Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities

206 Pages·2009·4.278 MB·English

by  Christoph Lindner

“A timely and insightful exploration into one of the most important inter-
sections today between cities, architecture and global culture. Stimulating
and provocative.”
Prof. Iain Borden, University College London, United Kingdom
“Urban culture has always been marked by fear and enthrallment, mutability
and meaning, rich and poor, but the specificity of these relations is ever
changing. These wonderfully diverse and interdisciplinary essays, focusing
especially on the visual culture of contemporary global cities, usefully present
and take stock of these old themes in the garb of our time.”
Prof. Thomas Bender, New York University, USA

Globalization, Violence, and the
Visual Culture of Cities
What connects garbage dumps in New York, bomb sites in Baghdad, and
skyscrapers in São Paulo? How is contemporary visual culture – extending
from art and architecture to film and digital media – responding to new forms
of violence associated with global and globalizing cities? Addressing such
questions, this book is the first interdisciplinary volume to examine the com-
plex relationship between globalization, violence, and the visual culture of
cities.
Violence – in both material and cultural forms – has been a prominent and
endemic feature of urban life in the global metropolitan era. Focusing on
visual culture and offering a strong humanities perspective that is currently
lacking in existing scholarship, this book seeks to understand how the violent
effects of globalization have been represented, theorized, and experienced
across a wide range of cultural contexts and urban locations in Asia, Europe,
North and South America, and the Middle East. Organized around three
interrelated themes – fear, memory, and spectacle – essay topics range from
military targeting in Baghdad, carceral urbanism in São Paulo, and the Paris
banlieue riots, to the security aesthetics of G8 summits, the architecture of
urban paranoia, and the cultural afterlife of the Twin Towers.
Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities offers fresh insight
into the problems and potential of cities around the world, including Beijing,
Berlin, London, New York, Paris, and São Paulo. With specially commis-
sioned essays from the fields of cultural theory, architecture, film, photog-
raphy, and urban geography, this innovative volume will be a valuable
resource for students, scholars, and researchers across the humanities and
social sciences.
Christoph Lindner is Professor and Chair of English Literature at the Uni-
versity of Amsterdam and Research Affiliate at the University of London
Institute in Paris. His book publications include Revisioning 007 (2009),
Urban Space and Cityscapes (2006), and Fictions of Commodity Culture
(2003).
‘Questioning Cities’
Edited by Gary Bridge, University of Bristol, UK and
Sophie Watson, The Open University, UK
The ‘Questioning Cities’ series brings together an unusual mix of urban
scholars under the title. Rather than taking a broadly economic approach,
planning approach, or more socio-cultural approach, it aims to include titles
from a multi-disciplinary field of those interested in critical urban analysis.
The series thus includes authors who draw on contemporary social, urban
and critical theory to explore different aspects of the city. It is not therefore a
series made up of books which are largely case studies of different cities and
predominantly descriptive. It seeks instead to extend current debates,
through, in most cases, excellent empirical work, and to develop sophisticated
understandings of the city from a number of disciplines including geography,
sociology, politics, planning, cultural studies, philosophy, and literature. The
series also aims to be thoroughly international where possible, to be innova-
tive, to surprise, and to challenge received wisdom in urban studies. Overall it
will encourage a multi-disciplinary and international dialogue always bearing
in mind that simple description or empirical observation which is not located
within a broader theoretical framework would not – for this series, at least –
be enough.
Published: Urban Space and Cityscapes
Christoph Lindner
Global Metropolitan
John Rennie Short
City Publics
The (dis)enchantments of urban
Reason in the City of Difference
encounters
Gary Bridge
Sophie Watson
In the Nature of Cities
Small Cities
Urban political ecology and the
Urban experience beyond the
politics of urban metabolism
metropolis
Erik Swyngedouw, Maria Kaika,
David Bell and Mark Jayne
Nik Heynen
Cities and Race
Ordinary Cities
America’s new black ghetto
Between modernity and development
David Wilson
Jennifer Robinson
Cities in Globalization Globalization, Violence, and the
Practices, policies and theories Visual Culture of Cities
Peter J. Taylor, Ben Derudder, Christoph Lindner
Piet Saey and Frank Witlox
Forthcoming:
Cities, Nationalism, and
Urban Assemblages
Democratization
How actor network theory changes
Scott A. Bollens
urban studies
Ignacio Farias and Thomas Bender
Life in the Megalopolis
Lucia Sa
Searching for the Just City
Peter Marcuse, James Connelly,
Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivio,
James Potter and Justin Steil

Globalization, Violence, and
the Visual Culture of Cities
Edited by
Christoph Lindner
First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2010 Christoph Lindner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lindner, Christoph
Globalization, violence and the visual culture of cities / Christoph Lindner.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. City and town life–Case studies. 2. Cities and towns–Case
studies. 3. Globalization–Social aspects–Case studies. 4. Violence–Case
studies. 5. Visual communication–Social aspects–Case studies. 6. Social
problems–Case studies. 7. Sociology, Urban–Case studies. 8. Intellectual
life–Case studies. I. Title.
HT119.L557 2009
307.76—dc22
2009005062
ISBN 0-203-88507-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–48214–3 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–88507–4 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–48214–1 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–88507–9 (ebk)
Contents
List of Figures xi
List of Contributors xiv
Foreword xv
NEZAR ALSAYYAD
Acknowledgements xvii
1 Globalization and violence 1
CHRISTOPH LINDNER
PART I
Fear 15
2 Architecture and economies of violence
São Paulo as case study 17
RICHARD J. WILLIAMS
3 Drugs and assassins in the city of flows 32
GEOFFREY KANTARIS
4 Temporary discomfort
Jules Spinatsch’s documentation of global summits 49
HUGH CAMPBELL
5 American military imaginaries and Iraqi cities
The visual economies of globalizing war 67
DEREK GREGORY