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 Below is the smoky, Dickensian riverside city that Bartholomew thought was out of date; above is what he wanted to replace it with.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!
