Rebecca E. Biron (ed.) (2009)
Durham: Duke University Press, 274 p.
Richard Young and Amanda Holmes (eds.) (2010)
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 272 p.
Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds.) (2012)
London: Sage, 448 p.
Reviewed by Christian Morgner
University of Luzern
Over the last 20 to 30 years, there has been an increasing recognition of the relation of arts and culture to the urban, particularly in Western societies. This trend has been influenced by several factors: the decline of economic activities and the subsequent social decay of urban centers, followed by their rejuvenation through arts and cultural industries; the innovative quality of artistic activities with regard to the global position of urban agglomerations; and questions about the fabrication of images and narratives of socio-urban life, so-called “urban imaginaries”. This topic has become increasingly relevant in many regions throughout the globe over the past decade – including Latin America – mainly because the problems and questions that initiated in Western societies have travelled to other parts of the world. However, the relation of arts and culture to the urban has yet to be discussed comprehensively. This review therefore focuses on a number of significant books treating the relationship between urban centers and artistic activities in Latin America.
City/Art, edited by Rebecca E. Biron, addresses
the artistic representations of a number of Latin-American
cities (p. 20) in the form of urban imaginaries focusing on the
“lived city” (23). The book is divided into three sections:
“Urban Designs”, “Street Signs”, and “Traffic”.
In the first section, Néstor García Canclini’s essay introduces an
innovative methodology to study the “lived city”. Canclini
selected a number of photographs of traffic and analyzed them with
focus groups. Those who experienced daily traffic, such as taxi
drivers, deliverers, or pedestrians, considered the city as
chaotic and abnormal. Conversely, government and police officialswho
manage traffic considered the city to be a perfectly normal place
where obstacles and problems should be anticipated. Hence,
different social practices led to different ways of imagining the
urban (43). The articles in the second section of the book deal
with urban imaginaries and forms of aesthetic resistance in urban
areas. Examples include graffiti and public art that attack the
established conventions of museums and monuments, such as the work
of Lotty Rosenfeldo (131). Other articles address urban
imaginaries such as filmic accounts that aim to resist urban,
governmental or mainstream media conventions. The third section
mainly deals with urban planning, such as Hugo Achugar’s
conversion of a prison into a mall in central Montevideo, or the
attempt to inject arts and culture into central Rio de Janeiro.
Cultures of the City, by Richard
Young and Amanda Holmes, focuses on the complex interaction
between people and urban places with regards to culture and
identity (2). Culture is understood as a form of lived urban
experience and expression. The book can be seen as an extension
of and companion to City/Art because of
the material discussed and its treatment of cities of a
peripheral status.
The section “Imagining Urban Identities” contains essays that
analyze representations, artworks, and fictional accounts. The
range of subjects is impressive, covering nueva trova song
lyrics in Cuba, filmic accounts and literary constructions of
urban space in Buenos Aires, as well as theatrical or performance
art in Mexico City. The essays are predominantly based on close
readings of particular works of art and discuss how meaning-making
processes of urban images in music, film, or literature challenge
official governmental representations. The second group of essays,
“Urban Identities and Cultures of the Periphery”, addresses Latino
communities in Los Angeles and Detroit. Again, works of art
undergo a close reading in regard to challenging established urban
images. The final section of the volume, “Performance and the
Ritualization of Urban Identities”, takes a more sociological
approach to similar content, using the term “culture” in a much
broader sense. Here, the construction of citizenship or the
formation of identities is discussed in relation to changes in the
urban infrastructure.
Both books, City/Art and Cultures of the City,
address topics of interest for a range of cultural professionals
(such as curators or urban planners) and humanities scholars. They
contain interesting historical details, subjects, and empirical
material. However, some of the material seems to be outdated and
not highly representative, e.g., where it concerns single case
studies of particular works of art. Their shared focus is artistic
representations, leaving the urban fabric and its function in
artistic expression unexplored. The books reveal little of how the
images of various cities are enabled or produced by their urban
fabric and socio-spatial configuration, such as via developments
in their cultural infrastructure, the concentration of artists,
and their creative environment. Both texts place the creation of
art and culture and its relation to urban fabric in the
background. Overall, thearticles found in these books only
describe changes in the pictorial self-descriptions and narratives
of metropolitan areas. Yet they fail to link them to broader
changes in the cities’ social structure or urban fabric. Cities,
Cultural Policy and Governance, edited by Helmut Anheier and
Yudhishthir Raj Isar, is the fifth volume of “The Cultures and
Globalization Series”. The book focuses on intersecting
cultures, globalization, and urban studies. With a methodology of
interest to urban planners, cultural geographers, and sociologists
alike, the text aims to link experiences within cities to more
general societal changes. The book lays emphasis on quantitative
measurements. Though the publication deals with cities from
various world regions, this review will focus on the Latin
American portion of the text.
The editors’ introduction offers an interesting perspective: the
societal rise of artistic activities, in particular in
metropolitan areas, can be well-explained by understanding a city
as a new type of global cultural actor; one often outclassing the
very national society in which it is located (2). Cities and their
cultures provide the societal background for the rise or decline
of artistic activities. Unfortunately, the authors are unable to
provide a conceptual frame of reference to link these two aspects
to culturally global cities (9). The volume tries to compensate
this by providing a number of case studies covering particular
cities and a large amount of statistical background information on
cultural developments.
The volume is divided into two parts. The first part opens with
conceptual articles on city branding, sustainable development,
informal economies, and communication networks, followed by case
studies on particular cities. A section entitled “City
Experiences” deals with a number of cities from Latin America,
such as Mexico City (Lucina Jiménez) and São Paulo (Maria Carolina
Vasconcelos- Oliveira). The articles in this section have a
predominantly quantitative orientation and reveal important
aspects of the spatial- cultural configuration of these cities’
artistic infrastructures. Both articles show that the cities under
discussion are marked by glaring inequality in the concentration
of cultural institutions (e.g., theaters, galleries, museums,
music venues). These institutions are clustered in a few regions
of the city, which excludes large parts of the population from
their use. For instance, the Iztapalapa district in Mexico City
houses more than three million people, yet not a single theater,
museum, or library (244). Aside from parks and public libraries,
all types of art venues are located in central São Paulo (274).
This could be considered a form of artistic segregation, but such
a conclusion is left for the reader to make rather than integrated
into a consistent theory or framework in the text. The gathering
of statistical data in the second part of the volume is laudable,
but it remains virtually unlinked to the section of articles.
Furthermore, it appears to have been collected in an inconsistent
manner. For example, the counting of art museums often differs and
the definition of “art museum” is not globally standardized.
The publications City/Art and Cultures of the City address
the role of urban artistic activities and their productive output
in the form of urban imaginaries, but do not fully link these
close readings to societal changes or provide a conceptual frame
for the relationship between an urban fabric and its artistic
activity. This is exemplified by the books’ explanation of the
rise or decline of complex social structures and patterns that
enable artistic production, such as the role of networks of
artists, exchange, critical stimulation and motivation, as well as
the integration of innovations from the art world at large.
However, the book Cities, Cultural Policy and Governance overshoots
the mark by providing ample background information, such as
statistical data on the number of art venues, while lacking an
explanation for individual differences. For instance, the book
does not probe why Rio de Janeiro has more art venues than Mexico
City and why these institutions are found only in major cities and
particular districts. The answers to these questions would require
more qualitative data than is given and might have benefitted from
ethnographic or anthropological fieldwork to establish a stronger
link between the data and individual case studies.
In sum, there remains a demand for publications which will reflect
at greater length on the relationship of an urban fabric to
artistic activity. A stronger conceptual and theoretical
discussion is required in future publications to integrate and
link artistic activities and the urban settings out of which they
arise.