Mapping Urban Imaginaries

Jamie Pelling

Co-Presenters: Matthew Spazian, Angela Valentin, Wanda Siqueira

College: College of Liberal Arts

Department: History

Abstract:

We have to imagine cities. The density of people living across and on top of each other, each with their own lives running alongside but almost totally independent of our own, overloads our cognitive processes. Cities present a challenge to human cognition; they push our capacity for co-existence to the limit. To make sense of urban density, we construct elaborate fantasies of urban space and the people who live there. It is this capacity to deal with the overwhelm that Georg Simmel claimed was definitive of the urban subject. In this research, our team addresses the psychic mechanisms people use to make sense of urban environments, investigating the imaginative and fantastical elements through which cities are processed. To do this, we have developed an interdisciplinary methodology that borrows from sociology, history, cultural studies, and the studio arts to re-interpret historical, textual accounts of cities and read them not as perfect, realistic accounts of an urban environment, but instead as an affective and contingent attempt by the author to get their head around the city itself. Taking as our examples Ottoman accounts of London and Anglophone writing on Istanbul, we investigate how urban imaginaries shaped cultural exchange in the late-nineteenth century and develop a series of heuristic techniques that push beyond well-traveled critiques of power, discourse, and materialism. As a result, we are able to shed new light on an historical problem of orientalism in Anglo-Ottoman relations, as well as demonstrate, empirically, the role that imagination, fantasy, and affect plays in description of the urban environment. Finally, we have used technical skills from the fine arts to produce visual depictions drawn from historical source material that highlight the disconnect between our imagination of cities and how they actually are. This research was conducted with funding from an NSF grant with a focus on urban data analytics.