The Urban Uncanny: A Collection of Interdisciplinary Studies

Description

The Urban Uncanny explores through ten engaging essays the slippage or mismatch between our expectations of the city―as the organised and familiar environments in which citizens live, work, and go about their lives―and the often surprising and unsettling experiences it evokes. The city is uncanny when it reveals itself in new and unexpected light; when its streets, buildings, and people suddenly appear strange, out of place, and not quite right. Bringing together a variety of approaches, including psychoanalysis, historical and contemporary case study of cities, urban geography, film and literary critique, the essays explore some of the unsettling mismatches between city and citizen in order to make sense of each, and to gauge the wellbeing of city life more generally. Essays examine a number of cities, including Edmonton, London, Paris, Oxford, Las Vegas, Berlin and New York, and address a range of issues, including those of memory, death, anxiety, alienation, and identity. Delving into the complex repercussions of contemporary mass urban development, The Urban Uncanny opens up the pathological side of cities, both real and imaginary. This interdisciplinary collection provides unparalleled insights into the urban uncanny that will be of interest to academics and students of urban studies, urban geography, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, social studies and film studies, and to anyone interested in the darker side of city life. Contents List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: the urban uncanny • Lucy Huskinson 2 Going underground: margins, dreams and dark spaces in Nimród Antal’s Kontroll (2003) • Owen Evans 3 Shadows over Oxford: memories, murder, mystery, and Morse • Ruth Meyer 4 This hated city: ‘Deadmonton’ – Edmonton’s alter-ego • Hessen R. Zoeller 5 Cities of the dead: the Catacombs and Père Lachaise Cemetery in post-revolutionary Paris • Erin-Marie Legacey 6 Ruptures in the city: retrospective memory in Benjamin’s Paris and Koolhaas’s New York • Ben Moore 7 Pathologizing the city: archetypal psychology and the built environment • Lucy Huskinson 8 The wandering architecture of city and psyche • Phyllis Mazzocchi 9 Geographies of loss and ruptured identities: the divided cities of Berlin and Nicosia • Catherine L. Dollard 10 Nostalgic maps: wandering in a disappearing cityscape in Mies, joka ei osannut sanoa ei [The Man Who Could Not Say No] (1975) • Essi Viitanen 11 Reconfiguring the urban body in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) • Daan Wesselman Index