Sadness in Cities (original) (raw)

This book is the outcome of seven seminars under the heading “Heritage as Common(s) – Commons as Heritage" organized by the Urban Heritage Research Cluster, University of Gothenburg. We have probed the notion of friendship, scrutinized the paradigm shifts from reproduction to production, explored the tension between top-down and bottom-up heritage. We have enjoyed the potential of biological commons and have looked into the different tempi and temporalities of commoning and heritage works. The seminar series has originated and evolved along the path we set up for the Urban Heritage Research Cluster in the start: “the city as an interface of different temporalities – i.e. past events, dreams for the future and contemporary constraints – and heritage as intermingled in many different urban realities and entangled in issues of aesthetics, ethics, space and power...”. The seminars have brought us to places like Ground Zero in New York, a creek in Olympia, Café The Swan in Amsterdam, Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility in Pet- aluma, St Ann ́s Church in Manchester, Central Park in New York, the Old city of Jerusalem, Stortorget in Malmö, the Al-Qaryon Square in Nablus, and Gezi Park in Istanbul. The seminar series have aimed at an exploration of the subject matter – Heritage as common(s) / Common(s) as heritage – but have, moreover, in and of itself made up an experiment. The experimental dimension came along with an elaboration and expansion of a particular seminar format. A conventional seminar-format is straight- forward thing with a content-oriented approach where scholars contribute to a joint discussion and also – in extension of that – build networks. As an experiment we ipped this order, drawing on the potential networking capacity of the seminar. Following this, instead of merely inviting a scholar to contribute with a short paper on our theme, we invited her or him to instantly do the same – that is to invite yet another scholar to also contribute with a short paper on our theme. The second choice of scholar was free of choice, and only delimited to curiosity: with whom would you like read and discuss each other’s papers?

Our everyday life will never fill it. And yet that empty space is waiting for Life. We took everything with us, brought back everything, except Life!… (Appia, 1922: 135) This paper examines the structures (performative, architectural, and cultural) that are produced in response to the crisis of large-scale fatality, disaster, and bloodshed. It responds to the statement in Robert Bevan’s book The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, that ‘[t]here is a danger in life becoming reified in permanent honour to memories of suffering’ (2006: 176), elaborating on this statement with the suggestion that expressions of grief can quickly become acts of aggression, thus turning the victim into a perpetrator.

Malcolm Lillie is NOT a co-author on this report - this cannot be edited out of the list (I have tried!)

ABSTRACT Based on fieldwork within the virtual social world Second Life, this paper focuses on its Second Afterlife Cemetery, promoting itself as the first ‘bury your avatar site’. Avatars are symbolically buried and memorialised on this site and so too are the real-life biological deaths of people who may or may not have corresponding Second Life avatar lives and histories. Second Life is a place in which diverse forms of family relationships are created through role-play within games or through other processes such as Second Life adoption agencies and classified advertisements where residents seek out others to enter into family role-play relationships. Second Life role-play families are sometimes inclusive of real-life biological family members so that a type of blended family emerges also inclusive of non-biological Second Life role-play family members. Second Life is thus a place in which complex digital kinship systems operate, informing its bereavement and memorial culture. In examining the complexity of gender structure, relationships and family ‘plots’ of memorials, this paper argues that a biological death in real life while deceasing a second life does not amount to the loss of one life. Second lives are partially independent of the life behind the screen and may indeed challenge the assumption that the corporeal, ontological gravitas of physical real-world existence is the only way of life that really matters for grieving and remembrance. The activity of memorialising a second life based on avatar sociality and embodiment, acknowledges and gives value to a computer-mediated, screen-based way of life with its particular formations of identity and practices of relationship. It can be independent socially of real-life relationships and mourned on its own terms for what it meant to others in this avatar-embodied world.

Social media, such as YouTube, is increasingly a site of collective remembering where personal tributes to celebrity figures become sites of public mourning. YouTube, especially, is rife with celebrity commemorations. Examining fans’ online mourning practices on YouTube, this article examines video tributes dedicated to the late Steve Jobs, with a focus on collective remembering and collective construction of memory. Combining netnography with Critical Discourse Analysis, the analysis focuses on the user comments where the past unfolds in interaction and meanings are negotiated and contested. The paper argues that celebrity death may, for avid fans, be a source of disenfranchised grief (Doka, 1999), a type of grief characterised by inadequate social support, usually arising from lack of empathy for the loss. The study sheds light on the functions digital memorials have for mourning fans (and fandom) and argues that social media sites have come to function as spaces of negotiation, legitimisation and alleviation of disenfranchised grief. It is also suggested that when it comes to disenfranchised grief, and grief work generally, the concept of community be widened to include communities of weak ties, a typical form of communal belonging on social media.

When The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) entered into World War I, they changed the future of two countries, in particularly that of Australia, where more significance is now placed on ANZAC Day than on Australia Day. The notion of Australian identity was largely formed on the beach of what is now known as ANZAC Cove and the sentiment the Australian public feel for ANZAC Day plays an important role in demonstrating the changing attitude and values of a society over time. Ultimately though, the reaction of the public comes not from the past, but from the politics of the present day.