpret urban histories and, using Krims's terminology, the social possibilities therein. The stated purpose of the book, a collection of five essays with an introduction, takes a premise the dramatic changes in the world metropolises over the past few decades, using them as instances for explaining changes in musical culture, and looking toward how the two processes may find a connection in a larger unity, including contributions from music back to urban form (p. xix). One promise of this approach is realized through the variety of musicological discussion thereby enabled, the diverse subject matter of each individual chapter serving here as cases in point: Defining the Urban Ethos, Space, Place, and Popular in Curacao and Else - where, Mourning the Impossible Libidi - nal City in Boogie Nights, Analysis after Adorno, and Music for the Design-Intensive City. These otherwise disparate topics are bound together quite tightly by the author's well developed knowledge of urban geography, and he lucidly offers the reader new tools with to examine the many modes of contemporary musical consumption. Chief among the theories Krims adopts is an economic world-view known as post-Fordism, recognizes a global economy built upon labor and production, vertical disintegration (outsourcing), liberalized trade, the centrality of information in production, and the increased role of regional and urban specialization (p. xxiii). As distinguished from Fordism, the mode of economic production born of Henry Ford's methods of mass production, post-Fordism depends on the process of flexible accumulation, in producers rely on specialized labor and production methods designed to react more quickly and specifically to market changes than would be otherwise possible using Ford's models. The distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism plays heavily into Krims's over-arching critique of what he believes to be cultural musicology's myopic celebration of subaltern cultural practices and their power to challenge the effects of capitalism. In Krims's view, such cultural practices, which profit from challenging or complicating national boundaries, dominant identities, and cultural homogeneities, acquire value precisely for having challenged hegemony-and not coincidentally, for having disrupted the deadening sameness embodied in Adorno's nightmare [the loss of human agency to total capitalism] (p. 104). Krims provides a healthy counter-balance to at least two decades of popular music scholarship, devoting the entirety of chapter 4 to challenging Adorno's own hegemonic status as cultural musicology's Marxist stand-in. If, as he posits, music now exists in a post-Fordist world, the spectral centrality of Adorno's theories to cultural musicology need to be revised, for-at the risk of oversimplification-Adorno lived in a Fordist world. According to Krims, now that the global economy is defined in part by nimbly adjustable design and niche marketing, any discussion of the culture industry of the mid-twentieth century is an anachronism; the potential loss of human agency to the totalizing forces of today's global capitalism becomes at once both more complicated and evasive. …

The Contradictions of Cosmopolitanism: Consuming the Orient at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and the International Potlatch Festival, 1909–1934

Seattle's Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and International Potlatch provide windows to the construction of a “cosmopolitan” urban ethos in the early twentieth century. Noting the ways this idea embraced Japan and the city's Japanese residents while serving white elites pursuit of urban and commercial advantage, the essay also comments on the space between cosmopolitan ideology and the persistence of anti-Japanese prejudice.

Homosexuality and the City: An Historical Overview

Ever since the time of ancient Athens and the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah, homosexuality has been associated with the city. Historians over the past decade have chronicled urban gay and lesbian groups in Renaissance Italy, Enlightenment France and Britain, and modern America and Australia, and social scientists have also identified emerging gay communities in Asia. Their researches show how homosexuals formed urban networks of sociability and solidarity, and how the presence of such minority communities impacted on urban development from Castro Street to Soho. Homosexuals often moved to cities to escape the sexual and social constraints of traditional life, and they played a major role in transforming the city and in creating a particular urban ethos. The city, in turn, is the site for the construction of much contemporary gay and lesbian culture.

The Urban Ethos

The purpose of this article is to study adolescents’ attitudes to rural living in relation to a dominant urban ethos.The question is raised whether processes of urbanization and individualization have left ‘place’ with a less important frame of reference than before. Are young people from the provinces nowdrawn towards the same values as city youth? If this is true, it is consistent with sociological theories about central developmental traits of our time,but in opposition to common assumptions among Norwegian researchers concerning special characteristics of growing up in local communities, especially in north Norway. The empirical analyses demonstrate that groups of pupils relate to these questions along different dimensions. District pupils have a more negative outlook on where they live and on settling there than do city pupils. Irrespective of geographical background, youth express similar preferences in relation to their home place. This leads to a discussion about the diminishing significance of place for the orientations of the modern individual. Even though local attachment and local identity may still be valid concepts, many young people today express values and preferences that are attached to urban settings, which indicates the existence of what I call an urban ethos.

Urban History, Urban Anthropology, and the Study of Migrants in Cities

The "city as context" offers a useful way to talk about connections (actual and potential) between urban history and urban anthropology in the study of immigrants. Several varying characteristics of cities, as they influence the insertion and incorporation of immigrants are explored. These include the historical depth of immigration in particular cities, the presence or absence of residentially‐segregated immigrant receiving areas, the nature of the immigrant labor market (including enclave economies), and a dominant set of values (an urban ethos) shaping economic and institutional life in a given city. [City as context, immigration, ethnic enclaves, urban ethos]

Is there a Muslim Society? Ernest Gellner's sociology of Islam

Ernest Gellner's well-known model aspires to a general interpretation of all Muslim societies, past and present. They are said to have invarying features, susceptible to analysis in terms of a common sociology, one of a dialectic between city and tribe, each with its own peculiar form of religion, and the dominance within the urban form of ulama leading a solidary community based on scripture and Divine Law. Within this configuration, political rule is always vulnerable to the double threat of the tribes at the gate and the ulama-led urban society which never fully recognizes the legitimacy of government. While modernity has ended the power of the tribes, urbanization and mass literacy have reinforced the religion-based urban ethos and its challenge to secular power, which explains the current surge of Islamism in politics. The validity of this model is questioned in the historical and the modern contexts. It is argued that there are certain cultural themes common to most Muslim lands and epochs which derive from religion and common historical reference, but that it would be a mistake to think that the concepts and entities specified by these themes, such as the category of ‘ulama’, are sociological or political contants: they are assigned different meanings and roles by socio-political contexts. Modern Islamism is a political ideology quite distinct from anything in Muslim history, which, in recent years, has become a dominant idiom for the expression of various and sometimes contradictory interests, aspirations and frustrations. In this it has replaced the previously dominant secular nationalisms and Marxism. The wide variety of social and political forms to be found historically and in the present cannot be interpreted as variations on a common model of an essential Muslim society, but are explicable only in terms of the normal practice of social and political analysis, like any other range of societies.

The Image of the City

This interdisciplinary urban history examines the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the St. Louis riverfront as a case study of the Progressive response to the urban disorder resulting from the modernization of American society during the twentieth century. Using the insights of urban sociologist Anselm Strauss into urban images and urban historian Blain Brownell into civic boosterism as a conceptual framework, this article draws upon original documents such as city plans and newspapers from the turn of the century until the 1947-1948 design competition for the memorial. These materials reveal an enduring pattern underlying attempts by St. Louis commercial and civic leaders to restructure the urban form-of the riverfront into an orderly image consistent with their progressive urban ethos.

Agro-Town Regions of Peripheral Europe

The concept of agro-town was elaborated by the geographers to describe a settlement that although it is chiefly populated by farmers and agricultural labourers has the size of a town and often includes urban institutions, urban social strata and functions. Such settlements are surrounded by vast areas of extensively used land which may extend to several tens of thousands of square kilometres. Agro-towns constitute settlement networks in themselves, without or with very few villages. In Europe agro-town regions are found in Andalusia, Southern Italy, Sicily and on the Great Hungarian Plain. In this paper the author makes a detailed study of the Hungarian agro-towns, describing their physical and social structure as well as their life-style and culture, and tracing their development and transformations back to the late Middle Ages. In the concluding chapter the Hungarian agro-towns are compared with their Mediterranean parallels. In spite of apparent differences (e.g. a general 'urbanity' and 'urban ethos' in the Mediterranean, and 'ruralness' in the Hungarian Plain) the paper points out basic similarities in the historic development and social significance of the agro-towns. The similar traits are interpreted as adaptations to more or less analogous situations in the periphery of the European continental division of labor.

Mediterranean Agro-Towns as a Form of Cultural Dominance. With Special Reference to Sicily and Andalusia.

As the prevalent settlement type, agro-towns are highly characteristic of Mediterranean societies. Their remarkable continuity was not only predicated upon political conditions (insecurity), but it was also intimately connected with specific economic and cultural processes. The significance of an urban ethos in the configuration of these forces has often been mentioned but still leaves us with several questions. What does life in agro-towns mean to the various groups of people living there? What are the main symbols employed to distinguish oneself from rural folk? We will argue that the notions of cultura and civiltà, respectively, have become an integral part of the cultural dominance of Mediterranean agro-towns over their rural hinterlands.

Brownell, Blaine A. The Urban Ethos in the South, 1920-1930

Brownell, Blaine A. <i>The Urban Ethos in the South, 1920-1930</i>