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Gritty Cities contains a selection of essays from the "Images of
the Urban" Conference held at the University of the Sunshine Coast from 17-19
July, 1997. The editors confess from the outset that this selection
was made from a "far broader range of papers", which I must admit seemed
too much of an invitation to refuse: while reading these essays, I found
myself all too frequently guessing at the principles of selection they had applied. I
make this admission because the thoughts that will be recorded here
regarding what I perceive to be the strengths and weaknesses of this
collection stem from these guesses.
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As it so happens, I vividly remember reading the call for papers
for the "Images of the Urban" Conference early in 1997. Indeed, I contemplated
submitting a paper of my own at the time (drawn from my study in the Cultural
Institutions course here at the University of Queensland). What this means
for my guesswork here is that I believe I am able to make a fairly
educated guess at just how broad that "far broader range of papers" might
have been.
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The list of issues that the conference convenors -- Finch and McConville --
suggested for submission in their call for papers is not matched very
closely by the range of issues covered in the fifteen essays they include
in Gritty Cities. It read as follows: Slums; Grunge; Social
Surveys; Streetspace; Communal Sites; Tourism; Modern Downtowns; Urban
Conservation; Film and Television. Of these nine issues, two (Grunge,
covering "literature and photographs", and Film and Television) provide
the principal focus for eight of the fifteen essays chosen for eventual
publication (including Marshall Berman's keynote, Graeme Davison's public
address, and Finch's own paper). The other seven papers (including
McConville's) focus on urban design and spectacle, from streetscapes to
landmarks, with a knowing eye turned toward the
commercialism underpinning urban growth and design in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries.
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What this means, to put it bluntly, is that the far broader range of papers
(dealing, that is, with slums, social surveys, and the other issues not
covered by the essays included in Finch and McConville's collection)
extends to those that do not coincide directly with the interests of the
editors. Yet I do not want this observation to be construed as a slur on
the editors, since I recognise that personal interest plays a significant
role in editorial practice in general. Indeed, I suggest that the limited
principle of selection which seems to have been used in this collection
may be one of its strengths, if read as representing an attempt to present
a relatively coherent group of essays.
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Clearly, in the shifting terrain (a metaphor I am using delibrately) of
Cultural Studies as a discipline, conferences represent a site in which
divergent voices can come together in one place and time to celebrate this
diversity, but also to affirm or reaffirm their disciplinary ties --
forged through similarities in the objects of study, in methods, and in
theoretical perspectives. In my reading of this collection, Gritty
Cities addresses this need to affirm disciplinary ties, in finding ways
to talk about the urban in Cultural Studies, such that we will be talking
about the same things, using the same language.
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In reflecting upon the conference, the editors state the idea of the
"image" provided the key to the "range of concerns" addressed by
presenters as diverse as "urban specialists" and "others whose primary interest was far
from the urban environment". They add that the "chapters produced here
reflect this range of concerns". By "chapters", I can only assume that
they are referring to the three broad subheadings under which they have
distributed the essays: "re/presenting the city" (with six essays,
including Berman's and Davison's); "walking on the street" (with five
essays, including Finch's); and "learning from landmarks" (with four
essays, including McConville's).
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These three "chapters" provide an interesting (and I suggest unsuccessful)
counterpoint to the two broad groupings under which, as I have
already argued, the essays had been selected for inclusion here. Clearly there are
two essays in the second "chapter" -- Finch's reading of propoganda films and
Brian Morris's reading of the film Falling Down -- which focus upon
representations of the urban, using similar modes of semiotic textual
analysis as those employed in the first six essays. The decision to choose
"streets" and "landmarks" as broad headings in this collection seems,
therefore, to be an attempt to conceal the degree to which the collection
is more directly oriented towards just two sets of interests.
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Where this collection seems to "fall down", perhaps, is just this attempt
to conceal the degree to which the collection is the product of
self-interestedness. The way in which it is packaged is quite telling -- the
cover uses an image inspired by the dime novel or film noir, which would
never suggest to the prospective reader that herein may be contained essays
on (for example) urban design at the turn of the century. Where a
collection of essays is predicated on the study of "Images of the Urban",
then the image<,i> used to frame the collection is important, and I do
not feel that the way in which this book is packaged adequately reflects what
the editors are attempting -- in a disciplinary sense -- to do with these
essays.
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In closing, I suggest that there is much of value in Gritty Cities,
particularly with respect to the study of the ways in which our experience
of urban life is mediated by (or is quite possibly the same as) the way in
which cityscapes are represented in discourses of culture, history,
economy, and politics. Being particular is, I think, the key to reading this
collection usefully. The editors suggest that a pleasing aspect for them
is the "use of scale" in these essays, using the study of the city as "a focus
through which the microstudy and the most abstracted and generalised can be
discussed together". This sense of scale may be obscured, however, by
reading these essays too readily in terms of the categories into which they
have been slotted here, rather than reading each essay on its own terms,
and recognising that it was selected for inclusion here because it addresses
the individual interests of one or other of the editors.
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Details
Lynette Finch and Chris McConville, eds. Gritty Cities. Sydney: Pluto, 1999.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Laurie Johnson. "Gritty Specificities: 'Gritty Cities'." M/C Reviews 29 Sep. 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/gritty.html>.
Chicago style:
Laurie Johnson, "Gritty Specificities: 'Gritty Cities'," M/C Reviews 29 Sep. 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/gritty.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Laurie Johnson. (1999) Gritty specificities: 'Gritty Cities'. M/C Reviews 29 Sep. 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/words/gritty.html> ([your date of access]).
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