Urban Mindscapes of Europe (European Studies 23) (European Studies: An Interdisciplinary Series in European Culture, History and Politics)

Urban mindscapes are structures of thinking about a city, built on conceptualisations of the city's physical landscape as well as on its image as transported through cultural representation, memory and imagination. This book pursues three main strands of inquiry in its exploration of these ‘landscapes of the mind'in a European context. The first strand concerns the theory and methodology of researching urban mindscapes and urban ‘imaginaries'. The second strand investigates some of the representations, symbols and collective images that feed into our understanding of European cities. It discusses representations of the city in literature, film, television and other cultural forms, which, in James Donald's phrase, constitute ‘archives of urban images'. The third and last section of the volume concentrates on the relationship between the collective mindscapes of cities, urban policy and the practice of city marketing. CONTENTS......Page 8 Authors in this volume......Page 10 Introduction. European Urban Mindscapes: Concepts, Cultural Representations and Policy Applications......Page 14 METHODOLOGY AND CONCEPT FORMATION......Page 34 The Gestalt of the Urban Imaginary......Page 36 Researching the Urban Imaginary: Resisting the Erasure of Places......Page 44 'An Avenue that Looks Like Me': Re-presenting the Modern Cityscape......Page 64 Urban Mindscapes Reflected in Shop Windows......Page 82 Encountering the City: On 'Not Taking Yourself With You'......Page 98 CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CITY......Page 112 Strange City: Belfast Gothic......Page 114 'Seeing the Future': Urban Dystopia in Wells and Lang......Page 128 Strangers (to) Themselves: Cityscapes and Mindscapes in 1980s European Cinema......Page 148 Once in TV's Royal City: Television Coverage of Royal Media Events......Page 164 Cartoons and the Comic Exposure of the European City of Culture......Page 180 Drifting Bridges: Semantic Changes of the Bridge Metaphor in Twentieth-Century Budapest......Page 198 Reconstructing the Ancient City: Imagining the Athenian Polis......Page 212 APPLICATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF URBAN MINDSCAPES......Page 226 The Myth of Berlin: the Imagined and the Staged City......Page 228 Berlin Literature and its Use in the Marketing of the 'New Berlin'......Page 238 Sites and Sights: the Urban Museum in a Changing Urban Structure......Page 260 Identity by Invocation or by Design? How Planning is Conjuring up a New Identity for Malmö......Page 276 Confessions of a Place Marketer......Page 288 Urban mindscapes are structures of thinking about a city, built on conceptualisations of the city's physical landscape as well as on its image as transported through cultural representation, memory and imagination. This book pursues three main strands of inquiry in its exploration of these 'landscapes of the mind' in a European context. The first strand concerns the theory and methodology of researching urban mindscapes and urban 'imaginaries'. The second strand investigates some of the representations, symbols and collective images that feed into our understanding of European cities. It discusses..