The double return of Friedrich Engels: Towards a dialectics of the trace (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beneath the Arches: Re-appropriating the Spaces of Infrastructure in Manchester (Ph.D. Thesis, 2014)
2014
This thesis sets out to explore the implications that transport infrastructures have on the production and perception of the urban built environment. Particularly, it focuses on the Victorian brick viaducts constructed to support the elevated railway in Manchester, England. It concentrates on Manchester’s post-‐industrial restructuring and re-‐imaging since the late 1960s, exploring how the presence of brick railway viaducts, as well as the uses beneath their arches, have impacted strategies for revalorisation in the wake of gradual deindustrialisation. In exploring the changing symbolic economy of landscapes dominated by railway infrastructure, as well as the shifting uses and images of railway arches, this thesis explores the interplay between political economy and the aesthetic and symbolic dimensions of urban regeneration. Upon establishing the mutually constituted history of Manchester’s elevated railways and its city centre and demonstrating how this 19th century process has shaped the form and character of the city, it excavates a cultural history of the infrastructural landscapes of the city. Special emphasis is placed on the uses and perceptions of railway arches, which have long served as symbols of dereliction and social disorder. These spatial and cultural histories act as a foundation for analysing how the city’s railway viaducts have been implicated in the re-‐ imagining of Manchester as a post-‐industrial city. These histories and representations are explored in relation to property-‐led strategies of environmental improvement, industrial displacement, and heritage tourism along the southern fringe of Manchester city centre, focusing on three thematic and spatially bound case studies. These case studies rely on documentary data of planning and design strategies, interviews with elite actors involved in the re-‐imaging of Manchester city centre, and ethnographic observation. Using critical discourse analysis, the thesis unpacks the narrative relationship between dominant representations of these spaces and professional justifications for their material and symbolic reconfiguration.
Introduction to ‘Manchester in a European Gaze’
Reshaping Youth Participation: Manchester in a European Gaze, 2022
The introduction to this edited collection sets out the context within which the current volume is set: Manchester, the city; the PARTISPACE European Project that explored spaces and styles of youth participation in eight cities in Europe; and the spaces of youth participation explored in the book. The chapter begins with a description of Manchester and its representations: its radical history and current status, and how recent contradictions or tensions manifest in everyday life. Drawing on Batsleer’s 30 years of experience of youth work in the city, the chapter recognises how political and social conditions have changed the nature of youth participation and in turn how participation has been shaped by the current policy context. This chapter will then introduce the situated ethnographic and participatory action research approaches in the PARTISPACE study that enabled the researchers to collaborate with community actors to co-produce knowledge and socially engaged research. Finally, it will introduce the PARTISPACE Manchester case studies included in the volume, and the commentaries from PARTISPACE colleagues in other European cities (who undertook similar work) featured in the book that complement, enhance, and speak to the Manchester case studies. Between 2015 and 2018, the PARTISPACE research consortium explored spaces and styles of young people’s participation across eight cities in Europe, including a city in Turkey. An edited book collection produced by the consortium already exists (see Walther, Batsleer et al., 2019), but in each city, there was much more to say than was possible in a single volume. This book is Manchester’s turn.
Culture Unbound, 2019
Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different-and often conflicting-stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification struggles. Post-punk 'retromania' (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts & Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester's post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of 'trans-cultural memory'. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley's documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories , sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester's post-punk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.
Vital urban materiality and its multiple absences: the building stone of central Manchester
Cultural Geographies, 2012
This paper endeavours to track some of the numerous absences conjured up by the building stone of Manchester. As a vital, ever-changing materiality entangled within a host of relations, stone can evoke the now absent human and non-human agencies of the city. Absence is revealed through an affective, sensual and imaginative engagement with stony materiality, so that the absences of other places, networks and connections, distant lives and events, human remains, cultural practices and tastes, environmental conditions and its material effects, historical recognition and matter itself are made present and acknowledged. In honouring the numerous humans and non-humans that have been integral to the ongoing production of the city, I show that stone is one element in dynamic, ongoing urban re-composition and emergence, constituting part of the city's ever-changing temporal collage.
Polysèmes: Landscapes/Cityscapes, 2019
This article highlights the role of visual artists in recording the mutations of a landscape that became industrial and urban. From the late eigteenth century and early nineteenth century onwards the development and the effects of the industrial revolution were starting to be depicted and early representations reflected a celebratory mood or already expressed a degree of fear and anxiety. A century later, L.S. Lowry’s cityscapes captured an ambivalent image of the industrial North of England. His archetypal industrial landscapes—part real, part imaginary—met with success as traces of industry he had represented were vanishing as a result of deindustrialisation and, later, of urban regeneration. Industrial remnants found across the North, such as in Lancashire and West Yorkshire, would later be immortalised by photographers whose representations showed how their presence in the landscape conveys a sense of place whilst maintaining collective identity and memory. Whether they have been preserved as heritage or have simply survived as ruins, mills and chimneys give the landscape and cityscape their historic identity, despite attempts at reshaping them or “de-industrialising” them in post-industrial cities. Yet, one may wonder whether artistic representations of industrial landscapes foster a stereotypically desolate vision of the industrial North or if they draw attention to the aesthetic and historic value of traces of industry, and highlight a reassessment of this type of heritage in relation to the preservation of an identity that may also be at odds with its industrial connection.
This book brings together a series of reflections and practices around issues of local and trans-local cultural production within different contexts in Europe, prompted through the agency of a collaborative and networked project: Rhyzom (www.rhyzom.net). All these cultures developed within local contexts are intrinsically related to political, economic, social and material aspects and to specific temporalities, spatialities, individual and collective histories and experiences. Like the whole Rhyzom project, the book is an attempt to create transversal links and connections within and across different local framings and to seize instances of the dynamic and complicated nature of notions of ‘local’ and ‘culture’ through multiple forms of practice, which address the critical condition of culture in contemporary society. In relations with ‘local, and ‘trans-local’, ‘place’ and ‘culture’, issues of conflict and contest, ecologies, politics and care practices, common and commonality, institutions and agencies are addressed. The book is written by architects, artists, activists, curators, cultural workers, educators, sociologists, geographers and residents living in different rural and urban areas in Europe and is addressed to anyone concerned with the relation between culture, subjectivity, space and politics today. The list of projects and topics presented in the book is open: the Rhyzom website provides the framework for further displays and possible collaborations.
Recipro (city) : The Spatial Reproduction of Social Relations in Manchester
This paper examines the effect of industrial capitalism on the physical form of Manchester during the industrial revolution. Using maps, diagrams and critical research, it scrutinizes the reciprocal relationship between social and economic structures and their embodiment in cityspace. Urban form changes too slowly to be easily perceived in the lifetime of one individual, but in Manchester during the industrial revolution, it transformed faster than ever before. The population growth (it quadrupled between 1750 and 1850) and capitalist labour relations resulted in the economic and spatial polarisation of classes. The terrible conditions in disease-ridden and overcrowded working-class slums prompted the emergence of two schools of thought: the Liberal Reformers and the Marxists. However, in their solutions to urban problems, liberal reformers failed to address poverty as a structural problem; and Marxists discussed only social and economic metastructures, patently ignoring the corporeal form of the city capitalism had wrought. This paper argues that spatial division of the classes was pivotal in maintaining and recreating the status quo. Physical form reproduced the social relations required for capitalism, and was produced by them, in reciprocity. While not negating the importance of political, social, and economic structures – and of individual human action, architecture mediates between the scale of a human being, and the scale of the city. The complexity is daunting, but a resolution between the two scales of urban understanding is central to contemporary planning debate.