Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 5.2 is now available

Intellect is delighted to announce that the Journal of Urban Cultural
Studies 5.2 is now available! For more information about the issue, click
here >> https://bit.ly/2QF7tI8

Special Issue: World-making in Urban Cultural Studies

*Contents*

*Making worlds in urban cultural studies*
Authors: Carolyn Birdsall And Simone Kalkman

In this editorial, we explore the relevance of the concepts of worlding and
world-making within the context of urban cultural studies. We ask how
cultural practices make worlds and how these practices are in turn worlded,
with particular attention to the diverse forms that the urban (as a
‘global’ phenomenon) takes across the world and fact that academic research
itself should be considered a form of worlding. In doing so, three focal
points come to the fore. The first is the importance of so-called ‘elite
dreams’ and their messy and contested relation with worlding practices from
below. Second, we emphasize the need to examine the social, political and
economic contexts in which cultural objects are created, distributed and
received – which calls for an interdisciplinary approach. Third, we focus
on historical differences and the need for longer-term perspectives within
scholarly research, considering how particular cultural practices are
preserved and remembered.

*The beach as microcosm of a cosmopolitan city: Imagining and experiencing
urban encounters at Trieste’s Pedocin beach*
Authors: Milou van Hout

This article focuses on the nature of beaches as places of urban
encounters, critically examining the cosmopolitanized discourse of
Trieste’s urban identity by exploring the dynamics of urban ‘world-making’
at Trieste’s Pedocin beach. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the
recent documentary L’Ultima Spiaggia (The Last Resort) (Anastopoulos and
Del Degan, 2016) moves away from the poetic elite imaginations that have
fashioned cultural narratives of Trieste. The film represents a
cosmopolitan experience, which, for Trieste’s beachgoers, is not enclosed
in the moment of encounter with diversity and the other. Cosmopolitanism,
here, is rather the individual capacity to live between the overlapping
urban realities that the triestini inhabit, and yet within their own
internal moment.

*(Re)Addressing Mostar: Global imaginaries, local activisms*
Authors: Giulia Carabelli

This article examines how artistic interventions in public space become
worlding practices that challenge established, global representations of
cities. Focusing on Mostar, an ethnically divided city in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, the essay contrasts the global representation of the city as
intolerant and uncooperative to the worlding practices of Abart, a
collective whose art interventions make visible moments of solidarity among
supposedly antagonistic actors. Through the mobilization of Lefebvre’s core
concepts of the production of space and heterotopia, this article explores
how Abart navigates global funding streams through the re-appropriation of
donors’ vocabulary as a means of countering their dominant narratives that
limit the very potentials of urban activism. Thus, Mostar’s network of
activists constitutes a significant example of grassroots actors critically
intervening into the ‘art of being global’.

*Of ‘Godziners’ and ‘Designer Citizens’: The emergence of designers as
political subjects in Cape Town*
Authors: Laura Nkula-Wenz

Over the course of 2011, the City of Cape Town bid for, and eventually won
the title of World Design Capital 2014. This article discusses how the
‘idea of design’ emerged as a new governmental rationality and mode of
subjectivation, positing the local ‘design community’ as an indispensable
macro-actor of local development and policy production. It unpacks the
various (self-)ascriptions and socio-economic aspirations pinned to the
notion of design and its actionable subjectivity, the designer. While
recognizing that the idea of design has raised hopes for innovative
solutions that could help to address Cape Town’s most pervasive urban
challenges, the article ultimately questions whether real change ‘by
design’ can be attained without designers acknowledging and
(self-)critically engaging with the political dimension of their work.

*Bourgeois worlds and urban nightmares: The post-Ottoman Balkan City
through the lens of Milutin Uskoković’s Newcomers*
Authors: Miloš Jovanović

In the nineteenth century, the bourgeois elites of newly minted national
capitals Belgrade and Sofia sought to produce ‘European’ urban space, their
first step on a path to industrial modernity and a new relationship with
the world. When such designs failed, their execution left real, devastating
material consequences. This article explores the underside of elite dreams
through Milutin Uskoković’s Newcomers (1910). Set in 1906 Belgrade, the
novel’s tragic form emphasizes the futility of bourgeois aspirations on the
periphery of global capital. I expand on such themes through archival
sources, which consistently describe the post-Ottoman city as a landscape
of dispossession. Ultimately, I argue that urban modernity has historically
been informed by failed elite dreams and their resulting urban nightmares,
particularly in spaces off-centre to capitalist flows.

*Favelas at the biennale: Exhibiting Brazilian informality in Europe*
Authors: Simone Kalkman

Brazilian favelas have become world-famous through representations in
cinema, tourism and art. This article discusses engagements with Brazilian
favelas in art and architecture, focusing on the 2016 Venice Biennale of
Architecture. This exhibition is analysed as a practice of worlding,
focusing on how artists and curators transform favelas into objects to be
seen, experienced and thought about. The article shows that the
incorporation of favelas into European art contexts is inextricably
related, first, to imaginaries of Brazilian nationality and, second, to the
idea that the global North can learn from favelas. Building on this, I
argue that ethical and epistemological questions are inextricably
intertwined when exhibiting Brazilian favelas in Europe, which implies
recognizing the complicity of academic research in this process of
knowledge production.

*Urban encounters: Performance and making urban worlds*
Authors: Dan Swanton

This article develops how urban encounters have been theorized and
mobilized across the social sciences to emphasize the ordinary and
unspectacular ways in which people live together in cities in response to
widespread talk of a crisis of multiculturalism. Situated in the contact
zone between social science disciplines and arts practice, the article
argues for performative and more political theorizations of spaces of
encounter. Focusing on photographer Mahtab Hussain’s project You Get Me?
(2017), the article examines how photographic portraits offer one example
of a performative encounter that takes up as a position in the politics of
lived experience by carving out spaces where difference might be
encountered in new ways, and by challenging viewers to imagine and enact
new ways of being-in-common.

*Seeing the self in the world: Attending to banal globalism in urban visual
cultures*
Authors: Simon Ferdinand

Urban visual cultures are permeated by images of the global earth. From
environmentalist posters presenting fragile whole earths, to logos that
brand international corporations, these visual figures have dissolved into
the scarcely scrutinized backdrop of everyday practice. This short article
underlines the significance of this ‘banal globalism’ as the condition in
which global discourses shape identities and frame experience in ways that
elude conscious disputation. It indicates two complexities surrounding
banal globalism. First I stress how the inconspicuousness and seeming
triviality of banal global images exceed critical approaches based on the
concentrated reading of visual objects. Then I indicate how such focused
analysis can uncover rich and strange global visions that might otherwise
be overlooked as part of the quotidian urban backdrop.

*Defiant worldings from Manchester, England: Expulsed global solidarities
and the international homeland of dignity*
Authors: Cornelia Gräbner

This article explores contemporary material and affective traces of two
instances of global solidarity in Manchester, England. The first is a
letter sent to Abraham Lincoln by an assembly of Manchester citizens in
December 1862, assuring Lincoln of their unwavering support for the
struggle for the freedom of all despite the cotton famine’s effect on those
assembled. The second instance refers to the multi-faceted practices of
solidarity with the Spanish Republic and the International Brigades.
Drawing on Stephen D’Arcy’s ‘language of the unheard’ and Ananya Roy’s
‘civic governmentality’, and on commemorative traces in Manchester’s
topography, the article reflects on how ‘defiant worldings’ are
commemorated, subordinated and/or marginalized but also how the spirit of
egalitarian, anti-racist and anti-fascist defiance is remembered and kept
alive.

*Mobile worlding: Exploring the trans-urban circulation and the
interconnectedness of migrants’ urban world-making practices*
Authors: Luce Beeckmans

This short-form article considers the concept of ‘mobile worlding’ in
relation to migrants’ world-making practices. Yet, instead of the
conventional focus on the transnational cultural exchange between migrants’
home and host countries, this article theorizes the trans-urban circulation
and interconnectedness of migrants’ urban world-making practices across
cities in Europe. It reflects on how migrants’ urban world-making practices
may be conceptualized as ‘practices of citation and reference in a world of
inter-connected urbanism’ or a ‘mobile urbanism’ from below (McCann et al.
and McCann and Ward). In this article, examples of urban world-making
practices of African diaspora are discussed, highlighting the author’s own
research on religious place-making in European cities, as well as other
instances of ‘mobile worlding’ that are not yet conceptualized as such, for
instance hip-hop and fashion.

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