METROPOLITAN DESIRES
CULTURAL RECONFIGURATIONS OF THE EUROPEAN CITY SPACE
Manchester European Research Institute
Department of Languages
Manchester Metropolitan University
8-9 September 2009
Balanced between physicalities and imaginaries, the city remains a privileged space for exploring the nature of contemporary social networks. The city itself is increasingly difficult to define, its limits stretching beyond any clear, tactile frontier as it incorporates ever-wider flows and trajectories deterritorialising itself. For many, however, the city is a space that gathers together fixed delimitations, boundaries, perimeters and no-go-out areas: a city territorialised.
Reassessing, exploring and comparing culture and cultural reconfigurations of the European city, therefore, the aim of this interdisciplinary, two-day conference is to probe the composition of these synchronous cities, asking whether the city offers possibilities for a more democratic space or whether projects for a desired cosmopolis can only founder in the realities of the metropolis.
Through the prism of culture (including, but by no means limited to, literature, film, music, art, photography, dance) the conference aims to address the following questions:
In what ways is the city being redefined as its parameters are altered?
How do cultural and individual identities shift within reconstructed urban spaces?
How does the city contain and/or release the forces of desire, order and disorder?
What perspectives are provided of diverse and anarchic city life?
How does the metropolis interact with its periphery and with the global, if indeed these are suitable terms for the contemporary nature of urban spaces?
In what ways do cultural narratives convey, construct and constitute the fluid and striated spaces of the modern city?
Who are the privileged and the underprivileged protagonists of the city and what role do they play in the urban imaginary?
Can urban culture and/or the cultural city participate in the construction of future democratic metropolises?
We invite proposals for papers that address some or any of the above questions, as well as those that challenge these issues and/or terminologies.
Though the focus of this conference is Europe and European cities, we encourage submissions that illustrate how alternative urban imaginaries interact with(in) the European city or even the way that European urban imaginaries are themselves disrupted in other contexts.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- Hybridity, transference and transculturation
- Globalisation and localisation
- Frontiers and margins
- The modern and postmodern city
- Cultural practices and everyday life
- Sexualities and sexual spaces
- Technology and meta-urban space
- Money, class and inequality
- Race and ethnicity
- Flows and barriers
- The self and the crowd
- Physical and imagined spaces
- Crime, justice and policing
- Flânerie
Proposals for individual papers should be addressed by email, by 01 May 2009 to
metdesires@mmu.ac.uk
Nicoletta DiCiolla
James Scorer
Edmund Smyth