[ecrea] Call for Articles | Urban Imaginaries - Diffractions - Issue 5 | Deadline for submissions: April 30 2015

Call for Articles

Diffractions - Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture


Issue 5 | Urban Imaginaries



Deadline for article submissions: April 30, 2014?





As James Donald put it long ago, “there is no such thing as a city”. As 
a complex product of both material and imaginary forces, cities are 
plural entities at the intersection of geographically and historically 
specific institutions, governmental intervention, global market 
relations, political participation and creative transgression. In this 
constitutive diversity, Donald argued, the city “is above all a 
representation”. Indeed, the city is continuously made and remade 
through acts of imagination, grounded as much in the materiality of 
physical space as in the historically constituted ideas about urban 
life. In the vein of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”, cities, 
as nations, can be conceived as spaces imagined into existence through 
multiple forms of representations and collective interactions.



Cities have become, more than ever, an outlet of often clashing social 
energies, where internal tensions and translocal connections intersect 
to shape but also contest the way urban life is configured and 
experienced. The popularity of the term “glocalization” - “the 
simultaneity – the co-presence – of both universalizing and 
particularizing tendencies” (Robertson, 1992) - suggests that global 
fluxes have led both to globalizing impulses and to multiple reactions 
against cultural uniformity through the “production of locality” 
(Appadurai, 1996). As social spaces where contradictory impulses 
coexist, cities are the site of political, legal and economic 
regulation, but also of creativity and dissenting practices.



Several authors have proposed the term “new metropolitanism” (Lenz et 
al. 2006) as a new concept to account for urban agency with regard to 
the material, cultural, social, and political processes that inform 
daily practices in a metropolitan setting. Drawing a divide between the 
history of modern metropolis - thoroughly scrutinized by the likes of 
Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel - and contemporary world cities, the 
term “new metropolitanism” pays attention to the reorganization of 
present-day urban spaces, driven by cosmopolitan ideals, multicultural 
imaginaries, global economic transformations, political participation 
and creative vitality. At the same time, the term can be an analytic 
resource to tackle the conflicting forces at play in contemporary 
cities, seen as sites of emancipatory fantasies and associative 
imagination, but also of control, coercion and exclusion.



Rather than unified forms then, cities are heterogenous spaces where 
“urban cultures of difference” (ibid, 19) come into contact, where 
conflict and struggle constitute experience and drive change (Brantz et 
al, 2014). This issue wishes therefore to examine the ways in which 
cultural and political imagination have shaped and contested the 
configuration and experience of historical and present-day urban space.



Topics may included but are not restricted to the following:



- Metropolitanism and urban cultures of difference

- Globalization, translocality and placemaking

- Austerity urbanism and post-industrial cities

- Dynamics of creativity and gentrification

- The right to the city: Urban citizenship and participatory culture

- Boundaries, centres and peripheries

- Ghost cities

- Cities and colonial imagination

- Experiencing the city: tourism and authenticity

- City branding

- Entrepreneurial and smart cities

- Surveillance and Public Space

- Cities as affective spaces

- Urban imagination in literature and the arts



We look forward to receiving full articles of no more than 20 A4 pages 
(not including bibliography) and a short bio of about 150 words by May 
15, 2014 at the following address: (submissions /at/ diffractions.net).

Diffractions welcomes articles written in English, Portuguese and Spanish.



Please follow the journal’s submission guidelines 
athttp://www.diffractions.net/submission-guidelines


DIFFRACTIONS also accepts book reviews that may not be related to the 
issue’s topic. If you wish to write a book review, please contact us at 
(reviews /at/ diffractions.net).



Diffractios is the online, open access and peer-reviewed journal of the 
doctoral program in Culture Studies hosted by the Lisbon Consortium and 
the Catholic University of Portugal. Find us online at www.diffractions.net.





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