Academic literature on the topic 'Boston Banks Urban Renewal Group'

Introduction In the wake of the disaster of World War I, the Surrealists formulated a hostile critique of the novel that identified its limitations in expressing the depth of the mind's faculties and the fragmentation of the psyche after catastrophic events. From this position of crisis, the Surrealists undertook a series of experimental innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. This article examines how the praxis of shock is deployed in a number of Surrealist city novels as a conduit for revolt against a society that grew increasingly mechanised in the climate of post-war regeneration. It seeks to counter the contemporary view that Surrealist city dérives (drifts) represent an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research. By reconsidering its origins in response to a world catastrophe, this article emphasises the Surrealist novel’s binding of the affective properties of shock to the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of the political position of Surrealism. The Surrealist City Novel Today it has almost become a truism to assert that there is a causal link between the catastrophic devastation wrought by the events of the two World Wars and the ideology of rupture that characterised the iconoclasms of the Modernist avant-gardes. Yet, as we progress into the twenty-first century, it is timely to recognise that new generations are rediscovering canonical and peripheral texts of this era and refracting them through a prism of contemporary preoccupations. In many ways, the revisions of today’s encounters with that past era suggest we have travelled some distance from the rawness of such catastrophic events. One post-war body of work recently subjected to view via an unexpected route is the remarkable array of Surrealist city novels set in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, representing a spectrum of experimental texts by such authors as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault, and Michel Leiris. Over the past decade, these works have become recuperated in the Anglophone context as exemplary instances of ludic engagement with the city. This is due in large part to the growing surge of interest in psychogeography, an urban research method concerned with the influence that geographical environments exert over the emotions and behaviours of individuals, and a concern for tracing the literary genealogies of walking and writing in broad sweeping encyclopaedic histories and guidebook style accounts (for prominent examples see Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust and Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography). Yet as Surrealist novels continue to garner renewed interest for their erotic intrigue, their strolling encounters with the unconscious or hidden facets of the city, and as precursors to the apparently more radical practice of Situationist psychogeography, this article suggests that something vital is missing. By neglecting the revolutionary significance that the Surrealists placed upon the street and its inextricable connection to the shock of the marvellous, I suggest that we have arrived at a point of diminished appreciation of the praxis of the dream-awakening dialectic at the heart of Surrealist politics. With the movement firmly lodged in the popular imagination as concerned merely with the art of play and surprise, the Surrealists’ sensorial conception of the city as embedded within a much larger critique of the creators of “a sterile and dead world” (Rasmussen 372) is lost. This calls into question to what extent we can now relate to the urgency with which avant-gardes like the Surrealists responded to the disaster of war in their call for “the revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and released the fantastic” (372). At the same time, a re-evaluation of the Surrealist city novel as a significant precursor to the psychogeograhical dérive (drift) can prove instructive in locating the potential of walking, in order to function as a form of praxis (defined here as lived practice in opposition to theory) that goes beyond its more benign construction as the “gentle art” of getting lost. The Great Shock To return to the origins of Surrealism is to illuminate the radical intentions of the movement. The enormous shock that followed the Great War represented, according to Roger Shattuck, “a profound organic reaction that convulsed the entire system with vomiting, manic attacks, and semi-collapse” (9). David Gascoyne considers 1919, the inaugural year of Surrealist activity, as “a year of liquidation, the end of everything but also of paroxysmic death-birth, incubating seeds of renewal” (17). It was at this time that André Breton and his collaborator Philippe Soupault came together at the Hôtel des Grands Hommes in Paris to conduct their early experimental research. As the authors took poetic license with the psychoanalytical method of automatic writing, their desire to unsettle the latent content of the unconscious as it manifests in the spontaneous outpourings of dream-like recollections resulted in the first collection of Surrealist texts, The Magnetic Fields (1920). As Breton recalls: Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and familiar with his methods of examination which I had had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought. (Breton, Manifesto 22–23) Despite their debts to psychoanalytical methods, the Surrealists sought radically different ends from therapeutic goals in their application. Rather than using analysis to mitigate the pathologies of the psyche, Breton argued that such methods should instead be employed to liberate consciousness in ways that released the individual from “the reign of logic” (Breton, Manifesto 11) and the alienating forces of a mechanised society. In the same manifesto, Breton links his critique to a denunciation of the novel, principally the realist novel which dominated the literary landscape of the nineteenth-century, for its limitations in conveying the power of the imagination and the depths of the mind’s faculties. Despite these protestations, the Surrealists were unable to completely jettison the novel and instead launched a series of innovations in form, structure, and style in an attempt to renew the genre. As J.H. Matthews suggests, “Being then, as all creative surrealism must be, the expression of a mood of experimentation, the Surrealist novel probes not only the potentialities of feeling and imagination, but also those of novelistic form” (Matthews 6). When Nadja appeared in 1928, Breton was not the first Surrealist to publish a novel. However, this work remains the most well-known example of its type in the Anglophone context. Largely drawn from the author’s autobiographical experiences, it recounts the narrator’s (André’s) obsessive infatuation with a mysterious, impoverished and unstable young woman who goes by the name of Nadja. The pair’s haunted and uncanny romance unfolds during their undirected walks, or dérives, through the streets of Paris, the city acting as an affective register of their encounters. The “intellectual seduction” comes to an abrupt halt (Breton, Nadja 108), however, when Nadja does in fact go truly mad, disappearing from the narrator’s life when she is committed to an asylum. André makes no effort to seek her out and after launching into a diatribe vehemently attacking the institutions that administer psychiatric treatment, nonchalantly resumes the usual concerns of his everyday life. At a formal level, Breton’s unconventional prose indeed stirs many minor shocks and tremors in the reader. The insertion of temporally off-kilter photographs and surreal drawings are intended to supersede naturalistic description. However, their effect is to create a form of “negative indexicality” (Masschelein) that subtly undermines the truth claims of the novel. Random coincidences charged through with the attractive force of desire determine the plot while the compressed dream-like narrative strives to recount only those facts of “violently fortuitous character” (Breton, Nadja 19). Strikingly candid revelations perpetually catch the reader off guard. But it is in the novel’s treatment of the city, most specifically, in which we can recognise the evolution of Surrealism’s initial concern for the radically subversive and liberatory potential of the dream into a form of praxis that binds the shock of the marvellous to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. This praxis unfolds in the novel on a number of levels. By placing its events firmly at the level of the street, Breton privileges the anti-heroic realm of everyday life over the socially hierarchical domain of the bourgeois domestic interior favoured in realist literature. More significantly, the sites of the city encountered in the novel act as repositories of collective memory with the power to rupture the present. As Margaret Cohen comprehensively demonstrates in her impressive study Profane Illumination, the great majority of sites that the narrator traverses in Nadja reveal connections in previous centuries to instances of bohemian activity, violent insurrection or revolutionary events. The enigmatic statue of Étienne Dolet, for example, to which André is inexplicably drawn on his city walks and which produces a sensation of “unbearable discomfort” (25), commemorates a sixteenth-century scholar and writer of love poetry condemned as a heretic and burned at the Place Maubert for his non-conformist attitudes. When Nadja is suddenly gripped by hallucinations and imagines herself among the entourage of Marie-Antoinette, “multiple ghosts of revolutionary violence descend on the Place Dauphine from all sides” (Cohen 101). Similarly, a critique of capitalism emerges in the traversal of those marginal and derelict zones of the city, such as the Saint-Ouen flea market, which become revelatory of the historical cycles of decay and ruination that modernity seeks to repress through its faith in progress. It was this poetic intuition of the machinations of historical materialism, in particular, that captured the attention of Walter Benjamin in his 1929 “Surrealism” essay, in which he says of Breton that: He can boast an extraordinary discovery: he was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”—in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The relation of these things to revolution—no one can have a more exact concept of it than these authors. (210) In the same passage, Benjamin makes passing reference to the Passage de l’Opéra, the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade threatened with demolition and eulogised by Louis Aragon in his Surrealist anti-novel Paris Peasant (published in 1926, two years earlier than Nadja). Loosely structured around a series of walks, Aragon’s book subverts the popular guidebook literature of the period by inventorying the arcade’s quotidian attractions in highly lyrical and imagistic prose. As in Nadja, a concern for the “outmoded” underpins the praxis which informs the politics of the novel although here it functions somewhat differently. As transitional zones on the cusp of redevelopment, the disappearing arcades attract Aragon for their liminal status, becoming malleable dreamscapes where an ontological instability renders them ripe for eruptions of the marvellous. Such sites emerge as “secret repositories of several modern myths,” and “the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral”. (Aragon 14) City as Dreamscape Contemporary literature increasingly reads Paris Peasant through the lens of psychogeography, and not unproblematically. In his brief guide to psychogeography, British writer Merlin Coverley stresses Aragon’s apparent documentary or ethnographical intentions in describing the arcades. He suggests that the author “rails against the destruction of the city” (75), positing the novel as “a handbook for today’s breed of psychogeographer” (76). The nuances of Aragon’s dream-awakening dialectic, however, are too easily effaced in such an assessment which overlooks the novel’s vertiginous and hyperbolic prose as it consistently approaches an unreality in its ambivalent treatment of the arcades. What is arguably more significant than any documentary concern is Aragon’s commitment to the broader Surrealist quest to transform reality by undermining binary oppositions between waking life and the realm of dreams. As Hal Foster’s reading of the arcades in Surrealism insists: This gaze is not melancholic; the surrealists do not cling obsessively to the relics of the nineteenth-century. Rather it uncovers them for the purposes of resistance through re-enchantment. If we can grasp this dialectic of ruination, recovery, and resistance, we will grasp the intimated ambition of the surrealist practice of history. (166) Unlike Aragon, Breton defended the political position of Surrealism throughout the ebbs and flows of the movement. This notion of “resistance through re-enchantment” retained its significance for Breton as he clung to the radical importance of dreams and the imagination, creative autonomy, and individual freedom over blind obedience to revolutionary parties. Aragon’s allegiance to communism led him to surrender the poetic intoxications of Surrealist prose in favour of the more sombre and austere tone of social realism. By contrast, other early Surrealists like Philippe Soupault contributed novels which deployed the praxis of shock in a less explicitly dialectical fashion. Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1928), in particular, responds to the influence of the war in producing a crisis of identity among a generation of young men, a crisis projected or transferred onto the city streets in ways that are revelatory of the author’s attunement to how “places and environment have a profound influence on memory and imagination” (Soupault 91). All the early Surrealists served in the war in varying capacities. In Soupault’s case, the writer “was called up in 1916, used as a guinea pig for a new typhoid vaccine, and spent the rest of the war in and out of hospital. His close friend and cousin, René Deschamps, was killed in action” (Read 22). Memories of the disaster of war assume a submerged presence in Soupault’s novel, buried deep in the psyche of the narrator. Typically, it is the places and sites of the city that act as revenants, stimulating disturbing memories to drift back to the surface which then suffuse the narrator in an atmosphere of melancholy. During the novel’s numerous dérives, the narrator’s detective-like pursuit of his elusive love-object, the young streetwalker Georgette, the tracking of her near-mute artist brother Octave, and the following of the ringleader of a criminal gang, all appear as instances of compensation. Each chase invokes a desire to recover a more significant earlier loss that persistently eludes the narrator. When Soupault’s narrator shadows Octave on a walk that ventures into the city’s industrial zone, recollections of the disaster of war gradually impinge upon his aleatory perambulations. His description evokes two men moving through the trenches together: The least noise was a catastrophe, the least breath a great terror. We walked in the eternal mud. Step by step we sank into the thickness of night, lost as if forever. I turned around several times to look at the way we had come but night alone was behind us. (80) In an article published in 2012, Catherine Howell identifies Last Nights of Paris as “a lyric celebration of the city as spectacle” (67). At times, the narrator indeed surrenders himself to the ocular pleasures of modernity. Observing the Eiffel Tower, he finds delight in “indefinitely varying her silhouette as if I were examining her through a kaleidoscope” (Soupault 30). Yet it is important to stress the role that shock plays in fissuring this veneer of spectacle, especially those evocations of the city that reveal an unnerving desensitisation to the more violent manifestations of the metropolis. Reading a newspaper, the narrator remarks that “the discovery of bags full of limbs, carefully sawed and chopped up” (23) signifies little more than “a commonplace crime” (22). Passing the banks of the Seine provokes “recollection of an evening I had spent lying on the parapet of the Pont Marie watching several lifesavers trying in vain to recover the body of an unfortunate suicide” (10). In his sensitivity to the unassimilable nature of trauma, Soupault intuits a phenomenon which literary trauma theory argues profoundly limits the text’s claim to representation, knowledge, and an autonomous subject. In this sense, Soupault appears less committed than Breton to the idea that the after-effects of shock might be consciously distilled into a form of praxis. Yet this prolongation of an unintegrated trauma still posits shock as a powerful vehicle to critique a society attempting to heal its wounds without addressing their underlying causes. This is typical of Surrealism’s efforts to “dramatize the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget so that it would not be swept away too quickly” (Lyford 4). Woman and Radical Madness In her 2007 study, Surrealist Masculinities, Amy Lyford focuses upon the regeneration and nation building project that characterised post-war France and argues that Surrealist tactics sought to dismantle an official discourse that promoted ideals of “robust manhood and female maternity” (4). Viewed against this backdrop, the trope of madness in Surrealism is central to the movement’s disruptive strategies. In Last Nights of Paris, a lingering madness simmers beneath the surface of the text like an undertow, while in other Surrealist texts the lauding of madness, specifically female hysteria, is much more explicit. Indeed, the objectification of the madwoman in Surrealism is among the most problematic aspects of its praxis of shock and one that raises questions over to what extent, if at all, Surrealism and feminism can be reconciled, leading some critics to define the movement as inherently misogynistic. While certainly not unfounded, this critique fails to answer why a broad spectrum of women artists have been drawn to the movement. By contrast, a growing body of work nuances the complexities of the “blinds spots” (Lusty 2) in Surrealism’s relationship with women. Contemporary studies like Natalya Lusty’s Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Katharine Conley’s earlier Automatic Woman both afford greater credit to Surrealism’s female practitioners in redefining their subject position in ways that trouble and unsettle the conventional understanding of women’s role in the movement. The creative and self-reflexive manipulation of madness, for example, proved pivotal to the achievements of Surrealist women. In her short autobiographical novella, Down Below (1944), Leonora Carrington recounts the disturbing true experience of her voyage into madness sparked by the internment of her partner and muse, fellow Surrealist Max Ernst, in a concentration camp in 1940. Committed to a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Carrington was treated with the seizure inducing drug Cardiazol. Her text presents a startling case study of therapeutic maltreatment that is consistent with Bretonian Surrealism’s critique of the use of psycho-medical methods for the purposes of regulating and disciplining the individual. As well as vividly recalling her intense and frightening hallucinations, Down Below details the author’s descent into a highly paranoid state which, somewhat perversely, heightens her sense of agency and control over her environment. Unable to discern boundaries between her internal reality and that of the external world, Carrington develops a delusional and inflated sense of her ability to influence the city of Madrid: In the political confusion and the torrid heat, I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring that digestive organ to health […] I believed that I was capable of bearing that dreadful weight and of drawing from it a solution for the world. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract. (12–13) In this way, Carrington’s extraordinarily visceral memoir embodies what can be described as the Surrealist woman’s “double allegiance” (Suleiman 5) to the praxis of shock. On the one hand, Down Below subversively harnesses the affective qualities of madness in order to manifest textual disturbances and to convey the author’s fierce rebellion against societal constraints. At the same time, the work reveals a more complex and often painful representational struggle inherent in occupying the position of both the subject experiencing madness and the narrator objectively recalling its events, displaying a tension not present in the work of the male Surrealists. The memoir concludes on an ambivalent note as Carrington describes finally becoming “disoccultized” of her madness, awakening to “the mystery with which I was surrounded and which they all seemed to take pleasure in deepening around me” (53). Notwithstanding its ambivalence, Down Below typifies the political and historical dimensions of Surrealism’s struggle against internal and external limits. Yet as early as 1966, Surrealist scholar J.H. Matthews was already cautioning against reaching that point where the term Surrealist “loses any meaning and becomes, as it is for too many, synonymous with ‘strange,’ ‘weird,’ or even ‘fanciful’” (5–6). To re-evaluate the praxis of shock in the Surrealist novel, then, is to seek to reinstate Surrealism as a movement that cannot be reduced to vague adjectives or to mere aesthetic principles. It is to view it as an active force passionately engaged with the pressing social, cultural, and political problems of its time. While the frequent nods to Surrealist methods in contemporary literary genealogies and creative urban research practices such as psychogeography are a testament to its continued allure, the growing failure to read Surrealism as political is one of the more contradictory symptoms of the expanding temporal distance from the catastrophic events from which the movement emerged. As it becomes increasingly common to draw links between disaster, creativity, and renewal, the shifting sands of the reception of Surrealism are a reminder of the need to resist domesticating movements born from such circumstances in ways that blunt their critical faculties and dull the awakening power of their praxis of shock. To do otherwise is to be left with little more than cheap thrills. References Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant (1926). Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part I, 1927–1930. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P, 2005. Breton, André. “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924). Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1990. ———. Nadja (1928). Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove P, 1960. Breton, André, and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields (1920). Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Carrington, Leonora. Down Below (1944). Chicago: Black Swan P, 1983. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1993. Conley, Katharine. Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1996. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010. Foster, Hal. Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1993. Gascoyne, David. “Introduction.” The Magnetic Fields (1920) by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Trans. David Gascoyne. London: Atlas P, 1985. Howell, Catherine. “City of Night: Parisian Explorations.” Public: Civic Spectacle 45 (2012): 64–77. Lusty, Natalya. Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Lyford, Amy. Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007. Masschelein, Anneleen. “Hand in Glove: Negative Indexicality in André Breton’s Nadja and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles, CA: ICI P, 2007. 360–87. Matthews, J.H. Surrealism and the Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1996. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt. “The Situationist International, Surrealism and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal 27.3 (2004): 365–87. Read, Peter. “Poets out of Uniform.” Book Review. The Times Literary Supplement. 15 Mar. 2002: 22. Shattuck, Roger. “Love and Laughter: Surrealism Reappraised.” The History of Surrealism. Ed. Maurice Nadeau. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. 11–34. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London: Verso, 2002. Soupault, Philippe. Last Nights of Paris (1928). Trans. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Exact Change, 1992. Suleiman, Susan Robin. “Surrealist Black Humour: Masculine/Feminine.” Papers of Surrealism 1 (2003): 1–11. 20 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal1›.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

This study is about the continual stride between 1860 and 2010 amongst the various interest groups involved with what the city of The Hague should look like. The thesis of the study states that the fragmented image that people in the city have or experience is the result of the wide variety of urban ensembles and public buildings, whether or not they are crowded together or even completed, that were successively presented and implemented by the interest groups involved. Stakeholders such as national and local politicians, the royal family, banks, industrialists, housing corporations, developers, architects, urban planners, and organizations of critical citizens have always been in conflict about what public buildings or iconic urban compositions should look like. With the best of intentions each group wants to shape the city with public buildings and urban compositions in their own way and the urge to achieve this is always playing a role in the background. It is as if the city is being stripped of space, movement, and time and that only the image of the city is what counts, an image that is endlessly being reproduced in the media to influence the public opinion. The scramble over the Spuiforum is just the latest affair in a long series of incidents in The Hague. The hardhearted efforts of those involved to create one balanced townscape has only delivered more fragmented images, yet perhaps this is the city’s greatest quality. It seems like just about everyone has been occupied with the Spuiforum since 2009 to the present. The battle between supporters and opponents has been going on for years. The media critics are always there looking for the next scandal, finding fault with motives that may not always be clear. However, as intense as the conflict appears now, it will soon be forgotten. Who remembers the conflict over the Willemspark or the Peace Palace? The numerous conflicts around the sea resort Scheveningen? The battles over urban renewal, the haggling around the competition for the House of Representatives or the rivalry and troubles around the The Hague City Hall? The Eurojust (The European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit)? The International Criminal Court? Such stormy conflicts arise and no sooner ebb away again, often into silent oblivion. And still, in most cases, the construction of the urban image is executed as planned, though often partially. Even more, the conflicts are of importance because they reveal how people experience the city and want to see it. Cracks in society are bluntly exposed this way. For example, the most monumental gateway in The Hague is that of the The Hague Police Precinct built in the 1950’s, which faces the rear side of The Hague’s progressive party’s flagship (1986-1989), the residential complex designed by Ricardo Bofill with parking access, garbage containers, and other utilities. A good observer can see the many contradictions of society mirrored in this situation in the city. The object of this study is to examine the image of the city and the conflicts pertaining to it. The image of the city, also referred to here as the city image, has become particularly popular in recent years. This is due in part to the new position of cities in the global urbanization process, whereby cities have become competitors and moreover, new opportunities for cities to present themselves worldwide result from the revolution in communication technology and digitization. The research shows that the city image, despite its elusiveness and fluidity, played an imperative role in the genesis of the city far earlier. Churchill’s statement ‘we formed our cities and the cities formed us’ could be broadened to: ‘we imagined our cities and that image formed us.’ Nancy Stieber (2006) gave in the book de STAD (2006) an insightful analysis on the relationship between images and the city. The city is conceptualized as a metaphor. According to her, that is one of the transformations of the urban fabric might undergo in our minds. She distinguishes three categories: the image of the city, the imagined city, and the imaginary city. The image of the city is the idea that is composed by individuals or groups: a creation that is triggered from experience of the city in the mind or a concept based on the actual city itself. The imagined city is the virtual arena conceived by artists, architects, city planners, marketers, and others through art, film, literature, music, advertising, architecture, and urban designs. This idea is certainly related to the first category, but here the focus is on the representation of the city by specialists that are making the presentations to convince people of the value and significance of an urban composition or public building. In this sense, the producers of the images are crucial since, after all, who needs to be convinced of which statement? Using a caricature on Berlage’s Amsterdam South, Stieber demonstrated that the categories are inseparable and all three are about metaphors of the city. ‘The city between the ears’, as noted by the geographer and urban marketing specialist Gertjan Hosper (2010). The goal of this study is to discover and describe consecutive city images of The Hague and the conflicts associated with them between 1860 and 2010, as well as to determine for whom, with what motive and background these city images were developed, where, in how far, and if these consecutive city images were realized, what the conflicts were about, and why the often unfinished images disappeared again, which resulted in the current fragmented image of the city. The human activities that take place in the buildings and surroundings, no matter how significant, were left out of the study for practical reasons. Every case study is of a dominant city image from a certain period. The central context is the relation between ‘the city between the ears’, the actual built city, and the many conflicts pertaining to that image. Each image will be analyzed in this study on the basis of iconic ensembles in the urban setting. The urban ensemble is iconic if it has been part of a public debate. It is unraveled by way of three aspects: the motives for and against of those involved, the shape of the urban space, and the architecture of the buildings. This study inevitably comprises multi-disciplinary research. Results of research on the morphology, typology, imagery, and historical sources are associated to each other. Aspects like urban space, development, and motives of stakeholders concerning the appearance of the locations are compared and present a new light. It’s not the knowledge acquired about the cause, a condition or situation from the past that is central to the study like in the research of a historian, but the knowledge gathered about the exchange between image and reality during a certain time frame. Throughout the case studies on particular urban ensembles, cross references are made between the histories of architecture, town planning, and politics and the social reality. The case studies chosen to prove the above mentioned thesis led to the following conclusions. The fragmented look of The Hague was directly caused by debates on the image of the city. Images of a city are a kind of visual or esthetic category that cannot be sharply defined but rather have something intangible and are fluid. Only at the project level can images be bright and clear. All of the city images were found to run a certain course in time of no longer than a 20 to 30 year time span. The image of the city is not always visually homogenous or in one particular style, but can instead be diverse. It also tends to bind places together that are distant, such as typical Dutch cauliflower neighborhoods from the 70’s, which can be found throughout the country. City images can also unite local and international aspects of the city and are more successful and domineering when there is a high development rate. In this respect, there are some large gaps in the historical context, blank areas where there was hardly any building development going on. There is always a motive behind the city image: the spontaneous city is fictitious. However, the motive is often forgotten whereby people wonder later on about the consistency between urban space, development, and the imagery that was used in the development process. As townscapes appear with new city images, they seem inadaptable. They are destructive and intolerant towards their predecessors, especially when those images rise within the existing city. It is normal to demolish an area to a build new ideal. The role of the stakeholders like architects, urban designers, and officials is highly overrated. It is the synergy between them and the context that is crucial. The city image plays a unifying and sometimes persistent role under these conditions, reminding us: the city, that’s us. On the basis of the study on the image of the city it is possible to draw the map of a city differently, precisely because that way the differences between cities become apparent.

About half way through Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film Home (2009) the narrator describes the fall of the Rapa Nui, the indigenous people of the Easter Islands. The narrator posits that the Rapa Nui culture collapsed due to extensive environmental degradation brought about by large-scale deforestation. The Rapa Nui cut down their massive native forests to clear spaces for agriculture, to heat their dwellings, to build canoes and, most importantly, to move their enormous rock sculptures—the Moai. The disappearance of their forests led to island-wide soil erosion and the gradual disappearance of arable land. Caught in the vice of overpopulation but with rapidly dwindling basic resources and no trees to build canoes, they were trapped on the island and watched helplessly as their society fell into disarray. The sequence ends with the narrator’s biting remark: “The real mystery of the Easter Islands is not how its strange statues got there, we know now; it's why the Rapa Nui didn't react in time.” In their unrelenting desire for development, the Rapa Nui appear to have overlooked the role the environment plays in maintaining a society. The island’s Moai accompanying the sequence appear as memento mori, a lesson in the mortality of human cultures brought about by their own misguided and short-sighted practices. Arthus-Bertrand’s Home, a film composed almost entirely of aerial photographs, bears witness to present-day environmental degradation and climate change, constructing society as a fragile structure built upon and sustained by the environment. Home is a call to recognise how contemporary practices of post-industrial societies have come to shape the environment and how they may impact the habitability of Earth in the near future. Through reflexivity and a ritualised structure the text invites spectators to look at themselves in a new light and remake their self-image in the wake of global environmental risk by embracing new, alternative core practices based on balance and interconnectedness. Arthus-Bertrand frames climate change not as a burden, but as a moment of profound realisation of the potential for change and humans ability to create a desirable future through hope and our innate capacity for renewal. This article examines how Arthus-Bertrand’s ritualised construction of climate change aims to remake viewers’ perception of present-day environmental degradation and investigates Home’s place in contemporary climate change communication discourse. Climate change, in its capacity to affect us globally, is considered a world risk. The most recent peer-reviewed Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases has increased markedly since human industrialisation in the 18th century. Moreover, human activities, such as fossil fuel burning and agricultural practices, are “very likely” responsible for the resulting increase in temperature rise (IPPC 37). The increased global temperatures and the subsequent changing weather patterns have a direct and profound impact on the physical and biological systems of our planet, including shrinking glaciers, melting permafrost, coastal erosion, and changes in species distribution and reproduction patterns (Rosenzweig et al. 353). Studies of global security assert that these physiological changes are expected to increase the likelihood of humanitarian disasters, food and water supply shortages, and competition for resources thus resulting in a destabilisation of global safety (Boston et al. 1–2). Human behaviour and dominant practices of modernity are now on a path to materially impact the future habitability of our home, Earth. In contemporary post-industrial societies, however, climate change remains an elusive, intangible threat. Here, the Arctic-bound species forced to adapt to milder climates or the inhabitants of low-lying Pacific islands seeking refuge in mainland cities are removed from the everyday experience of the controlled and regulated environments of homes, offices, and shopping malls. Diverse research into the mediated and mediatised nature of the environment suggests that rather than from first-hand experiences and observations, the majority of our knowledge concerning the environment now comes from its representation in the mass media (Hamilton 4; Stamm et al. 220; Cox 2). Consequently the threat of climate change is communicated and constructed through the news media, entertainment and lifestyle programming, and various documentaries and fiction films. It is therefore the construction (the representation of the risk in various discourses) that shapes people’s perception and experience of the phenomenon, and ultimately influences behaviour and instigates social response (Beck 213). By drawing on and negotiating society’s dominant discourses, environmental mediation defines spectators’ perceptions of the human-nature relationship and subsequently their roles and responsibilities in the face of environmental risks. Maxwell Boykoff asserts that contemporary modern society’s mediatised representations of environmental degradation and climate change depict the phenomena as external to society’s primary social and economic concerns (449). Julia Corbett argues that this is partly because environmental protection and sustainable behaviour are often at odds with the dominant social paradigms of consumerism, economic growth, and materialism (175). Similarly, Rowan Howard-Williams suggests that most media texts, especially news, do not emphasise the link between social practices, such as consumerist behaviour, and their environmental consequences because they contradict dominant social paradigms (41). The demands contemporary post-industrial societies make on the environment to sustain economic growth, consumer culture, and citizens’ comfortable lives in air-conditioned homes and offices are often left unarticulated. While the media coverage of environmental risks may indeed have contributed to “critical misperceptions, misleading debates, and divergent understandings” (Boykoff 450) climate change possesses innate characteristics that amplify its perception in present-day post-industrial societies as a distant and impersonal threat. Climate change is characterised by temporal and spatial de-localisation. The gradual increase in global temperature and its physical and biological consequences are much less prominent than seasonal changes and hence difficult to observe on human time-scales. Moreover, while research points to the increased probability of extreme climatic events such as droughts, wild fires, and changes in weather patterns (IPCC 48), they take place over a wide range of geographical locations and no single event can be ultimately said to be the result of climate change (Maibach and Roser-Renouf 145). In addition to these observational obstacles, political partisanship, vested interests in the current status quo, and general resistance to profound change all play a part in keeping us one step removed from the phenomenon of climate change. The distant and impersonal nature of climate change coupled with the “uncertainty over consequences, diverse and multiple engaged interests, conflicting knowledge claims, and high stakes” (Lorenzoni et al. 65) often result in repression, rejection, and denial, removing the individual’s responsibility to act. Research suggests that, due to its unique observational obstacles in contemporary post-industrial societies, climate change is considered a psychologically distant event (Pawlik 559), one that is not personally salient due to the “perceived distance and remoteness [...] from one’s everyday experience” (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole 370). In an examination of the barriers to behaviour change in the face of psychologically distant events, Robert Gifford argues that changing individuals’ perceptions of the issue-domain is one of the challenges of countering environmental inertia—the lack of initiative for environmentally sustainable social action (5). To challenge the status quo a radically different construction of the environment and the human-nature relationship is required to transform our perception of global environmental risks and ultimately result in environmentally consequential social action. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home is a ritualised construction of contemporary environmental degradation and climate change which takes spectators on a rite of passage to a newfound understanding of the human-nature relationship. Transformation through re-imagining individuals’ roles, responsibilities, and practices is an intrinsic quality of rituals. A ritual charts a subjects path from one state of consciousness to the next, resulting in a meaningful change of attitudes (Deflem 8). Through a lifelong study of African rituals British cultural ethnographer Victor Turner refined his concept of rituals in a modern social context. Turner observed that rituals conform to a three-phased processural form (The Ritual Process 13–14). First, in the separation stage, the subjects are selected and removed from their fixed position in the social structure. Second, they enter an in-between and ambiguous liminal stage, characterised by a “partial or complete separation of the subject from everyday existence” (Deflem 8). Finally, imbued with a new perspective of the outside world borne out of the experience of reflexivity, liminality, and a cathartic cleansing, subjects are reintegrated into the social reality in a new, stable state. The three distinct stages make the ritual an emotionally charged, highly personal experience that “demarcates the passage from one phase to another in the individual’s life-cycle” (Turner, “Symbols” 488) and actively shapes human attitudes and behaviour. Adhering to the three-staged processural form of the ritual, Arthus-Bertrand guides spectators towards a newfound understanding of their roles and responsibilities in creating a desirable future. In the first stage—the separation—aerial photography of Home alienates viewers from their anthropocentric perspectives of the outside world. This establishes Earth as a body, and unearths spectators’ guilt and shame in relation to contemporary world risks. Aerial photography strips landscapes of their conventional qualities of horizon, scale, and human reference. As fine art photographer Emmet Gowin observes, “when one really sees an awesome, vast place, our sense of wholeness is reorganised [...] and the body seems always to diminish” (qtd. in Reynolds 4). Confronted with a seemingly infinite sublime landscape from above, the spectator’s “body diminishes” as they witness Earth’s body gradually taking shape. Home’s rushing rivers of Indonesia are akin to blood flowing through the veins and the Siberian permafrost seems like the texture of skin in extreme close-up. Arthus-Bertrand establishes a geocentric embodiment to force spectators to perceive and experience the environmental degradation brought about by the dominant social practices of contemporary post-industrial modernity. The film-maker visualises the maltreatment of the environment through suggested abuse of the Earth’s body. Images of industrial agricultural practices in the United States appear to leave scratches and scars on the landscape, and as a ship crosses the Arctic ice sheets of the Northwest Passage the boat glides like the surgeon’s knife cutting through the uppermost layer of the skin. But the deep blue water that’s revealed in the wake of the craft suggests a flesh and body now devoid of life, a suffering Earth in the wake of global climatic change. Arthus-Bertrand’s images become the sublime evidence of human intervention in the environment and the reflection of present-day industrialisation materially altering the face of Earth. The film-maker exploits spectators’ geocentric perspective and sensibility to prompt reflexivity, provide revelations about the self, and unearth the forgotten shame and guilt in having inadvertently caused excessive environmental degradation. Following the sequences establishing Earth as the body of the text Arthus-Bertrand returns spectators to their everyday “natural” environment—the city. Having witnessed and endured the pain and suffering of Earth, spectators now gaze at the skyscrapers standing bold and tall in the cityscape with disillusionment. The pinnacles of modern urban development become symbols of arrogance and exploitation: structures forced upon the landscape. Moreover, the images of contemporary cityscapes in Home serve as triggers for ritual reflexivity, allowing the spectator to “perceive the self [...] as a distanced ‘other’ and hence achieve a partial ‘self-transcendence’” (Beck, Comments 491). Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photographs of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo fold these distinct urban environments into one uniform fusion of glass, metal, and concrete devoid of life. The uniformity of these cultural landscapes prompts spectators to add the missing element: the human. Suddenly, the homes and offices of desolate cityscapes are populated by none other than us, looking at ourselves from a unique vantage point. The geocentric sensibility the film-maker invoked with the images of the suffering Earth now prompt a revelation about the self as spectators see their everyday urban environments in a new light. Their homes and offices become blemishes on the face of the Earth: its inhabitants, including the spectators themselves, complicit in the excessive mistreatment of the planet. The second stage of the ritual allows Arthus-Bertrand to challenge dominant social paradigms of present day post-industrial societies and introduce new, alternative moral directives to govern our habits and attitudes. Following the separation, ritual subjects enter an in-between, threshold stage, one unencumbered by the spatial, temporal, and social boundaries of everyday existence. Turner posits that a subjects passage through this liminal stage is necessary to attain psychic maturation and successful transition to a new, stable state at the end of the ritual (The Ritual Process 97). While this “betwixt and between” (Turner, The Ritual Process 95) state may be a fleeting moment of transition, it makes for a “lived experience [that] transforms human beings cognitively, emotionally, and morally.” (Horvath et al. 3) Through a change of perceptions liminality paves the way toward meaningful social action. Home places spectators in a state of liminality to contrast geocentric and anthropocentric views. Arthus-Bertrand contrasts natural and human-made environments in terms of diversity. The narrator’s description of the “miracle of life” is followed by images of trees seemingly defying gravity, snow-covered summits among mountain ranges, and a whale in the ocean. Grandeur and variety appear to be inherent qualities of biodiversity on Earth, qualities contrasted with images of the endless, uniform rectangular greenhouses of Almeria, Spain. This contrast emphasises the loss of variety in human achievements and the monotony mass-production brings to the landscape. With the image of a fire burning atop a factory chimney, Arthus-Bertrand critiques the change of pace and distortion of time inherent in anthropocentric views, and specifically in contemporary modernity. Here, the flames appear to instantly eat away at resources that have taken millions of years to form, bringing anthropocentric and geocentric temporality into sharp contrast. A sequence showing a night time metropolis underscores this distinction. The glittering cityscape is lit by hundreds of lights in skyscrapers in an effort, it appears, to mimic and surpass daylight and thus upturn the natural rhythm of life. As the narrator remarks, in our present-day environments, “days are now the pale reflections of nights.” Arthus-Bertrand also uses ritual liminality to mark the present as a transitory, threshold moment in human civilisation. The film-maker contrasts the spectre of our past with possible visions of the future to mark the moment of now as a time when humanity is on the threshold of two distinct states of mind. The narrator’s descriptions of contemporary post-industrial society’s reliance on non-renewable resources and lack of environmentally sustainable agricultural practices condemn the past and warn viewers of the consequences of continuing such practices into the future. Exploring the liminal present Arthus-Bertrand proposes distinctive futurescapes for humankind. On the one hand, the narrator’s description of California’s “concentration camp style cattle farming” suggests that humankind will live in a future that feeds from the past, falling back on frames of horrors and past mistakes. On the other hand, the example of Costa Rica, a nation that abolished its military and dedicated the budget to environmental conservation, is recognition of our ability to re-imagine our future in the face of global risk. Home introduces myths to imbue liminality with the alternative dominant social paradigm of ecology. By calling upon deep-seated structures myths “touch the heart of society’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual consciousness” (Killingsworth and Palmer 176) and help us understand and come to terms with complex social, economic, and scientific phenomena. With the capacity to “pattern thought, beliefs and practices,” (Maier 166) myths are ideal tools in communicating ritual liminality and challenging contemporary post-industrial society’s dominant social paradigms. The opening sequence of Home, where the crescent Earth is slowly revealed in the darkness of space, is an allusion to creation: the genesis myth. Accompanied only by a gentle hum our home emerges in brilliant blue, white, and green-brown encompassing most of the screen. It is as if darkness and chaos disintegrated and order, life, and the elements were created right before our eyes. Akin to the Earthrise image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8, Home’s opening sequence underscores the notion that our home is a unique spot in the blackness of space and is defined and circumscribed by the elements. With the opening sequence Arthus-Bertrand wishes to impart the message of interdependence and reliance on elements—core concepts of ecology. Balance, another key theme in ecology, is introduced with an allusion to the Icarus myth in a sequence depicting Dubai. The story of Icarus’s fall from the sky after flying too close to the sun is a symbolic retelling of hubris—a violent pride and arrogance punishable by nemesis—destruction, which ultimately restores balance by forcing the individual back within the limits transgressed (Littleton 712). In Arthus-Bertrand’s portrayal of Dubai, the camera slowly tilts upwards on the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest human-made structure ever built. The construction works on the tower explicitly frame humans against the bright blue sky in their attempt to reach ever further, transgressing their limitations much like the ill-fated Icarus. Arthus-Bertrand warns that contemporary modernity does not strive for balance or moderation, and with climate change we may have brought our nemesis upon ourselves. By suggesting new dominant paradigms and providing a critique of current maxims, Home’s retelling of myths ultimately sees spectators through to the final stage of the ritual. The last phase in the rite of passage “celebrates and commemorates transcendent powers,” (Deflem 8) marking subjects’ rebirth to a new status and distinctive perception of the outside world. It is at this stage that Arthus-Bertrand resolves the emotional distress uncovered in the separation phase. The film-maker uses humanity’s innate capacity for creation and renewal as a cathartic cleansing aimed at reconciling spectators’ guilt and shame in having inadvertently exacerbated global environmental degradation. Arthus-Bertrand identifies renewable resources as the key to redeeming technology, human intervention in the landscape, and finally humanity itself. Until now, the film-maker pictured modernity and technology, evidenced in his portrayal of Dubai, as synonymous with excess and disrespect for the interconnectedness and balance of elements on Earth. The final sequence shows a very different face of technology. Here, we see a mechanical sea-snake generating electricity by riding the waves off the coast of Scotland and solar panels turning towards the sun in the Sahara desert. Technology’s redemption is evidenced in its ability to imitate nature—a move towards geocentric consciousness (a lesson learned from the ritual’s liminal stage). Moreover, these human-made structures, unlike the skyscrapers earlier in the film, appear a lot less invasive in the landscape and speak of moderation and union with nature. With the above examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity can shed the greed that drove it to dig deeper and deeper into the Earth to acquire non-renewable resources such as oil and coal, what the narrator describes as “treasures buried deep.” The incorporation of principles of ecology, such as balance and interconnectedness, into humanity’s behaviour ushers in reconciliation and ritual cleansing in Home. Following the description of the move toward renewable resources, the narrator reveals that “worldwide four children out of five attend school, never has learning been given to so many human beings” marking education, innovation, and creativity as the true inexhaustible resources on Earth. Lastly, the description of Antarctica in Home is the essence of Arthus-Bertrand’s argument for our innate capacity to create, not simply exploit and destroy. Here, the narrator describes the continent as possessing “immense natural resources that no country can claim for itself, a natural reserve devoted to peace and science, a treaty signed by 49 nations has made it a treasure shared by all humanity.” Innovation appears to fuel humankind’s transcendence to a state where it is capable of compassion, unification, sharing, and finally creating treasures. With these examples Arthus-Bertrand suggests that humanity has an innate capacity for creative energy that awaits authentic expression and can turn humankind from destroyer to creator. In recent years various risk communication texts have explicitly addressed climate change, endeavouring to instigate environmentally consequential social action. Home breaks discursive ground among them through its ritualistic construction which seeks to transform spectators’ perception, and in turn roles and responsibilities, in the face of global environmental risks. Unlike recent climate change media texts such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), The 11th Hour (2007), The Age of Stupid (2009), Carbon Nation (2010) and Earth: The Operator’s Manual (2011), Home eludes simple genre classification. On the threshold of photography and film, documentary and fiction, Arthus-Bertrand’s work is best classified as an advocacy film promoting public debate and engagement with a universal concern—the state of the environment. The film’s website, available in multiple languages, contains educational material, resources to organise public screenings, and a link to GoodPlanet.info: a website dedicated to environmentalism, including legal tools and initiatives to take action. The film-maker’s approach to using Home as a basis for education and raising awareness corresponds to Antonio Lopez’s critique of contemporary mass-media communications of global risks. Lopez rebukes traditional forms of mediatised communication that place emphasis on the imparting of knowledge and instead calls for a participatory, discussion-driven, organic media approach, akin to a communion or a ritual (106). Moreover, while texts often place a great emphasis on the messenger, for instance Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo DiCaprio in The 11th Hour, or geologist Dr. Richard Alley in Earth: The Operator’s Manual, Home’s messenger remains unseen—the narrator is only identified at the very end of the film among the credits. The film-maker’s decision to forego a central human character helps dissociate the message from the personality of the messenger which aids in establishing and maintaining the geocentric sensibility of the text. Finally, the ritual’s invocation and cathartic cleansing of emotional distress enables Home to at once acknowledge our environmentally destructive past habits and point to a hopeful, environmentally sustainable future. While The Age of Stupid mostly focuses on humanity’s present and past failures to respond to an imminent environmental catastrophe, Carbon Nation, with the tagline “A climate change solutions movie that doesn’t even care if you believe in climate change,” only explores the potential future business opportunities in turning towards renewable resources and environmentally sustainable practices. The three-phased processural form of the ritual allows for a balance of backward and forward-looking, establishing the possibility of change and renewal in the face of world risk. The ritual is a transformative experience. As Turner states, rituals “interrupt the flow of social life and force a group to take cognizance of its behaviour in relation to its own values, and even question at times the value of those values” (“Dramatic Ritual” 82). Home, a ritualised media text, is an invitation to look at our world, its dominant social paradigms, and the key element within that world—ourselves—with new eyes. It makes explicit contemporary post-industrial society’s dependence on the environment, highlights our impact on Earth, and reveals our complicity in bringing about a contemporary world risk. The ritual structure and the self-reflexivity allow Arthus-Bertrand to transform climate change into a personally salient issue. This bestows upon the spectator the responsibility to act and to reconcile the spectre of the past with the vision of the future.Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Angi Buettner whose support, guidance, and supervision has been invaluable in preparing this article. 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Iain Sinclair is a writer who is synonymous with a city. Sinclair’s sustained literary engagement with London from the mid 1960s has produced a singular account of place in that city (Bond; Baker; Seale “Iain Sinclair”). Sinclair is a leading figure in a resurgent and rebranded psychogeographic literature of the 1990s (Coverley) where on-foot wandering through the city brings forth narrative. Sinclair’s wandering, materialised as walking, is central to the claim of intimacy with the city that underpins his authority as a London writer. Furthermore, embodied encounters with the urban landscape through the experience of “getting lost” in urban environments are key to his literary methodology. Through works such as Lights Out for the Territory (2007), Sinclair has been repeatedly cast as a key chronicler of London, a city focused with capitalist determination on the future while redolent, even weighted, with a past that, as Sinclair says himself, is there for the wanderer to uncover (Dirda).In this essay, we examine how Sinclair’s wandering makes place in London. We are interested not only in Sinclair’s wandering as a spatial or cultural “intervention” in the city, as it is frequently positioned in critiques of his writing (Wolfreys). We are also interested in how Sinclair’s literary methodology of wandering undertakes its own work of placemaking in material ways that are often obscured because of how his work is positioned within particular traditions of wandering, including those of psychogeography and the flâneur. It is our contention that Sinclair’s wandering has an ambivalent relationship with place in London. It belongs to the tradition of the wanderer as a radical outsider with an alternative practice and perspective on place, but also contributes to contemporary placemaking in a global, neo-liberal London.Wandering as Literary MethodologyIain Sinclair’s writing about London is considered both “visionary” and “documentary” in its ambitions and has been praised as “giving voice to lost, erased, or forgotten histories or memories” (Baker 63). Sinclair is the “raging prophet” (Kerr) for a transforming and disappearing city. This perspective is promulgated by Sinclair himself, who in interviews refers to his practice as “bearing witness” to the erasures of particular place cultures, communities, and their histories that a rapidly gentrifying city entails (Sinclair quoted in O’Connell). The critical reception of Sinclair’s perambulation mostly follows Michel de Certeau’s observation that walking is a kind of reading/writing practice that “makes the invisible legible” (Baker 28). Sinclair’s wandering, and the encounters it mobilises, are a form of storytelling, which bring into proximity complex and forgotten narratives of place.Sinclair may “dive in” to the city, yet his work writing and rewriting urban space is usually positioned as representational. London is a text, “a system of signs […], the material city becoming the (non-material) map” (Baker 29). Sinclair’s wandering is understood as writing about urban transformation in London, rather than participating in it through making place. The materiality of Sinclair’s wandering in the city—his walking, excavating, encountering—may be acknowledged, but it is effectively dematerialised by the critical focus on his self-conscious literary treatment of place in London. Simon Perril has called Sinclair a “modernist magpie” (312), both because his mode of intertextuality borrows from Modernist experiments in form, style, and allusion, and because the sources of many of his intertexts are Modernist writers. Sinclair mines a rich seam of literature, Modernist and otherwise, that is produced in and about London, as well as genealogies of other legendary London wanderers. The inventory includes: “the rich midden of London’s sub-cultural fiction, terse proletarian narratives of lives on the criminous margin” (Sinclair Lights Out, 312) in the writing of Alexander Baron and Emanuel Litvinoff; the small magazine poetry of the twentieth century British Poetry Revival; and the forgotten suburban writings of David Gascoyne, “a natural psychogeographer, tracking the heat spores of Rimbaud, from the British Museum to Wapping and Limehouse” (Atkins and Sinclair 146). Sinclair’s intertextual “loiterature” (Chambers), his wayward, aleatory wandering through London’s archives, is one of two interconnected types of wandering in Sinclair’s literary methodology. The other is walking through the city. In a 2017 interview, Sinclair argued that the two were necessarily interconnected in writing about place in London:The idea of writing theoretical books about London burgeoned as a genre. At the same time, the coffee table, touristy books about London emerged—the kinds of books that can be written on Google, rather than books that are written by people of the abyss. I’m interested in someone who arrives and takes this journey into the night side of London in the tradition of Mayhew or Dickens, who goes out there and is constantly wandering and finding and having collisions and bringing back stories and shaping a narrative. There are other people who are doing things in a similar way, perhaps with a more journalistic approach, finding people and interviewing them and taking their stories. But many books about London are very conceptual and just done by doing research sitting at a laptop. I don’t think this challenges the city. It’s making a parallel city of the imagination, of literature. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)For Sinclair, then, walking is as much a literary methodology as reading, archival research, or intertextuality is.Wandering as Urban InterventionPerhaps one of Sinclair’s most infamous walks is recorded in London Orbital (2003), where he wandered the 127 miles of London’s M25 ring road. London Orbital is Sinclair’s monumental jeremiad against the realpolitik of late twentieth-century neo-liberalism and the politicised spatialisation and striation of London by successive national and local governments. The closed loop of the M25 motorway recommends itself to governmental bodies as a regulated form that functions as “a prophylactic, […] a tourniquet” (1) controlling the flow (with)in and (with)out of London. Travellers’ movements are impeded when the landscape is cut up by the motorway. Walking becomes a marginalised activity it its wake, and the surveillance and distrust to which Sinclair is subject realises the concerns foreshadowed by Walter Benjamin regarding the wanderings of the flâneur. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin quoted a 1936 newspaper article, pessimistically titled “Le dernier flâneur” [The last flâneur]:A man who goes for a walk ought not to have to concern himself with any hazards he may run into, or with the regulations of a city. […] But he cannot do this today without taking a hundred precautions, without asking the advice of the police department, without mixing with a dazed and breathless herd, for whom the way is marked out in advance by bits of shining metal. If he tries to collect the whimsical thoughts that may have come to mind, very possibly occasioned by sights on the street, he is deafened by car horns, [and] stupefied by loud talkers […]. (Jaloux, quoted in Benjamin 435)Susan Buck-Morss remarks that flâneurs are an endangered species in the contemporary city: “like tigers, or pre-industrial tribes, [they] are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passages” (344). To wander from these enclosures, or from delineated paths, is to invite suspicion as the following unexceptional anecdote from London Orbital illustrates:NO PUBLIC RITE [sic] OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. […] In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old trace. Who walks? “There used to be a road,” they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. […] The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes […] are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: “Strangers. Travellers.” (69-70)There is an excess to wandering, leading to incontinent ideas, extreme verbiage, compulsive digression, excessive quotation. De Certeau in his study of the correlation between navigating urban and textual space speaks of “the unlimited diversity” of the walk, highlighting its improvised nature, and the infinite possibilities it proposes. Footsteps are equated with thoughts, multiplying unchecked: “They are myriad, but do not compose a series. […] Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities” (97). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the erratic trajectories, digression, and diversion of Sinclair’s wanderings are aligned with a tradition of the flâneur as homo ludens (Huizinga) or practitioner of the Situationist derive, as theorised by Guy Debord:The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey or the stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view, cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. (“Theory of the dérive” 50)Like Charles Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, Sinclair is happily susceptible to distraction. The opening essay of Lights Out is a journey through London with the ostensible purpose of diligently researching and reporting on the language he detects on his travels. However, the map for the walk is only ever half-hearted, and Sinclair admits to “hoping for some accident to bring about a final revision” (5). Sinclair’s walks welcome the random and when he finds the detour to disfigure his route, he is content: “Already the purity of the [walk] has been despoiled. Good” (8). Wandering’s Double Agent: Sinclair’s Placemaking in LondonMuch has been made of the flâneur as he appears in Sinclair’s work (Seale “Eye-Swiping”). Nevertheless, Sinclair echoes Walter Benjamin in declaring the flâneur, as previously stereotyped, to be impossible in the contemporary city. The fugeur is one détournement (Debord “Détournement”) of the flâneur that Sinclair proposes. In London Orbital, Sinclair repeatedly refers to his wandering as a fugue. A fugue is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home, and often occurring as a reaction to shock or emotional stress.” As Sinclair explains:I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word […]. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. […] The fugue is both drift and fracture. (London Orbital, 146)Herbert Marcuse observed that to refuse to comply with capitalist behaviour is to be designated irrational, and thus relegate oneself to the periphery of society (9). The neo-liberal city’s enforcement of particular spatial and temporal modalities that align with the logic of purpose, order, and productivity is antagonistic to wandering. The fugue state, then, can rupture the restrictive logic of capitalism’s signifying chains through regaining forcibly expurgated ideas and memories. The walk around the M25 has an unreason to it: the perversity of wandering a thoroughfare designed for cars. In another, oft-quoted passage from Lights Out, Sinclair proposes another avatar of the flâneur:The concept of “strolling”, aimless urban wandering […] had been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent—sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing. No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey. […] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how. (75)Not only has the flâneur evolved into something far more exacting and purposeful, but as we want to illuminate, the flâneur’s wandering has evolved into something more material than transforming urban experience and encounter into art or literature as Baudelaire described. In a recent interview, Sinclair stated: The walker exists in a long tradition, and, for me, it’s really vital to simply be out there every day—not only because it feels good, but because in doing it you contribute to the microclimate of the city. As you withdraw energy from the city, you are also giving energy back. People are noticing you. You’re doing something, you’re there, the species around you absorb your presence into it, and you become part of this animate entity called the city. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)Sinclair’s acknowledgement that he is acting upon the city through his wandering is also an acknowledgement of a material, grounded interplay between what Jonathan Raban has called the “soft” and the “hard” city: “The city as we might imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture” (quoted in Manley 6). Readers and critics may gravitate to the soft city of Sinclair, but as Donald puts it, “The challenge is to draw the connections between place, archive, and imagination, not only by tracing those links in literary representations of London, but also by observing and describing the social, cultural, and subjective functions of London literature and London imagery” (in Manley, 262).Sinclair’s most recent longform book, The Last London (2017), is bracketed at both beginning and end with the words from the diarist of the Great Fire of 1666, John Evelyn: “London was, but is no more.” Sinclair’s evocation of the disaster that razed seventeenth-century London is a declaration that twenty-first century London, too, has been destroyed. This time by an unsavoury crew of gentrifiers, property developers, politicians, hyper-affluent transplants, and the creative classes. Writers are a sub-category of this latter group. Ambivalence and complicity are always there for Sinclair. On the one hand, his wanderings have attributed cultural value to previously overlooked aspects of London by the very virtue of writing about them. On the other hand, Sinclair argues that the value of these parts of the city hinges on their neglect by the dominant culture, which, of course, is no longer possible when his writing illuminates them. Certainly, wandering the city excavating the secret histories of cities has acquired an elevated cultural currency since Sinclair started writing. In making the East End “so gothically juicy”, Sinclair inaugurated a stream of new imaginings from “young acolyte psychogeographers” (McKay). Moreover, McKay points out that “Sinclair once wryly noted that anywhere he ‘nominated’ soon became an estate agent vision of luxury lifestyle”.Iain Sinclair’s London wanderings, then, call for a recognition that is more-than-literary. They are what we have referred to elsewhere as “worldly texts” (Potter and Seale, forthcoming), texts that have more-than-literary effects and instead are materially entangled in generating transformative conditions of place. Our understanding sits alongside the insights of literary geography, especially Sheila Hones’s concept of the text as a “spatial event”. In this reckoning, texts are spatio-temporal happenings that are neither singular nor have one clear “moment” of emergence. Rather, texts come into being across time and space, and in this sense can be understood as assemblages that include geographical locations, material contexts, and networks of production and reception. Literary effects are materially, collaboratively, and spatially generated in the world and have “territorial consequences”, as Jon Anderson puts it (127). Sinclair’s writings, we contend, can be seen as materialising versions of place that operate outside the assemblage of “literary” production and realise spatial and socio-economic consequence.Sinclair’s work does more than mimetically reproduce a “lost” London, or angrily write against the grain of neo-liberal gentrification. It is, in a sense, a geographic constituent that cannot be disaggregated from the contemporary dynamics of the privileges and exclusions of city. This speaks to the author’s ambivalence about his role as a central figure in London writing. For example, it has been noted that Sinclair is “aware of the charge that he’s been responsible as anyone for the fetishization of London’s decrepitude, contributing to an aesthetic of urban decay that is now ubiquitous” (Day). Walking the East End in what he has claimed to be his “last” London book (2017), Sinclair is horrified by the prevalence of what he calls “poverty chic” at the erstwhile Spitalfields Market: a boutique called “Urban Decay” is selling high-end lipsticks with an optional eye makeover. Next door is the “Brokedown Palace […] offering expensive Patagonia sweaters and pretty colourful rucksacks.” Ironically, the aesthetics of decline and ruin that Sinclair has actively brought to public notice over the last thirty years are contributing to this urban renewal. It could also be argued that Sinclair’s wandering is guilty of “the violence of spokesmanship”, which sublimates the voices of others (Weston 274), and is surely no longer the voice of the wanderer as marginalised outsider. When textual actors become networked with place, there can be extra-textual consequences, such as Sinclair’s implication in the making of place in a globalised and gentrified London. It shifts understanding of Sinclair’s wandering from representational and hermeneutic interpretation towards materialism: from what wandering means to what wandering does. From this perspective, Sinclair’s wandering and writing does not end with the covers of his books. The multiple ontologies of Sinclair’s worldly texts expand and proliferate through the plurality of composing relations, which, in turn, produce continuous and diverse iterations in an actor-network with place in London. Sinclair’s wanderings produce an ongoing archive of the urban that continues to iteratively make place, through multiple texts and narrative engagements, including novels, non-fiction accounts, journalism, interviews, intermedia collaborations, and assembling with the texts of others—from the many other London authors to whom Sinclair refers, to the tour guides who lead Time Out walking tours of “Sinclair’s London”. Place in contemporary London therefore assembles across and through an actor-network in which Sinclair’s wandering participates. Ultimately, Sinclair’s wandering and placemaking affirm Manley’s statement that “the urban environment in which (and in response to which) so much of English literature has been written has itself been constructed in many respects by its representation in that literature—by the ideas, images, and styles created by writers who have experienced or inhabited it” (2).ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Towards an Assemblage Approach to Literary Geography.” Literary Geographies 1.2 (2015): 120–137.Atkins, Marc and Iain Sinclair. Liquid City. London: Reaktion, 1999.Baker, Brian. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London and New York: Phaidon, 1995.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002.Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Chambers, Russ. Loiterature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005.Day, Jon. “The Last London by Iain Sinclair Review—an Elegy for a City Now Lost.” The Guardian 27 Sep. 2017. 7 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/27/last-london-iain-sinclair-review>.Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.———. “Détournement as Negation and Prelude.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Dirda, Michael. “Modern Life, as Seen by a Writer without a Smart Phone.” The Washington Post 17 Jan. 2018. 4 July 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/modern-life-as-seen-by-an-artist-without-a-phone/2018/01/17/6d0b779c-fb07-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9333f36c6212>.Hones, Sheila. “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography.” Geography Compass 2.5 (2008): 301–1307.Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.Kerr, Joe. “The Habit of Hackney: Joe Kerr on Iain Sinclair.” Architects’ Journal 11 Mar. 2009. 8 July 2017 <https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/the-habit-of-hackney-joe-kerr-on-iain-sinclair/1995066.article>.Manley, Lawrence, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.McKay, Sinclair. “Is It Time for All Lovers of London to Pack up?” The Spectator 2 Sep. 2017. 6 July 2018 <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/is-it-time-for-all-lovers-of-london-to-pack-up/>.O’Connell, Teresa. “Iain Sinclair: Walking Is a Democracy.” Guernica 16 Nov. 2017. 7 July 2018 <https://www.guernicamag.com/iain-sinclair-walking-democracy/>.Perril, Simon. “A Cartography of Absence: The Work of Iain Sinclair.” Comparative Criticism 19 (1997): 309–339.Potter, Emily, and Kirsten Seale. “The Worldly Text and the Production of More-than-Literary Place: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s ‘Inner North’”. Cultural Geographies (forthcoming 2019).Seale, Kirsten. “‘Eye-Swiping’ London: Iain Sinclair, Photography and the Flâneur.” Literary London 3.2 (2005).———. “Iain Sinclair’s Archive.” Sydney Review of Books. 10 Sep. 2018. 12 July 2019 <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/sinclair-last-london/>.Sinclair, Iain. Dining on Stones, or, The Middle Ground. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004.———. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta, 1997.———. London Orbital. London: Penguin, 2003.———. The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City. London: Oneworld Publications, 2017.Weston, Daniel. “‘Against the Grand Project’: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (2015): 255–280. Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality Volume 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.