"Invisible Cities" and the Urban Imagination

ISBN-13: 9783031130472 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 359 str.

Benjamin Linder

Opis

In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50^th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination

Part I Cities & Theory

2. Invisible Cities: Learning to Recognize Urban Society

3. How to Map the Invisible

4. Invisible Cities and the Work of Storying the Future

5. Paris, Latour, and Calvino

6. Queer Cities, Bodies & Desire: Reading Nicole Brossard alongside Italo Calvino

7. On the Epistemic Ruins of Existence

Part II Cities & Cities

8. “The Void not Filled with Words": The Role of Venice in Invisible Cities

9. A Tale of Two Ethnographers: Urban Anthropologists Read Invisible Cities

10. Fifty Years of Soul City: Lessons of a Black Utopia

11. Tirana Visible and Invisible

12. The Lost City: The Pathos of Arab Jerusalem

13. “Submerging the City in Its Own Past”: Tracing Glasgow’s Architectures of Inhabitation

14. Poetics of the Invisible, Poetics of Rubble

15. Encountering Urban Mutualities and Indeterminacy with a Dar es Salaam Taxi Driver

16. Reconstructing Memory and Desire in Bhaktapur, Nepal

17. The Weight of the City: The Burden and Opportunities of Urban Villages

18. Don’t Nuisance the Relented City: Community Barriers and Urban “Keepers” in the Haedo, Buenos Aires

Part III Cities & Practice

19. The Architect and Invisible Cities

20. Visible Cities: Calvino in Performance

21. The Pedagogy of Storytelling in Invisible Cities

22. Invisible Smart Cities

23. Peripheral Visions of Empire: Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo (Homage to Calvino)

24. Imagining São Paulo with Invisible Cities

25. Desires and Fears in the Invisible Eternal City

26. Nyctopolis, the City of Darkness

27. Epilogue: A Comparative Palimpsest of Urban Plenitude and Difference

O autorze

Benjamin Linder is Assistant Editor at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands.