Abstract
As explained in their introduction, the title of Sonda, Coletta, and Gabbi’s volume, Urban Plots, Organizing Cities, is meant to invoke the multiple meanings of “plot” as a narrative structure, a geographical area, and the process of charting space. To explain this understanding of cities, they describe urban space as defined through a trialectic that they term “The Urban Gestalt” (p. 4), consisting of the dynamic interplay between “narratives,” “practices,” and “artifacts.” By applying this framework, they hope to further their overall aim of bringing together urban and organization studies in an approach centered on the idea of the urban as processual—composed not so much by a particular kind of built environment as by the open-ended social relations that organize urban space and the ever-changing material aspects of that organization. The result of their efforts is a thoughtfully constructed, engaging collection that brings together qualitative work done in a range of urban contexts—including cities in Italy, France, Germany, and Colombia—by authors with backgrounds that include sociology, urban planning, history, and literature. On the whole, the editors are successful in their aim of creating a book that “provides a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary understanding which may be helpful in addressing urban complexity” (p. 5).
The book is organized such that there are thematic links between consecutive chapters allowing for a sense of linear continuity, despite the heterogeneous empirical foci of the various authors. The first two chapters deal most explicitly with artifacts in the built environment. In Chapter 1, “The Graphical Performation of a Public Space: The Subway Signs and their Scripts,” Denis and Pontille examine a new system of signs installed to assist riders of the Parisian subway system. They understand these signs as “organizational artefacts” (p. 13) that order space graphically, with the aim of “identify[ing] the kind of readers this new graphical organization of subway space supposes” (ibid.). In their analysis, they identify several scripts that structure relationships between riders and the subway system—including riders as information seekers, route planners, and problem solvers—and examine the embodied practices required by each of these narratives. Their discussion bridges linguistic theory and actor-network theory, presenting a compelling approach for researching mobility in urban space. Following this, Brighenti’s discussion in Chapter 2, “The Wall and the Mobile Phone: Organizing, Governing, Resisting,” also addresses the interactions between material artifacts and urban social practices such as mobility. She argues for the need to develop an “analytic scheme to address the materialities, functionalities and affectivities of walls” (p. 26), and outlines several areas of investigation that might make up such an approach. While less developed than her discussion of walls, Brighenti also discusses possibilities for a similar set of questions about how mobile telephones and other forms of “new media” shape and are shaped by urban space, particularly in terms of how they affect the movement of people and information within cities.
Several of the chapters address intersections between organizational practices and discursive representations of space in local conflicts over urban redevelopment projects. In the book’s third chapter, “Redefining the Right to the City: Representations of Public Space as Part of the Urban Struggles,” Stavrides examines the struggle among different groups over plans to tear down an older public housing development in a neighborhood of Athens, Greece, in order to make way for privatization. Like Brighenti’s discussion of flows of people within cities, Stavrides focuses on how local residents and their supporters mobilized a discourse that emphasized the potential of the porous public spaces characteristic of the targeted neighborhood for breaking down divisions among different groups. Stavrides thus argues for an approach to progressive urban planning that focuses on pores, or thresholds, between groups rather than on identity-based claims to public space by members from any one particular group. In Chapter 4, “Hybrid Cities: Narratives of Urban Development and Popular Culture, the Case of Medellín (Colombia),” Acevedo and Carreira look at different narratives about urban development in Medellín, Colombia, in relationship to recent modernization projects introduced by the city’s policy makers. Drawing from the postcolonial concept of hybridization, they discuss ways in which local community members actively reappropriated certain elements of these projects by incorporating local values, traditions, and aesthetic preferences. While their argument might have benefited from more detailed empirical evidence, Acevedo and Carreira’s discussion is illustrative of how ostensibly universal principles of development are reinterpreted and reshaped according to the specific contexts in which they are applied, not only by local elites such as municipal policy makers, but also by the communities targeted by such projects.
Bifulco and Bricocoli also address urban policies as shaped by both top–down and grassroots practices in Chapter 5, “Organizing Urban Space: Tools, Processes and Public Action.” They discuss the redevelopment of a public housing complex in Turin, Italy, focusing on how neighborhood regeneration and facility-upgrading programs made use of an integrated approach to solving disputes that drew together public institutions, private institutions, and local community members. They argue that connections such as those made between the institutions in their case study have the potential to feed back into institutional learning at wider scales and even to alter broader societal relations. This interest in relationships between public and private institutions is similarly addressed by Borghi and Meschiari in Chapter 6, “Public Sphere in Times of Governance: Public Action, Disputed Building and Local Cultural System in a Northern City of Italy”—an analysis of negotiations over the redevelopment of a historically and culturally significant site of a disused foundry in Modena, Italy. Borghi and Meschiari argue for a governmentality approach to theorizing actions of the state in projects involving contested notions of culture and public memory. They also highlight the successful use of participatory decision making and consensus building in their empirical example.
Borghi and Meschiari’s concern with public memory and the meanings of historically significant sites is shared by Grünig in her discussion of East German urban imaginaries in Chapter 7, “Transition, Memory and Narrations in the Urban Space: The Case of East German Cities.” Grünig identifies and explores different conceptualizations of East German urban space as related to different conceptualizations of East German history, noting the centrality of discourses about before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She then turns to an analysis of the city of Leipzig, discussing how museums, public memorials, fictional literature, and architectural aesthetics both reflect and contribute to various discourses about the meanings of “the urban” in East Germany. She explains what is at stake in the construction of these narratives, pointing out that “the question about who is legitimated to remember the [German Democratic Republic] past goes together with the question about who is legitimated to redefine the context of urban life in the present and for the future” (p. 117).
In the eighth and final chapter, “Transforming Spaces: Translation as a Practice that Reveals Changing E-Motional Structures in Space,” Allocca considers the idea of ‘translation’ not just in terms of a move between different languages, but as a creative, affective, and inherently spatial practice that juxtaposes multiple locations and creates complex subjectivities. She explores these ideas through a close analysis of descriptions of urban space in the work of several writers of German transnational literature. Her discussion draws from the work of Deleuze and Lacan as well as from the field of topological mathematics—a range that makes for a rich, though somewhat dense, set of theoretical connections. The inclusion of a chapter on translation and its placement at the end of the book suggests a degree of self-reflection on the part of the editors: all of the contributors discuss research done in non-Anglophone contexts, and all but one are based at institutions in non-English-speaking countries. The difficulties as well as the creative possibilities of translation were almost certainly a fundamental part of putting this collection together.
Urban Plots, Organizing Cities is most likely to appeal to those with an interest in how discursive constructions of urban space relate to negotiations over development projects, particularly in terms of how such projects are interpreted and experienced by the public. The book’s approach is decidedly open ended, seemingly more aimed at generating questions about how planning might be conceptualized and researched as a meaning-making practice rather than at providing definitive analyses of particular empirical examples or charting clear policy directions. Although this open-endedness is one of the book’s strengths, it does present certain shortcomings. While the editors’ claim that the book “has its own plot” (p. 5) generally holds true, this “plot” is occasionally fleeting. For example, the chapters range in terms of the extent to which they engage with the book’s purported goal of bridging urban and organization studies. In addition, while Allocca’s concluding chapter on the spaces of translation does, in some ways, provide a means to reflect on the entire volume, it would have been useful and appropriate for the editors to provide their own concluding comments, perhaps including a more detailed discussion of their own editorial process. Despite these concerns, however, Urban Plots, Organizing Cities is both thought provoking and well conceived.