Water Cities: papers at Åbo Akademi University’s English department

On 26 September the first session of the English department’s literary research seminar PREMIS of the academic year 2018-19 was held. Under the heading ‘Water Cities‘, there were two talks. I presented on St Louis, destructiveness, life stories and city personality with the title ‘River City Blues: Tales and Visions of St Louis’.

Any comments or observations would be valuable: my aim is to turn this into an article submission for an American studies, cultural studies, cultural geography or related interdisciplinary journal.

I went through the Pruitt-Igoe story and the personal accounts of the city of Eliot and Armstrong, integrating those from the Narva and Stockholm presentations. I also got to the planner Harland Bartholomew and in particular his 1928 Plan for the Central River Front. The images attached to this post relate to that. Below is the smoky, Dickensian riverside city that Bartholomew thought was out of date; above is what he wanted to replace it with.

Preparing this particular paper was valuable because it took me further with planning discourses associated with Bartholomew and others, but above all because it enabled me to explore the notion of city personality as used in some sorts of writing about cities but not in others.

Lena Englund then spoke about her recent researches into journalistic accounts of the Cape Town water crisis, still current in 2018. Lena’s title was ‘‘“The rest of us prayed for rain” –  Tracing the Personal in Accounts of the Water Crisis in Cape Town’.

There were some notable cross-overs and consonances between the papers, despite differences of physical geography, historical moment, genre and other things. For me it was clear that the idea of doom and the narrative of apocalypse had been used in discursive accounts of both cities, St Louis and Cape Town.

Thanks to all who were there!

Pruitt-Igoe Comes to Tensta Konsthall

On 21 September, I spoke at the one-day symposium ‘Large-Scale Housing Projects as Productive Space in Literature and Culture’ held at Tensta konsthall, a centre for contemporary art in the 1960s large-scale suburb of Tensta, Stockholm. This was an event jointly presented by ALUS and the Department of Culture and Aesthetics (IKE) and the Department of Baltic Languages, Finnish, and German, Stockholm University.

My talk developed my work on the intersections between individual experience and citiness or the personality of a city using the example of life stories of different sorts from 20th century St Louis, Missouri. When you put together for example the memories of the poet T.S. Eliot of childhood in St Louis in the 1890s and early 1900s, with the memories of residents of the Pruitt-Igoe development from the 1960s and early 1970s, you start to see connections and stories that wouldn’t emerge otherwise.

In the talk, ‘Myth and Materiality in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth‘, I took as a primary text an archive and interview based documentary film (dir. Chad Freidrichs, 2011). The film is a rich source for grasping both the ways in which the story of Pruitt-Igoe has been told, and the harshly material aspects of how life there broke down in unmaintained buildings. Many of the speakers in the film expressed positive aspects of life there, including senses of celebration, togetherness and home.

Overall this was a fascinating symposium, which worked well for discussion. Topics were close enough for us really to learn from each other, and we didn’t pack the day with too many talks so there was space for freer exchange of thoughts at the end. The venue, in the heart of a ‘large-scale housing project’ built as part of Sweden’s Million Programme, contributed a great deal. We had a tour of the shopping centre in the venue where, in connection with the Tensta Konsthall and community centre, art has been installed in various shops and small-businesses now established there. This was a great opportunity to hear about Tensta from a resident artist and also interact a little with community members who have very varied backgrounds.

Narva, an Industrial Border City: Literary Reflections. Symposium in literary urban studies and discussion day

  On 13 September 2018 I spoke at the symposium ‘Narva, an Industrial Border City: Literary Reflections’, held in Narva, Estonia. Unlike most of the speakers I did not speak about Narva, North East Estonia, or even Europe. Here is the abstract for my talk, Mobilizing a Riverine Border City: Plans and Memoirs of St Louis, 1910-60. I introduced the city beside the Mississippi which has a long-standing narrative of itself as the ‘Gateway to the West’. Individuals’ narratives of the city are exemplified by memoirs and autobiographies written by those who spent portions of childhood and youth there, including the poet T.S. Eliot and the boxer Henry Armstrong. Both wrote forms of Protestant spiritual autobiography concerned with this city which has a strong Roman Catholic tradition. Eliot and Armstrong’s views of the city contrast with those taken by city planners, notably Harland Bartholomew, who radically reshaped the city between the 1910s and 1950s as it entered an era of dramatic decline.

I was delighted to participate in such a dynamic event at this border city where several cultures meet. Apart from the formal discussions in the seminar room, a highlight was a guided tour of the now disused Kreenholm works (pictures from inside), a vast cotton mill with many ancillary buildings, on the western side of the Narva river separating the EU and Estonia from Russia to the east. Thanks go to the other organizers of the event, from the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, and the Centre for Landscape and Culture at Tallinn University. The event took place at the splendid new building of the University of Tartu’s Narva College, next to the seventeenth-century old city hall of Narva which survived the Second World War, unlike few other buildings in the town.