Cities Interrupted: Visual culture and urban space

✍ Scribed by Shirley Jordan; Christoph Lindner (editors)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 257
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Cities Interrupted explores the potential of visual culture – in the form of photography, film, performance, architecture, urban design, and mixed media – to strategically interrupt processes of globalization in contemporary urban spaces.
Looking at cities such as Amsterdam, Beijing, Doha, London, New York, and Paris, the book brings together original essays to reveal how the concept of ‘interruption’ in global cities enables new understanding of the forms of space, experience, and community that are emerging in today’s rapidly transforming urban environments.
The idea of ‘interruption’ addressed in this book refers to deliberate interventions in the spaces and communities of contemporary cities – interventions that seek to disrupt or destabilize the experience of everyday urban life through creative practice. Interruption is used as an analytic and conceptual tool to challenge – and explore alternatives to – the narratives of speed, hyper-mobility, rapid growth, and incessant exchange and flow that have dominated critical thinking on global cities.
Bringing art and creative practice into the centre of discussions about the future of cities, alongside discussions of development, design, justice, health, sustainability, technology, and citizenship, this book is essential reading for anyone working at the intersections of a range of urban, cultural and visual fields, including urban studies, urban design and architecture, visual studies, cultural studies, media studies, art history, and social and cultural geography.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
CONTRIBUTORS
FOREWORD: INTERRUPTING INTERRUPTION
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 VISUAL CULTURE AND INTERRUPTION IN GLOBAL CITIES
What is interruption?
Visualizing interruption
Note
PART ONE CRISIS AND RUIN
2 WHY WE LOVE ‘INTERRUPTION’: URBAN RUINS, FOOD TRUCKS AND THE CULT OF DECAY
What’s wrong with dystopianism?
The great inversion
‘Interruption’ meets the great inversion
Meet the food truckers
So when was interruption?
Notes
3 RESCUING HISTORY FROM THE CITY: INTERRUPTION AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN BEIJING1
Soft powers
Urban dreams
Intervention
Breaking
Interruption
Notes
4 INTERRUPTING NEW YORK: SLOWNESS AND THE HIGH LINE
Slow New York
Elevated street
The High Line effect
Slow street
Heterotopia and retro- walking
Note
5 SOUND, MEMORY AND INTERRUPTION: GHOSTS OF LONDON’S M11 LINK ROAD
Traffic streams
LINKED: Where are all those people now?
Out of time, out of place
Ghosts and the dislocation of time and space
Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Notes
PART TWO RESISTANCE AND RENEWAL
6 SUBURBIA, INTERRUPTED: STREET ART AND THE POLITICS OF PLACE IN THE PARIS BANLIEUES1
The image of the Cité : building consensus in the banlieues
Interrupting art
Conclusion
Notes
7 LOOKING AT DIGITAL VISUALIZATIONS OF URBAN REDEVELOPMENT PROJECTS: DIMMING THE SCINTILLATING GLOW OF UNWORK
What sort of image is a digital visualization?
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
8 ‘HERE WE ARE NOW’: AMSTERDAM’S NORTH–SOUTH METRO LINE AND THE EMERGENCE OF A NETWORKED PUBLIC
Lessons from the past
Here we are now: from tunnel vision to open house
Conclusion: in defence of crisis
Notes
9 POP-UP SHOPS AS INTERRUPTIONS IN(POST-)RECESSIONAL LONDON
From ‘limited time’ retail to community-oriented pop-up shops
Creative fillers at times of recession
A shared pop-up aesthetics
Expected and unintended experiences
Conclusions
Note
PART THREE BODIES AND SPACE
10 INTERRUPTION EXPANDED: URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY’S PERSPICACIOUS VIEW
I
II
III
IV
11 BUILDERING, URBAN INTERVENTIONS AND PUBLIC SCULPTURE
Charms and perils of verticality
Buildering as metaphor
Notes
12 INTERRUPTING THE STREET
Beat Streuli: reconfiguring the street
Michael Wolf: Street Views
Coda: from still to slow
REFERENCES
INDEX