Martin J Murray

Theorizing cities under stress

A t first glance, it might appear that Specular city , Wounded cities , and Popular culture in the age of white flight have little in common. After all, these three studies focus on different cities at different historical periods, and they construct their arguments within different conceptual frameworks and unrelated historiographical traditions. Yet what shines through in all these books is the shared understanding that cities are not just aggregations, or accumulations, of buildings varying in size and shape, streets and passageways, configured landscapes, population densities, socioeconomic relationships, and so on, but also repositories of imagined pasts and futures, sites of memory and nostalgia, and show-cases for the visual display of symbols and images. 1 Put in another way, cities are more than their built environment, and more than an agglomeration of zones, places, and locations; they are also active agents integrally connected with the fashioning of distinctly urban sensibilities, attachments to place, and 'structures of feeling'.

Besides their wonderfully eclectic interdisciplinary approaches, the common thread that connects these three books under review is their shared concern with deciphering

cities under stress. Despite the different urban localities and the different time-periods, all three books address the interlocking themes of the spatial configuration of urban landscapes, the uses (and abuses) of public space, and the collective memory of urban residents. In Specular city , Laura Podalsky views the spatial reconfiguration and cultural transformation of Buenos Aires during the interregnum after the downfall of the Juan Pero ´n in 1955 and before his restoration in 1973 through the lens of film, fictionwriting, and architecture. She argues that the abrupt departure of Pero ´n provided middle-class urban residents, who were eager to erase the working-class imprint that the Peronist movement had inscribed on the cityscape, with a unique opportunity to redefine the use of public space, to rebuild cityspaces, and to recast urban social relations in ways that favored their class interests and sensibilities. She juxtaposes a constellation of distinctly modern and popular cultural forms: cinema, fiction-writing, architectural design, and sequestered shopping arcades. Aside from their growing popularity, these cultural forms came to symbolize a new visuality of urban spectacle that defined Buenos Aires after the downfall of Juan Pero ´n. 2 In Wounded cities , Jane Schneider and Ida Susser bring together a disparate collection of essays that critically assess the external forces, the ongoing conflicts, and the particular events that have 'traumatized', 'injured', and otherwise 'afflicted' various cities around the world. In their view, 'wounded' cities are the embodiment of all that has gone wrong with contemporary urbanism. Yet whatever the source of the affliction, 'wounded' cities Á/ like all cities Á/ are dynamic entities, containing within themselves 'the potential to recuperate loss and reconstruct anew for the future'. [START_REF] Susser | Wounded cities: destruction and reconstruction in a globalized world[END_REF] Finally, in Popular culture in the age of white flight , Eric Aliva seeks to explain the connection between 'white flight' from the central city and the rapid expansion of racially homogeneous suburbs in Los Angeles after World War II, on the one side, and the formation of an inclusive white identity incubated within these suburban spaces, on the other. In his view, 'the culture of suburban whiteness' Á/ symbolized by Hollywood cinema, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and the freeway system Á/ dovetailed with the emergence of a new political outlook that rejected the tenets of new Deal liberalism and adopted instead a race-conscious, sociocultural sensibility that anticipated the rise of the Reaganite New Right. 4

City as spectacle

Laura Podasky uses the visual metaphor of 'spectacle' to decipher both the physical transformation and the sociocultural metamorphosis of Buenos Aires in the almost two decades between the ouster of Juan Pero ´n in 1955 and his triumphal return to political power in 1973. In constructing her analysis, she draws on the theoretical work of such urban scholars as Frederic Jameson, David Harvey, Mike Davis, Ed Soja, and Derek Gregory to weave together a compelling argument that links the materiality of urban space with its discursive representations. Borrowing from Henri Lefebvre, Podalsky develops a tripartite analytic framework that distinguishes between three spatial registers: built environment (stable material structures); lived practices (the everyday uses of urban space); and discursive representations. She employs this analytic framework with great clarity and eloquence in her investigation of Buenos Aires.

Podasky establishes the sociohistorical context for her story by moving backward in time. During the nine-year reign of Juan Pero ´n (1946Á/1955), she contends, the spectacle of working-class militancy, coupled with the steady stream of immigrant newcomers from the rural hinterlands to the capital city, fundamentally reshaped the urban landscape of Buenos Aires. Fearing the specter of political power in the hands of newcomers to the city, the anti-Peronist urban elite reacted to these unsettling circumstances with a great deal of class resentment and hostility. They associated Peronism with the 'loss of the city' Á/ a city taken over by unruly working-class crowds, with their 'anonymous earth-coloured faces' and their raucous, noisy demonstrations in the public spaces of the central city, particularly the centrally-located and symbolically significant Plaza de Mayo. 5 The use of the urban landscape as 'exhibitionary space' for the Peronist regime no longer guaranteed the upper-middle class urban residents the vaunted, special place in the public sphere they long regarded as their birthright. Nurtured in the aristocratic milieu of 'natural' hierarchies, the urban elite looked upon working class supporters of the Personist regime through the demonizing lens of a quasi-racialized Other. Whereas the Peronists focused attention on the working class newcomers by naming them descamisados [the shirtless ones], middle-class urbanites derisively dismissed these new arrivals to the city as cabecitas negras [literally, little black heads], a derogatory term for provincial immigrants and a pejorative reference to their indigenous sociocultural heritage.

In the years following the downfall of Pero ´n, middle-class residents sought to reassert their class identity through the transformation in the uses and meanings of urban space. A host of social groups, including filmmakers, architects and designers, fiction-writers, and urban planners Á/ the organic intellectuals of the property-owning urban middleclass Á/ moved quickly to impose their vision of middle-class propriety on the urban social fabric by 'taking back' the city from the 'unruly' masses, the boisterous crowds, and the plebian newcomers with their unsophisticated tastes and unvarnished mannerisms. Taking her cue from Diana Taylor's study of performance and power, Podalsky stresses the importance of urban spectacle to the Peronist regime, particularly the staged performativity of large-scale political rallies in the public spaces of the city. [START_REF] Taylor | Disappearing acts: spectacles of gender and nationalism in Argentina's dirty war[END_REF] She argues that, after the downfall of Juan Pero ´n, a succession of political regimes sought, with varying degrees of success, to erase the collective consciousness and the historical memory of working class militancy. 7 Podalsky shows that the physical and symbolic transformation of the urban landscape in both the physical and symbolic realms was not a linear process, but the result of multiple dynamics that overlapped and intersected in surprising ways. The steady accretion of soaring skyscrapers and other innovative building-types transformed the built environment of the city. These iconic symbols of high modernism brokered a visible break with the Peronist past and marked re-entry of Argentina into the world market. 8 The rapid construction of expensive high-rise apartment complexes towering above the streetscape enabled anxious middle-class urban residents to geographically (and hence culturally) distance themselves from the conventional public 241 Theorizing cities under stress uses of urban space); and discursive representations. She employs this analytic framework with great clarity and eloquence in her investigation of Buenos Aires.

Podasky establishes the sociohistorical context for her story by moving backward in time. During the nine-year reign of Juan Pero ´n (1946Á/1955), she contends, the spectacle of working-class militancy, coupled with the steady stream of immigrant newcomers from the rural hinterlands to the capital city, fundamentally reshaped the urban landscape of Buenos Aires. Fearing the specter of political power in the hands of newcomers to the city, the anti-Peronist urban elite reacted to these unsettling circumstances with a great deal of class resentment and hostility. They associated Peronism with the 'loss of the city' Á/ a city taken over by unruly working-class crowds, with their 'anonymous earth-coloured faces' and their raucous, noisy demonstrations in the public spaces of the central city, particularly the centrally-located and symbolically significant Plaza de Mayo. 5 The use of the urban landscape as 'exhibitionary space' for the Peronist regime no longer guaranteed the upper-middle class urban residents the vaunted, special place in the public sphere they long regarded as their birthright. Nurtured in the aristocratic milieu of 'natural' hierarchies, the urban elite looked upon working class supporters of the Personist regime through the demonizing lens of a quasi-racialized Other. Whereas the Peronists focused attention on the working class newcomers by naming them descamisados [the shirtless ones], middle-class urbanites derisively dismissed these new arrivals to the city as cabecitas negras [literally, little black heads], a derogatory term for provincial immigrants and a pejorative reference to their indigenous sociocultural heritage.

In the years following the downfall of Pero ´n, middle-class residents sought to reassert their class identity through the transformation in the uses and meanings of urban space. A host of social groups, including filmmakers, architects and designers, fiction-writers, and urban planners Á/ the organic intellectuals of the property-owning urban middleclass Á/ moved quickly to impose their vision of middle-class propriety on the urban social fabric by 'taking back' the city from the 'unruly' masses, the boisterous crowds, and the plebian newcomers with their unsophisticated tastes and unvarnished mannerisms. Taking her cue from Diana Taylor's study of performance and power, Podalsky stresses the importance of urban spectacle to the Peronist regime, particularly the staged performativity of large-scale political rallies in the public spaces of the city. [START_REF] Taylor | Disappearing acts: spectacles of gender and nationalism in Argentina's dirty war[END_REF] She argues that, after the downfall of Juan Pero ´n, a succession of political regimes sought, with varying degrees of success, to erase the collective consciousness and the historical memory of working class militancy. 7 Podalsky shows that the physical and symbolic transformation of the urban landscape in both the physical and symbolic realms was not a linear process, but the result of multiple dynamics that overlapped and intersected in surprising ways. The steady accretion of soaring skyscrapers and other innovative building-types transformed the built environment of the city. These iconic symbols of high modernism brokered a visible break with the Peronist past and marked re-entry of Argentina into the world market. 8 The rapid construction of expensive high-rise apartment complexes towering above the streetscape enabled anxious middle-class urban residents to geographically (and hence culturally) distance themselves from the conventional public places of the urban landscape, and hence to avoid social interaction with the unruly crowds, the peripatetic newcomers to the city, and the urban 'riff-raff'. 9 Similarly, the steady increase in the number of privately-owned automobiles offered greater geographical mobility for the middle and upper classes, or as Podasky puts it, a 'way to move around the city with greater freedom and, perhaps more important, to negotiate the urban terrain without having to encounter the working classes'. 10 Podasky pays particular attention to the spatial reconfiguration of the city and such visual attractions as enclosed shopping arcades, or galerı ´as , to trace the emergence of a middle-class consumer culture. The proliferation of these glitzy sites of consumption after the fall of Pero ´n provided a sheltered environment separated from the public spaces (streets, plazas, boulevards) of the city. Yet instead of fostering the leisurely gaze of the strolling fla ˆneur, the new galerı ´as 'encouraged the spontaneous purchases by hurried pedestrians'. 11 In an argument that dovetails nicely with what Vanessa Schwartz suggests in Spectacular realities , Podalsky contends that the symbolic representation of Buenos Aires relied upon an explicit connection between visual and written texts. 12 She describes a variety of novel practices of visual spectacle that sprang up after the fall of Pero ´n to celebrate middle-class consumerism. Producers of the new popular culture Á/ architects, intellectuals, filmmakers and fiction-writers, in particular Á/ aimed to please this middle-class urban public through the construction of a shared experience through the written word and visual display. The specular city, embodied in architecture, enclosed shopping arcades, the new cinema, and popular fiction-writing, created a shared environment through which 'respectable' urban residents began to imagine themselves as active participants in a refined middle-class consumer culture that distanced itself from the unruly masses that the Peronist movement had relied upon for political support.

Podalsky traces the connection between new architectural designs, new transportation patterns, and new consumer practices that originated in the late 1950s with the growing literary and cinematic obsession with the urban landscape of Buenos Aires. The physical transformation of city became the subject of new films, short stories, and novels that dramatized the disillusionment, alienation, and estrangement of middleclass urban residents. The new cinema (particularly filmmakers associated with the Generatio ´n del 60 ) and fiction-writing that blossomed during the 1960s looked upon the city as a site of new social anxieties by focusing attention on the alleged invasion of the city by the uncultured masses pouring in from the provinces. Podalsky argues that the urban literature focusing on the city can be 'seen as a reaction to the influx of provincial peoples who had migrated into Buenos Aires and were associated with Peronism'. 13 In stressing enduring sociocultural continuities over recurrent political ruptures, Podalsy argues that the urban transformations of the 1960s served as 'an incubator' for the flowering of post-modernist consumer culture of the 1990s. New kinds of advertising blunted some of the censorial labours of the ever-vigilant state administration that sought to monitor political subversion and amoral sexuality. At the same time, the new 'culture industries' contributed to the creation of 'a new cultural sensibility' that places of the urban landscape, and hence to avoid social interaction with the unruly crowds, the peripatetic newcomers to the city, and the urban 'riff-raff'. 9 Similarly, the steady increase in the number of privately-owned automobiles offered greater geographical mobility for the middle and upper classes, or as Podasky puts it, a 'way to move around the city with greater freedom and, perhaps more important, to negotiate the urban terrain without having to encounter the working classes'. 10 Podasky pays particular attention to the spatial reconfiguration of the city and such visual attractions as enclosed shopping arcades, or galerı ´as , to trace the emergence of a middle-class consumer culture. The proliferation of these glitzy sites of consumption after the fall of Pero ´n provided a sheltered environment separated from the public spaces (streets, plazas, boulevards) of the city. Yet instead of fostering the leisurely gaze of the strolling fla ˆneur, the new galerı ´as 'encouraged the spontaneous purchases by hurried pedestrians'. 11 In an argument that dovetails nicely with what Vanessa Schwartz suggests in Spectacular realities , Podalsky contends that the symbolic representation of Buenos Aires relied upon an explicit connection between visual and written texts. 12 She describes a variety of novel practices of visual spectacle that sprang up after the fall of Pero ´n to celebrate middle-class consumerism. Producers of the new popular culture Á/ architects, intellectuals, filmmakers and fiction-writers, in particular Á/ aimed to please this middle-class urban public through the construction of a shared experience through the written word and visual display. The specular city, embodied in architecture, enclosed shopping arcades, the new cinema, and popular fiction-writing, created a shared environment through which 'respectable' urban residents began to imagine themselves as active participants in a refined middle-class consumer culture that distanced itself from the unruly masses that the Peronist movement had relied upon for political support.

Podalsky traces the connection between new architectural designs, new transportation patterns, and new consumer practices that originated in the late 1950s with the growing literary and cinematic obsession with the urban landscape of Buenos Aires. The physical transformation of city became the subject of new films, short stories, and novels that dramatized the disillusionment, alienation, and estrangement of middleclass urban residents. The new cinema (particularly filmmakers associated with the Generatio ´n del 60 ) and fiction-writing that blossomed during the 1960s looked upon the city as a site of new social anxieties by focusing attention on the alleged invasion of the city by the uncultured masses pouring in from the provinces. Podalsky argues that the urban literature focusing on the city can be 'seen as a reaction to the influx of provincial peoples who had migrated into Buenos Aires and were associated with Peronism'. 13 In stressing enduring sociocultural continuities over recurrent political ruptures, Podalsy argues that the urban transformations of the 1960s served as 'an incubator' for the flowering of post-modernist consumer culture of the 1990s. New kinds of advertising blunted some of the censorial labours of the ever-vigilant state administration that sought to monitor political subversion and amoral sexuality. At the same time, the new 'culture industries' contributed to the creation of 'a new cultural sensibility' that 'interpolated Argentine citizens as urban consumer-subjects and promoted consumption as an adequate substitute for social engagement'. 14 Beginning in the 1960s, the steady accretion of new buildings (with postmodern design motifs), upscale retail shops, boutiques, and high-end restaurants 'substantially transformed' the central city. 15 Podalsky argues that, taken together, the elements that constituted the reconfigured cultural realm of Buenos Aires formed the basis of a new hegemonic project that aimed to pull together a 'nation sharply fractured by political divisions'. 16 In its conventional usage, 'hegemony' implies a broad social consensus that the political power wielded by those at the 'commanding heights' of the state apparatus is legitimate. In my view, the way that Podalsky uses hegemony is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. As she herself acknowledges, the succession of military and civilian governments that ruled Argentina after 1955 experienced considerable difficulties in crafting a new social consensus, and establishing their legitimacy as speaking for the nation as an imagined community. 17

The city as organic whole

The interlocking themes of crisis, trauma, and recuperation are the subject of Wounded cities . In their Introduction to this collection of essays, Jane Schneider and Ida Susser put forward a framework of analysis that conceptualizes cities from what they regard as 'two contrasting, irreducible points of view'. On the one hand, they conceptualize the city as a 'body politic', that is, as an evolving entity capable of suffering and recuperation, of injury and recovery, and even of massive destruction and Phoenixlike 'rebirth'. This use of an organic metaphor serves as an orienting device that enables them to treat the city as a coherent subject, that is, as a unified whole with its own intrinsic nature and integrity, its own historical specificity, and its own meaning. Treating the city as an organic unity means acknowledging that changes in any part of the urban fabric necessarily affects the whole. On the other hand, Sussser and Schneider situate cities at the intersection of the 'global' and the 'local', where powerful external forces intrude upon the particularity of place by disrupting historically-specific patterns of social life, and by intensifying conflicts and exaggerating differences in particular locations. 18 In laying out their own analytic framework, Susser and Schneider take issue with the highly influential 'global cities' paradigm associated with the pathbreaking work of Saskia Sassen. The 'global cities' paradigm rests on the view that the spatial dispersal of giant transnational corporations over considerable distances requires a parallel territorial concentration of 'command and control' functions at the apex of an evolving global urban hierarchy. Sassen identifies Tokyo, New York, and London as the exemplars of 'global city' model because, as the world's great financial centers with their heavy concentrations of corporate headquarters, they coordinate the most important functions necessary for the world economy to operate. For Susser and Schneider, there is something highly misleading about arranging cities in a single, hierarchical rank-order according to which some are endowed with particular 243 Theorizing cities under stress 'interpolated Argentine citizens as urban consumer-subjects and promoted consumption as an adequate substitute for social engagement'. 14 Beginning in the 1960s, the steady accretion of new buildings (with postmodern design motifs), upscale retail shops, boutiques, and high-end restaurants 'substantially transformed' the central city. 15 Podalsky argues that, taken together, the elements that constituted the reconfigured cultural realm of Buenos Aires formed the basis of a new hegemonic project that aimed to pull together a 'nation sharply fractured by political divisions'. 16 In its conventional usage, 'hegemony' implies a broad social consensus that the political power wielded by those at the 'commanding heights' of the state apparatus is legitimate. In my view, the way that Podalsky uses hegemony is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. As she herself acknowledges, the succession of military and civilian governments that ruled Argentina after 1955 experienced considerable difficulties in crafting a new social consensus, and establishing their legitimacy as speaking for the nation as an imagined community. 17 The city as organic whole

The interlocking themes of crisis, trauma, and recuperation are the subject of Wounded cities . In their Introduction to this collection of essays, Jane Schneider and Ida Susser put forward a framework of analysis that conceptualizes cities from what they regard as 'two contrasting, irreducible points of view'. On the one hand, they conceptualize the city as a 'body politic', that is, as an evolving entity capable of suffering and recuperation, of injury and recovery, and even of massive destruction and Phoenixlike 'rebirth'. This use of an organic metaphor serves as an orienting device that enables them to treat the city as a coherent subject, that is, as a unified whole with its own intrinsic nature and integrity, its own historical specificity, and its own meaning. Treating the city as an organic unity means acknowledging that changes in any part of the urban fabric necessarily affects the whole. On the other hand, Sussser and Schneider situate cities at the intersection of the 'global' and the 'local', where powerful external forces intrude upon the particularity of place by disrupting historically-specific patterns of social life, and by intensifying conflicts and exaggerating differences in particular locations. 18 In laying out their own analytic framework, Susser and Schneider take issue with the highly influential 'global cities' paradigm associated with the pathbreaking work of Saskia Sassen. The 'global cities' paradigm rests on the view that the spatial dispersal of giant transnational corporations over considerable distances requires a parallel territorial concentration of 'command and control' functions at the apex of an evolving global urban hierarchy. Sassen identifies Tokyo, New York, and London as the exemplars of 'global city' model because, as the world's great financial centers with their heavy concentrations of corporate headquarters, they coordinate the most important functions necessary for the world economy to operate. For Susser and Schneider, there is something highly misleading about arranging cities in a single, hierarchical rank-order according to which some are endowed with particular characteristics that make them more 'global' or 'world-class' than others. In contrast to the 'global cities' model, Susser and Schneider suggest that the ongoing process of globalization has brought all the cities of the world as embedded nodal points in 'a single, interconnected web' where 'variation among them is hardly attributable to a rank order of 'more' or 'less' engagement with [a host of] globalizing pressures'. 19 Susser and Schneider divide the essays into four sections: (1) the Degradation of Urban Life, (2) Crises of Crime and Criminalization, (3) Rapid, Inconsistent Expansion, and (4) Reconstruction and Recovery. This sequential order is not accidental. Despite the overwhelming noir imagery that pervades most of the essays, the narratological ordering of the book Á/ starting with degradation and ending with recovery Á/ suggests the possibility that 'wounded' cities can recuperate, where regeneration offers a hopeful vision of a better future. Whereas Mike Davis views 'dead cities' (kept alive by truly heroic artificial means) as the almost inevitable outcome of the 'ordinary' practices of unrelenting capitalist growth and the accompanying environmental degradation, Susser and Schneider are more cautious in their substantive claims about possible urban futures. 20 To be sure, they acknowledge that cities suffer the deleterious effects of globalization, and that these are part-and-parcel of the expected, 'ordinary' patterns of urban growth and transformation. Yet what they are primarily concerned with are the extraordinary circumstances that cause 'exceptional' harm, often in unexpected ways, to cities around the world. 21 In their panoramic excursion around the globe, cities are 'wounded' in so many different ways: some (the city of Ulan-Ude in Siberia) are so frozen by sub-zero temperatures that their inhabitants literally retreat into hibernation to await the spring thaw; others (Mexico City, Kingston) are so scarred by crime and violence that residents fear to venture into public space; and still others (Medellı ´n and Harlem) are so debilitated by narcotics and the accompanying drug-wars that young people experience death in unprecedented numbers. Some cities (Xalapa) have experienced job losses and declining incomes for most urban residents in the face of neo-liberal reforms; others (Beirut, Belfast, Palermo) are so wracked by civil strife and so partitioned into rival zones of control that they cease to function as whole units; and finally, still others (Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City) experience unfettered expansion at such an accelerated pace that urban planners and municipal authorities lose so much control over urban governance that they can no longer hope to provide the services and infrastructure necessary to sustain settled urban residents and newcomers alike.

In his opening essay, David Harvey lays particular stress on the strengths and weaknesses of the use of organic metaphors to frame the analysis of cities. In suggesting that 'body politic' is a 'contested term', he points out (and correctly in my view) that in the whirlwind world of competitive rivalries and sometimes antagonistic interests 'what looks like a wounded city to some appears perfectly healthy to someone else'. 22 It is also the case that treating the city as an organic unity can sometimes easily slip into simplistic functionalism that ignores the sometimes uneven, disconnected, and contradictory impulses of 'city building' processes.

Urban decay, degeneration, and perpetual crisis are closely linked with declining social investment in urban infrastructure and the abandonment of modernist-inspired 244 characteristics make them more 'global' or 'world-class' than others. In contrast to the 'global cities' model, Susser and Schneider suggest that the ongoing process of globalization has brought all the cities of the world as embedded nodal points in 'a single, interconnected web' where 'variation among them is hardly attributable to a rank order of 'more' or 'less' engagement with [a host of] globalizing pressures'. 19 Susser and Schneider divide the essays into four sections: (1) the Degradation of Urban Life, (2) Crises of Crime and Criminalization, (3) Rapid, Inconsistent Expansion, and (4) Reconstruction and Recovery. This sequential order is not accidental. Despite the overwhelming noir imagery that pervades most of the essays, the narratological ordering of the book Á/ starting with degradation and ending with recovery Á/ suggests the possibility that 'wounded' cities can recuperate, where regeneration offers a hopeful vision of a better future. Whereas Mike Davis views 'dead cities' (kept alive by truly heroic artificial means) as the almost inevitable outcome of the 'ordinary' practices of unrelenting capitalist growth and the accompanying environmental degradation, Susser and Schneider are more cautious in their substantive claims about possible urban futures. 20 To be sure, they acknowledge that cities suffer the deleterious effects of globalization, and that these are part-and-parcel of the expected, 'ordinary' patterns of urban growth and transformation. Yet what they are primarily concerned with are the extraordinary circumstances that cause 'exceptional' harm, often in unexpected ways, to cities around the world. 21 In their panoramic excursion around the globe, cities are 'wounded' in so many different ways: some (the city of Ulan-Ude in Siberia) are so frozen by sub-zero temperatures that their inhabitants literally retreat into hibernation to await the spring thaw; others (Mexico City, Kingston) are so scarred by crime and violence that residents fear to venture into public space; and still others (Medellı ´n and Harlem) are so debilitated by narcotics and the accompanying drug-wars that young people experience death in unprecedented numbers. Some cities (Xalapa) have experienced job losses and declining incomes for most urban residents in the face of neo-liberal reforms; others (Beirut, Belfast, Palermo) are so wracked by civil strife and so partitioned into rival zones of control that they cease to function as whole units; and finally, still others (Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City) experience unfettered expansion at such an accelerated pace that urban planners and municipal authorities lose so much control over urban governance that they can no longer hope to provide the services and infrastructure necessary to sustain settled urban residents and newcomers alike.

In his opening essay, David Harvey lays particular stress on the strengths and weaknesses of the use of organic metaphors to frame the analysis of cities. In suggesting that 'body politic' is a 'contested term', he points out (and correctly in my view) that in the whirlwind world of competitive rivalries and sometimes antagonistic interests 'what looks like a wounded city to some appears perfectly healthy to someone else'. 22 It is also the case that treating the city as an organic unity can sometimes easily slip into simplistic functionalism that ignores the sometimes uneven, disconnected, and contradictory impulses of 'city building' processes.

Urban decay, degeneration, and perpetual crisis are closely linked with declining social investment in urban infrastructure and the abandonment of modernist-inspired improvement projects targeting impoverished neighbourhoods. In a provocative contribution, Claudio Lomnitz seeks to make sense of the urban crisis of Mexico City through the metaphor of death. He suggests that the 'depreciation and degradation of urban life' in Mexico City Á/ with a population larger than the whole of Central America Á/ city finds its counterpart in the ritual elaboration of death through public commemorations ('Day of the Death'), the apparent fatalism of urban residents in the face of grave risk, and the emergence of more predatory and violence forms of criminality. 23 Cities suffer seemingly irreparable harm when they become embedded in the global circuits of the international trade in illegal drugs. In a short essay, Don Robotham traces the ongoing tragedy of Kinston, (Jamaica) as a anemic city starved of resources and abandoned by those with the financial means to migrate elsewhere. 24 In a particularly compelling account of random violence and death, Mary Roldan tells the story of Medellı ´n, a once quiet city in the mountains of Columbia that descended downward into a spasm of violence that spiraled out of control. In a strange twist that reflected the scope of urban collapse, a macabre 'death industry' developed around the random killings, where local entrepreneurs Á/ with 'assembly-line precision' Á/ were able to arrange '''non-stop' service for a potential victim [of violence] from massacre to burial in one fell swoop', including the provision of everything from flowers to candy, and grave-diggers to elaborate crypts and mausoleums. Week-end funerals assumed a 'perversely festive air' as friends, families, and comrades of the deceased flooded the cemeteries, 'bringing food and drink with them, playing the dead cartel soldier's favorite heavy metal music on imposing loud speakers, writing notes and leaving offerings before the graves of their disappeared parches [buddies]'. 25 Most of the case studies in the Wounded cities collection concern devastation caused by war, civil strife, and sectarian violence. The essay by Dominc Bryan details the transformation of Belfast into a polarized city, divided along sectarian lines and characterized by partitions, barriers, and walls. 26 Similarly, Aseel Sawalha chronicles how the bitter Lebanese civil war (1975 Á/1991) destroyed Beirut, a thriving, cosmopolitan banking and commercial center, and a city once considered the 'Paris' or the 'jewel' of the Middle East. Ironically, the launching of the massive reconstruction effort to rebuild the city center along modernist lines reproduced the very symptoms of urban disorder it was designed to eliminate: informality, illegality, blighted landscapes, and degraded infrastructure. 27 Like most edited volumes, Wounded cities suffers from unevenness. Some essays were more informative, provocative, and better written than others. At times, some contributors seemed at pains to impose the 'wounded' metaphor onto their otherwise conventional narrative accounts of particular cities. The limitations of essay-length forced the authors into the unenviable choice of balancing broad generalizations with precise empirical detail, sometimes with mixed results. While Susser and Schneider seem to suggest that cities can indeed recuperate from trauma and devastation, they actually provide little evidence where the rejuvenation of cities to the benefit of the urban poor has taken place in the recent past.

245

Theorizing cities under stress improvement projects targeting impoverished neighbourhoods. In a provocative contribution, Claudio Lomnitz seeks to make sense of the urban crisis of Mexico City through the metaphor of death. He suggests that the 'depreciation and degradation of urban life' in Mexico City Á/ with a population larger than the whole of Central America Á/ city finds its counterpart in the ritual elaboration of death through public commemorations ('Day of the Death'), the apparent fatalism of urban residents in the face of grave risk, and the emergence of more predatory and violence forms of criminality. 23 Cities suffer seemingly irreparable harm when they become embedded in the global circuits of the international trade in illegal drugs. In a short essay, Don Robotham traces the ongoing tragedy of Kinston, (Jamaica) as a anemic city starved of resources and abandoned by those with the financial means to migrate elsewhere. 24 In a particularly compelling account of random violence and death, Mary Roldan tells the story of Medellı ´n, a once quiet city in the mountains of Columbia that descended downward into a spasm of violence that spiraled out of control. In a strange twist that reflected the scope of urban collapse, a macabre 'death industry' developed around the random killings, where local entrepreneurs Á/ with 'assembly-line precision' Á/ were able to arrange '''non-stop' service for a potential victim [of violence] from massacre to burial in one fell swoop', including the provision of everything from flowers to candy, and grave-diggers to elaborate crypts and mausoleums. Week-end funerals assumed a 'perversely festive air' as friends, families, and comrades of the deceased flooded the cemeteries, 'bringing food and drink with them, playing the dead cartel soldier's favorite heavy metal music on imposing loud speakers, writing notes and leaving offerings before the graves of their disappeared parches [buddies]'. 25 Most of the case studies in the Wounded cities collection concern devastation caused by war, civil strife, and sectarian violence. The essay by Dominc Bryan details the transformation of Belfast into a polarized city, divided along sectarian lines and characterized by partitions, barriers, and walls. 26 Similarly, Aseel Sawalha chronicles how the bitter Lebanese civil war (1975 Á/1991) destroyed Beirut, a thriving, cosmopolitan banking and commercial center, and a city once considered the 'Paris' or the 'jewel' of the Middle East. Ironically, the launching of the massive reconstruction effort to rebuild the city center along modernist lines reproduced the very symptoms of urban disorder it was designed to eliminate: informality, illegality, blighted landscapes, and degraded infrastructure. 27 Like most edited volumes, Wounded cities suffers from unevenness. Some essays were more informative, provocative, and better written than others. At times, some contributors seemed at pains to impose the 'wounded' metaphor onto their otherwise conventional narrative accounts of particular cities. The limitations of essay-length forced the authors into the unenviable choice of balancing broad generalizations with precise empirical detail, sometimes with mixed results. While Susser and Schneider seem to suggest that cities can indeed recuperate from trauma and devastation, they actually provide little evidence where the rejuvenation of cities to the benefit of the urban poor has taken place in the recent past.

Suburbia and splintering urbanism

The primary aim of Popular culture in the age of white flight is to explore how social identities are situated within spatial practices. In seeking to understand the creation of a culture of suburban whiteness in Los Angeles after World War II, Eric Avila takes 'race' and 'space' as his primary categories of analysis. Through an examination of such seemingly disconnected iconic symbols of popular culture as film noir, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, and the extensive network of freeways, he traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness that coalesced around a inchoate conception of 'white identity' in Los Angeles in the post-World War II period.

The emergence of the so-called 'L.A. School' of contemporary urban studies has triggered a great deal of debate over the status of Los Angeles as a paradigmatic exemplar of a new kind of postmodern urbanity. 28 By arguing against the exceptionality of Los Angeles, Avila suggests that what we gain from analyzing this place can help us in making sense of other cities. 'Like all cities, Los Angeles maintains a distinct identity that materialized under a unique set of political, economic, social, and geographic circumstances', he contends. 'And yet, to greater and lesser degrees, the city also mirrors larger processes that shape the development of cities in the United States, the West, and beyond'. 29 Suburbanization is a mode of urbanization in which cities extend outward rather than upward to accommodate the locational appetites of largely middle-class homeowners, retailers, and real estate developers. In Los Angeles as elsewhere, the suburbs represented a new sociospatial order that promised relief from the disquieting anxieties of modern urban life: congestion and overcrowding, noise, pollution, anonymity, promiscuity, crime, and ethnic (and racial) diversity. 30 Postwar suburbanization sanctioned the formation of a new racial geography that reinforced, to an even greater degree, the spatial contrast between white and black lives. [START_REF] Avila | Popular culture in the age of white flight[END_REF] On a broader scale, mass suburbanization rekindled latent desires for a sanitized social order that revolved around on class harmony, middle-class respectability, and racial homogeneity.

Avila links seemingly unrelated cultural markers Á/ Hollywood and film noir, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and the freeway grid Á/ as the symbolic embodiments of the 'new' Los Angles that took shape in the decades following World War II. 32 This disparate collection of 'spatial fantasies', as Avila calls them, asserted a normative vision of what a city should (and should not) be. Through its visual rendition of film noir and science fiction, Hollywood dramatized the 'blight' and decay that afflicted the urban core of Los Angeles during the 1940s. As white flight and deindustrialization denuded the physical and social landscape of the inner city, Hollywood marketed spectacles of urban decline as mass entertainment. Set amid the littered streets, dark alleys, and decaying buildings of the downtown, film noir represented the postwar crisis of the public city through its dystopian narratives of social disorder and psychological malaise. 33 If film noir dramatized the postwar crisis of the public city with its menacing images of urban disorder and chaos, then Disneyland embodied the utopian longings of the new white suburbanites. Through its emphasis on race as a central 'theme', its

Suburbia and splintering urbanism

The primary aim of Popular culture in the age of white flight is to explore how social identities are situated within spatial practices. In seeking to understand the creation of a culture of suburban whiteness in Los Angeles after World War II, Eric Avila takes 'race' and 'space' as his primary categories of analysis. Through an examination of such seemingly disconnected iconic symbols of popular culture as film noir, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, and the extensive network of freeways, he traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness that coalesced around a inchoate conception of 'white identity' in Los Angeles in the post-World War II period.

The emergence of the so-called 'L.A. School' of contemporary urban studies has triggered a great deal of debate over the status of Los Angeles as a paradigmatic exemplar of a new kind of postmodern urbanity. 28 By arguing against the exceptionality of Los Angeles, Avila suggests that what we gain from analyzing this place can help us in making sense of other cities. 'Like all cities, Los Angeles maintains a distinct identity that materialized under a unique set of political, economic, social, and geographic circumstances', he contends. 'And yet, to greater and lesser degrees, the city also mirrors larger processes that shape the development of cities in the United States, the West, and beyond'. 29 Suburbanization is a mode of urbanization in which cities extend outward rather than upward to accommodate the locational appetites of largely middle-class homeowners, retailers, and real estate developers. In Los Angeles as elsewhere, the suburbs represented a new sociospatial order that promised relief from the disquieting anxieties of modern urban life: congestion and overcrowding, noise, pollution, anonymity, promiscuity, crime, and ethnic (and racial) diversity. 30 Postwar suburbanization sanctioned the formation of a new racial geography that reinforced, to an even greater degree, the spatial contrast between white and black lives. [START_REF] Avila | Popular culture in the age of white flight[END_REF] On a broader scale, mass suburbanization rekindled latent desires for a sanitized social order that revolved around on class harmony, middle-class respectability, and racial homogeneity.

Avila links seemingly unrelated cultural markers Á/ Hollywood and film noir, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and the freeway grid Á/ as the symbolic embodiments of the 'new' Los Angles that took shape in the decades following World War II. 32 This disparate collection of 'spatial fantasies', as Avila calls them, asserted a normative vision of what a city should (and should not) be. Through its visual rendition of film noir and science fiction, Hollywood dramatized the 'blight' and decay that afflicted the urban core of Los Angeles during the 1940s. As white flight and deindustrialization denuded the physical and social landscape of the inner city, Hollywood marketed spectacles of urban decline as mass entertainment. Set amid the littered streets, dark alleys, and decaying buildings of the downtown, film noir represented the postwar crisis of the public city through its dystopian narratives of social disorder and psychological malaise. 33 If film noir dramatized the postwar crisis of the public city with its menacing images of urban disorder and chaos, then Disneyland embodied the utopian longings of the new white suburbanites. Through its emphasis on race as a central 'theme', its regimented ordering of spatial relations, its staunch insistence on family values and wholesome entertainment, and its privileging of a mythical, small-town, Midwestern sensibility, Disneyland 'repudiated the slums of the noir imagination, supplied a usable past, present, and future for Southern California's transient and mobile population, and modeled popular idealizations of race and space in the age of white flight'. 34 As a counterpoint to the urbanoid wretchedness of Coney Island, Disneyland symbolized the 'retreat from the public culture of New Deal liberalism' and instead warmly embraced a privatized, suburban ideal of conspicuous consumption. 35 In the confident view of city officials, the erection of Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine Á/ involving the eviction of a settled Chicano community Á/ demonstrated the regenerative possibilities of modernist-inspired urban renewal. As a substitute for urban streetcars, the vast network of new freeways underscored the centrality of highway construction for suburban growth and development. Beginning in the early 1950s, freeway building constituted the largest public works project in the history of Los Angeles. Carried out by a phalanx of 'faceless bureaucrats' in the Division of Highways, this massive undertaking, which involved the physical erasure of numerous neighborhoods, lacked a single leading official Á/ a Baron Haussmann or Robert Moses, for example Á/ that 'the public could either venerate as a hero of progress or despise as an executioner of urban communities'. 36 In a masterful tour de force , Avila insightfully identities film noir, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and the vast freeway grid as cultural expressions of both the sociospatial transformation of Los Angeles in the post-World War II period in general, and the emergence of suburbanism as a way of life, in particular. As he points out, investigating these expressions of popular culture 'offers a glimpse into the more subtle interplay of conflict, contestation, and even consensus', thereby permitting a much more nuanced analytic approach than that which informs much of the historiography of the distinct brand of (sub)urbanism' that engulfed Southern California after World War II. 37 Avila argues that these spatial practices, taken together, engendered a growing awareness and consciousness of race, or to put it precisely, that they produced a 'culture of suburban whiteness'. 38 Yet while I find his argument provocative and believable, I do not find it convincing. I think that he allows association of these cultural markers with racial formation to substitute for a causal analysis that accounts for the construction of a self-conscious 'white suburban identity'. What he fails to do, in my estimation, is to adequately explain how and why, in his words, 'popular culture in the age of white flight codified the formation of a white suburban identity that encompassed the aspirations of diverse groups pursuing the fruits of postwar consumer affluence'. 39 In my view, for Avila's argument to be persuasive, he must more firmly establish the causal links between popular culture in the age of white flight with the formation of a distinctive 'white suburban identity', and clarify with greater precision how 'whiteness' as a distinctive racial identity became 'naturalized' as the normative ideal for the white racial formation that evolved in tandem with suburban expansion in Los Angeles after World War II.

247

Theorizing cities under stress regimented ordering of spatial relations, its staunch insistence on family values and wholesome entertainment, and its privileging of a mythical, small-town, Midwestern sensibility, Disneyland 'repudiated the slums of the noir imagination, supplied a usable past, present, and future for Southern California's transient and mobile population, and modeled popular idealizations of race and space in the age of white flight'. 34 As a counterpoint to the urbanoid wretchedness of Coney Island, Disneyland symbolized the 'retreat from the public culture of New Deal liberalism' and instead warmly embraced a privatized, suburban ideal of conspicuous consumption. 35 In the confident view of city officials, the erection of Dodger Stadium at Chavez Ravine Á/ involving the eviction of a settled Chicano community Á/ demonstrated the regenerative possibilities of modernist-inspired urban renewal. As a substitute for urban streetcars, the vast network of new freeways underscored the centrality of highway construction for suburban growth and development. Beginning in the early 1950s, freeway building constituted the largest public works project in the history of Los Angeles. Carried out by a phalanx of 'faceless bureaucrats' in the Division of Highways, this massive undertaking, which involved the physical erasure of numerous neighborhoods, lacked a single leading official Á/ a Baron Haussmann or Robert Moses, for example Á/ that 'the public could either venerate as a hero of progress or despise as an executioner of urban communities'. 36 In a masterful tour de force , Avila insightfully identities film noir, Disneyland, Dodger Stadium, and the vast freeway grid as cultural expressions of both the sociospatial transformation of Los Angeles in the post-World War II period in general, and the emergence of suburbanism as a way of life, in particular. As he points out, investigating these expressions of popular culture 'offers a glimpse into the more subtle interplay of conflict, contestation, and even consensus', thereby permitting a much more nuanced analytic approach than that which informs much of the historiography of the distinct brand of (sub)urbanism' that engulfed Southern California after World War II. 37 Avila argues that these spatial practices, taken together, engendered a growing awareness and consciousness of race, or to put it precisely, that they produced a 'culture of suburban whiteness'. 38 Yet while I find his argument provocative and believable, I do not find it convincing. I think that he allows association of these cultural markers with racial formation to substitute for a causal analysis that accounts for the construction of a self-conscious 'white suburban identity'. What he fails to do, in my estimation, is to adequately explain how and why, in his words, 'popular culture in the age of white flight codified the formation of a white suburban identity that encompassed the aspirations of diverse groups pursuing the fruits of postwar consumer affluence'. 39 In my view, for Avila's argument to be persuasive, he must more firmly establish the causal links between popular culture in the age of white flight with the formation of a distinctive 'white suburban identity', and clarify with greater precision how 'whiteness' as a distinctive racial identity became 'naturalized' as the normative ideal for the white racial formation that evolved in tandem with suburban expansion in Los Angeles after World War II.

Unsettled cityscapes

The approach to understanding cities that characterizes all three books under review is what Lynn Lees has called 'urban biography', or the tracing of a specific theme (or closely related set of themes) in one city at a time. Rather than treating cities as mere instances of generic 'city types', these three studies seek to uncover the historical specificity of particular cities. This narrowing of the focus for research reflects the current skepticism with the explanatory powers of grand, macro-historical models and their 'universalising' claims Á/ such as the Chicago School of urban sociology, Marxian economics, Braudelian theories of the longue dure ´e , and the like, which reached their intellectual zenith in the 1980s Á/ to account for the historical peculiarities of urban transformation. By turning away from grand theorizing of macro-historical explanation and embracing instead interpretive approaches that take seriously the connection between materiality and meaning, these three studies have focused attention on trying to grasp, whether implicitly or explicitly, the impact of global processes on small-scale social life in urban settings. 40 What these three books have in common is their understanding of cities as 'representational' spaces, that is, cities as imagined places, as conveyers of meaning, and as iconic symbols of normative ideals. They also share the view of the city as palimpsest: a multilayered space where, at any given moment traces of an older city coexist with embryonic signs of a newer one about to come into existence. All are theoretically informed rather than theoretically driven accounts of urban life. Put specifically, they all seem to agree that general theories, pitched at high levels of abstraction, fail to grasp the historical specificities of urban transformation. 41 Finally, these books attest to the growing interest and importance of geographical themes in the analysis of urban life. Each in their useful and provocative ways, they explore how the use of urban space, attachments to place, and sites of memory enable us to think more clearly about, as Stephen Legg puts it, 'the presentness of the past'. 42

Notes

Unsettled cityscapes

The approach to understanding cities that characterizes all three books under review is what Lynn Lees has called 'urban biography', or the tracing of a specific theme (or closely related set of themes) in one city at a time. Rather than treating cities as mere instances of generic 'city types', these three studies seek to uncover the historical specificity of particular cities. This narrowing of the focus for research reflects the current skepticism with the explanatory powers of grand, macro-historical models and their 'universalising' claims Á/ such as the Chicago School of urban sociology, Marxian economics, Braudelian theories of the longue dure ´e , and the like, which reached their intellectual zenith in the 1980s Á/ to account for the historical peculiarities of urban transformation. By turning away from grand theorizing of macro-historical explanation and embracing instead interpretive approaches that take seriously the connection between materiality and meaning, these three studies have focused attention on trying to grasp, whether implicitly or explicitly, the impact of global processes on small-scale social life in urban settings. 40 What these three books have in common is their understanding of cities as 'representational' spaces, that is, cities as imagined places, as conveyers of meaning, and as iconic symbols of normative ideals. They also share the view of the city as palimpsest: a multilayered space where, at any given moment traces of an older city coexist with embryonic signs of a newer one about to come into existence. All are theoretically informed rather than theoretically driven accounts of urban life. Put specifically, they all seem to agree that general theories, pitched at high levels of abstraction, fail to grasp the historical specificities of urban transformation. 41 Finally, these books attest to the growing interest and importance of geographical themes in the analysis of urban life. Each in their useful and provocative ways, they explore how the use of urban space, attachments to place, and sites of memory enable us to think more clearly about, as Stephen Legg puts it, 'the presentness of the past'. 42

Notes 1 The

 1 classical statement on the city as image is Kevin Lynch, The image of the city (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1960). 2 Podalsky, Specular city , pp. 1 Á/21.

3 Ida

 3 Susser and Jane Schneider, 'Wounded cities: destruction and reconstruction in a globalized world', in Schneider and Susser, Wounded cities , p. 1.

Theorizing cities under stress

Theorizing cities under stress


Richard Powell

Rene ´e

Hulan Montreal

Northern cultures: myths, geographies and representational practices

 Although such praise could be couched as colonial nostalgia over the failure of metropolitan novelists to compete with the narratives of the erstwhile empire, 4 a renewed statement of interest in Canadian culture was still evident.

However, although the three narratives all deal with families with Canadian associations, only Carol Shields's meditation on the process of writing in Unless actually circulates through Canadian landscapes. Moreover, not one of the three authors was

born in Canada, and that, according to critic Eva-Marie Kro ¨ller, tempered celebrations through the launch of 'an intense investigation of how to determine the ''Canadianness'' of a writer'. [START_REF] Kro ¨ller | Introduction[END_REF] Perhaps Germaine Greer's cruel dismissal of Rohinton Mistry's Family matters on BBC Television was rather too representative of external opinion: 'It's a Canadian book Á/ a Canadian book about India Á/ what could be more boring!' [START_REF] Henighan | When words deny the world[END_REF] In Montreal, whilst much of the world press were concerned with accusations of plagiarism by Martel from the work of the Jewish Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar, 7 despite his having been born in Spain, as the son of distinguished Que ´be ´cois poet Emile Martel, Yann was attacked by inde´pendantistes as an assimile´for choosing to write in English. 8 What was unfortunate, according to many Canadian critics, was that a national literature was beginning to abandon its idiom just as it was achieving international recognition for a 'distinctive literary voice'. 9 Although some Canadian novelists were becoming widely successful, commentators feared that this was being achieved by linking Canada to broader stories of diaspora and migration. As Stephen Henighan put it, novelists should be instead presenting stories that engage local 'histories and realities', what he termed 'writing in Canadian'. 10 This diversion into the politics of contemporary Canadian fiction highlights, of course, the problematic of postcolonial literatures in English and French. What are the consequences for 'national' literatures when limited degrees of indigenous selfdetermination occur concurrently with favourable immigration policies and official bilingualism, as they have in Canada? Under the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988, should Canadian literature be developing or maintaining its own national traditions, whatever they might be, or should proponents focus on achieving honours from metropolitan cultures? I commence with this account of the events of October 2002, as the two books under review, both published by McGill-Queens University Press that same year, come into direct contact with these questions, by producing studies of (perhaps) the broadest theme in the Canadian national imaginary, that of nordicity .

It is very difficult to define what is meant by Canadian nordicity. It is best summarized as the perceived ways in which the climate, ecology and topology of northern Canada affect the habits of mind of the different cultures of the polity. A variegated number of Canadian scholars, including Harold Innis, Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood, have been concerned with the importance of the impact of Canadian northern landscapes in different ways. [START_REF] Innis | The fur trade in Canada: an introduction to Canadian economic history[END_REF] For many Canadian intellectuals, northernness has been the torque to dissipate the torpor surrounding discussions of national unity. Indeed, the political philosopher John Ralston Saul, consort to the incumbent Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, uses the northern environment as the keystone of his tripartite Canada formed from interactions between Anglophones, Francophones, and First Nations. [START_REF] Saul | Reflections of a Siamese twin: Canada at the end of the twentieth century[END_REF] It should be obvious from the outset, therefore, that to discuss the north is to consider the heart of Canadian cultures. Is the idea of the Canadian north a founding tradition to be rehabilitated, or is it a myth that has facilitated discrimination towards Canadians from non-European backgrounds? As Sherrill Grace puts it in her Preface to Canada and the idea of north , her 'book is about Canada' and results from her 'love for and desire to understand this stubborn, complex, infuriating place'. [START_REF] Grace | Canada and the idea of north[END_REF] More interestingly, in fundamentally conflicting ways, these books provide sophisticated accounts that turn on issues of national myth, representational practices and performances, and geography and environment. In doing so, both authors have much to say about Canadian imaginations of geographical interest.

Myths of north

Sherrill Grace presents a wide-ranging and purposefully interdisciplinary account of the role of nordicity in Canadian imaginations. Her 'fundamental premise' is that Canadians 'are constantly imagining and constructing Canada-as-North'. 14 The approach adopted is broadly Foucauldian, and involves the analysis of ideas of north in constant flux across broad fields of endeavour, resulting in what she terms the 'discursive formation of North'. 15 As Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Grace provides succinct accounts of the roles of fiction, poetry, stage and theatre, as well as cartographic practices and indigenous oratures (performances of oral traditions), in constructing her argument.

The result is impressive and lavishly illustrated. The book is obviously the result of at least a decade of scholarship. Moreover, Grace marshals this diverse material in order to argue for the need for fundamental unity of the diverse cultures of the Canadian polity. Korean-born artists, Que ´be ´cois fiction and Inuit elders all come in for favourable commentary when they illustrate how the north is a common theme for all Canadians.

For Grace, the imagining of Canada-as-North includes all attempts at repudiation of or resistance to the perception of Canadian nordicity. Rene ´e Hulan's Northern experience and the myths of Canadian culture is very much an attempt at disavowal. As Hulan puts it, starkly, 'I believe, on the contrary, that the north has little if anything to do with being Canadian today.' [START_REF] Hulan | Northern experience and the myths of Canadian culture[END_REF] Hulan is antagonistic to the accounts of nordicity by Canadian intellectuals, of which Grace is the most recent. For Hulan, any articulation of an idea of north as the basis for a 'national culture . . . is a myth both in the sense of an untruth, or false notion, and in the sense of a story that articulates a specific worldview'. 17 The notion of the north, Hulan argues, has acted as an exclusionary force to both 'new Canadians' (recent immigrants, often from non-European origins) and the very oldest Canadians (indigenous peoples or 'First Nations'). As such, the 'focus on the nordicity of national identity is part of a broader tendency in Canadian cultural history that seeks to unify and to shape collective experience and, in so doing, to smooth over differences'. 18

Northern geographies

The idea of Canada-as-North is based on geography. The post-Confederation nationalists of the last three decades of the nineteenth century, such as the Canada First movement, placed the overcoming of northern environments at the centre of a modern national identity. Ever since, Hulan argues, both 'the preoccupation with national unity and the relationship between national identity and the environment' have been perennial in Canadian history. 19 In a settler dominion inhabited by diverse aboriginal groups, Canadian nationalists were never able to make a successful argument for an organic connection with the land that is endemic to Romantic nationalism. Climate and ecology, Hulan argues, were all that Canadians could hold in common. For Canadian nationalists therefore, 'the environment holds the transformative potential to condition and form a distinct cultural identity, to facilitate acculturation, and thus to bring political unity'. 20 This 'geographical determinism', as Hulan puts it, is a common theme in Canadian scholarship. 21 Grace takes a different tack with 'the equally important domain of geography'. 22 As well as devoting significant space to the critical histories of cartography initiated by Brian Harley, Grace draws on Wreford Watson's geographies of mind, and stresses that the geography of North 'is a fascinating site for competing, shifting, ideologically invested rhetorics and cartographies'. 23 Some of these aspects of northern geographies might be familiar to some cultural geographers from the work of Rob Shields. [START_REF] Shields | Places on the margin: alternative geographies of modernity[END_REF] But Hulan's debt to Shields notwithstanding, what is most striking from both accounts is the degree of geographical sophistication and awareness of Canadian literary and cultural critics. Perhaps due to the work of geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin, whose attempts at quantifying nordicity and instituting nordology (the study of the north) at the centre of Canadian institutional geographies are widely cited in the academy, cultural criticism in Canada is suffused with geographical metaphors. [START_REF] Hamelin | Nordicite ´canadienne[END_REF] The accounts of High Arctic geografictiones by Calgary's itinerant novelist Aritha Van Herk, and John Moss's notion of geography as the imposition of knowledge over landscape, for example, are only the most recent manifestations of the geographical preoccupation in Canadian thought. [START_REF] Van Herk | Places far from Ellesmere: a geografictione: explorations on site (Red Deer, Alberta[END_REF]

Representations and practices

Moreover, both accounts discuss the roles of representational practices and performances in myths of nordicity. Sherrill Grace stresses the important intertextuality of representations of the Canadian north. By developing a dense argument that juxtaposes Foucault with Bakhtin and Bourdieu, Grace regards the 'social semiotics' of texts as functioning in a 'dynamic, interactive semiosis that is constantly experiencing constraint and resistance over time'. 27 Representations of the Canadian north, like those of Edward Said's Orient, are read , and for Grace this practice entails 'working with signs, [and] manipulating codes', that is, 'the process of social semiotics'. 28 This is illustrated through detailed discussion of Charles Shanly's poem 'The walker of the snow' (1867), and Blair Bruce's famous painting The phantom hunter (1888), both of which rely on the northern Ojibwa and Cree mythology of the Windigo. [START_REF]The Windigo is a mythical figure, usually a lone hunter or trapper, who has been driven mad by the north. Often in the process of becoming Windigo, the hunter will have been driven to cannibalism. The Windigo story thus circulates through numerous indigenous and European narratives of the north, including tales of the Franklin expeditions and Margaret Atwood's Surfacing[END_REF] The theme of ghosts of the north surfaces more forcefully in Grace's discussion of 'Performing north'. 30 This encompasses musical composition, including Glenn Gould's innovative CBC radio play The idea of north (1967), which forms the inspiration for Grace's study, as well as stagings of the north in theatre and indigenous oral traditions. All these performances rely on the presence and circulation of ghosts, including, for Grace, 'the most pervasive ghost of them all: the ghost of Canada itself'. 31 Hulan argues that myths of the north have developed from the collecting of aboriginal stories. It would appear from Hulan, therefore, that the notion of nordicity is in many ways reliant on a yearning for the internal colonies of northern Canada. It is not that Grace is unaware of what she terms the 'destructive and repugnant' aspects of representations of North. 32 On the contrary, following Bhabha and McClintock, she sees the north as having to be colonized by story in order to captured for the Canadian nation. She therefore devotes a chapter to Inuit representations of the north, in order to demonstrate spaces of resistance. [START_REF]an epochal moment of Inuit self-representation and rewriting of the north, could only be granted the briefest mention in a note apparently added[END_REF] However, the analysis here contains a large quotient of theoretical discussion relative to textual examination. Despite Grace's honesty in discussing only Inuit work written in English, one still wonders whether she is merely re-articulating the 'project of colonization through narration', 34 albeit in a more sensitive and sophisticated register.

The analysis of northern representations offered by Rene ´e Hulan is different, and cleaves very close to critical studies of gender and nationalism. For Hulan, narratives of north affirm an imagined 'rugged, individualistic national character', which elevates 'a masculinist, engendered north to the position of ''national consciousness'''. 35 As Hulan persuasively argues, in art by the Group of Seven (for example) the northern landscape becomes 'the blank page from which the presence of all people has been erased'. 36 However, the most interesting and novel element of Hulan's account is based on the importance of ethnography, and thus of practices of mobility, social interaction and dwelling, for representations of the north. For Hulan, there is 'an ethnographic impulse in Canadian literary criticism', by which Canadian literature is treated 'as a body of texts that has something to say about Canadian people'. 37 This has resulted in the spatialization of difference between north and south in Canada. In turn, 'this has led to the assumption that only real first-hand experience in the geographical north authorizes one to speak about the discursive or imagined north'. 38 Hulan argues, therefore, that this has allowed experience (of the north) to become the mainstay of epistemic privilege in discussions of northern spaces. This is much more than Mary Louise Pratt's notion of 'autoethnography', [START_REF] Pratt | autoethnography describes the process by which subjugated peoples choose to represent themselves in ways that engage with colonizing cultures[END_REF] as Hulan argues that the practices of ethnography themselves have influenced future accounts of, say, interactions between indigenous peoples and southern Canadians by novelists, and especially by those who write about the north without ever having travelled there.

The focus of Hulan's study is thus experience and, compared with Grace, she emphasizes ethnographic rather than literary encounters with north. She discusses classical Arctic ethnographies by Franz Boas and Diamond Jenness, and makes a number of criticisms of recent, reflexive travel accounts by authors such as John Moss. According to Hulan, as Arctic travel is 'obscure to most [Canadian] citizens', arguments about the north are 'political escapism'. 40 Even in such accounts where 'non-Inuit tend to depict Inuit as ideal Canadians', for Hulan epistemic violence is still committed on aboriginal peoples by disrupting opportunities for self-articulation. 41 Much of Hulan's critique is persuasive. At the same time, she herself has not only not undertaken any ethnography; she appears never to have travelled north. 42 Her accounts of the difficulties writers have in struggling to represent personal experiences and social interactions ring hollow at times. Whilst the appropriation of voice and authority of personal ordeal are always problematic in ethnography, it is important not to neglect the analytic power that can result from the concomitant reflexive anxieties and physical hardships of such practices.

Conclusions

It is difficult to find much at fault in these accounts. At times Grace struggles to integrate discussions of discourse theory or semiotics with those of specific texts. A more significant structural problem with Grace is that reliance upon discursive formations means that every mention of north is grist for the critic's mill. Thus the study is absolutely comprehensive but occasionally a little staid. In contrast to this discussion of every representational practice associated with northern Canada, Hulan's account still bears the hallmarks of the PhD dissertation from which it is derived. [START_REF] Hulan | Representing the Canadian north : stories of gender, race, and nation[END_REF] At times breathless, at times leaving the reader wanting more development of points, and certainly less erudite than Grace, Hulan is able to argue forcefully for iconoclasm in respect of Canada's supposed national traditions. Not only is she cynical about 'the cult of nordicity', 44 she argues that all '''Canadian culture'' is a collection of myths'. [START_REF] Desbiens | Hulan tends to stress these differences at the expense of certain commonalities, and admits to ignoring the north in Que ´be ´cois nationalism. For a geographical approach to Quebec nationalism[END_REF] This is very much Á/to adapt a joke once made by philosopher Susan Haack Á/a young person's book, but it is all the better for it. [START_REF] Haack | Deviant logic, fuzzy logic: beyond the formalism[END_REF] It is interesting that Hulan argues that the 'focus of Canadian attention seems to turn northward specifically at moments of intense nationalist feeling', as the reconfiguration of the polity occurred with the creation of the new territory of Nunavut on 1 April 1999. 47 Grace concludes that Nunavut provides an opportunity for returning the north to Canada and thus for bringing Canadians back together. For Grace, 'now, more than ever before', 48 Canadians must acknowledge their economic dependence on northern resources and the present and potential impacts of climatic and environmental change in the circumpolar Arctic. As Grace argues, Canadians 'will not change Canada by jettisoning the idea of north but by interpolating new voices into the dialogue'. 49 Thus she proposes 'the Magnetic North thesis', which endorses ideas of nordicity as 'practical, exigent realities', but which allows that 'the magnetism of North can attract (is irresistible to) everyone who lives, or comes to live, in Canada'. 50 Ultimately, the tensions between these two accounts of Canada and nordicity come down to competing national imaginations. The myth of North is reliant on the question of Canada. If diasporic novelists can be accepted as successful Canadians, then new Canadian voices can be intercalated into ideas of North. This is not only an issue for Canadian literary imaginations. It is imperative for the sustenance of numerous Canadian environments and livelihoods.


reviews in brief Geografia. By Franco Farinelli. Turin: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, Filosofia. 2003. 237 pp. £16.50 paper. ISBN 88 06 1620 6.

Geografia : the title is biblically simple. Its subtitle could have been: 'the rise and fall of cartographic reason'. The author is one of the leaders of contemporary Italian geography and the book is published in a renowned collection of contemporary philosophy. The sum of all this is a book containing the obsessions and creative flashes of Franco Farinelli. Those familiar with his work have been (often impatiently) awaiting the arrival of this very book for some time now.

The readers of Geografia will not be disappointed: it is a great book. One of those works that you pass on to friends and colleagues with the excitement felt when offering a rare present. Its overarching theme is Farinelli's main obsession: cartographic reason. The style of Geografia is quasi-aphoristic: it is composed of 98 chapters, each of them exactly two pages long. Such a layout is of course self-consciously autoreferential: the mathematical equivalence of the chapters mirrors the cartographic grid as if telling the reader: 'look how difficult it is to escape from Flatland.'

Reading Geografia may prove at the same time very easy and very difficult. The book manages to be at the same time very abstract (when Farinelli, for instance, shows the continuity between the triangulation of the surveyors and the semiotic triangle) and very concrete (when the author summarizes in a few pages the structure of traditional Italian landscape). In general, though, the abundance of examples and anecdotes (my favourite being when the author shows the homology between Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata and Biagio Rossetti's plan for the city of Ferrara, pp. 140 Á/41) offer an efficient helping hand into the complex strands of thought of the author.

The book is organized in three parts: the pyramid and the triangle , dealing with the origins of geography and its role as a matrix of modern Western thought; the landscape and the icon , dealing with different arguments revolving around vision and images (landscape as an idea and as a strategy, especially in German geography, the impoverishment of geographical thought after Ritter and Ratzel or the illusion of a cartography of the human genome); and city, map, space , dealing . . . precisely with what the title promises and also with the challenges of a geography of informational space.

The thesis running through these four parts is, on the one hand, that modern Western history can be considered as the moulding of the world according to a cartographic logic and, on the other, that this logic has become obsolete for the understanding and organization of the world in present times. The map is defined by the author as 'a formidable ontological device, a silent tool for the implicit Á/ and therefore unreflexive Á/ definition of the nature of things in the world' (p. 85). Farinelli leads us through the labyrinthien origins of this device, from Homer to Hippodamos and Alberti. A device through which the world is 'curarized': movement is frozen into solid matter, process into form, people into things. Geography as a discipline has been, Farinelli argues, of critical importance in this 'mappification' of our ways of thinking, and consequently for the transformation of the material world.

The thesis itself will not surprise readers of Geografia familiar with work in the history of geography and cartography of the past two decades. What is dazzling, however, is how the author moves smoothly, in the spaces defined by his rigid cartographic grid, from Hobbes to Hippodamos, from Humboldt to Alberti, from Dolly to Mike Davis or from the Italian soccer star Alessandro Totti to . . . Anaximander, creating unexpected and illuminating relations.

Too enthusiastic this review? Okay, let's come with a critique then. Franco Farinelli remains very much the heir of German phenomenology. This is manifest in his (Heideggerian) passion for origins and etymology as well as in his critique of modernity as a disenchantment of the world. I sometimes wonder, however, in the company of a few others, whether we have ever really been modern, if the world was ever really disenchanted and, therefore, if the critique of modernity should not be replaced (or at least complemented) by the careful analysis of the heterogeneous associations that we day by day fabricate with pieces of beings and technology, nature and culture, symbols and stones, maps and subversions of the maps. Because of this 'German idealist' positioning Geografia does not completely live up to one of its proclaimed ambitions: 'to be a first step towards the only possible global geography: that of senses, viewpoints and models of the world' (p. 37). Farinelli's book is more often a brilliant critique than a proposal.

This being said, for anyone only remotely interested in the discourse of geography, reading Geografia is a constant jubilation. This book explores four moments in the changing architectural expression of the relationship between nation and nature in the United States: the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of conservation; the economic depression of the 1930s and ideals of a return to nature; the atomic age in the aftermath of the Second World War associated with hubris and paranoia; and ecopolitics in the 1970s and movements for alternative living. For each moment the authors focus on

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# 2005 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 10.1191/1474474005eu333xx cultural geographies 2005 12: 379 Á/382