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Language, Space and Power:

Urban Entanglements
Edited by
Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott

VOLUME 13

Published by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies


w w w.helsinki.f i/c ollegium/journal
ISSN 179 6 -29 8 6
ISBN 978 - 952-10 - 8578 - 9
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
Edited by Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott

Contents

Language, Space and Power: Reflections on Linguistic and Spatial 1


Turns in Urban Research
Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott

The Hybrid Performance of a District: A Study of the Work of a Tenants’ 28


Association
Nicolas Bencherki

Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums. Towards a 45


Microsociological Contextualisation Analysis
Yannik Porsché

Linguistic Landscape as a Translational Space: The Case of Hervanta, 73


Tampere
Kaisa Koskinen

Ethnic Diversity and Creative Urban Practice: The Case of Bradford’s 93


Mughal Garden
Charles Husband & Yunis Alam

Capitalising on the City: Edinburgh’s Linguistic Identities 115


Maggie Scott

Textually Produced Landscape Spectacles? A Debordian Reading of 132


Finnish Namescapes and English Soccerscapes
Jani Vuolteenaho & Sami Kolamo

Crippled City: Joel Lehtonen’s Krokelby as a Radical Inversion of 159


Finnish National Romantic Landscapes
Lieven Ameel

List of Contributors 175

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Language, Space, Power:
Reflections on Linguistic and Spatial Turns
in Urban Research

Jani Vuolteenaho
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Lieven Ameel
University of Helsinki

Andrew Newby
University of Helsinki

Maggie Scott
University of Salford

Seeking to locate the case studies of Language, Space and Power: Urban
Entanglements in the context of recent academic history, this introductory article
explores the manifestations and legacies of the so-called linguistic and spatial turns
in urban research. With regard to the linguistic turn, we first illustrate approaches
characteristic of structuralism-inspired urban semiotics and postructuralism-
affected discussions of the postmodern urban condition. In these research fronts,
that were extremely fashionable in the late twentieth century, language was adopted
as a pivotal metaphorical model to conceptualise the power-embeddedness of
urban spaces, processes and identities. More recently, however, the ramifications
of the linguistic turn across urban research have proliferated as a result of
approaches in which specific place-bound language practices and language-based
representations about cities have been scrutinised. Sharing an understanding of the
linguistic realm as a category that is analytically distinct from the social and material
realms, we identify methodological orientations (from discourse analytic to speech
act theoretical frameworks), social scientific theories (from Laclau to Lefebvre) and
thematic interests (from place naming to interactional uses of spoken language)
that have been significant channels in re-directing urban scholars’ attention to
the concrete workings of language. As regards the spatial turn, we highlight the
relevance of the connectivity-, territoriality-, attachment- and entanglement-focused
conceptualisations of space for the study of language-related power issues in urban
settings. Finally, we introduce the volume’s empirical articles.

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 1–27.
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Introduction

This volume opens up new vistas of research into the power-related workings of
language in cities: the roles of narratives, advertising texts, translations, place names
and street signage as the “agents” of planning and governance, of place promotion
and branding, of heritage production and museum exhibitions, of politically-aware
fiction and of urban transformation at large. Broadly speaking, traces of two turns
experienced in the social sciences and humanities during the last few decades
unite the following seven case studies: first, the linguistic turn, an endemic current of
analysing socio-cultural phenomena as language-like constructions; and second,
a less pervasive (but still highly influential) spatial turn that has sensitised scholars
to all kinds of spatio-temporal distances, flows, territorialisations, identities and
entanglements. Importantly, both of these academic “mass movements” have been
profoundly interdisciplinary by nature. Sweeping across disciplinary boundaries,
the linguistic and spatial turns have brought formerly disjointed schools of thought
into dialogue. One of the aims of this volume is to showcase how the studies of
what we call language-space interfaces have enriched urban research.

One might at present argue that the original enthusiasm associated with the
more long-lived linguistic turn – a term initially promulgated by the philosopher
Richard Rorty as early as the mid-1960s (Spiegel 2009; see also Rorty 1992;
Shapiro 1984) – has recently been on the wane. As a backlash against the
unprecedented mushrooming of constructionist and deconstructionist approaches
and associated textual metaphors in the academic vocabulary, it may even be
argued that the current academic fashion is to deplore its legacy. While the
linguistic turn has always had critics in both human-oriented and natural sciences
(e.g. Palmer 1990; Sokal 1996; Ray & Sayer 1999; Flyvbjerg 2001; Hamnett 2001),
recent years have witnessed a surge of new paradigms in which the concepts
of materiality, practice, performativity, affect, cognition, consciousness and even
“non-representationalism” have been suggested as remedies for the “culturalist”
excesses it arguably generated (e.g. Latour 1993; Philo 2000; Miller 2001; Peltonen
2004; Ankersmit 2005; Biernacki 2005; Thrift 2008). That said, the sweeping
generalisations about a wholesale withering of academic interest in language seem
to us far too simplistic. As also evinced by this volume, one extremely important
and enduring legacy of the linguistic turn has been the sensitisation of researchers
in the humanities and social scientists to cultural otherness and ethnicity- and
gender- -related identity politics. For critical scholarship that was previously
preoccupied with “fixed” ideological antagonisms, class hierarchies and socio-
economic structures, the widespread recognition of the importance of language
as the object of politics paved the way for the pluralisation of the theories of power
(e.g. Hall 1992, 83–84). As we contend that the actual inheritance of the linguistic

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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

turn is much more nuanced than its critics typically allow, a central leitmotif in this
introduction is to trace sustainable aspects in its legacy for urban research.

By contrast, the cross-disciplinary interest in spatiality has not as yet shown


signs of slackening but has rather gained momentum. In Anglophone social
sciences, catchphrases like “the difference that space makes” and “geography
matters” began to proliferate in the 1980s in research on the dialectic of society
and space by theorists like Doreen Massey, Anthony Giddens and John Urry (see
e.g. Gregory & Urry 1985; Gregory 1994, 106–124). As the focus of attention
subsequently shifted from these social scientific conceptualisations towards the
more culture- and difference-attuned understandings of spatiality, earlier works by
Walter Benjamin (e.g. 1999), Henri Lefebvre (1991), Michel Foucault (e.g. 1980) and
Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze & Guattari 1987), among many other cultural theorists,
were also acknowledged as forerunners to the spatial turn (e.g. Soja 1989; 1996;
Gregory 1994; Massey 1995a; Crang & Thrift 2000; Withers 2009). Since then
and until now, language-entangled spatial power issues have formed a part of a
wide interdisciplinary interest in the spatiality of societal and cultural phenomena.
Although the spatial and linguistic turns cannot be collapsed into one other, our
argument is that this enhanced sensitivity towards language as the object of politics
has, in itself, enduringly contributed to the broadening of conceptions of spatiality
(see e.g. Desforges & Jones 2001; Scott 2004; Auer & Schmidt 2010; Jänicke &
Lenehan 2010; Mark et al. 2011). The present volume is not alone in instantiating
such a tendency. Among recent anthologies, for instance, Language and Space:
An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation (Auer & Schmidt 2010) highlights
a recently diversified interest in spatial issues within the discipline of linguistics,
whereas Language and the Moulding of Space: An Interdisciplinary Discussion
(Jänicke & Lenehan 2010) brings together literary scholars, architects, sociologists
and geographers to discuss the effects of changing spatial realities to language,
the roles of language in articulating the meanings of geographical space as well as
abstract and fictional spaces that exist only or predominantly in language.

During the conference “Urban Symbolic Landscapes: Power, Language,


Memory”, held in Helsinki in May 2011, it became increasingly apparent to us that
urban research is currently a field in which ideas and approaches linked with the
linguistic and spatial turns are currently applied, cross-fertilised and elaborated
by exponents across the humanities and social sciences. While a selection of
papers presented in that conference forms the backbone of the present volume,
this introduction seeks to contextualise the conceptual and methodological
underpinnings of the following case studies in the light of recent academic history.
Given that the majority of the volume’s articles represent analyses of concrete
place-bound language practices rather than the elaborations of spatial theory, we
have opted to put more emphasis on the offerings of the linguistic turn to urban
research conducted over the last few decades. Firstly, we illuminate examples of

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

structuralism- and poststructuralism -inspired approaches in which language has


been treated as “metaphorical” shorthand for investigating urban landscapes and
processes. Secondly, we note a recent shift from these metaphorising approaches
towards the “literal” analyses of urban language practices and language-based
representations about cities. In this connection, we identify important but hitherto
rarely acknowledged methodological, theoretical and thematic channels through
which this gradual transformation seems to have occurred. Rather than pursuing
recent trajectories in spatial theory-formation as has been done elsewhere (e.g.
Gregory 1994; Crang & Thrift 2000; Hubbard et al. 2004; Massey 2005; Jessop et al.
2008; Warf & Arias 2009), in the penultimate section we elucidate language-related
ramifications of the spatial turn, and in particular, the relevance of the connectivity-,
territoriality-, (de)attachment- and entanglement-focused conceptualisations of
space for the study of linguistic power issues in urban contexts. Finally, we introduce
the volume’s case studies with an eye to conceptual and methodological themes
discussed in this introduction.

Language Metaphors and the City

While any synoptic recounting of the history of the linguistic turn is beyond the
scope of this article, a common denominator among influential structuralist
and poststructuralist theorisations behind this scholarly transformation was
engagement with language in a very wide sense. In this context, effectively all
kinds of representational systems and social practices were seen as “language-
like” phenomena (e.g. Jameson 1974; see also Rorty 1992, 369).1 In structuralism,
the Saussurean model of enclosed sign systems was applied to all sorts of cultural
and societal phenomena, whereas poststructuralists favoured the conception that
all forms of signification are based on discursive-epistemic exclusions and thus
characterised by fundamental indeterminacy. In this section, we will concentrate on
the applications of semiotic theory to the study of cities, as well as the discussions
of the postmodern urban condition, two prominent research fronts in which these
types of language-based metaphorisations flourished especially during the final
decades of the twentieth century.

1 In addition, a plethora of fields linked with the philosophy of language (e.g. Austin 1962;
Wittgenstein 1968), pragmatism (e.g. Peircean semiotics), social constructionism (Berger &
Luckmann 1966; Hacking 1999), literary criticism (from Bakhtin to Said), versions of Marxism (from
Benjamin to Gramsci), feminism (Butler 1997), postcolonial theory (Spivak 1988; Bhabba 1994),
and debates over the crisis of representation (e.g. White 1978; Clifford & Marcus 1986) have also
been counted among the discussions related to the linguistic turn. Given this complexity, it is not
surprising that the linguistic turn has had a number of partially overlapping labels in recent decades.
Alongside ”linguistic turn”, the appellations cultural turn (predominantly in the social sciences),
discursive turn (a slightly more common term in the humanities) and postmodern turn (a largely
outmoded catchphrase of the late 20th century) have at times been used interchangeably.

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A now-classic metaphorical approach to the language-space interface is


urban semiotics, a field of research that was initiated by Roland Barthes and
other structuralism-inspired continental European scholars in the 1960s and that
became salient in Anglo-American social science some twenty years later (e.g.
Choay 1986; orig. 1965; Barthes 1986; orig. 1970–1971; Gottdiener & Lagopoulos
1986; see also Blonsky 1985). By and large, the partisans of this field distanced
their approach from the study of speech and the written word as the signs of the so-
called natural languages. Instead, urban semioticians tended to blur the distinction
between the linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects of the city by taking language
as an overarching trope for reading the denotative and connotative messages of
interior architecture, façade styles, urban fashions, car-body designs, pedestrian
flows, and the like. Apart from a shared understanding of the concept of the sign
as foundation of the field, however, no theoretically uniform school of thought
emerged. In a version of urban socio-semiotics promulgated by Mark Gottdiener
and Alexandros Lagopoulos, for instance, urban space was conceived of as a
“pseudo-text” produced both by semiotic and non-semiotic (i.e. material and social)
processes. Writing as editors of The City and the Sign, Gottdiener and Lagopoulos
(1986) were deeply sceptical of the “idealist” tenets of deconstructionism (ibid., 15).
Meanwhile, they also pitted their approach against the cognitively-focused Lynchian
view in which the urban environment was reduced to the city-dwellers’ perceptual
knowledge of the physical form (see Lynch 1960), and further, denounced design-
focused studies in architectural semiotics in which “finance capitalists, real estate
developers, the working class, and teenage graffiti sprayers” were clustered
together and the social stratification of signification of urban space was typically
ignored (ibid., 13). Accordingly, Gottdiener’s (1986) analysis of American suburban
shopping malls discovered a structuring principle in which “instrumental rationality”
was disguised as “social communication” and the “eroticism of urban encounters”
(Barthes 1986) was harnessed to attract well-to-do shoppers to the commodified
landscape incarnations of decentralised post-industrial urbanism.

Gottdiener and Lagopoulos’ (1986) theoretical stance contends that the


metaphorisation of the city in semiotic terms does not necessarily lead to insensitivity
to the power hierarchies of the social and material world. A similar awareness of
the socially stratified (some would say dichotomist) nature of urban sign systems
was also inherent to Michel de Certeau’s (e.g. 1984) hugely influential writings
on cities. While de Certeau’s erudite, essentially poetic, works are not usually
coupled with urban semiotics in the strictest sense, its language-centred echoes
are obvious in his writings (Blonsky 1985; de Certeau 1985; see critically: Thrift
2008, 77–78), along with an undertow of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian
analyses of modern panopticism, speech act theory and Wittgenstein’s critique
of the expert languages. Witness how de Certeau (1985), after having likened the
Manhattan skyline to “the tallest letters in the world” and a view down from the
107th floor of the World Trade Center to “a god’s regard… that transforms the city’s

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

complexity into readability and that freezes its opaque mobility into a crystal-clear
text”, metaphorises the street-level city of common practitioners as a labyrinthine
world of enunciative speech-acts that evade top-down rationalistic and ideological
domination:

It is below – ‘down’ – on the threshold where visibility ends that the city’s common
practitioners dwell. The raw material of this experiment are the walkers, Wandersmänner,
whose bodies follow the cursives and strokes of an urban ‘text’ they write without reading.
[…] Everything happens as though some blindness were the hallmark of the processes
by which the inhabited city is organized. The networks of these forward-moving,
intercrossed writings form a multiple history, are without creator or spectator, made up
of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces; with regard to representations, it
remains daily, indefinitely, something other. (ibid., 124, italics in the original)

In urban research, the wide application of de Certeau’s views about both


sides of the power hierarchy at issue – the strategic “textualisations” of the city by
planners, politicians and other powerful actors, and tactical everyday “enunciations”
by ordinary urbanites – is indicative of a much more general dissemination of
linguistically-inflected vocabulary beyond the field of urban semiotics per se. This
notion has held true as much for urban sociology and literary research as for
architectural theory and human geography. In the 1990s, in particular, spectacular
edifices tended to be read “as communicative texts, which like advertisements are
culturally encoded with popular meanings” (Crilley 1993, 237), and whole urban
landscapes likewise as textual expressions of hegemonic ethnic-cultural ideologies
and oppositional political or identity-based standpoints (e.g. Duncan 1990; Gregory
1994, 133–203).

An especially noteworthy interdisciplinary research focus, often characterised


by the dense use of language (and spatial) metaphors in the fashion of
poststructuralism, has concerned itself with the impasses of modern(ist) urban and
cultural development. That is, indeterminacy-focused vocabulary of the demise of
grand narratives provided both the critics and advocates of postmodernism with
a conceptual-rhetorical repertoire to address the alleged novelties and excesses
of the ongoing urban transformation. In his book Architectures of Excess, for
instance, the media scholar Jim Collins (1995) asserted that the “Big Picture” of
Los Angeles – a path-breaking “hyperreal” metropolis for many postmodernists
(e.g. Baudrillard 1988; Soja 1989) – was unattainable “from any single vantage
point because the city as lived environment is that cacophony of voices formed
by the private narratives of its inhabitants and the popular films, rap songs and
television images that circulate in, around and through those personal narratives”
(Collins 1995, 41). For critics, too, the metaphors of uncontrollable instability and
multiplicity have often played an important rhetorical role in their portrayals of the
postmodern urban condition. In Jameson’s (1991) gloomy diagnosis, for instance,
the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles served as an emblem of

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how “we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space” have not
kept pace with the endless, commodified intertextualities of recent cultural evolution
(ibid., 38–44). Similarly, Zygmunt Bauman’s (1996, 51) apocalyptic portrayal of
postmodern life as one “lived in a city in which traffic is daily re-routed and street
names are liable to be changed without notice”, was hardly intended to be read as
a literal description of contemporary urban occurrences, but rather as a metaphoric
dramatisation en route to his more serious theoretical considerations of the ethical
challenges of our times.

Above kinds of structuralist and poststructuralist impulses have contributed to


the introduction of new theoretical perspectives into the purview of urban studies in
the course of the last few decades and continue to figure in present-day academic
discussions in a multitude of mutated guises. Especially when reading more or less
purely poststructuralist writings about cities (e.g. Feher & Kwinter 1987; Clarke 2003),
however, it is difficult to avoid an impression of their limitations in tackling material
and social urban realities (see Shields 1996 on the problems of applying Derridean
deconstructionism in theorising about cities). Clearly, cities as spatio-historical
formations are not only constituted of and conditioned by endless differences,
multiple voices, ceaseless flows and the intertextual chains of signification, but
also by hierarchically “structured” material constellations, spatial practices, cultural
conventions and associated subject positions (e.g. Wolff 1992). Seen from this
broadly “materialist” perspective, it is hardly surprising that the poststructuralist and
postmodernist theorisations of cities as “simulations of simulations” (Baudrillard
1988) or spaces where there exists “no outside-text” (Derrida 1994, 158) have
been waning in recent years.

Language Practices in Urban Research

As decades have passed, the metaphorically textual treatments of the city as


described above have increasingly moved away from the forefront of scholarly
debates. In their stead, the recent diversification of language-inflected urban
studies has been caused mainly by the proliferation of analyses of urban language
practices in the more literal sense. Thus, contrary to conceptions of language as
the model of the urban, in these latter approaches the pivotal subject matter is
the investment of material and social spaces of and within cities with language-
mediated meanings.
Indeed, questions on how specific written and spoken language practices and
forms – related to urban planning and governance; place marketing and branding;
translated signage; the representations of space in literary fiction; reproduction of
urban identities through time-honoured place names; discursive staging of the past
in museum exhibitions and sports arenas et cetera – simultaneously reflect and
shape urban realities also figure prominently in this volume’s case studies. While it

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

is beyond the scope of this introductory article to examine motifs and justifications
behind the strengthened fascination with such topics, part of their explanation may
be related to protracted criticisms of the structuralist and poststructuralist “tendency
to tame the spatial into the textual” (Massey 2005, 54; Lefebvre 1991, 5–17). Be that
as it may, specific methodological, theoretical and thematic “channels” clearly have
existed through which the interdisciplinary interest in concrete urban language-
uses has progressed in the course of recent decades, and on which we shall
concentrate in this section.

Firstly, the prolonged popularity of certain methodologies associated with the


linguistic turn cannot be dismissed when seeking explanations for the enhanced
status of study of specific urban language practices. Interpretative frameworks
with a propensity to address the mutually constitutive relationship between the
linguistic and the material realms have played key roles in this regard. Among
such methodologies have been the discourse analytic and speech act theoretical
frameworks. As regards the former, the broadened notion of discourse – understood
in the Foucauldian lineage as an epistemic formation that not only establishes “the
limits of what is ‘sayable’” (Laclau 2006, 114) but that also shapes subjectivities
and material arrangements (e.g. Foucault 1972; 1980)2 – has yielded myriad
applications, extensions and elaborations in urban research. Although there
are often incommensurable differences between variants of discourse analyses
(e.g. Fairclough 1992; Blommaert 2005; Laclau 2005; Glynos & Howarth 2007),
in broad academic terms the concept of discursivity has formed an important
bridge between the humanities (for which, broadly, linguistic issues focusing on
the corpora of written and spoken language from archives to fictional texts and
inspections of linguistic-textual detail have always been pivotal concerns) and the
social sciences (conventionally preoccupied with extra-linguistic societal, political
and urban processes).

Currently, the same can be said of the spatial and urban applications of speech
act theory in grasping the mediation between language and the material and
social realms. Since Austin’s seminal works (1962) and the critical elaborations
by Judith Butler (1990: 1997) and other theorists of performativity (e.g. Sullivan
2011), the analyses of how different types of “utterances” persuade their audiences
and prompt actions have proliferated and facilitated dialogues across disciplinary
boundaries. To give a specific urban example: the official re-naming of a street
may go unnoticed or provoke protests depending on the absence or presence
of social and ideological tensions among local people (cf. Rose-Redwood 2008).

2 Critical of the Derridean version of poststructuralism for its reduction of discursive practices
to textual traces only (Eribon 1992, 119–121), Michel Foucault (e.g. 1972; 1974) more specifically
defined a discursive formation as a canonised set of rules and practices that “systematically form
the objects of which they speak”, and equally crucially, made other ways of speaking and thinking
about these objects irrelevant if not impossible (Foucault 1972, 49).

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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

By the same token, a publicly displayed warning: “24 hour CCTV recording in
operation” is likely to influence the visible aspects of on-site crowd behaviour by
discouraging unlawful activity, but it also may replace and worsen (perceived)
problems elsewhere (see also Bencherki’s article in this volume on actions by a
civic organisation to alter the city authorities’ way of dealing with an acute housing
problem). Indeed, speech act theory’s potential to interrogate the effectiveness and
limitations of the power of specific language practices to trigger social and material
consequences and often unintended chain-reactions seem far from exhausted in
urban research.

Secondly, and quite comprehensibly given the overall academic saliency


of language matters in the course of recent decades, a pronounced “linguistic
awareness” has characterised many recent social scientific theorisations with no
primary focus on language and textuality as such. Let us begin with an example
that concomitantly also illustrates the enduring impact of poststructuralist
conceptualisations in current political theory. Ernesto Laclau (2005) has stressed
the capital importance of names (incorporating not only brand names and
common names such as Coca-Cola or Americanness, but also the names of youth
subcultures and trade unions), as in themselves “empty signifiers”, crystallising
popular identities and discourses that otherwise comprise of essentially diffuse
symbolic elements (see also Selg & Ventsel 2008). Further, Dean MacCannell’s
(1976) now classic theory of site sacralisation can be mentioned as a structuralism-
affected framework that explicated (alongside the physical production of spatial
attractions) important functions of names, signage, narratives, textual reproduction
and other language practices in tourism and heritage production. Influenced by
speech act theoretical views on how language-based classifications and words
veritably “do things”, Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into the power of state-centred
linguistic “monopolies” in imposing the official visions of the social world as well
as the sociological consequences of language-created “phantasms, fears, and
phobias, or simply false representations” have likewise catalysed much subsequent
research (Bourdieu 1991; Bourdieu 1998: 19–20; see also Bourdieu & Eagleton
1992: 116).

As our final instance of the indirect influence of the linguistic turn on a number
of prominent theorists, the considerations of language by the Marxist-humanist
philosopher Henri Lefebvre are of particular relevance here. In his works written
during the zenith of structuralism and poststructuralism, Lefebvre (e.g. 1991, 7)
attacked theorists like Derrida, Barthes and Kristeva for lacking “any sense of
limitations” to their language-enclosed meta-theoretical underpinnings. His hugely
influential The Production of Space (Lefebvre 1991; orig. 1974), in particular, was
decidedly suspicious of the then fashionable efforts to theorise social space in
general and cities in particular from deconstructionist and semiotic perspectives.
Despite his denouncement of “the-priority-of-language thesis” (ibid.,16), however,

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Lefebvre’s own conceptualisations of space and critical accounts of everyday life


perceptively addressed a range of acute linguistic phenomena, from the forms and
functions of texts in societal subsystems like fashion markets and tourism to the
circulation of self-referential “talk about talk” as a widespread tendency in modern
art forms and commodified mass culture (Lefebvre 1971).

Although scattered across a variety of academic fields, our argument is that


the theoretical insights and commentaries like those of MacCannell, Bourdieu and
Lefebvre have formed a kind of persistent sub-text of the linguistic turn that has for
its part facilitated research on specific aspects of the interface between language
and space. Another key point here is that social scientific conceptualisations such
as those discussed above have essentially differed from more “purely” semiotic and
poststructuralist theories in the sense that they have treated the linguistic realm as
an intricately entangled yet analytically distinct category from the social and the
material. Speaking specifically about the power-embedded practices of place and
street naming, this is exactly what Vuolteenaho and Berg (2009, 11) have recently
underscored:

[N]aming strategies almost invariably operate inextricably in tandem with other


material and discursive processes equally fundamental for the operation of power. In
complex ways, extra-linguistic (e.g. spatio-temporally routinized practices, ceremonial
rituals, boundary-markings and -fencings, cartographic and other representational
delineations) and linguistic (not only place naming as such, but also coding places
through numbering them, calling places by classificatory common nouns, oral and
written discourses on places, and so on) measures of placemaking intertwine and
support each other. [italics as in the original]

This brings us to the third significant way in which the studies of urban language
issues have become increasingly salient; namely, the upsurge of interdisciplinary
domains of research in which a specific type of language practice has been
adopted as the crux of empirical and theoretical discussions. An apposite example
is provided by newer critical place-name research itself, a field that has challenged
commonly held lay and academic views about the apparent political innocence of
place names, and instead tackled the mediating role of these spatial inscriptions
in the (re)production of ideologically-charged spatial knowledges and place-bound
identities (e.g. Palonen 1993; Palonen 2008; Berg & Vuolteenaho 2009; Rose-
Redwood & Alderman 2012: also see the articles by Scott and Vuolteenaho &
Kolamo below). Intriguingly, one of the key conceptualisations in this scholarship
has been to approach urban nomenclatures as “city-texts”; yet as Maoz Azaryahu
(1996, 324) explains, this is not to be understood as an analogy or metaphor but
as “a manifest and specific semiotic feature of the city” (see also Rose-Redwood
2008, 882). A related branch of research that also figures in this volume is linguistic
landscape research (see especially Koskinen’s article below). In this research field,
language choices and related power issues in authoritative and commercial texts in

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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

the public space are brought under scrutiny in different types of multilingual urban
settings (e.g. Shohamy & Gorter 2009).

Last but not least, the detailed analyses of spoken language, its uses in
different types of interactional settings and the associated negotiations of identity
and otherness cannot be left unmentioned as a growing linguistically-focused
field of urban research (in this volume, see Porsché’s article). In this connection,
innovative research agendas have been facilitated by a set of widespread
methodologies (pertinent versions of discourse analysis, conversation analysis,
speech act theory etc.) and topical research questions of how wider societal and
urban processes (pertaining to glocalisation, commodification, the mass media
and multimodal uses of technological novelties like portable ICTs) interpenetrate
people’s talk (Laurier 1998; Myers 2006; Johnstone 2010). Importantly, the study
of everyday communicational situations has been one of the main channels for the
rapprochement between the discipline of linguistics – a field traditionally accused
of an introverted and formal approach to language (e.g. Bakhtin 1984, 181–183;
Downes 1984, 7) – with a number of other disciplines that nowadays share an
interest in concrete language practises and their ideological entanglements (see
e.g. Pred 1990; Pavlenko & Blackledge 2004; Gal 2006; Paunonen et al. 2009;
Coupland 2010; Johnstone 2010; Eckert 2012). While this situation stands in
contrast to the early phases of the linguistic turn when its research foci tended to
have “less and less to do with the details of work in linguistics” (Rorty 1992, 362;
see also Ng 1998), it is also a further indication of the renewability of research on
language, space and power.

Whilst the list of recent approaches to language-related topics and power


issues could be continued, the above illuminations are sufficient to underscore
the plurality of ramifications of the linguistic turn across urban research. In the
light of the above examples, it is indeed difficult to accept claims that sensitivity
to language amounts to scholarly imprisonment in the theoretical labyrinths of
cultural constructions, representations and textuality alone (e.g. Latour 1993, 90;
Thrift 2003). That said, the distinction we have drawn between the metaphorical
and literal treatments of the language-space interface is not intended to imply that
the former approaches are necessarily of lesser relevance. In research questions
that concern, for instance, schisms between the strategic textualisations of the city
by powerful actors and the tactical practices, lived meanings and often unheard
voices of unprivileged groups (cf. de Certeau 1984), metaphorisations of the city
as a language-like construction have undiminished relevance. Even so, it currently
seems that the most sustained inheritance of the linguistic turn in urban research
concerns attuning researchers to specific language-related practices and their
workings as part of wider power relations and spatial transformations.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Conceptualising Space in Language-


sensitised Urban Research

We have already noted that the linguistic and spatial turns cannot be equated
with each other. Even so, recent academic history has witnessed considerable
convergences between them: spatial metaphors abound in language-oriented
research and vice versa, many leading exponents of the linguistic turn have played a
kind of double role in the reconciliation of broadly linguistic and spatial perspectives,
and so on. What, then, about the spatial turn itself? What theoretical contributions
does it have to offer to the study of the interrelationship between language and space
in urban settings? Of course, conceptualisations of space are not an academic
novelty as such, but a prolonged feature in physics, mathematics, economic theory
and continental philosophy (e.g. in phenomenology, see Bachelard 1994; orig.
1958). Around a quarter century ago, however, the term “spatial turn” came to
denote, in the Anglo-American social sciences, a breakaway from abstractions in
which societal processes had been approached as if taking place “on the head of
a pin, in a spaceless, geographically undifferentiated world” (Massey & Allen 1984,
4). Soon, the spatial turn also became associated with cultural and poststructuralist
theories on identity politics. From the 1990s onwards, a “veritable flood of spatial
discourses proliferating across the disciplines” also came to matter in entirely new
ways in the humanities (Friedman 2005, 192). In literary studies, postcolonialist and
feminist scholars, in particular (e.g. Said 1978; Gilbert & Gubar 1980; Ashcroft et al.
1989), became increasingly interested in questions of spatial conceptualisations,
and engaged with theoretical frameworks from sociology and geography. There
was also an upsurge of frameworks for analysing trajectories, thresholds, spatial
nodes, and other elements of literary space, as well as the extra-literary relations of
these with the urban space in the “actual” world (e.g. Moretti 1998; 2005; Ette 2005;
Dannenberg 2007; Bridgeman 2007, 55). In the humanities and social sciences in
general, the heightened interest in spatiality simultaneously implied a turn away
from objectivist views of space as an “empty backdrop”,3 instead conceiving it
as a dynamic configuration. Meanwhile, it became increasingly commonplace
to acknowledge that the understandings of space – whether lay or professional,
implicit or explicit – in themselves are not power-neutral, but generative of effects
and inequities that traverse through the functioning of the global economy to the
cultural processes of meaning-giving (e.g. Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1996).

3 As a sophisticated example of the often implicit conceptualisations of space as a “void”


where things happen, let us refer to what was termed “Geographical Linguistics” in Ferdinand de
Saussure’s (1959, 191–211) classic lectures. In these lectures, the category of space was addressed
through methodological questions related to the diversity of official languages and dialects spoken
in particular geographical areas as well as the spatio-temporal diffusion of linguistic waves. Yet,
as de Saussure (ibid., 21) himself put it, “everything that relates to the geographical spreading of
languages and dialectal splitting belongs to external linguistics [as these] do not actually affect the
inner organism of an idiom”.

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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

Despite ambitious attempts towards comprehensive theoretical accounts of


spatiality by social and cultural theorists, the concept of space has remained as a
sort of “Babel of conflicting interpretations” (Crang & Thrift 2000, 2) – a notion that
also holds true in recent language-attuned spatial and urban research. Neither have
the transfers of specific spatial theories between different disciplinary frameworks
always occurred without friction. One source of mismatches can be found in the
problematic conceptual exchanges between, on the one hand, disciplines that
have conventionally concentrated on “earth-bound” spatial phenomena (such
as geography) and on the other hand, disciplines (such as literary research) that
investigate cultural and imaginary emanations (see e.g. Smith & Katz 1993; Gil
2011, 74; more generally on “travelling” concepts, see Said 1983; Bal 2002). Given
the very malleability of the concept, it indeed seems essential to acknowledge, as
the geographer David Harvey (1973, 13–14, 197) and the sociolinguist Barbara
Johnstone (2010) have done, that different research questions call for different
conceptions of spatiality. With this notion in mind, it is reasonable to assume that for
the investigations of language-space interfaces, too, some theoretical approaches
to space are more germane than others. Accordingly, in the rest of this section we
will concentrate on the conceptualisations of four specific dimensions of space
– aspects of spatiality related to connectivity, territoriality, (de)attachments and
entanglements4 – and identify acute challenges related to each within language-
and power -attuned urban research.

Fuelled above all by intensified globalisation, the connectivity aspect of spatiality


has been the key pillar in discussions on a range of present-day transformations.
In the mainstream debates on globalisation, shrinking travel times and high-speed
telecommunications networks that enable immediate communication on a planetary
scale have been pervasive themes. From a critical angle, however, Massey (2005,
81–89) has accused many academic accounts of globalisation for subscribing
uncritically to the visions of “unfettered mobility” in ways that reiterate the abstract
conceptualisations of space-economy, both within economics and among the
elites of global capitalism. Indeed, as soon as one re-considers the much-hyped
overcoming of distances vis-à-vis today’s socio-spatially uneven “power geometries”
(Massey 1991; 2005) in general, and the persistence of more conventional, typically
smaller-scale and less-hyped communicational forms in particular, the traditional
subject of language contacts can be recast from angles such as new core-periphery
arrangements and the onward march of English and other “world languages”
(Coupland 2010, 67). An array of timely research horizons opens up: through what
kinds of discourses and language practices do the business and political elites of

4 While these four spatialities seem especially relevant from the perspective of the study of
interrelationship between language and space, it must be noted that they differ, for instance, from the
specific conceptualisations of space – related to territory, place, scale and networks – that Jessop,
Brenner and Jones (2008) see as being of particular importance for the theoretical understanding of
contemporary political-economic restructuring.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

today exert their power, and how do the mantras and narratives of “free unbounded
space” affect the fates of localities in different parts of the world (Massey 2005, 81;
see also Marazzi 2008)?5 How is the privileged status of so-called world-cities,
for instance, accentuated if not constructed, by linguistic means? Are the globally
connected “non-places” like airport terminals and technoparks characterised by
linguistic homogenisation and enfeeblement, as Marc Augé (1995) has maintained?
In contrast, what are the language-related manifestations of decline and seclusion
in less-favoured urban pockets bypassed by new networked communication
infrastructures (Graham & Marvin 2001, 15; Atkinson 2009, 299, 306)? Given that
“the local” has contemporarily acquired positive values, as an antidote to culturally
levelling and all-too-familiar manifestations of “the global” (Coupland 2010, 74), in
what linguistic ways has this counter-tendency been actualised in different types
of urban contexts? The questions above illustrate some of the largely uncharted
spatio-linguistic tendencies and contradictions pertaining to the (dis)connectivity
aspect of spatiality.

Secondly, the resilience of territoriality as an organising aspect of socio-spatial


processes and power constellations poses an exact antithesis to the notion of
“the end of geography” (O’Brien 1992) endorsed in the sweeping representations
of globalisation as a borderless and difference-annihilating process. As Paasi
(2003, 475) has put it, people’s awareness of being part of the global space of
flows seems to have rather generated “efforts to strengthen old boundaries and
to create new ones”. Here, one branch of research questions emanates from the
inherited status of the modern nation-states as the central agents of “linguistic
territoriality”, a status that has been achieved through the centralised practices
of language standardisation, schooling, the suppression of minority tongues,
language proficiency tests, canonised literary works et cetera (e.g. Bourdieu 1991;
Gal & Irvine 1995; Vuolteenaho & Ainiala 2010). As Lieven Ameel demonstrates in
this volume, this territorial-linguistic fix has also been challenged through different
language practices, such as satirical fiction. In which ways are the linguistic
hegemonies of nation-states over their territories slackening due to the rise of the
local and deterritorialising processes related to worldwide spatial commodification
(cf. Vuolteenaho and Kolamo’s article below)? Or do the state-controlled
bureaucratic-linguistic conventions still turn a blind eye to actual multiculturalisation,
as Koskinen’s study on the linguistic landscape of a Finnish suburb in this volume
seems to suggest?

Another territoriality-related research frontier concerns the complicity of


language practices in the internal polarisation of contemporary cities. Currently,

5 In Christian Marazzi’s (2008) otherwise critical speech act theory-influenced analysis of today’s
information- and finance led “new economy”, a somewhat curious absence is the scant attention paid
to spatio-linguistic power hierarchies emanating from the status of English as a globally hegemonic
business language (cf. Vuolteenaho & Kolamo on Finnish high tech landscapes in this volume).

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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

spectacular consumption citadels, luxurious officescapes and gentrified industrial


estates strive, in different ways, to stand out from the rest of the cityscape. The
critics of neoliberal urbanism, in particular, have emphasised that these revamped
and CCTV-monitored enclaves – not to speak of elite developments that are gated
in the literal sense – simultaneously reflect a widespread upper-class contempt
for the cultural otherness of the unprivileged groups, a contempt often disguised
as a discourse about the apparent dangers of urban life (Smith 1996; Ellin 1997).
Concomitantly, the stigmatisation of declining urban areas has further entrenched
the perceptions of the city as a patchwork of starkly antithetical environments
(see e.g. Wacquant 2008; Caldeira 2009). In connection with these bipolar
transformations, language practices seeking to revamp or stigmatise specific
urban territories, or to strengthen or challenge discursive social spatialisations
about them (Shields 1991), are a prevalent but often unnoticed phenomenon (e.g.
Gilbert 2007; Vuolteenaho & Ainiala 2009; Brighenti 2010). From media discourses
to promotional narratives, statutory bans, warnings (“24 hour CCTV recording in
operation”), protest banners, wall inscriptions and other “markers of the spatiality
of power relationships embedded in the landscape” (Myers 1996, 237), language
forms a quintessential part of the ongoing de- and re-territorialisation processes
within cities.

In our third conceptual “species of spatiality” (cf. Perec 2008) of relevance for the
study of urban language practices, people’s attachments to and detachments from
place are brought to the fore. In the lead of more or less explicitly poststructuralism-
inspired thinkers in cultural and postcolonial studies and postmodern sociology,
much emphasis has been put on the fluidity rather than rootedness of spatial
identities. In this conceptualisation, spatial and ambulatory metaphors (see e.g.
Pratt 1992) like “exileness”, “in-betweenness” and “nomadism” have abounded in
re-conceptualising the complex co-ordinates and mobilities of people’s lives, and
in turn, re-examining the status of cities and urban places as the contested stages
of identity politics. Undoubtedly, the members of ethnic groups in diaspora, as
Stuart Hall writes, quite literally tend to “belong to more than one world, speak more
than one language (literally and metaphorically), inhabit more than one identity,
have more than one home [and] have learned to negotiate and translate between
cultures” (1995, 206, italics added). In Bauman’s (e.g. 1998) sweeping view, even
the privileged Western urbanites base their “touristic” identities on the variegated
symbolic resources of global media and consumer culture. In general, the above
kinds of indeterminacy-focused views have afforded valuable insights into the dis-
embeddedness of people’s identities in any unilaterally place-bound sense – and
importantly also evinced language’s mediating role in the identities’ embeddedness
in complex power relations and cultural-linguistic tensions, operative on a global
scale.
In this connection, however, two characteristic caveats in the poststructuralist
and -modernist conceptualisations of spatial identity politics must be emphasised.

15
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

First of all, the above kinds of theorisations often seem to imply, problematically,
the diminishing of the importance of the local contexts and materiality of everyday
life as the anchor points of identity-building. In the light of theoretical and empirical
engagements with the subject of spatial attachment in the alternative traditions of
phenomenology (e.g. Relph 1976; Tuan 1991; Light & Smith 1998), environmental
psychology (e.g. Altman & Low 1992; Lewicka 2008), research on spoken language
and interactional situations (e.g. Pavlenko & Blackledge 2004; Myers 2006), and
not least in critical studies on marginalised groups’ struggles for their right to
the city (e.g. Mitchell 2003), the demise of the local clearly does not hold true.
Meanings and memories accumulated bodily, biographically and intersubjectively
across “proximate” encounters still self-evidently matter in the shaping of people’s
identities alongside their more “distant” attachments (e.g. Ameel & Tani 2012).
Indeed, it ought to be above all an empirical task to investigate the links between
spatial attachments and the language-based processes of identity-formation, and
how these differ along the lines of social class, gender and ethnicity. Further, it
should not be taken at face value that the realm of spatial attachments is detached
from the realms of societal structures or strategic calculations by powerful
actors (cf. de Certeau 1984). Inasmuch as media- and language-based spatial
socialisation programs have been central to the building of nation-states and other
types of “imagined communities” in the course of modernisation (Anderson 1991),
so too have present-day marketing professionals begun to commercially harness
people’s positive emotions of belonging as a socially consolidating resource for
place branding (e.g. Anholt 2005, 117; see critically, Mayes 2008).

Finally, it is not accidental that our fourth and broadest conceptual lens for
examining space – the entanglement dimension of spatiality – is present in this
volume’s title. In this conceptualisation, spatiality is understood as a relational
outcome of historical and geographical interconnections: the intertwining of the
chains of production and consumption, co-presence of and clashes between
different ideological and scientific discourses, ascending and descending planning
models and design fashions, encounters between natives and newcomers, tensions
between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, and not least, the communicational
forms through which the human and non-human elements of space are signified
and enter the realm of dialogues and re-negotiations. In Massey’s influential theory
(e.g. 1991), for instance, places are understood as particular points of intersection:
“their ‘local uniqueness’ is always already a product of wider contacts; the local
is always already a product in part of ‘global’ forces, where global in this context
refers not necessarily to the planetary scale, but to the geographical beyond, the
world beyond the place itself” (Massey 1995b, 183). An equally relevant definition
in terms of this volume’s aim to investigate the entanglements of language within
the extra-linguistic processes of the production of space is provided by Lefebvre
(1991; see also Shields 1999, 144–146), according to whom the form of social
space, as is most pronouncedly manifested by cities, is

16
Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

encounter, assembly, simultaneity [of] everything that there is in space, everything that
is produced either by nature or by society, either through their co-operation through
their conflicts. Everything: living beings, things, objects, works, signs and symbols…
(Lefebvre 1991, 101)

While social space in general and cities in particular are self-evidently about
much more than just linguistic relationships and language practices, Lefebvre
makes explicit the idea that signs and symbols and their variegated usages are an
indispensable aspect of the production of space. At the level of people’s everyday
interactions, the simultaneously innate and cultural medium of language is a pivotal
means by which people give meaning to their lives and surroundings as well as
more or less successfully exert their “spatial competence” (Lefebvre 1991). Via
speaking, listening, reading and writing and other mundane language-embedded
acts the urbanites – from business(wo)men and socialites to graffiti-painters and
the homeless – linguistically perform the city as a practiced space, make things
happen (or at least try to do so) and occasionally even manage to challenge its
power configurations. Similarly, words are deeds as part of institutionally sanctioned
or otherwise powerful representations of and discourses on space as in planning
laws and regulations, marketing strategies, street plans or party platforms. Less
assuredly, the theoretical views and emancipatory utopias of critical scholarship
(say, the conceptualisations of the city as a readable text, a disorientating labyrinth
or a democratic agora) as well as the imaginative forms of writing (as in poetry or
satirical fiction) may also find their entry to broader discourses and visions about
better life, inspire museum exhibitions, stir politically weighty protests and even
alter the fates of cities and their residents. In this latter sense, too, cities are not
finished products or texts, but continually evolving assemblages of ideational,
social and material processes. In the last instance, as a non-autonomous force,
language is caught up in a range of urban processes and simultaneously endowed
with a potential capacity to alter them.

From their specific perspectives, the articles in this volume shed light on
different types of language-space interfaces and their entanglements with urban
power issues.

Introducing the Articles

The legacies of the linguistic and spatial turns are echoed throughout this
volume in a variety of ways. Between the following case studies by scholars from
sociology, linguistics, translation studies, media and communication research,
urban geography and literary research, there are remarkable overlaps as regards
theoretical discussions and methodological approaches, many of them highlighted

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

above. In addition, concerns with institutional language practices, the language-


mediated meanings of places for different urban actors, commodification and
branding of space, and heritage production as a part of today’s marketing aspirations
are themes that surface again and again in this theme issue. Comprising seven
independent empirical articles in addition to this introduction, there are two major
issues that Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements aims to address
as a whole: the relevance of both metaphorical and literal approaches to language
in urban research, and the intertwining of different types of language practices with
the wider material and social processes in the power-related production of urban
space.

The volume begins with Nicolas Bencherki’s fascinating analysis of a dispute


over the unhealthy living conditions of immigrant tenants of a residential building
in Montréal, Québec, Canada. As bedbug, mildew and water leakage problems
became evident, a local tenants’ association took measures to convince the
city officials about their presence and that the building’s deplorable condition
required more than just cosmetic actions. Bencherki documents ethnographically
how this “translational” endeavour aimed at making the mildew-infested physical
artefact “speak” for itself with an argumentative emphasis on “objective” moisture
measurements and thermal photographs. In conceptual terms, the article combines
innovatively the viewpoints of “materialist” actor-network theory, “linguistic” speech
act theory and poststructuralist thinkers, and exemplifies a contemporary academic
tendency in which the very materiality of spatial surroundings has been brought to
the fore in the study of the language-space interface.

By invoking Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Yannick Porsché introduces at


the beginning of his paper a specific type of interactional space, the museum,
as an “effectively enacted utopia in which… all the other real sites that can be
found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted”
(Foucault 1986, 24). In the rest of this methodologically-focused article, Porsché
outlines ideas related to the analysis of the production and reception of an exhibition
in three museums in Paris (the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration) and
Berlin (the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Kreuzbergmuseum). Echoing
complex ongoing cross-cultural negotiations in Europe, the analysed exhibition
project addressed the representations of immigrants in the public sphere in France
and in Germany from 1871 until the present day. While drawing from sociological,
sociolinguistic and ethnomethodological literature, and combining interaction
and discourse analytical frameworks, Porsché discusses issues of memory,
knowledge production and relationship between the discursive and the material
in the museums as the spaces of de- and recontextualisation, and sheds light on
multimodal interactional practices in museums through two conversation-analytic
research examples.

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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

While in Bencherki’s article, translation is a metaphor for something that occurs


between the material and discursive realms, in Kaisa Koskinen’s case study the
concept denotes the communication of texts between different languages that
people actually speak. By bringing together perspectives of translation theory and
linguistic landscape studies, Koskinen charts the literal textuality of the streetscape
in the suburb of Hervanta in Tampere, Finland, on the basis of a sample of translated
signage in Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic and English. In addition to
tackling a number of other translation-related identity political issues, the article
also provides an illuminating example of how the everyday symbolism of urban
places is still influenced not only by cultural globalisation, but also by nation-states’
persisting linguistic hegemonies within their territories. Much to the author’s surprise,
the relatively multilingual (yet non-tourist) neighbourhood was characterised by a
scarceness of publicly visible non-Finnish signage. While some local shopkeepers
and religious communities had opted to address the neighbourhood’s residents
with persuasive translated signage, municipal or state institutions present in the
area had rather adopted a minimalistic translation policy in this regard.

In their piece on Bradford’s Lister Park, and its recently constructed Mughal
Garden, Charles Husband and Yunis Alam analyse the historically and ethnically
multi-layered semiotic environment of the inner-city area of Manningham. The
article provides a street-level exploration of how the legacy of nineteenth-century
civic planning in Britain – heavily influenced by idealised images of imperialism, as
is still readable from many of the area’s street names – has been re-imagined and
re-contextualised in the latter part of the twentieth century. During this period, de-
industralisation and demographic changes (over 70% of Manningham’s population
now adhere to Islam, as a result of successive generations of immigrants, notably
from the Indian sub-continent) contributed to stigmatising representations of the
area as a “problematic” suburb. In the national media, Manningham has been even
marked linguistically as one of the “ghettoes” in contemporary Britain – a territorial
stereotype that stands in marked contrast with the mundane streetscape of
Manningham. In this context, the development of Lister Park was conceived as one
means of reviving the locale. By analysing the local street and commercial signage,
as well as built environment and policy documents, Husband and Alam show how
history was adapted to suit the needs of the present: the original imperial context of
the park was re-imagined as a means of developing a sense of regeneration and
ethnic-social inclusivity.

Maggie Scott’s article “Capitalising on the City: Edinburgh’s Linguistic


Identities” considers the range of names of the Scottish capital, and examines
the literary, cultural and commercial contexts of their use and dissemination. The
name Edinburgh itself is an etymological hybrid of Celtic and Germanic elements,
and as the best-known name for the city, it tends to predominate in a variety of
discourses. However, Edinburgh is also known as Dùn Èideann in modern Scottish

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Gaelic, and its Scots names span a variety of registers from the more ‘literary’
Auld Reekie to the more ‘vernacular’ Embra or Embro. The author argues that
the histories of these names are intrinsic to the ways in which they are interpreted
and reinterpreted, resonating with cultural meaning which continues to evolve with
the changing societal and urban circumstances in which they are articulated. The
analysed aliases, resonating with the historically-grounded meanings of Scotland’s
capital and the languages of Scots, Scottish Gaelic and Scottish English, continue to
contribute to the city’s place identity. As such, these aliases exemplify the functioning
of place names as linguistic-cultural icons that frequently play a significant role in
the identity of politically and commercially motivated representations of space.

Against the grain of fashionable nonrepresentational theories (e.g. Smith 2003;


Thrift 2008), Jani Vuolteenaho and Sami Kolamo’s article takes its cue from Guy
Debord’s (1995) provocative statement that in the media-saturated “societies of
the spectacle” representations reign supreme over all aspects of human life. In
particular, the authors experiment with an idea that the spectacular logic – the
use of superlatives, evocations of different sorts of earthly paradises, eulogist
narratives and slogans and other forms of “big talk” – characterises the language
of today’s place marketing and branding strategies. Empirically, Vuolteenaho and
Kolamo compare naming and other language practices across newly-built leisure-
and technoscapes in Finland and major football stadiums in England. The case
studies suggest that the boosterist language practices in the two national contexts
share certain unquestionably spectacular characteristics, yet also differ with
regard to the favouring of either culturally escapist (an increasingly common focus
across Finnish namescapes) or historically grounded (a prevalent focus across the
otherwise hypercommodified English soccerscapes) motifs in the signification of
landscapes. The authors argue that the enhanced role of the market-led “language-
imagineering” as exemplified in the article should be seen as a specific cultural
manifestation of the ongoing neoliberal urban transformation.

In the volume’s final article, an absorbing perspective on fictional space


is investigated. Here, Lieven Ameel examines how shape is given, in the novel
Henkien taistelu (“The Battle of the Spirits”, 1933, by the Finnish author Joel
Lehtonen), to the imaginary Helsinki suburb of Krokelby. This specific literary
space is constructed as a radical, satirical reversal of earlier canonised artistic
representations of national-romantic landscapes in the Finnish context. Informed
by the cultural pessimism of the interwar period, the deformed suburb of Krokelby
appears as an imago mundi, an image of the world, evoking the diseases at the heart
of society. The distorted character of Lehtonen’s “Crippled City” is not only visible in
the ways in which the physical landscape, buildings and characters are described,
but also through the use of the satirical literary genre in the novel. The result is a
disturbing literary landscape that can be read as a critical artistic representation
of what Lefebvre (1991) terms “abstract space”, the dominant form of space in

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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott

capitalist societies, characterised by the homogenisation and commodification of


identities and differences – a view of urban space that also figures explicitly and
implicitly in many of the preceding articles of Language, Space and Power: Urban
Entanglements.

Overall, our hope is that the volume’s case studies illustrate the relevance of
the study of different facets of the interrelationship between language and space
across disciplines, and will inspire research on similar topics in cities in different
parts of the world, as well as spur reflections on the partly intertwining trajectories
of the linguistic and spatial turns as signposted in this introduction.

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27
The Hybrid Performance of a District:
A Study of the Work of a
Tenants’ Association

Nicolas Bencherki
Polytechnic Institute of New York University

Using the case of a four-year ethnography of a tenants’ association in an underprivileged


district of Montréal, Québec, Canada, I show how workers use artefacts to translate the
built landscape – the physical characteristics and issues of buildings – into language.
This translation, I contend, is necessary to ground the association’s calls to city
officials for intervention as legitimate and necessary. In turn, those calls, as they are
recirculated, open up or deter programs of action. In other words, action is transformed
into language which in turn calls for further action – and the distinction between action
and language fades. This is not only a theoretical stance but also a preoccupation of
participants themselves, whose daily work consists of effacing their own intervention
and of presenting their calls for repairs as genuine demands from the district’s built
landscape itself. This is especially important in a district where gentrification and other
physical changes have a growing impact on poorer citizens. As researchers, we need to
keep in mind that pitting materiality against language, or action against its descriptions,
is unproductive from a pragmatic point of view and fails to account for the way in which
community workers – among others – work and attempt, discursively, to shape their
environment while presenting that environment as speaking “by itself.”

Introduction

Since 2000, I have been involved – at first as an employee and subsequently as


a member of the board – in the tenants’ association of a poor district of Côte-
des-Neiges, Montréal (Québec, Canada),1. Through my work at the Côte-des-
Neiges Tenants’ Association (CTA) and through a four-year ethnographical inquiry

1 Montréal (among many other peculiarities) federates several arrondissements, which I translate
here as boroughs. Côte-des-Neiges is part of the Côte-des-Neiges/Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough,
which has its own mayor and administration. Borough mayors and some of their city councillors are
members of Montréal’s city council.

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 28– 44.
Bencherki

conducted there between 2007 and 2011, I became increasingly interested in the
crossfire of discourses that community organizations, city officials, government
agencies and other players exchange as part of their daily work to improve the
lives of district residents. I felt, however, that something was omitted from the usual
descriptions of public debate: could the object of the debate, too, play a part in the
discussions? Studies tend to sort beings, in advance, into two categories: knowing
subjects on the one hand, and known objects on the other (see e.g. criticisms
addressed to Latour by Lenoir 1994). The first are humans who can talk and
produce discourse about the second, who are usually non-humans (or humans-as-
objects, e.g. the bodies of medical patients). My experience, though, suggested a
different direction. Given the importance of materiality in the work of the CTA – they
constantly work with buildings – I was under the impression that a large part of their
daily life remains unaccounted for by a depiction that would focus only on human
actors and talk. In addition, had I produced such a depiction, I would have been
unable to explain how talk becomes concrete, material action, except by using a
basic model of action. A model where people make a decision and then act on the
basis of that decision omits the constant adjustments that are made as action feeds
back onto itself. Saying that concrete material action feeds back on itself amounts
to acknowledging that materiality is active and plays a part in the very definition of
the program of action to be undertaken (for a redefinition of the activity-passivity
divide, see Cooren 2010).

What especially struck me is that contrary to the “townhall” model often used
to account for local politics (e.g. Gastil & Levine 2005; for a discussion, see Deetz
1992; Tracy, McDaniel & Gronbeck 2007; Tracy 2010), both the CTA and the city
spent relatively little time invoking values, norms, principles and other “Kantian”
preconditions to “good” action. Rather, some courses of action were being presented
as natural or as made necessary by the contingencies of the current situation –
and especially by the material condition of the district’s built landscape. This also
means, paradoxically, that participants, rather than invoking their subjectivities and
agencies try (e.g. Marks 1995; Allen 2007), on the contrary, to efface themselves
and appear as the mere faithful intermediaries or spokespeople of those necessities
(for the distinction between active mediators and passive intermediaries, see Latour
2005, 37).

What is at stake, then, is to get the built landscape to talk and say whether any
action is good for it. Of course, buildings cannot actually talk. Different methods (in
the sense of Garfinkel’s ethnomethods; see Garfinkel 1967) are used to translate
what the building has to say into language, in order to feed it into the conversation.
Such a method must ensure that what is being said is faithful to the original, but
faithfulness does not mean fewer intermediaries, less translation, but on the
contrary more mediators (Latour 2005, 40) to ensure that some sort of equivalence
is preserved between the “original” and the translation (see Latour 1988; 1999, 24–

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

79). I will focus here on two examples of mediators used to turn a building’s actions
into language and thus allow the building to participate in the conversation, namely
moisture meters and thermal imaging.

Making the buildings speak is also important because language allows the
establishment of relations between entities of various ontologies – for example
between the building and the law. Materiality also establishes relations: for
example, it is the physical disposition of dwellings that constitutes some people
as “neighbours”. However, it is at the linguistically-established intersection of
ontologies that a state of facts (the way the building is) can become a call for further
action (the way things should be; see Blackburn 2003). That the pipes of a building
are leaking is not in itself good or bad. When put in relation with the health of the
building’s inhabitants, though, an ethical dimension appears and we can now say
that leaky pipes are bad for people’s health.

My understanding of the way materiality can participate in conversation,


though, requires a different understanding of language. I cannot maintain a clear
divide between, on the one hand, the realm of discourse and, on the other, the
realm of materiality and action (e.g., to which language would refer in a descriptive
relationship). Thanks to speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), it is possible
to acknowledge that the boundary between both is in fact blurry (or altogether
inexistent). Then, not only can buildings talk (I will tackle this metaphor below), but
talk can lead to action, and action can then feed back into talk.
Before going into more detail, however, I must first introduce the Côte-des-
Neiges district of Montréal, which is both the setting and the lead character of this
article.

The District of Côte-des-Neiges

The Côte-des-Neiges district of Montréal is as large as a small city – and has


many of the problems that come with size. It counts over 100,000 inhabitants2, of
whom 50% are not native speakers of the country’s official languages, French and
English (and 4.4% cannot speak these languages at all, compared to 2.8% for the
whole of Montréal). About 58.1% of Côte-des-Neiges residents are first-generation
immigrants (against 32.9% for Montréal) and a good part of them has recently
arrived in the country, Côte-des-Neiges being, thanks to its relatively low rents,
where many newcomers first establish. Half of residents are members of visible
minorities, against 25% in Montréal.

2 I wish to thank Christian Paquin, from the CSSS de la Montagne, for having produced and
shared this very useful set of data about the Côte-des-Neiges district. His work is based on the 2006
Canadian census.

30
Bencherki

For the Côte-des-Neiges Tenants’ Associations, working with this poor, often
resourceless population is routine, but also a daily challenge as the association itself
lacks stable funding and is unable to hire more than three permanent employees.
It counts on a network of volunteers and on the punctual help of law and social
work interns, who help the employees give legal advice to tenants, organize class
actions against landlords (Côte-des-Neiges has many large residential buildings of
over thirty units) or, more generally, help newcomers find their way in Montréal’s
labyrinthine bureaucracies. A good deal of the CTA’s work also consists of lobbying
city officials and national agencies in order for current sanitation and maintenance
laws and regulations to be better applied, for example by demanding that more city
inspectors be hired and shortening the delays at the Rental Board, which is the
administrative court for housing (a very precise description of the CTA’s work can
be found in Bencherki & Cooren 2011).

I contend that the CTA is involved into the shaping of Côte-des-Neiges as a


district, by producing discourses and opposing those produced by concurrent
entities, most importantly those of the borough administration. Those discourses
are not “mere talk” but open or limit possible programs of action. In turn, concrete,
material action feeds back to allow or deter possible discourses. That materiality
does things – and indeed embeds morality, as Verbeek (2006), among others,
points out – is very relevant for Côte-des-Neiges community workers and residents,
who are witnessing a considerable gentrification of the district. One cannot ignore
the everyday effects of the fact that upper-scale apartment towers are being built
in place of more accessible housing, or that a railroad track isolates the district
from the adjacent richer ones. On the other hand, the availability of bike lanes and
bike-share stations, or the recent installation of benches along the main street,
constitute concrete improvements to the daily life of district inhabitants. It may be
tempting to argue that these are “real” actions or effects, in contrast with the “softer”
effect of talk (this is what the distinction between “corporeal” and “non-corporeal”
effects implies in Deleuze & Guattari 1987). This is not, though, the way in which I
view the role of language. Such a view is based on a misunderstanding of Austin’s
(1962) speech act theory where only the illocutionary is considered as the “real”
speech act, while the perlocutionary (i.e. the consequences of talk) is viewed as
being a mere after-effect: in other words, the effects of talk on materiality is only
indirect, thus the two domains remain distinct. However, not only did Austin not
establish such a distinction, but the CTA workers, as we will see, were very much
preoccupied with erasing oppositions between the built landscape of Côte-des-
Neiges and the discourses produced about them: their efforts to change the district
through speech relied on speech being attributed to the buildings and the district
themselves.

This is why I allow myself to say that buildings “talk”: of course I’ve never
actually had a conversation with a building, but from a pragmatic point of view,

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

what is at stake in the work of the CTA is to show that the built environment caused
the discourse they are holding and, in a sense, is its author. A stronger, and much
longer, argument for the idea that “things do things with words” (to borrow from
Austin’s title) can be found in Cooren and Bencherki (2011). In this paper I will
limit my work to showing empirically how CTA workers make use of two artefacts,
moisture meters and thermal images, that in effect allow the buildings of Côte-des-
Neiges to “say things by themselves,” but then proceed to downplay their active
role in the “voicing” of the buildings.

As mentioned, the data for this paper is taken essentially from a four-year
ethnography (see also Bencherki & Cooren 2011) conducted at the CTA, where I
was employed previously (and where I still volunteer). In addition, for this paper in
particular, I interviewed two of the employees on their use of the moisture meters.
I will focus especially on two related issues. I will mainly concentrate on the case
of a specific building – let’s call it the Hymans building – to show how the CTA’s
discourse interacts with that of other entities to make material action (repairs,
mostly) possible or not. I will then expand the discussion to the CTA’s work more
generally to show how moisture meters and thermal images allow buildings to take
part in the conversation and, in their turn, constrain possible discourses.

Shaping a District

The Hymans building case became important when a school for autistic children
discovered that one of its pupils had severe bedbug bites and referred the case
to the Public Health Services (PHS). When PHS doctors visited the building, they
discovered that in addition to a major bedbug infestation, the building was riddled
with mildew. At that moment, the PHS decided to focus special attention on Côte-
des-Neiges and asked for the help of the CTA to get access to the tenants, who are
usually not fluent in either official language and are reluctant to open their doors
to people they do not know. The CTA was to be the PHS’s eyes and arms in the
district. The case got even higher priority when a woman from the building, who
suffered from a respiratory disease, was independently referred to the PHS by her
own physician.

CTA workers already knew the Hymans building. They had already asked city
inspectors to visit the building, which they did regularly since 2008. The typical
inspection report, though, never actually mentioned the mildew.

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Bencherki

Figure 1. Extract of an inspection report regarding the Hymans building: “Repair the wall
surface, which is damaged. These works must be completed at the latest 30 days after
receiving this notice.”

10. Art. 25.1. Réparer le revêtement du mur qui est brisé.

Ces travaux doivent être exécutés au plus tard 30 jours


après la réception de cet avis.

As is shown in Figure 1, the inspector’s report of April 2010 only ordered the
landlord to “Repair the wall surface, which is damaged.” This had been the way
in which mildew issues were addressed by Côte-des-Neiges city inspectors for
a long time. However, as long as landlords were only required to “repair the wall
surface,” they could get away with only washing or painting over the walls, thus not
actually getting to the root of the problem, which is usually a water leakage in the
pipes running through the walls.

When the PHS became involved, later in 2010, it declared the building unfit for
human living. The PHS’s declaration, however, is not legally binding. Yet, while they
could have gone on writing their reports the same way, city inspectors changed
the way they spoke of mildew. In a February 2011 report, they tackled the question
directly (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Excerpt of the February 2011 inspection report: “During a verification on February
4, 2011, we noticed the presence of mildew in the aforementioned building, especially in
apartments 104, 105, 106, 301 and 306, which may cause health problems to inhabitants;
this contravenes to Article 25.10 of the Bylaw on sanitation and maintenance of dwellings,
according to which such a presence, as well as the conditions that allow its proliferation, are
prohibited and must be suppressed.”

Lors d’une vérification en date du 4 février 2011, nous avons constaté la présence
de moisissures dans le bâtiment précité, notamment dans les appartements nos 104,
105, 106, 301 et 306, pouvant causer des problèmes de santé aux occupants, ce qui
contrevient à l’article 25.10 ° du Règlement sur la salubrité et l’entretien des logements
selon lequel un telle présence, ainsi que les conditions qui en favorisent la prolifération,
sont prohibées et doivent être supprimées.

I will later explore in greater depth why the city inspectors may have changed
the way they address mildew issues. For the moment, it must be noted that in spite
of this new, more detailed report, nothing was done three months after the notice
was given to the landlord, and people still lived in the apartment. To the CTA (and to
the PHS), this delay was intolerable as the health problems related to mildew (not
to mention bedbugs) were not improving.

The CTA, the PHS and the district’s health administration (which is an agency of
the national government) asked to meet the borough mayor. The mayor, however,

33
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

asked to know the intended strategies of all partners and to receive all related
documents prior to the meeting, a demand all parties rejected. Instead, they asked
a journalist to get involved (Elkouri 2011). The mayor refused to talk to the journalist,
but a borough spokesperson said to her there was “no urgent need to act” and
that the landlord was collaborating. The landlord, the journalist discovered, did
make a few cosmetic repairs, which the borough deemed sufficient, but a PHS
epidemiologist, after yet another visit to the building, confirmed that the mildew was
still there and that the water leakages had not been repaired, stating that the PHS
maintained the same verdict it had issued three months earlier: the building was
unfit for human habitation.

On the very day the newspaper article was published, the CTA called for a
press conference, in effect re-circulating the content of the article, and, in order to
give a more “human interest” edge to the case, provided the example of a specific
family. Within the same day, the borough issued a press release in which it stated
that the family had been offered low-income housing, or the option of staying at the
hotel, and implied that the PHS intervention was in fact its own idea. A controversy
was therefore sparked over how long the mayor had been aware of the situation
(since, in order to have invited the PHS, he should have known about the building’s
condition for over a year). The mayor then called his own press conference, where
he asserted that the city could not evacuate the building because it had to give
a chance to the landlord (it should be noted that the case had been going on for
years) and because the tenants need to respect their leases (Karwatsky 2011). This
latter assertion was denied by the CTA, since Montréal bylaws allow the borough to
evacuate buildings as it deems fit.

The case is still ongoing as I write this.

Making Buildings Speak by Themselves

Let us return to one particular element of the case: the fact that city inspectors
changed the way they spoke of mildew and began to address it upfront, in contrast
to their earlier habitual cryptic references to wall surfaces needing repair.

I contend that this change hinges on the PHS’s involvement in the case. More
specifically, working with the PHS has changed the way the CTA files its complaints
to the city, giving them a technological twist. Prior to the collaboration with the
PHS, the CTA would merely mention the presence of mildew, as eyewitnessed by
workers or tenants themselves. PHS specialists, however, used – and convinced
CTA workers to use – moisture meters. These devices, when applied against a wall,
measure humidity, effectively providing proof not only of the presence of mildew,
but also of water leakages, which would have otherwise required the removal of

34
Bencherki

the wall and the visual inspection of the pipes that lie behind it. The experts of the
PHS also use thermal photography (Fig. 3), which provides colour-graded images
superimposed on pictures of the building, exposing locations of excessive humidity.

In the interviews3 I conducted with two CTA workers involved with the
organization’s outreach program (i.e. they visit the apartments and buildings, as
opposed to the in-office legal help clinic, which is the CTA’s other major program),
Tania and Christopher showed how the moisture meters and the visual presentation
of their readings constituted important elements in convincing tenants and courts
of the importance of repairing buildings.

Figure 3. A thermal image as reproduced from a PHS report. Photo: Yves Frenette, Direction
de la santé publique de Montréal, used with permission.

Tania recounts the story of a building where some tenants did not want to take
steps to solve their water leakage problems, as they did not believe the problems
were severe enough to be worth the fight. After she started using the moisture
meters, things changed: “The machine would go ‘beep-beep’ in the yellow-red”,
tells Tania. “He understood there was a water leakage. I did not have to convince
him with words, the machine did.”

3 The interviews were conducted in French. I provide here my own translation.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Figure 4. The moisture meter applied against a dry wall. Photo: Nicolas Bencherki.

Her colleague Christopher shows me the binder where he keeps his file for
the Hymans building. A map of each apartment shows little numbered marks
that indicate where measures were taken. The next page of Christopher’s binder
features pictures of the meters’ dial displaying values (similar to Fig. 4), with
numbers referring to each numbered mark.

Figure 5. The new electronic meter. Photo: Nicolas Bencherki.

He also tells me about a new meter purchased recently by the CTA (Fig. 5).
“It does not have a dial, but it can record up to 625 measures in different folders.
Instead of pictures that can take up a lot of space, you can upload the data on the

36
Bencherki

computer.” He explains that the first meter, the one with the dial, is easy to use, but
it requires experience to know whether it is being employed properly. The trickiest
issue is that there can be metal objects behind the wall that the meter mistakes for
humidity (e.g. pipes or structural elements). Experience teaches the user, though,
that while water leakage readings will gradually fade as you get farther from its
core, a metal object will give a single, localized high reading.

What is at stake with moisture meters is whether the Rental Board will
acknowledge the CTA’s capacity to use the machines and accept measures made
by CTA personnel as receivable proof. Christopher and Tania fear that they may
need to find some expert to explain the working of the meters at the Board and then
testify that CTA workers did use it the proper way.

Even if the Rental Board should not accept as a proof measures made by
the CTA using the moisture meters, Christopher suggests they could use them
to identify buildings with mildew problems and then bring in the PHS, “the real,
undisputable experts.” They could even lend the devices to the tenants, who could
themselves take measurements regularly, in order to draw a broader picture of the
situation.

As for the newly bought meter, since it does not have a dial and only displays
and stores measures as numbers, Christopher is worried that it may require some
work to figure out an appealing, visual way of presenting the measures at the
Board. For example, the plan on which measures are plotted could be improved.
However, the fact that this meter records precise numbers, while being less visual,
could have its positive side: “With the needle, it’s not like the number. With the first,
you know it’s between 40 and 60, with the other device, you get ‘59’!”

When I ask what changed in their work since they bought the meters,
Christopher does not hesitate: “The device gives us the ability to see behind walls!”
Tania explains that without the devices, trying to spot mildew with one’s bare eyes
is rarely accurate. “Visually, if it’s black, you can tell. Otherwise, there’s no way of
knowing.” Christopher also explains that, “We’ve got landlords who are experts
at cleaning and painting over the walls.” He gives the example of a volunteer who
had been led to think an apartment had been cleared of moisture, only to see it
coming back even stronger a few weeks later. “It’s almost more dangerous, warns
Christopher, because during that time, the water keeps leaking.” Thanks to the
moisture meters, Tania and Christopher hope that water leakages and the resulting
mildew will be diagnosed earlier and be tackled at the source.

Another technology that has become available thanks to the PHS’ involvement
is thermal imaging. The cameras as such are not in the hands of CTA workers,
but PHS specialists include the images they generate in reports that they share

37
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

with the association. Figure 3 shows an example of such an image. These images
allow a visual representation of where water leakages may be located in a building
thanks to a color-graded picture superimposed on a conventional photograph.
Colors, ranging from blue (colder) to red (hotter), correspond to more or less humid
regions.

Analysis

Before analysing the Hymans building case, I was given a more detailed description
of the moisture meters and the thermal imaging methods. There are two ways of
describing the way in which these technologies make a difference. The first is to
say that PHS and CTA workers use the devices to see things they could not see
otherwise. This would be a more conventional view of technology as an extension
of human organs, as developed for instance by medium theory, its most famous
proponent being Marshall McLuhan (1965). However, Cooren (2004) remarks that
it can also be said that the technology does something, too. Cooren gives the
example of a note: while it can be said that “I remind myself of something using a
note,” it would be just as true to say that “the note reminds me of something”. It is in
fact this very capacity of the note to do something on its own that is at work when,
the next day, I see the post-it note on my computer screen. As I remember I have
an appointment, whether it is I, or someone else, or some helpful angel who put the
note becomes irrelevant at that moment. If I were just reminding myself and if the
note were completely passive, then why would I use the note at all? The heart of
Cooren’s argument is that within a “chain of agency” (Castor & Cooren 2006, 572),
selecting a specific author is a matter of debate rather than an intrinsic property of
action.

This is why it can also be said that the building “tells” the PHS specialists and
the CTA workers, through the lens of the thermal camera or through the moisture
meters, that there are water leakages at some places. This is what makes science
“objective”: the apparatus the scientists of the PHS put in place are not only means
of extending their own sensory organs, but also ways of making objects speak by
themselves, and much of scientific writing is dedicated precisely to making the
authors vanish and letting “the facts speak by themselves” (Latour & Woolgar 1979;
Latour 1987).

This is also what the CTA wishes to achieve at the Rental Board with respect to
the moisture meters. Christopher and Tania are worried that the court could accuse
them of making the building say things it does not “intend” to say, if they improperly
use the devices. They seek the help of specialists who, thanks to their “objectivity”
(i.e., their capacity to make objects speak), could testify that when CTA workers
use the moisture meters, their own selves are not involved in the process and that

38
Bencherki

their reports (the maps that show where the measures were taken) are transparent
portraits of what the buildings have to tell.

This may explain the change in the city inspectors’ reporting of the presence
of mildew in the buildings of Côte-des-Neiges. Thanks to the CTA complaints and
to the PHS reports, to which they have access and which feature the thermal
images and the moisture meter measures, it is now possible for the city inspectors
to state “objectively” that there is mildew. Just as Tania said that, prior to her use
of the moisture meters, she could only tell of the presence of mildew when there
were large dark sports on the walls. Moreover, the city inspectors could not tell, for
sure, that there was mildew in the buildings, let alone whether there were leakages
behind the closed walls. Now that an apparatus is in place that allows the buildings
to say by themselves, as it were, that water leakages are present, city inspectors
can make such assertions in their reports and change the phrasing from a vague
testimony of walls needing repairs (Fig. 1) to a specific description of the problem
(Fig. 2). In other words, city inspectors can now also vanish in their reports: they are
not describing their own interpretation of the issue; they are now “merely” repeating
what the buildings already say by themselves.

The PHS and city inspectors’ reports are especially important because they
feed back the building’s statements into the debate. Just as the moisture meters and
the thermal images operate a first translation to allow the buildings to “speak,” the
reports correspond to a second level of translation: they do not only describe what
the situation is, but, from this observation, draw a conclusion on what the situation
ought to be. This is, as Blackburn (2003), among others, notes, the characteristic
feature of ethical discourse. The reports, indeed, state that the situations of the
buildings – there is mildew and water leakage – should not be the case, and justify
this evaluation according to standards – the law in the case of city inspectors,
human health in the case of the PHS. In the same way as the physicians ensure
that the human body does not suffer from any aggression, the city inspectors
ensure that the body of the laws and, relatedly, the structure of the buildings, are
not threatened (for an “immunological” perspective of the social and the world, see
Sloterdijk & Heinrichs 2011).

This passage from is to ought is important as it stresses that the way things are
calls for further action when it undergoes translation through language. Language,
then, is not only a way of describing a world outside of speech, as a supplementary
layer on top of reality. Rather, in the same way as Castor and Cooren (2006), as I
mentioned earlier, speak of “chains of agency,” language is also part of a same mesh
with action, turning actions into further actions. That words do things is not per se a
new observation: Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) are well-known academic names
and speech act theory has been used in a variety of fields for a long while already.
However, for the most part, authors still understand language as a separate stratum.

39
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

This limited view does not allow accounting for the many things that are in fact
performed in a single action, and maintains an unnecessary distinction between,
on the one hand, “real” actions and, on the other, their descriptions. Deciding that
one point in the chain of agency should be the privileged locus of action is a matter
of debate, which stresses the role of language not only in describing action, but
indeed in transforming it, connecting it with others and generating even further
action (see Deleuze 2006, 79).

Taking such a stance allows the dissolution of the distinction between talk and
“real” action, which would precede or follow it, and in any case be different from
it. Talk is now one action among others in a chain or a nexus, where choosing
a focal point is a matter of decision – that is, of de-caedere, of cutting what is
not separate in itself. This does not mean that talk plays no specific role: as I
said, re the transition from is to ought, a passage that cannot be performed by
materiality itself. Talk is one way of connecting singular points together (in other
words, of establishing relations) and it is especially powerful in that it can do so
across ontologies. In a Peircian vocabulary (Peirce 1931, 545–559), we could say
that firstness, or the “thing in itself”, can only reaffirm its existence, but it needs
to be connected with something else in order to mean anything – and in Peircian
semiotics, meaning is equated with action: asking what something means is asking
what it does. In other words, it is in relatedness that action obtains, and language is
one way in which that connection – and therefore action – is performed. This is why
the building per se cannot demand anything, but once it is put in relation, through
talk (or otherwise) with rules, public health, and other considerations, then it starts
asking to be repaired.

The relation is therefore productive, and it is so in at least two ways. It produces


something new: a new meaning (“this is a run-down building”), a new action
(the building is repaired) and/or a new being (the new, repaired building). It also
produces the very elements of the relation, which do not pre-exist the latter. Said
otherwise, there are not buildings and words waiting to be put in relation with each
other – rather there are buildings being constituted as they are being described by
city regulations, which in turn gain a new existence each time they are applied to
specific buildings.

This is what is at stake when the borough mayor claims that the Hymans building
could not be evacuated because tenants had to respect their leases. CTA workers
quickly understood that the mayor was not merely reminding people what the law
said and putting it in relation with the building. He was both constituting the building
as an object to which the law applies and constituting the law itself (and that specific
interpretation of it) as he was summoning it. CTA workers, for their part, contended
that the building escaped the scope of law (because of its deplorable condition)

40
Bencherki

and that, in fact, the law could not be as the mayor attempted to constitute it (i.e.
there are exceptions to the necessity of respecting the lease).

In this case, it is human beings who attempted, through language to perform


(the mayor) or resist (the CTA) the relation between the law and the building.
However, things can also resist their enrolment in relations (see Benoit-Barné
2009). For example, the building could have collapsed or the wording of the
law could have turned out to be different: in such cases, the mayor’s attempted
constitution of both elements would have failed, and the relationship would have
been unable to produce new things (for example, a responsible administration that
is respectful of the law). This is practically what happened some years ago when
the CTA was working in a different building, not very far from the Hymans one. It
was one of Côte-des-Neiges’s largest buildings and was inhabited mostly by recent
immigrants from Sri Lanka who did not know the state of their building was illegal
and (wrongly) feared that the landlord could interfere with immigration procedures.
The CTA organized the tenants into a class action against the landlord, but it was
clear that no serious action could be undertaken without the collaboration of the
borough. In that case, too, the borough initially denied there were any problems
and deferred action by claiming legal obstacles. Even inspections by the Régie du
bâtiment (Québec’s building authority) did not encourage the borough to act. The
case took a new turn only when the CTA organized visits of the building for the
media. When images started circulating on television and in the press – images
that claimed to be faithful representations of the building – it became obvious that
the building resisted attempts by the borough to constitute it as properly maintained
(and to constitute itself as a good administration).

Discussion and Conclusion

The figure of the city cannot be reduced to the built environment. The polis has
deep roots, for example, in Plato’s Republic (see 1937; see also MacIntyre 1966),
as a matter of concern for public debate. This is so because Plato held that proper
action and evaluation stem from each individual’s position within the polis. A
good citizen is one who acts according to his assigned place and fulfills his role
thoroughly. Interestingly, the philosopher did not observe any existing city to draw
conclusions about what proper behaviour should be. While he certainly had an
acute understanding of his contemporaries, he built imaginary, ideal cities in his
writings, and then drew conclusions as to how people should behave given the
way those cities were structured. In a sense, Plato already acknowledged that
a) the city influences the way people behave and b) the way the city is built is
important in the influence it may have. What Plato lacked, though, was empiricism
and materialism. He failed to recognize that if people should act according to the
precepts of their ideal cities, people already did act according to those of existing,

41
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

actual cities. Those real cities are not only built in writing (although they are, too),
they are also built of stone and wood. A city’s materiality is both the result and
the setting of debate, conversation and quarrel. Put otherwise, talk and materiality
are not two different realms; rather, they are intertwined and cannot be separated
but analytically. Why is this so? Because both language and materiality establish
relations, stabilize them and make them durable (on the example of the city of
Paris, see Latour & Hermant 1998). I do not need, each time, to renegotiate my
position in the city and decide what constitutes proper action given that position.
The city is built in such a way that already includes my position: the gates keep
me out of the affluent houses, I cannot access some districts without a car, or the
absence of benches makes it impossible for me to linger in the financial district. It
is clear that I am expected not to go to those places.

This explains why the stakes are high for the Côte-des-Neiges Tenants’
Association. As rental buildings are being replaced by condominiums, as the district
is being gentrified, not only is there less space for the poorest, but less actions
become available to them. It is exactly through this feature of the built environment
– that it is active and asks for actions – that the very shaping of the district is
possible. Since the mayor, the CTA, the PHS and their partners claim to work for
the district, the latter is the standard against which their actions are evaluated.
For this to be possible, there has to be ways to turn the district’s evaluation into
language, so that it can feed back into the constitution of the relations that open up
or deter actions.

I have attempted here to offer detailed observations of practices and artefacts


that operate this translation. However, these are not only my concerns as a
researcher, but also very much those of CTA workers themselves. As the account
of the Hymans building case shows, getting the translation right has important
practical consequences, as it means getting the borough to act or not. Conversely,
the borough attempts to present itself as a responsible administration by relating
the building with elements of the law – that is to say, a good administration, one
that does what its place in the polis demands. Yet, in the cases I presented, the
CTA and its PHS partners have been able to mobilize artefacts that succeeded at
producing translations that staged the buildings as speaking by themselves, and
therefore presented the building’s evaluation as objective, i.e. as not tainted by the
CTA’s involvement.

This leads me to insist, as a final word, on the idea that action can never be the
product of a single actor, but always already shared. In order for the CTA (or any
of its workers) to act, it needs to shape its action as conforming to the buildings’
or the district’s program of action. Otherwise, the CTA could not act legitimately:
since it is the Côte-des-Neiges Tenants’ Association, it needs Côte-des-Neiges to
“agree” with what it does, and must therefore spend a good deal of effort at making

42
Bencherki

the district speak and make it say that it wants them to do whatever they do. If
they acted entirely on their own, they would not be acting for Côte-des-Neiges,
but merely for themselves. An idiosyncratic justification, in extreme cases, could
be completely incomprehensible, for justification always involves borrowing from a
repertoire that is not entirely internal to the actor (for example, Derrida stresses that
speaking is never speaking one’s own tongue, but a tongue that is already that of
the other: see Derrida 1996).

If a single lesson should be retained from this paper it is that understanding


our cities and, more generally, our collectives is impossible if we do not accept
that action is always already shared among a variety of entities, rather than the
prerogative of humans. Or, as Paul Grice (Grice 1975, 30–31) put it: “To exclude
honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to
be seen in the company of any but the best objects.”

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penser en rond.
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Hills: Sage Publications.
Lenoir, T. 1994. Was the last turn the right turn? The semiotic turn and A. J. Greimas.
Configurations 2, 119–136.
Marks, D. 1995. Accounting for exclusion: Giving a ‘voice’ and producing a ‘subject’. Children
& Society 9, 81–98.
McLuhan, M. 1965. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: McGraw-Hill.
Peirce, Charles S. 1931. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. I: Principles of
Philosophy. Edited by C. Hartshorne, Charles and W. Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Plato. 1937. The Republic. Translated by P. Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Searle, J. R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. London: Cambridge
University Press.
Sloterdijk, P. & H.-J. Heinrichs 2011. Neither Sun nor Death. London: Semiotext(e).
Tracy, K. 2010. Challenges of Ordinary Democracy: A Case Study in Deliberation and Dissent.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Tracy, K., McDaniel, J. P. & B. E. Gronbeck (eds.) 2007. The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse,
and Ordinary Democracy. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2006. Materializing morality. Science, Technology & Human Values 31,
361–380.

44
Public Representations of
Immigrants in Museums
Towards a Microsociological
Contextualisation Analysis1

Yannik Porsché
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz / Université de Bourgogne

This paper outlines a microsociological contextualisation analysis as a methodology


which selectively combines elements of interaction and discourse analysis to
approach questions of knowledge and memory construction. Examples of such
an analysis are presented from a case study on the production and reception of
an exhibition designed by and presented in museums of history and migration in
Paris (the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration) and in Berlin (the Deutsches
Historisches Museum and the Kreuzbergmuseum). In order to investigate how
national and European images of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’ are produced in “epistemic
cultures” (Knorr-Cetina 2007) of the “global culture industry” (Lash & Lury 2007) the
analysis focuses on the interaction between the museum institutions and the general
public and asks: How is the public represented in public? Discursive and material
constellations function as enabling and constraining contexts which participants
simultaneously refer to and (re)produce in text and talk. The construction by reference
is accomplished through multimodal contextualisation cues in talk, which serve as
a methodological anchor point for the analysis. Additionally, ethnographic data and
trans-sequential comparison sheds light on the context understood as conditions
of possibility beyond conversation’s structural capacities. The article shows that
not only does the content of the analysed exhibition deal with public negotiations of
immigrant representations, but that the work by and within the museum institutions
and the reception of the exhibition by museum visitors themselves constitute an
asymmetrical, cross-cultural stage for negotiation.

Introduction

In this paper I will outline a microsociological contextualisation analysis by


presenting an empirical case study concerned with knowledge constructions

1 For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper I would like to thank the reviewers as well
as Johannes Angermüller, Vivien Sommer, Miguel Souza, Paul Sarazin, Ronny Scholz, Jennifer
Cheng, Felicitas Macgilchrist and Patricia Deuser.

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 45 –72.
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

of images of immigrants in a Franco-German museum exhibition – concerning


representations both held by the public and negotiated in public. With reference
to theoretical notions about the museum space, issues of representation and
the public I will combine elements from interaction and discourse analysis. I will
illustrate the methodology’s use with two empirical examples.

The Exhibition Space

Museum exhibitions are strange places. Selected objects, people and discourses
are taken out of their “natural habitat” and rearranged in an attempt to make the
topic of the exhibition tangible or at least manageable. Objects are placed in
showcases and people take a step back in order to reflect on what is seen. Visitors
stop their daily routines and leave the noisy and chaotic city life behind them when
they enter the museum building. In the early opening hours or in less popular
exhibitions the visitor finds him/herself in a spacious, clean and calm exhibition
space looking at society, arranged in an orderly fashion from a seemingly objective
point of view. Well-researched information on labels next to the objects gives a
condensed explanation of what an object is. And the scenography makes clear
how the relation between the objects makes up the mosaic of the exhibition topic
– knowledge, memory and experience seem to be presented in their purest forms
(or at least we would like to believe so, sometimes against our better judgement;
cf. Macdonald 2003, 3-5; Winkin 2001). By the time the first school classes arrive,
and as visitors and guides begin to argue about the exhibition or the labels and
the audio guide tell diverging stories, it becomes clear that even the “heterotopic”2
exhibition space cannot be a place outside all places, decontextualised and free of
social order.

In the case study I take a closer look at one of these places,3 which attempts to
tackle no less than the question of how immigrants are and have been represented
in the public sphere in France and in Germany since 1871 – a date considered
pivotal in the foundation of both nation states. Without doubt it is an ambitious
endeavour to present one hundred and forty years of national history of two nations
in one room, in a way that one can grasp it and talk about it, ideally in a one-hour
guided tour. The image of society portrayed in the exhibition thus needs to be a

2 Museums can be considered as an “effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the
other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and
inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate
their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they
reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias” (Foucault 1986
[1967], 24).

3 The case study presented is analysed more broadly in my PhD project ‘Representing Foreigners
in Museums. A Microsociological Contextualisation Analysis of Franco-German Knowledge
Constructions’ (working title).

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rather condensed one. It is needless to say that a number of people4 working on


the exhibition project with various national, political and disciplinary backgrounds
would not easily agree on what should or should not be displayed and how, or what
an anticipated public might think the objects refer to. Even before a visitor comes
into the environment the museum is already a “contested terrain” (Lavine & Karp
1991) that offers dynamic, ambivalent and contradictory classifications, which are
then critically consumed by the audience.

Considering that exhibitions are not produced in a vacuum outside time and
space, Lash and Lury (2007) describe today’s exhibitions as being particularly
dynamic spaces of de- and re-contextualisation. Whereas objects in the past might
have been produced according to a labour-intensive Fordist model in order to
represent something, and the meaning could be understood by interpretive decoding
of the object as a cultural good, the generation of meaning is said to have now
become more fluid, informational, moving and open. In anticipation of the expected
audience the production of cultural objects is design-intensive and geared towards
what they will be used for. Particular attention is given to institutional settings by
conceptualising them as “brands”, which become apparent to the consumer in an
immediate affective and multimodal experience of using ‘things’ over and above
any concrete perception.5

As will be outlined in the next section, approaches of practical and material


sociology attempt to take multimodal practices and things into account when
analysing the production of meaning and social order. For instance, Doering and
Hirschauer (1997) look at how objects are alienated and turned into artefacts when
placed into the museum space. They show how a generally disciplined and passive
behaviour in the museum space creates an institution’s and its artefacts’ aura which
enables a risk-free encounter with the Other. Before presenting examples from the
case study, I would like to turn to the methodological question of how one might
go about analysing the dynamic and multimodal (re-)contextualisation practices
between various people, objects, discourses and institutional settings which are
involved when negotiating meaning.

4 The team was made up of German and French museum practitioners and two external academic
committees from the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration and the Deutsches Historisches
Museum, respectively, working together on the general preparation, yet, to a large extent, separately
in the implementation of the exhibition in each institution.

5 For example, a product by brands like Apple or Nike conveys much more a lifestyle or experience
than a certain kind of product.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Representing the Public in Public –


Methodological Reference Points for a
Microsociological Contextualisation Analysis

The exhibition project on representations of immigrants in the public sphere


poses the following question as much to the curators and visitors as to me as
a researcher: what is ‘representation’ and what is ‘the public’? Firstly, one might
ask how ‘representation’ contributes to the knowledge production of an abstract
cartography of ‘the public’, and where immigrants are marked on the map of ‘the
public’ in the exhibition project. Secondly, we are confronted with the question of
how ‘the public’ is produced in a state of being publicly visible, that is how ‘the
public’ is represented ‘in public’.

Generally speaking, ‘representation’ means that something absent, which is


being referred to (e.g. an idea, a group of people), is made visible or is prototypically,
symbolically or politically stood for (cf. Hoffmann 2009, 24ff.).6 Here, I will highlight
problems with notions of cognitive or material objective portrayals of reality. I argue
that the publicly negotiated subject positions, that is the temporary ‘Selves’, are
involved in a politically relevant way when talking about the public, that is when
referring to representations of the ‘Others’. In the case of immigration the question
of who is a politically recognised speaker is a particularly contentious issue (e.g.
San Martín 2009). At the same time the representation of who is being talked about,
that is images of the public or the political parties designed by public relation-
campaigns, is becoming increasingly important (cf. Kavanagh 1995, 13), and as we
will see, was also debated in the museums of this case study.

Regarding political representation in museums, Chakrabarty (2002) distinguishes


between two notions of the political: according to a pedagogical logic humans only
become political when educated; based on abstract reasoning, entities such as
the ‘public’, ‘nation’ or ‘class’ can be imagined. In mass-democracies’ performative
logic on the other hand, humans are inherently political, for example a consumer
has a right to choose or refuse a product, whether s/he knows about his/her rights
or not. And the senses, crucial for memory and experience as forms of embodied
knowledge, will, it is said, become increasingly powerful in the media of late
democracies. Chakrabarty maintains that contemporary museums are successful
in overcoming the academic view that sensual experience only allows access to
the local, the particular and the present (vs. abstract, cognitive, representational
knowledge of cultural entities). From this perspective, looking at embodied political

6 For example, Spivak (1988) building on Marx’s distinction between aesthetic-philosophical re-
presentation (Darstellung) on the one hand and political representation (Vertretung) on the other;
the former referring to portrayals and the latter to standing for someone through representation
(portrait vs. proxy).

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knowledge in the museum space is at least as interesting as attempting to elicit


cognitive knowledge about abstract notions in interviews.

Various dimensions of representation – mental, material or embodied images


and political voices – are relevant when investigating how museum staff and visitors
reflect on what images the public has of immigrants. When placing an object in the
appropriate historical section of the exhibition or talking about stereotypes and
discrimination implied in media of propaganda, a whole array of subject positions
or voices is mobilised which calls into question a simple relationship of a museum
object ‘a’ representing a societal fact ‘b’ – be it an absent person, institution or
discourse. It is therefore not surprising that objects can be understood and used
in very different ways depending on who talks to whom about an object and where
it is placed. Following Kant’s ‘Copernican turn’, Cassirer’s theory of ‘symbolic
forms’ and Peirce’s ‘triadic relation of signs’, Hoffmann (2009, 26–54) describes
the ‘crisis of representation’ based on the insight that representational practices
always involve directionality depending on the eye of the beholder, as well as the
“epistemic culture” (e.g. Knorr-Cetina 1999; 2007) context in which the relation is
articulated or interpreted.

Traditional Cartesian understandings of cognition or the philosophy of mind


according to which we can make a meaningful distinction between mental
representations and external reality as formulated, for example, in Lippmann’s
(1922) introduction to his book on public opinion entitled “The World Outside and
the Pictures in Our Heads”, have been criticised by Discursive Psychology (DP;
Potter & Wetherell 1987). DP adheres to a constructionist and relativist ontology
based on ethnomethodology (Edwards, Ashmore & Potter 1995; cf. Porsché &
Macgilchrist, forthcoming for an overview). It shares with sociological approaches
the premise that knowledge does not mirror but constructs reality in interactive
social settings (Gilbert & Mulkay 1984; Knorr-Cetina 1999). Concepts of mental
representation are shown to be problematic if treated as “ways of understanding
the world which influence action, but are not themselves parts of action” (Potter
1996, 168; italics in original). Instead, in a defence of Social Representation Theory
by Moscovici (1961), it might be said that representations “not only influence
people’s daily practices – but constitute these practices” (Howarth 2006, 74;
italics in original). They need to be “seen as alive and dynamic – existing only
in the relational encounter, in the in-between space we create in dialogue and
negotiation with others. They are not static templates that we pull out of cognitive
schemas” (Howarth 2006, 68). Social representation (cf. also Goffman 1959) then
does not only entail the representative and the represented (representee) but also
the audience and mutual expectations, which can be crucial in authorising the act
of representation. The approaches mentioned differ in their stances towards the
question of whether representations are predominantly to be found in the brain or in
public interactions between people. Approaches of distributed cognition (Hutchins

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

1995) or the extended mind (cf. Clark & Chalmers 1998; Menary 2000) at least
urge us to re-think the boundaries of cognition and acknowledge the activity of the
environment. Representation thus appears to be spread across a whole network of
social relations that involve humans as well as non-humans.

Furthermore, we need to ask what kind of ‘public’ is represented in an exhibition


and how. The question of the public is interrelated to the one of representation. For
instance, Jovchelovitch (1996, 122; emphasis in original) suggests that public life
“is one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of social representations”,
whereby representations are seen as the knowledge-link between the individual
and society. The public and representation is also combined in Garfinkel’s work. He
describes his own ethnomethodological concept of ‘accountability’ as both publicly
“detectable” or “recordable” (Garfinkel 1967, 33) and “picturable” or “representable”
(ibid., 34). Generally speaking, definitions of the public (life or sphere) can refer to
a stage (visible or open vs. private or secret), a communicative-interactive process
or a collective actor resulting from communication (cf. Rucht 2010, 8–9). Such
definitions frequently draw on Lippmann, Dewey, Arendt and most notably on
Habermas’s (1990 [1962]) ideal sphere of a political public (‘Öffentlichkeit’) and
thereby refer to the basic functional principle of democratic communication, that
is, an ideally free, open, equal and non-exclusive exchange of rational arguments
which would lead to a legitimate consensus. Intriguingly, the public as a theoretical
and normative notion of the common good/public opinion or the public sphere
where the interest or opinion is formulated is usually not analysed on the level
of everyday communication. Yet it is in public where this sphere is acted out. It
thus appears promising to me to investigate, on the level of everyday interaction,
matters such as how citizens, journalists or politicians are endowed with different
capacities to draw legitimately on their publicity (cf. Bußhoff 2000, 18).

Habermas’s initial account has subsequently been criticised (cf. Calhoun 2010;
Fraser 1990, 62; Nieminen 2008, 12–13; Wickham 2010), modified on several
occasions (cf. Turner 2009) and is still taken as the basis for much political theory.
For example, Neidhardt (2010) conceptualises public communication as involving
speakers, an audience and mediators (most notably today’s mass media). Messages
which receive attention after a process of input, throughput and output today form
a plurality of public opinion, which, however, does not need to be congruent with
the findings of opinion research based on interviewing individuals within a given
population. Instead individuals make use of an increasing number of arenas where
voices can be publicly articulated (e.g. on the internet). Unless members of the
press collect what has been said on these arenas and tie these voices to traditional
public media on a political macro level, they run the risk of remaining fragmented
and only possibly becoming politically relevant through social movements. A
methodologically crucial point then is how we analyse a public taking into account
the plurality of voices (e.g. beyond only press corpora). Regarding discourse

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theoretical complexities concerning representation, the methodology cannot be


based on a linear Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver Model (Berlo 1960; for
a critique see Winkin 1996). As an alternative Turner (2009, 237–238) refers to
Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT) as

an emerging approach to the study of public life that focuses on the res in res publica,
arguing that that [sic] the entire tradition of sociology and political science that includes
both Habermas and his critics has focused on the quality of representation and
communication at the expense of what it is that is communicated, of the thing that is a
matter of public concern in the first place.

With regard to the case study’s methodology the question is how we turn from
the question of what is or ought to be ‘the public’ to an empirical analysis of what is
communicated as well as how notions of the public are made relevant in concrete
epistemic cultures of the museums.

Schmidt and Volbers (2011) describe practice-theoretical approaches, such


as Latour’s ANT (cf. also Kalthoff, Hirschauer & Lindemann 2008; Hirschauer
2001; Mohn 2002), which concentrate on what is publicly visible, that is, they draw
on publicness as a methodological principle. They are thereby frequently seen
as disregarding questions concerning macro-sociological phenomena such as
the public, which are not directly observable.7 Schmidt and Volbers state that a
praxeological approach rejects the micro-macro dichotomy on the grounds that firstly
every observation is necessarily mediated, and secondly they are convinced that
so-called macro-sociological phenomena can nevertheless be understood through
empirical analysis (e.g. Knorr-Cetina & Bruegger 2002). For instance, Latour (1994)
rejects varying levels of depth of society; instead human and non-human actors (or
actants) both produce the ‘local’ through techniques of canalisation, distinctions,
focussing and reduction as well as the ‘global’ through culminating, compiling or
condensing on the same level of social and situated practices.

The ‘global’ can further be understood as trans-situational contexts or structures


(cf. Scheffer 2010) which also belong to the same realm as ‘local’ interactional
practices, even if their source of impact is not apparent in a specific instant.
According to Schmidt and Volbers, establishing joint-attention to something absent
over time can best be achieved through objects. Participants might understand
what an object is designed for without it being necessary for the producer or the
circumstances of the object’s production to be present. Nor need this practical
knowledge be consciously available.8 In order to operationalise ‘practices’, I suggest

7 This is similar to debates between conversation analysis (e.g. Schegloff 1987) and linguistic
anthropology (e.g. Duranti 1997) or critical discursive psychology (cf. Wetherell 1998; Schegloff
1997; 1998) about the scope of the analysis.

8 For instance, Fleck (2006, 153–154) argues that we need to forget learned routines to be able
to recognise something.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

paying attention to multimodal contextualisation cues to, for example, institutions,


debates, subject positions or objects, which can serve as material anchor points
for the analysis.9

The analysis10 for this purpose draws on Goffman’s (1981) work on participant
frameworks and his notion of staging numerous voices,11 positioning theory
(Harré & van Langenhove 1999; Harré & Moghaddam 2003; Harré et al.
2009), Gumperz’s (1992) contextualisation cues and techniques of multimodal
versions of conversation analysis (CA).12 They show that actions are performed in
a specific instance of discourse using situated devices (‘interpretative repertoires’;
cf. Edley 2001; Wetherell & Potter 1988) without postulating or reifying the
existence of separate (topical) discourses or institutions which are supposedly at
work. Thus Potter et al. (1990, 209ff.) and Wiggins and Potter (2008) criticise a
“tectonic” discourse conception embraced by analysts such as Parker.13 On the
other hand, ignoring the fact that people refer to discourses and are constrained
and stimulated by conditions beyond conversation’s structural capacities is not a
viable alternative. Drew and Heritage (1992, 22) and Heritage and Clayman (2010)
focus on how talk instantiates institutions, and Heritage and Raymond (2005, see
also Raymond & Heritage 2006; Heritage 2012) introduce ‘epistemics’ as a CA
approach to knowledge and identity. Wetherell’s (1998; 2007) broader discourse
perspective includes notions from Foucault, ethnography and Bakhtin. This allows
Wetherell to deal with issues of identity and power relations, yet runs the risk of
attributing an ontological status to phenomena as being quasi-independent of the
specific interaction situation (cf. Parker 2008, 547).

9 Whereby clear-cut distinctions between the material and the discursive are questioned, based
on the view that the former is imbued with discursive meaning and the latter is constituted by a
material surface that is open to interpretation (without assuming a stable or true inherent meaning
hidden in the depths of these signs, cf. Angermüller 2007, 104).

10 See also Porsché (2013a; 2013b) for examples from this case study with a focus on multimodal
markers and debates in the press, respectively.

11 On post-structural and polyphony-theoretical enunciative pragmatics cf. Angermüller 2007;


2011.

12 For example, Goodwin and Duranti (1992), Mondada (2009); in guided tours De Stefani (2010)
or regarding museums Luff, Heath and Pitsch (2009), Heath and vom Lehn (2004) and vom Lehn et
al. (2001).

13 Intriguingly, Parker’s (1992, 6–22; 2008) list of discourse characteristics that is meant to help in
identifying discourses in analysis (e.g. their objectivity and reflexivity) sounds very similar to some
of Assmann’s (1988, 13–16) points about cultural memory, which could be questioned on similar
grounds.

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The challenge is to link adequately the context to contextualisation: CA, DP


and Gumperz’s or Auer’s14 contextualisation research focus on the talk-intrinsic,
indexical process in the temporal organisation of interaction (utterances, actions
and contingencies providing the context for subsequent responses) and the type of
interaction (e.g. expected behaviour in classroom interaction).

In addition, the methods of discourse analysis that are helpful are the ones
that do not arbitrarily posit potential, extrinsic aspects of the context as explaining
variables15 without examining practices of contextualisation (cf. Arminen 2000;
Pomerantz 1998). Instead, they take the discursive, material and institutional
context into account by understanding them as resources for participants (e.g.
drawing on past events, orienting to categories of gender, ethnicity etc.) and as
conditions for interactions (e.g. discursive preconstructs, institutional configurations
or modalities of objects or technologies enabling or encouraging certain actions
rather than others). Context and contextualisation are here intertwined in a circular
way: the context provides the conditions for acts of contextualisation which, in
turn, (re)produce the context. The location of knowledge production, or epistemic
culture, therefore constitutes both a constraining or enabling frame which reaches
into specific instances of knowledge construction as well as an indexical activity of
referencing and differentiating.

The Museum Exhibition

The museum exhibition analysed in the case study is entitled “À chacun ses
étrangers ? France – Allemagne 1871 à aujourd’hui / Fremde? Bilder von den
Anderen in Deutschland und Frankreich seit 1871”16 and was first shown in Paris
at the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (CNHI) in cooperation with the
Goethe Institute Paris and a year later at the Deutsches Historisches Museum
(DHM) and the Kreuzbergmuseum (KM) in Berlin. The exhibition was first shown in
the temporary exhibition space on the top floor of the CNHI in a side wing connected
to the permanent exhibition hall and a year later in the temporary exhibition space

14 According to Auer (1992, 26), the relevance of the context becomes manifest, either by being
“brought along” such as the physical surroundings, time and features of the participants, which
need to be foregrounded by contextualisation or at the opposite pole by being “brought about”
in conversation (e.g. the activity type, modality, cultural knowledge about participation), which is
created by contextualising the following sequence in the interaction. In between these poles there
are social roles connected to institutional settings or default assignments through interactional
histories, which must be reaffirmed by contextualisation.

15 Cf. van Dijk’s (2006; 2008; 2009) concept of the context as a subject participant construct,
which however, does not take DP’s critique of traditional cognitive theories into account.

16 Literally “To Each Their Own Foreigners? France-Germany from 1871 until today / Foreigners?
Images of the Others in Germany and France since 1871”, and translated by the DHM in their
English audioguide “The Image of the ‘Other’ in Germany and France from 1871 to the present”.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

of the DHM (a building designed by the famous architect I.M. Pei).17 Beginning in
1871 (Reichsgründung in Germany and first elections of the Troisième République
in France) the exhibition guides visitors chronologically through (dis-)continuities
and similarities and differences of images of immigrants that were found in the
public spheres in France and Germany, for example, in cultural events, political
administration, legislation, academia or the press. In some instances the ways
in which immigrants presented themselves is shown and questions about the
identities of immigrants and the host society are raised; the main topic, however,
concerns the images that were constructed of the immigrants by members of the
host societies and how these representations were fabricated. While historical
phases18 constitute the central ordering principle in both versions of the exhibition,
in the larger exhibition space in the DHM parts of the room were more extensively
dedicated to certain themes (anthropology, “schwarze Schmach”, anti-Semitism, the
Algerian war, “Gastarbeiter” and Islam). And in the CNHI, pieces of contemporary
art accompanied the historical artefacts, most of which were not shown in the DHM
version.19 While constituting “the same” exhibition in both versions, singling out
certain objects by the interior design (a way of ‘local’ contextualisation) or relating
them to pieces of contemporary art or cartographic arrows and graphs illustrating
the migrant movements across the world (ways of ‘global’ contextualisation) had an
impact on how they were dealt with.

The institutions have very different (political) histories, frequently shown to be


relevant in the practices of producing and receiving the exhibition: the French CNHI
used to be a colonial exhibition building in 1931, which turned into a museum of
colonial art and history and was officially inaugurated – amidst much controversy
– as the museum and network of immigration history in France in 2007 (cf. Murphy

17 Shown from the 16 December 2008 to the 19 April 2009 in Paris and from the 15 October 2009
to the 21 Februrary 2010 in Berlin. In the case of the CNHI immigration is presented in a separate
institution on a national platform. The all-encompassing national DHM on the other hand includes
immigration as one temporary topic among others, without dedicating immigration significant
attention in the permanent exhibition (with the exception of special guided tours on International
Migrants Day appointed by the UN). In the KM immigration is framed as a topic in its own right in
several temporary exhibitions, and in the permanent exhibition it is treated as an essential part of
the local history.

18 For example, in Germany: 1871–1914, 1914–1918, 1918–1933, 1933–1945, 1945–1970, 1970–


1989, 1989–2009 and in France: 1871–1914, 1914–1918, 1918–1940, 1940–1945, 1945–1970,
1970–1983, 1983–2009.

19 Parallel to this temporary exhibition, known to CNHI staff as the “France-Allemagne” exhibition,
a smaller temporary project was initiated by the network of immigration organisations (the réseau
des associations) coordinated by the CNHI. The smaller exhibition dealt with topics similar to those
of the main exhibition, yet in a very different way. Following an announcement by the CNHI (an
appel à contributions), various art projects by students (schools and universities) were selected by
the CNHI and funded by the European Union initiative “The European Year of Intercultural Dialogue
2008”. These art projects (e.g. installations, descriptions and outcomes of student exchanges or
newspaper projects) were presented in the CNHI in a room (the Hall Marie Curie) on the ground floor
of the institution that is connected to the main hall (the Forum). In the DHM, on the other hand, the
presentation of this smaller exhibition was not considered. Instead the KM, a neighbourhood/local
history museum founded in 1990, was found as an appropriate host for the network initiative, which
was then called “Baustelle Identität / Identités en chantier” [Building Site of Identity].

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2007; Stevens 2008). The DHM was inaugurated – also with much controversy –
as the German history museum in 1987. The current permanent exhibition opened
to the public in 2006 with the main building previously serving as an arsenal, a war-
museum, for Nazi-war-propaganda and a German Democratic Republic (GDR)
history museum (cf. Heuser 1990; Maier 1992; Mälzer 2005; Ohliger 2002).

It transpired that the production process of this exhibition project made


the exhibition an especially interesting object of study. Allegations of political
censorship at the DHM, which were reported to the press by enraged members
of the external academic committee, were subsequently discussed in interactions
within the museum. This allows for an analysis of how the issue “travelled” through
different modalities of interaction. In the course of these interactions previously
discussed controversies surrounding the opening of the DHM were brought up,
which would otherwise not have been talked about. Although no comparable
allegations occurred in France, recent debates about the CNHI formed a part of
the French production of the exhibition, too.

In general, this case study enables the analysis of intersections and tensions
between academic, political and institutional discussions. For instance, an academic
conference and doctoral workshops were organised to prepare the exhibition and
the exhibition was financed by different political bodies – the French state, the
German state and the European Commission. In this process several different
academic approaches to national and cultural identity were brought forward, some
of which differ from traditional notions that remain widespread in political debates
(cf. Porsché 2008; 2011). At the same time, political stances occasionally drew on
academic work when setting the institutional frame for what could be shown in the
museums and in light of these stances museum topics were debated. How it was
possible to produce an exhibition that was in some instances considered not in
alignment with dominant, conservative political, academic and public debates and
how apparent tensions were negotiated merits careful analysis of contextualisation.

I will turn to specific examples of such contextualisation in the following sections.


The research material is based on ethnographic video and audio recordings
of guided tours and discussions between museum staff and visitors as well as
interviews with staff and visitors, guestbook entries and the press coverage of the
exhibition. The first analysed case presents an extract from a discussion in the
CNHI between a guide and pupils at the end of a guided tour when talking about
a magazine cover of Le Figaro that was presented in a showcase. In the second
case I show how a newspaper page in museum’s guest book, which publicly raised
allegations of censorship in the DHM, was discussed by a guide and a school
teacher after a guided tour of the DHM version of the exhibition.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Case 1: Islam in the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration

This contextualisation analysis asks, on the one hand, which context constitutes the
enabling or constraining frame for an interaction, and, on the other hand, how this
frame is brought about through contextualisation cues in the interaction. Considering
the first side of the coin, interactions during guided tours of the exhibition take place
in a certain institution and at a specific location. The first example (Transcript 1
below) takes place towards the end of a tour in the CNHI.20 Comparing this scene
with other recordings within the same institution as well as in the DHM shows that
discussions between the guide and the audience are generally few and far between
in these speech events. They are noticeably more common in the CNHI and usually
occur at the end of the tours in both institutions. Also, the topic of conversation the
participants engage in is not drawn out of thin air, but in this example they refer to
a specific object (a cover page of Le Figaro magazine, 28.10.1985; Fig. 1), which
is placed in a showcase. The object is thereby literally framed as important for the
topic of the exhibition. And the cover image and title themselves refer to several
debates, for example, the statue of the French Marianne and the national colours
referring to the French nation and the headscarf tied around it referring to the
presence of Islam, titled “Serons-nous encore Français dans 30 ans ?” [Are we still
going to be French in 30 years?].

Figure 1. Le Figaro. Photo: Antti Sadinmaa.

A multimodal analysis of an extract from an interaction in which the magazine


cover is talked about makes it clear that references to debates which might seem
easily circumscribed in the abstract as discourses existing in society are in fact very

20 The guided tours were non-scripted, yet based on an introductory tour given by the respective
curatorial team of each institution as well as the exhibitions’ catalogues.

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much dependent on the specific setting. Here, for example, the statue of Marianne,
which is depicted on the magazine cover, is also being shown elsewhere in the
exhibition and the topics of discrimination and prejudices are referred to in the
narrative of the guided tour. These general points about the context might be stated
on the basis of ethnographic field notes alone. The details of how the context is
negotiated through dynamic, tacit and not necessarily conscious contextualisation
cues (the other side of the coin, both illustrated in Fig. 2 below), however, calls for
a closer look at the transcript21 and the video-recordings:

Transcript 1: Guided tour in the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration.22

1 guide: En fait ((swallow)) ce qu’on a vu c’est que maintenant on parle moins de race
2 biologique, mais on parle plus en terme de cu:lture\ .h et on parle plus
3 notamment en terme de re:ligion. .h Et >quand même< la religion eh
4 musulmane c’est/ (.) >quelque chose qui est vraiment brandi comme< en plus
5 (.) depuis le onze septembre comme faisant peur\ .h eh /c’est assez impre- ça
6 c’est les années quatre-vingt, mais aujourd’hui c’est toujours le cas. .h En en
7 gros ce que ça veut dire c’est qu’on va moins\ dire tous les arabes sont pareils,
8 (..) parce que voilà\ eh (il a été) prouvé k’sait quand même délicat de le dire sur
9 un plan scientifique, .hh mais on pourra dire (.), écoutez/ ah >assez
10 facilement<, « ah les musulmans sont comme ceci comme cela. » ((pupil turns
11 to guide)) Ça dérange moins maintenant, alors que c’est le même processus en
12 réalité, ehm? Parce que parmi les populations musulmans il y a énormément de
13 différences.
14 pupil: Mais Madame?
15 guide: Oui
16 pupil: Fin, ce n’est pas (à nous a trompé) que ce soit raciste, mais c’est vrai que
17 l’islam\ (.) ils viennent en France >ou ils vivent en France< mais ils s’adaptent
18 pas aux lois et e::h les valeurs franç↓aises.(.) Ils prennent la liberté et=
19 group: =la culture
20 pupil: et la culture et tout ((guide and pupil step back and fold their arms))
21 guide: Be:n, [je ne suis ] pas sure de ça/ (.) Je ne crois pas
22 group [( ) ]
23 guide: que ça soit vrai en fait.=
24 pupil: =Parce que (.) nous, on est un pays laïque et ils ne respectent pas ça. (.)

21 Owing to space constraints, aspects of multimodality are pointed out in the analysis by means
of screen shots in Fig. 2 without providing detailed annotations for gaze, body posture, gesticulation
etc.

22 Roughly summarised the guide in this passage explains to a group of pupils that people in
the past would employ racial categorisation, which has been replaced by cultural and religious
categorisation. Whereas the former way of categorising has been discredited by science, the latter is
said to be generally more accepted. The guide maintains that both ways of categorisation, however,
rely on the same mechanism of stereotyping and that glossing over differences within groups of
people remains problematic. The guide says that Muslims for instance have been stigmatised and
feared since 9/11. A pupil, supported by other classmates, challenges the guide by stating that the
Islamic people in fact come to, or live in, France and take the freedom and culture but do not respect
French laws and values. The guide disagrees and begins to talk about the number of religious
Muslims, when the pupil clarifies that she is not talking about Muslims but “real Islamists”. The guide
explains that it is important not to confuse Muslims with Islamists.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

25 group: [( ) ]
26 guide: [C’est un peu étonnant ce que vous dites] parce que ((guide: laughs)) il y a
27 quand même plein de gens qui sont musulmans donc [ils peuvent être croyants]
28 pupil: [Oui, mais je ne parle pas]
29 des des des musulmans moi. Je parle vraiment des islamistes eh=
30 guide: =Ah (.) alors (.) ça [c’est encore autre chose ]
31 pupil: [( ) ]
32 guide: effectivement, mais voyez moi, je vous parle des musulmans\ donc attention
33 aussi au (.) mais ça c’est un un, comment on dit ?, un amalgame que souvent on
34 fait aussi, un musulman intégriste c’est pas la même chose.

Contextual references can be of an explicit nature to the aforementioned


academic work (8/9), which, for example, serve the function of legitimising the
institutional presentation. Or more subtle intonation-indicated references (10: “ah
les musulmans sont comme ceci comme cela.” [ah Muslims are like this or like
that]) signal that a different speaker is being cited.23 Adhering to the principle of
the members’ orientation, we can keep speculations to a minimum as to whether
the guide hereby constructs a subject position and whether or not her intention
is to reject the position. Instead we notice that the pupil listening turns from the
showcase to the guide precisely at the moment in the interaction when the guide
says something that can be considered a subject position (10/11). Observing
that, she poses a question concerning the quoted utterance at the next possible
occasion (‘transition-relevant place’) introduced by an indicator of polyphony “Mais”
[But] (14). It is plausible that the pupil considers the guide to be rejecting a certain
subject position (which the pupil decides to defend). In response to the question
the guide and then the pupil both take a step back and fold their arms (18–21),
which clearly shows that they are positioning themselves on contradictory subject
positions (‘projecting disaffiliation’). Only after stating more precisely what they were
referring to, namely the pupil talking about “islamistes” [Islamists] and the guide
about “musulmans” [Muslims] do they seem to resolve the issue of misalignment
(marked by a ‘sequence-closing third’ and ‘change-of-state token’: 30). Hereby,
the guide shifts from a personal “C’est un peu étonnant ce que vous dites” [It is
a bit surprising what you are saying] (26) in the specific interaction to a common
confusion that “on fait” [one does] (33/34) in the general public “out there”, which
makes the pupil’s statement possibly more excusable or understandable (vs. the
claim of incertitude [21], surprise and amusement [26] indicating dispreference).
Conversely, looking at how the guide changes from a general, third person “c’est”,
“on parle” [that is; one says] (1) to a personal, first person “Je ne crois pas” [I don’t
think] (21) or “Moi, je vous parle des” [I am talking to you about] (32) further enables

23 By indicating what we think of a view held by someone who would say such a thing we engage
in what Goffman (1981, 325) calls “sustaining or changing footing”. He goes on to explain that this
provides the speaker with “the least threatening position in the circumstances, or, differently phrased
the most defensible alignment”.

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us to see how the positioning in relation to the official front-stage presentation in


the name of the institution is managed.

The way different subject positions seen to be circulating in ‘the public’ are
mobilised by carefully altering the distance and stance towards them, the people
present and the hosting institution – as well as what does or does not have to
be pointed out by whom – informs us about practices of representation in this
specific epistemic culture and instance of interaction. In this sequence a consensus
is negotiated that racism as well as fundamentalism is to be disapproved of; yet
differences in what a headscarf means or whether this constitutes a threat to France
can be noted, which hint at prior (poorly defined) discourses being brought into this
conversation. The opposite positioning therefore cannot be attributed only to what
the guide said, but in part also to a knowledge of other interactions, for example, in
the mass media or voiced by politicians which previously constructed these subject
positions. And it is crucial to the outcome of this negotiation in which institutional
frame, where in the exhibition and in what interaction format, it takes place. For
instance, only in an established ‘integrative practice’ (Schatzki 1996) of teaching
with reference to a body of accepted research and set in a politically tolerated
but somewhat peripheral institution24 do we understand the guide’s authority and
stance.

Figure 2. Microsociological contextualisation analysis.

24 For example, funded by the government, yet geographically located on the periphery of Paris
and inaugurated with the noticed absence of President Sarkozy.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

In order to include more issues involved in these epistemic settings than


analysing interactional linguistics and ethnographic observations alone, these can
be read in the light of information from an interview carried out with the guide. For
instance, the guide talked about the difficult situation she faced because whilst
sympathising with protestors in front of the museum who were criticising French
immigration ministers her job was to present a national museum. Also, the pupil’s
hedging (16) along the well known line “I am not a racist but...” (cf. Bonilla-Silva
& Forman 2000) and self-repair (17) could contribute to a broader understanding
of the specific political debating culture. It tells us that voicing a certain view is
possible, yet needs to be marked as problematic.25

A comparison of how the same object is talked about in the CNHI and the DHM
makes similarities and differences in two epistemic settings visible. In order to see
what kind of statements are considered (un)problematic, the analysis can focus on
how the same object was, for example, framed by a CNHI guide as “pour rigoler”
[to laugh at] with the effect that the visitors laughed, whereas the same object was
called “spannend, wenn man das sagen kann” [fascinating, if it is possible to say
that] in the DHM. Thus the question is neither whether a certain object is in fact
funny, nor whether an individual finds it funny or not (cf. vom Lehn 2006, 1350ff.).
Instead the fluctuating roles26 participants take on and the styles of presentation
they perform in certain (institutional) circumstances have a more important impact
on the interactive process of knowledge construction.

Case 2: Allegation of Censorship in the Deutsches Historisches Museum

This example deals with a heated debate that revolved around a label about
contemporary racism and integration in Germany and Europe which in Paris
received little attention.27 Presumably it would not have received more attention
in Berlin either; however, it made newspaper headlines in Germany due to an

25 The reason the pupil felt the need to hedge her statement can be explained solely by looking at the
ways in which the guide had already indicated her disapproval of negative or generalising statements
about Muslims. However, only additional, extrinsic context information enables understanding of the
political stance the guide is (seen) to be taking, which goes beyond the participant framework and
institutional setting of the particular interaction.

26 These dynamic roles are a topic of positioning theory (e.g. Harré & van Langenhove 1999),
and Sacks (1992, 40–48) calls this social organisation a “membership inference-rich representative
device (MIR) “ (also known as ‘Membership Categorisation Device’).

27 The issue mainly concerned a label stating that discrimination against foreigners shifted
from the national to the European level. Debates mostly revolved around how this message was
downplayed by the sentences “Während innerhalb Europas die Grenzen verschwinden, schottet
sich die Gemeinschaft der EU zunehmend nach außen ab. Die ‘Festung Europa’ soll Flüchtlingen
verschlossen bleiben” [While borders within Germany disappear, the European Union increasingly
seals itself off from the outside. ‘Fortress Europe’ is supposed to remain closed to refugees.] being
replaced by “Das Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge fördert seitdem staatlicherseits die
Integration von Zuwanderern in Deutschland” [Since then through the Ministry for Migration and
Refugees the state supports the integration of immigrants in Germany.].

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allegation of censorship. According to informants, the director gave in after being


pressured by the Ministry of Culture and – opposed by the staff – changed the
label. Besides the obvious importance of the political and institutional context,
it is interesting to follow how the issue travelled and was dealt with: it was first
raised publicly in an article in the press after a member of the scientific committee
contacted a journalist. This article was then pasted into the guestbook under a
heading “Liebes DHM, warum?” [Dear DHM, why?] (Fig. 3).28

Figure 3. Guestbook. Photo: Yannik Porsché.

It was then mentioned in some guided tours, once for instance with the remark
that the label had been modified but not the audio guide. One person in the audience
(a journalist) then published an article entitled “Es gilt das gesprochene Wort” [The
spoken word counts]. In the following I would like to present an interaction following
a guided tour that takes up this incident:

28 Guestbooks (or internet blogs about the exhibition – in a different way, cf. Meier 2008) offer a
whole new set of modalities for the interaction: With the text multiple speakers are brought onto the
stage (the journalist, the academic committee and the director mentioned in the text etc.), which can
be commented on, highlighted, crossed out etc. by later readers, for example, without them having
to face the other authors. More extreme (e.g. right wing) or more general viewpoints (e.g. whether
the DHM collaborate with the Bundeskulturminister [minister of culture] as a “Bundesbeauftragter für
Propaganda” [national representative for propaganda] or whether the CNHI is a “musée de bonne
conscience” [museum for a good conscience]) become possible. In this example addressing the
history museum with a term of endearment, conventional in writing letters, positions the writer as
generally sympathetic with the museum, yet at the same time confronts the institution (and not e.g. a
particular member of staff) with the newspaper article, which functions as a piece of evidence. The
utterance “warum?” [why?] presupposes that the events happened as described in the article (e.g.
instead of asking the DHM what happened exactly).

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Transcript 2: Guided tour in the Deutsches Historisches Museum.29

1 guide: Bon, [merci] bonne journée ((☺))


2 teacher: [merci] merci, à vous aussi.
3 guide: et bon week-end
4 pupil: Merci. ((laughing))
5 […]
6 teacher: (Wo ist denn jetzt) das eh umstrittene corpus delicti
7 [zum Thema] Zensur?
8 guide: [Ah oui, oui]
9 teacher: und ich weiß nicht, ob, ich hab jetzt kein Audioguide, da hieß es der sei ja noch
10 nicht ((walk to the label))
11 guide: C’est vraiment seulement eh la dernière phrase là (.) qui a été changé. C’est
12 maintenant [la]
13 teacher: [et] ça c’est plus l’originale
14 guide: No!
15 teacher: Das haben wir, das ist jetzt ausgetauscht hier?
16 guide: Das ist ausgetauscht.
17 teacher: Aha. [Das ist ]
18 guide: [Du filmst ] jetzt nicht mehr, ne? ((☺))
19 me: Eh doch, grad noch ((laughing)) filme ich schon, ja, aber das weiß ich sowieso
20 schon, ja, ja ((laughing))
21 teacher: Ja, ja, das war ja nun in der Zeitung [und ]
22 guide: [ja, ja]
23 teacher: Und da war also ein etwas kritischerer Satz, oder wie?=
24 guide =Also hier stand (.) ursprünglich, >also so< im (.) jetzt eh umformuliert=
25 teacher: =mhm=
26 guide: eh zusammengefasst eh, dass Deutschland (.), also >innerhalb der
27 europäischen< Un(.)ion,=

29 In this transcript the guide and the visiting school class end a guided tour by wishing each
other a good day. The teacher then approaches the guide and asks where the infamous corpus
delicti that surrounds the issue of censorship can be found. The teacher inquires about the audio
guide, which she has heard has not been modified. The guide says that it was really only the last
sentence that had been changed. The teacher states that this passage is no longer the original and
then asks the guide whether it has been replaced. The guide confirms that it had been replaced
and asks me whether I am still filming. I respond that I am, but that I know about it already anyway.
The teacher adds that this incident had already been in the press and asks whether the initial
sentence was a more critical one. The guide summarises in her own words that it originally said that
internal borders in Germany or in the European Union are disappearing and people are no longer
controlled at borders. Yet Europe (first the guide says Germany and corrects herself) is said to be
sealing itself off from the outside. The guide ironically explains that in contrast to the audio guide
the label had to be changed to the current version. The teacher exclaims that this is funny and that
it should have been left unchanged and debated. The teacher goes on to say that the curation of
the exhibition should hopefully be “free”. The guide states that the museum work used to be free
and the teacher expresses that the modification is worrying. The guide says that this matter was not
supposed to go to the press and that this happened unofficially. The teacher maintains that this is
normal and happens to all things that are supposed to remain secret. The guide recounts that this
matter had only been vigorously discussed for a brief period of time and is mainly forgotten now.
Without elaborating on the debate she adds that one could have made an interesting connection to
an incident that was broadcast in the news and subsequently discussed among staff. The incident
she seems to be referring to concerns media broadcasts about a contract of a TV journalist on
national television which was surprisingly not renewed by politicians and could also be understood
as politicians inappropriately influencing public discourse. Yet, a connection between these two
incidences of exertion of political influence, to the guide’s knowledge, (regrettably) had not been
made.

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28 teacher: =mhm=
29 guide: durch Schengen und so weiter die internen Grenzen fallen, >dass man die
30 Leute nicht [mehr] an den Grenzen kontrolliert<, eh dass sich
31 teacher: [mhm]
32 guide: aber Deutschl- eh, dass sich Europa zunehmend nach außen ab[schottet ]
33 [abschottet]
34 ja
35 guide: Das stand da ursprünglich.
36 teacher: Mhm
37 guide: Und eh das musste geändert werden und jetzt steht d↑e:hr Satz hier. Und im
38 Audioguide hört man=
39 teacher: =Das ist ja auch putzig, ne?
40 guide: Ja, ja
41 teacher: Das ist ja köstlich. Ich meine allein das ist ja schon, ich meine dann soll man
42 ihn stehen lassen und sagen darüber kann man sich streiten, oder=
43 guide: =Ja=
44 teacher: =eh (.) ich meine es gibt eine Ausstellungskonzeption und die ist ja wohl
45 hoffentlich (.) „frei“ ((indicated using her hands))
46 guide: Ja:h\, bisher war sie auch frei ((laughing))
47 teacher: Ja, ja, schon heftich, ne?
48 guide: Und eh, ja. Das ist jetzt geändert worden und es sollte natürlich ursprünglich
49 auch nicht in die Presse gehen, das ist dann unter der Hand lanciert worden, das
50 ist dann=
51 teacher: Ja, klar, das iss logisch, das ist wie (.)
52 bei allen [Sachen ]
53 guide: [aber das ist halt ]
54 teacher: die nicht (.) bekannt werden [sollen ((laughing))]
55 [ja, ja, aber ] das ist natürlich jetzt ein
56 bisschen wieder eingeschlafen. Das war halt kurzzeitig=
57 teacher: =Aha, ok=
58 guide: =ist das hochgekocht worden
59 teacher: Mhm
60 guide: Ehm, was halt interessant gewesen wäre worüber wir uns natürlich auch
61 unterhalten haben, eh, was im ZDF vor kurzem passiert ist, da hätte man ja
62 auch=
63 teacher: =Ach so=
64 guide: eine, mit Brender, ne?=
65 da hätte man [ja] auch eine Verbindung ziehen können
66 teacher: [ja]
67 ja
68 guide: eh und sei- und darunter dann die entsprechenden Schlüsse ziehen können.=
69 teacher: =mhm=
70 guide: =Das ist schei↑nbar, >soweit ich das mitbekommen habe<, halt nicht passiert=
71 teacher: =(schon ok) ja, mhm/ (.)
72 guide: naja\
73 teacher: Ja/ (0.7)

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This passage tells us something about how institutional issues and press reports
reach into the interaction and how they are dealt with. Temporarily and spatially
separated from the official front-stage presentation (which had e.g. been closed
by wishing each other good day: 1-4) the visiting class teacher and the tour guide
engage in a semi-private conversation in which less official matters such as the
allegation of censorship can be talked about. Without having to identify the label
further (overlap 7/8) it is framed as an “umstrittenes corpus deliciti” [controversial
corpus delicti] (6) and the audio guide is brought into the conversation carefully
(9: “ich weiß nicht” [I don’t know]). The guide falls back into the official language
of the guided tour (i.e. ‘code switching’: 11), which was French, and relativises
(downgrades the first assessment of censorship with “vraiment seulement” [really
only]) that only the last sentence had been changed (although, comparing the
versions of the text, in fact several sentences were modified, of which only the
final one was considered noteworthy by the press). The teacher changes back to
German (15) and shifts from “Zensur” [censorship] to a more neutral, descriptive
and less accusatory statement that this text is no longer the original, which the
guide decisively confirms. Yet, remaining on a merely descriptive account of
the fact that the text had been replaced (the guide in 24 and 35 confirming the
statement offered by the teacher in 13), this begs the question of who changed
it and why. And the replacement is marked as a problem, for example, by asking
me whether I am still recording. The sound of voice is “smiley” and the guide does
not ask me to refrain from doing so, but the question (in combination with me
saying that I know about it already and the teacher pointing out that it had been
in the press, which qualifies it as having once been a secret that is now a matter
of public knowledge) demonstrates that documenting institutional trouble is more
problematic than filming the official tour.

At the end of the guide’s account (32/33) the teacher joins in finishing the guide’s
sentence. She thereby affirms what can be seen as a European-critical sentence,
thereby possibly encouraging unofficial statements. This provides an opportunity
for the guide to use an ironic tone of voice (Goffman’s ‘keying’) when she points
to the new sentence (37: “d↑e:hr Satz hier” [this sentence here]). Irony proves to
be very effective to innocently point at what is officially written while being pretty
sure that the present audience gets the dismissive hint, especially when taking up
the teacher’s earlier statement that something else is heard in the audio guide,
which was connected to her enquiry about censorship (7, 9). Put more generally,
irony can serve to strategically maintain a multiplicity of ways one can understand
what has been said (cf. Günthner 2002). The teacher indicates that she noticed
the irony by briefly framing the occurrences as a funny issue (39), with which the
guide can innocuously agree. Saying that the exhibition practice should be “free”
(the guide indicating inverted commas with her hands) and the guide laughing and
replying that it used to be free, without anyone having to articulate it, it becomes
clear that it was not free in this case (44–46). To make sure that the irony is not

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taken simply as humour the visitor re-qualifies the issue as a serious one (47). The
participants are thus collaboratively saving face, with the result (60–73) that the
guide can point out that she regrets that a possible, even evident (60: “natürlich”
[naturally]), connection to another scandal of informational/cultural politics, which
had occurred around the same time, had not been made. By pointing out that it
had not been made (in the wider public, the press) she is of course performing this
connection herself. Her point being though that this connection should not only
have been made by the staff but elsewhere in order for it to become acknowledged
and politically relevant (‘self-repair’ from a personal “sei-“[ne] to a general or
factual utterance “die entsprechenden Schlüsse” [“one’s” to “the appropriate
conclusions”]). Which interaction counts as being made in public (in the sense of
German term Öffentlichkeit) thus depends very much on where exactly it is being
voiced, by whom, in the presence of which (filming or note taking) audience, with
which tone of voice, and at what point in the public interaction sequence, that is,
in the mutually visible and accountable condition of social interaction. From one
instance to the next the presentation of an issue can oscillate between constituting
a mere replacement on the one hand and a ridiculous or scandalous (and thus not
approved of) instance of censorship on the other.

Another way that the wider context penetrates the interaction is through
Goffman’s (1967) interaction rituals implicating symbolisation processes that go
beyond the interpersonal exchanges, such as a gift presented to the tour guide by
the teacher shortly after the end of the transcript. Beyond the instrumental function
of the gift, it expresses gratitude (and thereby the donor considers it noteworthy to
comment on the guide’s commitment or the quality of her tour) and has membership
significance, for example, in this case a present from the Christmas market signaling
a personal and not merely an institutional tie, for which paying the entrance fee
would have sufficed.

The institutional observations can also be understood as part of wider societal


circumstances: The transcribed passage in the last example shows that a careful
voicing of critique of the institution or the cultural ministry is possible (while
playing the game of managing the brand of the museum as officially being neutral,
working independently and with scientific integrity). However, interactions on other
platforms show a continuum of different kinds of public. These range from the
semi-private conversation after the tour, via the curators talking in the auditorium to
a group of teachers to official press conferences or finally the vernissage attended
by politicians and the media. The last mentioned public stage has symbolic
relevance on the national scale and makes different utterances (im)possible or,
when voiced, these are seen in a different light (e.g. the representative of the
Bundeskulturminister [minister of culture] criticising the exhibition in her speech at
the vernissage caused offence to the curators and was followed by reports in the
press). On the day of the opening, when the audience is considered the national

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public, the museum seems to be an important public relations instrument for the
political spokesperson. Here the labels should display messages that put the
current government in a good light instead of the museum constituting an arena for
critical debate.

At the same time national politics does not seem to be particularly interested in
interactions in the smaller exhibition designed by immigrant associations (shown
in the CNHI and the KM). The cultural status of the national museums as “high-
culture” intersects here with questions of representation, for example, when the
smaller student exhibition – against the will of the immigrant network department
– was not allowed to have its own name in the CNHI and was not considered for
display in the national DHM but only in a neighbourhood museum considered as
occupying a peripheral position by DOMiD (“Dokumentationszentrum und Museum
über die Migration in Deutschland”) (Gogos 2011).

Finally, the many temporary exhibitions annually shown at the DHM result in
such a heavy workload and involving so much pressure on the staff that they are
depicted by an informant as similar to a “factory’s production line”. Furthermore,
a large number of school classes, foreign language and exchange students or
international tourists were at times squeezed through the main exhibition in the
temporary exhibition space in the CNHI and the DHM. Meanwhile the smaller
exhibition on the ground floor of the CNHI and in the KM, which was less advertised
and less prestigious, remained empty. Analysing interactions in the museum
space thus shows how global commodification processes simultaneously manifest
themselves and are produced on the local level of interaction.

Conclusion

An attempt has been made to introduce a museum case study and look at
how theoretical notions of ‘representation’ and ‘the public’ are relevant from a
methodological point of view – how representations of ‘the public’ are negotiated
‘in public’. Two examples were chosen to illustrate some techniques from a
methodological approach meant to combine interaction and discourse analytical
methods in a microsociological contextualisation analysis. I aim to underline the
situatedness of knowledge construction and investigate how discourses, people,
points of view, institutions and objects from elsewhere are brought onto the stage –
be it through explicit or implicit multimodal contextualisation cues within and across
interaction sequences, which are shown in transcripts and recordings, or through
enabling and constraining contextual constellations, which are constructed by the
researcher on the basis of interviews or ethnographic data. Applied to a binational
museum exhibition, the analysis shows that not only is the definition of the public
sphere at the heart of the exhibition, but the question of what kind of public stage

66
Porsché

the museum constitutes is crucial to interactions within the museum. Producers


and visitors of the exhibition engage in asymmetric negotiations about which kind
of ‘things’ they refer to and how to define the institutional situation of interaction.
The attempt to produce knowledge about what is the public and how immigrants
are represented within it thus constitutes a continuous and context-dependent
endeavour.

Transcription Notation – adapted version of Gail Jefferson (1984).

underline emphasis
(.) micropause
(0.4) timed pause
[ ] talk at the same time/overlapping talk
= latching/next speaker continues with absence
of a discernable gap
( ) inaudible on the recording
((laughing, taking a step back)) described phenomena/movement
((☺)) smiley voice
(not sure) there is doubt about accuracy of material in
round brackets
Yea::h, I see:: extension of the preceding vowel sound
I think .hh I need more a full stop before a word or sound indicates
an audible intake of breath
hh out breath
[...] square brackets indicate that some transcript
has been deliberately omitted.
↑ or / or ? voice going up markedly (within word,
beginning/end of word, end of phrase)
↓or \ or . voice going down markedly
. and ? refer to intonation curves, / and \ to
inflections with a delimitable beginning and
end and ↑ and ↓ to jumps of pitch.
, same or slightly raised intonation indicating
continuation or an insertion
>faster< speaking faster than surrounding talk
<slower> speaking slower than surrounding talk
« word » indicating reported speech through intonation

67
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

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72
Linguistic Landscape as
a Translational Space:
The Case of Hervanta, Tampere

Kaisa Koskinen
University of Eastern Finland

In this article, the linguistic landscape of the suburb of Hervanta in Tampere,


Finland is studied from the perspective of translation studies. The data, collected
in 2011, consists of 22 cases of translated signage. This data was analysed by
using categorisations previously developed by Reh (2004) and Edelman (2010).
Additionally, numerous translation studies viewpoints and concepts are introduced,
including covert and overt translations, target- and source-orientedness,
domestication and foreignisation, pragmatic adaptations, and the concepts
of translational assimilation and accommodation. I argue that an adequate
understanding of translated signage requires paying attention not only to what is
translated but also to how translations are produced, and that translation studies
can offer tools for this kind of analysis.

Introduction

Linguistic landscape research has produced numerous vivid descriptions of the


multilingual nature of contemporary cityscape (see, e.g., Shohamy et al. 2010).
According to Michael Cronin (2006), the multilingual, multi-ethnic space that we
now encounter in urban settings is first and foremost a translation space. In migrant
societies translation is not only desirable, it is vital, since the city, as many have
argued, is a place of language contact. It thus follows that the city is also a space
for translation. Stereotypically, translating is related to international business,
diplomacy and cultural contacts with “elsewhere”. Cronin emphasises that in today’s
society, “elsewhere is next door” (ibid., 17).

Cronin argues for the city as the locus of micro-cosmopolitan analysis, that is,
for cosmopolitanism from below, which identifies the global relevance of the local,
the small and the mundane (ibid., 15). One such local and mundane feature is the

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 73 –92.
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

usage of languages in public space. Public and commercial signs are one concrete
realisation of the language policies and practices of a particular area:

The city is a place of language contact, as we have said, and the signs in public space
are the most visible reminder of this. The linguistic landscape not only tells you in an
instant where on earth you are and what languages you are supposed to know, but
it contains information going far beyond this. It provides a unique perspective on the
coexistence and competition of different languages and their scripts, and how they
interact and interfere with each other in a given place. (Backhaus 2007, 145)

There is a growing body of “micro-cosmopolitan” research on the linguistic


landscape and the coexistence and competition of different languages in various
urban settings. In this article, I will look at one specific linguistic landscape, that of
the suburb of Hervanta, the most multicultural and multilingual area within the city
of Tampere, one of Finland’s major metropolitan areas. The focus of my analysis
is multilingual or, to be more precise, translated signage, and I will approach this
data from the point of view of a translation scholar, looking specifically at the
translation consequences of the increasing multilingualism in this particular locale.
My goal is not to enumerate the respective numbers of various languages visible
in the public sphere, but rather to analyse the issues of authorship, audiences, and
community and their connections with “elsewhere”. To accomplish this I shall look
at the translational practices as manifested in Hervanta’s particular signage; and
I will also focus on non-translation, in cases where one might expect more than
one language. This translation studies perspective has, to my knowledge, not yet
been applied to linguistic landscape research before, and it will hopefully open new
avenues for researchers interested in analysing the co-existence of more than one
language in various linguistic landscapes.

Hervanta as a Multilingual Space

The data were collected in the suburb of Hervanta, Tampere in 2011. Data
collection was part of a larger project to chart and describe multilingual and, in
particular, translational practices in the city of Tampere. In this article, I place
a more methodological emphasis on the linguistic landscape data collected
for that project. Tampere was selected for the case study not because of its
uniqueness but because of its normality: it is a regular mid-size European town
(200,000 inhabitants). It is not a cosmopolitan metropolis known for its hybridity
and multiculturalism; rather, it represents “any town, Finland”. It may thus be that
the findings in Tampere are more generalisable and perhaps more revealing than
those from a very distinctive metropolis (cf. Ben-Rafael et al. 2010, xiii). A Finnish
city is also interesting within linguistic landscape research, since Finland is officially
a bilingual country, yet neither Finnish nor Swedish is a global language, and as

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Koskinen

such, one does not expect short-term visitors or recent immigrants to know either,
thus putting the notion of “dominant language” in a new light.

Within the city of Tampere, the suburb of Hervanta was selected for a closer
analysis for various reasons. Situated 10 kilometres from the city centre, this satellite
suburb was originally built in the 1970s. It is both the biggest and most international
suburb of Tampere, with 11 per cent of its population consisting of foreign nationals
(one third of all foreign nationals living in Tampere; City of Tampere 2011a, 16). If
the growing spectrum of languages spoken in Tampere is visible anywhere in the
cityscape, it will be in Hervanta. With 22,000 inhabitants, Hervanta is also a town
within a town, and one can find many kinds of public spaces and facilities in its
centre: malls, shops, a municipal library, a parish church, a police station and so
on.

Another factor that makes Hervanta an interesting case is that its multilingualism
stems from various sources. On the one hand, there are numerous housing projects
where recent immigrants and non-affluent local inhabitants have settled, such that
Hervanta has been associated with the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum.
On the other hand, the Technical University of Tampere (with its international
students and staff) is located in Hervanta. Numerous Nokia complexes have also
brought many IT experts from various parts of the world to live and work in Hervanta.
The premises of the Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Police College
of Finland add to the academic and ‘respectable’ profile of Hervanta. The intended
audiences for multilingual signage can thus be rather diverse, and one is advised
not to presuppose any power hierarchies between different languages based on
their users’ assumed status. What one does not have to any large extent, however,
are international tourists, or signage directed towards them. This gap makes the
signage profile different from city centres, and supposedly allows a more insightful
window into the relations between more permanent inhabitants.

The three largest groups of foreign nationals in Hervanta come from Russia (400),
India (311) and Estonia (146) (City of Tampere 2011a, 17). In addition to Finnish, the
most widely spoken languages are Russian (848), Arabic (203), Chinese (190) and
Somali (102) (City of Tampere 2011b).1 It is impossible to be more precise about
Chinese, since more granular data (Cantonese, Mandarin, etc.) is not available
in the national or municipal statistics. There is little legislation governing the use
of languages in signage in Hervanta. The only stipulations governing linguistic
landscapes in Finland concern the use of the two official languages in municipal
signs, and as the percentage of Swedish speakers in Tampere is well below the

1 Nationalities and languages do not coincide: some speakers of foreign languages are Finnish
citizens, and many languages are spoken in more than one country of origin.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

required eight per cent of the population,2 there is no official requirement to include
any signage in Swedish in the linguistic landscape anywhere in the city of Tampere
(see Language Act 423/2003, § 5 and 33). The role and use of languages other than
Finnish and Swedish is even less controlled. Any translations found in Hervanta
do not, then, exist as a response to any official requirement, and they can thus be
interpreted as indications of more deliberately motivated language practices.

Methodology and Data

The set of translational data used in this article was collected in Hervanta throughout
the summer of 2011. Fieldwork was conducted in four subsequent visits to the same
area: twice in June, once in July and once in August. These visits were preceded
by a pilot visit in January. The purpose of these visits was to register not only
the more permanent signage but also more fleeting notices, and to observe the
potentially differing language practices ‘between and amongst’ these two sets. To
focus on public spaces, the area was strategically confined to the very heart of the
suburb within the two most central blocks along which most of the public institutions
and the central shopping district are located: Insinöörinkatu (Engineer Street) and
Lindforsinkatu (Lindfors Street). The academic institutions are located outside this
area, and were thus excluded; although researching the linguistic landscape in
schools, universities and research institutions would undoubtedly yield fruitful data
(see, e.g., Hanauer 2009), this task falls outside the present purview of observing
the shared public spaces common to all residents of Hervanta.

The focus of my research was the linguistic landscape of this central district,
as an accidental visitor would experience it, within those spaces anyone can freely
enter. That is, I have explored the public space that was “exposed to the public eye”
(Ben-Rafael et al. 2010, xiv). As researcher, I thus adopted the role of a tourist,
walking around with a camera and a notebook, observing and documenting the
coexistence of more than one language. Originally, I had hoped to expand the role of
written communication that traditionally dominates linguistic landscape research by
also taking into account the soundscape and by also observing everyday situations
including oral interpreting. Soon, however, it became apparent that to be able to do
so I would have needed to conduct much more extensive fieldwork within a more
ethnographic orientation. I did happen to witness a couple of instances of ad-hoc
interpreting, but they are not included in this data. The tourist role also indicates
that I have not attempted to chart the linguistic background or language attitudes
of those I encountered in the streets, nor have I tried to uncover the origins of the

2 The Swedish-speaking population in Tampere is around one thousand, making it the third
largest group, following the two thousand Russian speakers (City of Tampere 2011, 15).

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Koskinen

signage I documented, for example by interviewing shop owners or people affixing


posters.

Figure 1. An assumed covert translation. Photo: Lauri Hietala.

On all field trips I covered the same area. Since the focus of my research is on
translational signage, only those signs that exhibit more than one language, either
within the same sign frame or in two or more adjacent signs in different languages,
have been collected. This means that my data consist of overt translations (that
is, translation processes that can visibly be identified as such because of the
coexistence of both versions), whereas covert translations (that is, monolingual
signs that have been produced in a translation process) remain outside the scope
of this methodology. Although covert translations are beyond my reach in this
analysis, it is important to note their existence. They are one regular aspect of any
translational space: if no mediators are available, it is the task of the residents to
translate themselves and their lived experiences into the dominant language (cf.
the concept of assimilationist translation below). (For more on the categories of
overt and covert translations see House 1977). Note that one likely example of
covert translation – not included in my translational data – is the menu of a Chinese

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restaurant (Fig. 1). While it is all in Finnish, several atypical wordings indicate that
it has been either translated from an existing (presumably) Chinese version, or
its author has engaged in a mental self-translation process, transferring the more
familiar Chinese names into Finnish format.

The field was intentionally narrowed to ensure that the selected area can be
fully covered, but during the fieldwork the scarceness of any non-Finnish signage
within this relatively multilingual area came as a surprise. Indeed it was a significant
finding as such: in contrast to the image presented in many research projects,
and my own intuition based on familiarity with the area, the linguistic landscape in
Hervanta is surprisingly monolingual, and also more frugal and less chaotic than
many case studies of linguistic landscapes would have us anticipate. Multilingual
signage reflects this limited use of languages other than Finnish, and my data is
thus rather small. As the objective of this article is methodological, and the aim
is to test the usability of translation studies perspectives in linguistic landscape
research, this is not a major concern. All in all, my data includes photos of 22
different items of micro-cosmopolitan, translational use of language in the public
space of central Hervanta, and they form the basis of the analysis below.

Figure 2. Meidän kauppa (”Our shop”). Photo: Lauri Hietala.

As often is the case in linguistic landscape research, counting the data was not
straightforward (see, e.g., Spolsky 2009, 32). First, some cases were so ephemeral
that if I did not use the first photo opportunity, the exemplar was gone when I
next arrived on the scene; some findings from the pilot visit in particular were thus

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not recorded, but those that were are included in the present data. Second, if a
particular multilingual sign reappears numerous times within the same linguistic
landscape, is it to be counted once or are all occurrences to be counted separately?
For instance, are the bilingual recycling instructions that are glued to all rubbish
bins inside the mall to be counted only once or each separately? Since I am not
presently working towards a quantified analysis, I selected variation rather than
statistical enumeration, so multiple data entries have been ruled out. The third issue
was the question of how to count signage that does not have clear-cut boundaries,
and this proved the most problematic issue for quantifying purposes. If we have
before us, say, a sign with the name of the shop in two languages, as well as all
information concerning its merchandise and opening hours in two languages, and
two short-lived notices in two languages (Fig. 2), is this to be counted as one, three,
five or more data entries? Or what should the researcher do if the original appears
on one sign, and its translation in another? Again, my exploratory methodological
aims allow me to circumvent this problem. (For example, I am able to count the
first sign as two items because of differences in the direction of translation and
the permanence of the signs, while counting the second instance as just one).
But drawing the lines differently in complex cases such as this can indeed distort
comparability of the results obtained in different projects. It also follows that my
data yield conservative figures on the occurrences of translational signage in this
specific locale.

Linguistic Landscapes and Translation

Linguistic landscape research typically focuses on evidence of multilingualism in


the landscape. It thus follows that since translation is often the process through
which any documentation comes to take on a new linguistic form, translatedness
is an issue closely related to linguistic landscape research. Indeed, it has been
argued that the availability or non-availability of translation is an important, if seldom
studied, analytical category in linguistic landscape research (Backhaus 2007, 31).
Thus far, researchers interested in translation-related processes have mainly relied
on applying the categorisation of the four multilingual writing strategies defined by
Mechthild Reh (2004): duplicating, fragmentary, overlapping and complementary.
Duplicating strategy refers to cases where exactly the same information is given
in both languages; fragmentary multilingual writing involves cases where full
information is given in one language, but fragments of it are also translated into
another; and overlapping writing refers to cases where the two language versions
offer partially the same information but also both convey additional content. The
last of Reh’s categories is actually not a translation category: it denotes instances
of code-switching or mixing of languages where complete understanding of the
message presupposes the knowledge of both (or all) languages in use and no

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translations have been provided. This last subset of signage was not included in
my data.

Reh’s categories are useful as such, but they only refer to what has been
translated. To fully understand the roles and functions of the translated signage,
one also needs to look at how the translations came about. Louise Edelman
(2010, 99) attempted do so in expanding on Reh’s categories by introducing a
more translation-oriented sub-categorisation. In her model, duplicating is further
divided into “word-for-word translation” and “free translation”, fragmentary writing is
renamed as “partial translation”, whereas the category of “no translation” highlights
the lack of a translation component in complementary multilingual writing. The
categories of free and literal translation do indeed begin to answer the question
how.

However, within translation studies this traditional binary division has been
found to be too simplistic, and to grasp the variety of translation strategies fully,
a more nuanced understanding of the options available for translators is needed.
This is where translation studies can be of assistance. In translation studies,
there is a long research tradition of studying translation strategies. One can, by
way of example, look at the above-mentioned overt and covert translations, non-
translation, foreignising or domestication strategies, and pragmatic adaptations
such as explicitation and implicitation, additions and omission, simplification, and so
on. Questions of authorship, ideology and power have also been widely discussed
in translation studies, as have irony, allusions and wordplays and the difficulties in
translating these. In the following, the data will be analysed from the perspective of
translation studies. As this is a tentative exercise, I do not anticipate all the above-
mentioned cases to be found in my data.

My data is limited, and is unsuited for a quantifying analysis, but an overview


of its characteristics can still be revealing. The data has thus been categorised
in a number of ways. In addition to Reh’s and Edelman’s categories I have also
classified the data according to author type. The author categories applied to this
data were the municipality of Tampere, religious communities (local parishes of
various Christian denominations), commercial actors (promotional material), and
companies (without immediate aims of selling anything to the customers). I was
also prepared to add the category of private individual, but there were no items
corresponding to this classification. Other categories for classification were the
intended audience (when definable) and the specific language-pair involved. This
kind of fieldwork does not permit direct access to the translation process, hence it
is impossible to determine with certainty which is the source language and which
the target. This may be one reason for the tendency to describe duplicating texts as
“translations of one another” in linguistic landscape literature (e.g. Edelman 2010,
99). My strategy was to rely on visual dominance and assumed authorship; that is,

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I have classified as source language the one which is placed on top, on the left,
in bigger letters, or in fragmentary translation as the dominant language, or can
be identified as the native language of the author, when identifiable in person or
role (see Scollon & Scollon 2003, 120). I realise this strategy can be vulnerable to
misinterpretation, and the categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive.3 I will
return to this below, but in discussing translation strategies it is difficult to proceed
without some notion of directionality.

Translated Signage in Hervanta


Overview

The first significant observation I made was realising that data matching my criteria
were not abundant. Multilingualism was not as dominant in the linguistic landscape
of Hervanta as I had anticipated, and translation was not as widespread as I
had thought. Comparing the case of Hervanta to Reh’s and Edelman’s findings,
I have, however, come to view my data in a slightly different light. In their data
(collected in Lira, Uganda and The Netherlands respectively) multilingualism was
much more commonly manifested in mixing languages than in translating, and in
some examined areas there were zero translations (Reh 2004; Edelman 2010,
99-100, 103). Complementary multilingualism was excluded from my data, but
it did not overwhelmingly dominate the field. Also, taking into consideration the
fairly small-scale area and my conservative counting method, 22 items is in fact
a non-negligible number of translations. Indeed, given its history, Finland can be
considered a translation-embracing country, as supported by these figures.

Finnish is the dominant language in Hervanta. It is thus hardly surprising that it is


represented in my data sampling, with only one exception (a poster in Chinese and
English). English is the most common partner of Finnish: 11 items were translated
into or from English. It is followed by Swedish (6), which was only used as a target
language. Russian, the most common foreign language in Hervanta, was used in
only 3 items (in both directions), as was Chinese. Arabic was used in but one item.

English occupies a special place in linguistic landscape research: researchers


often discuss its global dominance and its emblematic functions as a display
language. Indeed, even in Hervanta there are numerous examples of global
English. In translated signage, however, its position and functions appear to be
different. It is not primarily used because of its prestige value (only one commercial
item uses English as a promotional tool because of its symbolic value) but much
more functionally as a lingua franca for those who may not understand Finnish.

3 Additionally, it is not sensitive to different writing systems and cultural conventions.

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The direction of translation is thus typically from Finnish into English (7 items).
English signage, on the other hand, is less typically translated into Finnish (3
items). This indicates that the primary translation need is not to help speakers of
Finnish to understand English, but to support those who do not understand Finnish
by providing translation into a language that is assumed to be widely known;
according to the municipal statistics there are only 87 native speakers of English
living in Hervanta (see City of Tampere 2011b).

The presence of all other languages found in the data can be explained as
reflecting the local language ecology, but the predominant role of Swedish is
something of a surprise. Although Tampere has an active Swedish-speaking
minority, its members are mostly located in other parts of the city, and only 60
Swedish speakers live in Hervanta (City of Tampere 2011b). So, translating Finnish
signage into Swedish does not seem to fulfil any significant communicative
function here. All the items translated into Swedish were authored by private and
commercial companies (two banks, two security companies, a pizza parlour and a
second-hand shop). They were not specifically designed for the local context, but
rather were standard issue, used by the companies that also operate elsewhere
in Finland. The use of Swedish translations does not seem to stem from a local
“good reasons” principle (Ben-Rafael 2009), reflecting the local translation needs
reality of the residents; rather, their necessity in bilingual municipalities elsewhere
in Finland has brought about a policy of always offering Swedish translations,
including areas where there is a limited communicative – or symbolic – need for
Swedish translations.

Applying Reh’s categories, an overwhelming majority of the items (16) fall


into the category of duplicating writing; there are only three cases of fragmentary
translations and two cases of overlapping translation. (I was unable to assess
the one Chinese-English item from this perspective and it has thus not been
categorised here). Reh’s categories actually function better than I anticipated for
initial classification, but the category of duplicating is too heterogeneous for closer
analysis. This is undoubtedly the reason why Edelman proposed the further division
into literal and free translations. In my data, this division (applied to both duplicating
and overlapping translations) yielded 14 literal translations and four that could be
classified as free. However, quite a number of the literal ones consisted of one-
word phrases, and in cases such as hälytys / alarm it is fairly difficult to imagine a
free translation.4

4 This is an interesting case where Swedish and English have the same word. In my data these
stickers are classified as a case of Finnish into Swedish, based on the assumption that they are
created to fulfil the requirements of bilingual communities. In a different context or by another
researcher it might be seen as English.

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In this data, this new categorisation does not solve the original problem of Reh’s
category, namely that of inclusiveness. In addition to being either literal or free,
translations are known to exhibit various other characteristics as well. Below, I
will draw attention to those translation aspects that this data bring to light. A focus
on the role of target-orientedness (versus source-orientedness), and the related
concept of foreignising together with issues of identity, are offered as new tools for
categorising translated signage. The data also highlight the need for the fieldworker
to be alert to not only occurrence of relevant data but also their non-occurrence
when expected. Non-translation can be an equally relevant and telling feature of a
translation space as the existing translations.

Target-oriented Translation

One of the central questions often posed in linguistic landscape research is


“linguistic landscape for whom?” (e.g. Backhaus 2007, 143). This kind of target-
orientedness is also common in translation studies, where the intended readers and
target culture considerations have attracted significant attention. Considerations for
future readers are a typical reason for various pragmatic adaptations in translation
(see Vehmas-Lehto 1999, Ch. 12). Explicitation, censorship, politeness strategies
and other ways of taking the new audience into consideration might be used to
explain the “freeness” of free translation. However, in my data a clearly identifiable
reader-orientation does not fully coincide with the category of “free” translation, not
even when taken together with partial translations (or fragmentary writing, in Reh’s
terms).

Figure 3. Partial translation. Photo: Lauri Hietala.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

There are seven items in my data where one can discern a clearly defined target
audience. Three of those are targeted at students, two at practising Muslims, one
at anyone who does not yet speak fluent Finnish and wants to practise, and one
at Russian men. And indeed there is a slight predominance of partial, overlapping
and free translation in this group. Taken together, this can be seen to imply that
a target-oriented translation of signage often adopts a pragmatic approach, and
source text data is either translated only to the extent deemed necessary (also
adding information when necessary) or it is translated in a manner that is deemed
acceptable to the target audience. In practice, this could involve partial translation
and explicitation as in the case of Figure 3. In this item, the only piece of information
that is translated concerns student discounts (i.e. it is a case of partial translation).
Interestingly, although visually rather similar, the Finnish and English versions of
the translated section are not identical. Their content is the same, but emphasis
is placed differently. The international students are explicitly informed that in order
to qualify for the discount they will need to have a student ID, whereas the Finnish
version makes explicit that this discount concerns only salon services, not products.

Figure 4. Non-reader-oriented translation. Photo: Kaisa Koskinen.

On the other hand, the data also include items that are clearly not target-oriented.
One could argue that all those signs which contain a translation into Swedish
are, on the basis of their language choice alone, to be placed in this category.

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Additionally, some of them adopt a translation strategy that further highlights


this attitude. One such case concerns parking restrictions (Fig. 4). Information,
authored by a private parking company, is posted in only Finnish and Swedish.
Failure to comply with these restrictions constitutes a parking infringement and is
subject to fines. Thus, by not translating these signs with lingua franca English,
for example, and thereby supporting those who may have difficulties with these
two national languages, the sign is an impediment, especially since it is drafted in
complex, bureaucratic language. This quality seems to be even more pronounced
in the Swedish translation. It is not important whether those looking for a parking
space actually understand the message; the fact that the restrictions have been
posted allows parking tickets to be issued to all those who do not comply with them.

At the other extreme, there are persuasive messages. In addition to the


reader’s understanding, the author is hoping for a positive affective response and
desired action. Initially I anticipated the more commercial signage to be examples
of these, but in this data, translated commercial signs are rather neutral and low-
key. Instead, another group of authors adopts the most persuasive style, namely
religious communities. Commercial actors and private companies (18 items)
produced the overwhelming majority of the data, but religious communities came
second with three items. It is noteworthy that these three items exhibit more than
one language-pair (Finnish-English, Finnish-Russian), three different authors,
duplicating and fragmentary writing strategies, as well as free, literal and partial
translation.

While most of the commercial signs are affixed permanently (including their
translations), the items authored by religious bodies were all temporary by nature,
and I am quite confident that if fieldwork continued, new items would be found.
(Incidentally, the cases of interpreting that I encountered were observed within this
same framework). All this seems to indicate that religious institutions have taken
an active role in supporting the multilingual community in which they are located.
Persuasiveness in the style of these items stems from the fact that they invite
people to participate in a particular activity (or, in one case, support the cause of
fair trade).

Non-translation

In multilingual settings, where most linguistic landscape studies have been carried
out, one crucial question is that of language choice (Spolsky 2009, 33). For which
functional or symbolic purposes is a particular sign written in a particular language?
This issue has been touched upon above. Another relevant language choice worthy
of further investigation is that of choosing whether to translate or not to translate,
and the functional or symbolic reasons behind this choice. Spolsky (ibid.) proposes

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three relevant conditions for the choice of language: The first, and obvious, condition
is to write the sign in a language you know. The second condition is communicative
and functional, and it advises the author to write the sign in a language that can be
read by the people that are expected to read it. The third condition emphasises the
symbolic value of languages, as it urges you to write the sign in your own language
or in a language with which you wish to be identified.

Looking at these conditions from the point of view of translation, it is evident


that translating can soften all these conditions. Obviously, you can only translate
from and into a language you know, but there are professional translators to help
you escape this limitation. The second condition, in particular, can greatly benefit
from translation, as you then do not need to choose just one language but can
address several readerships at once. Third, overt translation can function as a
way of distancing yourself from a language version you do not yourself wish to be
identified with.

Because translating is such a central strategic tool in multilingual settings, it is


all the more interesting to take a closer look at those instances of language use
where translation has specifically not been opted for. Note, however, that non-
translation in this sense is a different category from Edelman’s “no translation” or
Reh’s “complementary writing”, which both refer to multilingual signage with no
overlapping content in the two languages; non-translation refers to those cases
where there is no multilingual element in the signage even though one might have
expected to see some (because of symbolic or functional reasons). It thus denotes
a gap in the data, a zero-category.

In this data, the most conspicuous gap is the absence of translated top-down
messages from any official actors. Hervanta is big enough to warrant its own
municipal and state service offices. The following are all present in Hervanta: a
police station, social security services, a health care unit, a municipal dentist,
maternity care, a recreational centre, and a municipal library. Recent immigrants
will need to visit many of these offices, the police station and social security office
to name just two, and many of these services have a special mandate in supporting
multiculturalism (such as the library). Much to my surprise, the only item in my data
that is authored by the municipality is the recycling instructions on rubbish bins
inside the mall.

None of these institutions posted any non-Finnish information on their doors


or windows. (Since there is no regulation to use Swedish in Tampere, these
institutions did not even do that, adopting a minimalist policy that is different from
many commercial enterprises and companies as discussed above). In one case,
the main entrance doors are locked, and one must press a somewhat hidden buzzer
to gain admission. There is no linguistic (or visual) support in finding the buzzer

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for those who do not understand the instructions in Finnish. This non-translation
strategy is strikingly different from, for example, the one adopted in the City of
Tokyo where official originators were found to predominate in translated signage
(Backhaus 2007, 102).

Perhaps most striking was the lack of any translation on the doors of the
municipal shelter for abused families. For obvious reasons, the doors of this facility
are always kept locked, but as the vulnerability (both linguistically and in terms of
independence) of immigrant women in particular is well documented, it is particularly
unaccommodating to expect someone in distress and seeking help to decipher
administrative Finnish instructions and opening hours. It is no small feat, though, to
come up with simple solutions, either. Using a language in this case would single out
any language selected for use in translation with domestic violence, an unintended
and unwanted outcome. Still, listing information in all potentially relevant languages
is not feasible due to sheer space limitations. Lingua franca English could be used,
but it is not immediately clear whether that would constitute a viable solution. Still,
the lack of translation (or any form of multilingualism) in signs posted by official
institutions contrasts sharply with the policy adopted by religious institutions. It
is readily discernible that the municipality does not reach out to its non-Finnish-
speaking inhabitants. Intentionally or unintentionally, it sends a message:

the presence (or absence) of language displays in the public space communicates a
message, intentional or not, conscious or not, that affects, manipulates or imposes de
facto language policy and practice. (Shohamy 2006, 110; cited in Hult 2010)

Collective Identity and Translation

The lack of municipal translation activity can be interpreted as a non-inclusive


gesture. By not providing translations in signposts, the city seems to be saying
that you are not welcome unless you speak the local language. Language learning
is obviously key to accommodation, but as most new incoming residents do not
have Finnish skills upon arrival, those institutions which play a special role in the
lives of these newcomers would do well to reconsider their visibility in the linguistic
landscape of Hervanta.

As Ben-Rafael reminds us, signs can indeed be used to reinforce a collective


identity:

L[inguistic] L[andscape] items … may indeed be designed to also assert – among other
interests – their actors’ particularistic identities, i.e. “who they are” in front of “who they
are not”, exhibiting thereby a priori commitment to a given group within the general
public. (Ben-Rafael 2009, 46)

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Figure 5. Identity building in signs. Photo: Lauri Hietala.

There are some examples in my data that seem to attest to this kind of identity
building. One of them is actually identical to Ben-Rafael’s example: a food store
that displays the word halal in its shop windows (Fig. 5). According to Ben-Rafael
this is a way for the shop owners to declare unambiguously who “their customers”
are. However, in this case the use of translation is also of interest. Whether one
should talk about translation or transcription in this case is in fact debatable, since
the window texts repeat the term in Arabic script and Roman letters. As there
is no other way of saying halal in Finnish than using this loan word, I consider it
a case of translation (yet another example of the difficulties of categorisation).5
Obviously, the functional purpose of these signs is to inform potential customers
that this is a place where halal food products can be purchased, and this can
also be interpreted as a symbolic marker of collective identity: we are your shop if
you value the principles of halal like we do (note that this is not language-based,
but cultural and religious identity). At the same time, however, there is another

5 Halal, and other similar concepts such as kosher are widely used as loan words in many
European languages. Having Arabic and Roman scripts side by side unsettles the principle, also
used as the basis of my classification, that ”left” precedes ”right”. Cases such as this, where the
transcribed version is to the left and the Arabic to the right is a very democratic way of presenting
the two versions.

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symbolic value, and that is to announce the multi-ethnic nature of the shop or its
ethnicity as culturally non-dominant . This, in turn, can be interpreted as welcome
exoticism by some, and as unwelcome foreign influence by others. This small, two-
word example is thus a useful reminder of the complexities involved in producing
and interpreting signs. The audiences of linguistic landscapes in the public space
are in no way restricted, and those putting up their signs have no way of controlling
how these signs will be interpreted and by whom.

Another intriguing case of particularism in my data concerns a Russian shop


(Fig. 2). The shop is called Meidän kauppa (Our shop), and the name is offered both
in Finnish and in Russian (Nash magasin), in a literal translation. The same applies
to the list of produce in the shop window. According to the principles of priority
given by Scollon and Scollon, I have categorised this example as a translation from
Finnish into Russian, as Finnish is placed on the left in the shop name and on top in
the list. However, the bold possessive pronoun in the shop name attests differently.
It is a lovely example of how to use the linguistic landscape as a means of taking
possession (Backhaus 2007, 88). Although the name is in Finnish, it is self-evident
that the “us” in the name does not refer to Finns; it is to be understood as a literal
translation of nash magasin, selecting the Russian-speakers as the in-group, the
Finns are the out-group. It follows that the translation, although it is a product of an
entirely literal and straight-forward translation strategy, has a curiously foreignising
effect for Finnish readers who are first invited in the role of “us” by the Finnish
translation meidän, only to be alienated by the realisation that it is not intended to
refer to Finnish readers. Foreignising and domesticating translation strategies are
indeed another duo that might prove useful in classifying translated signage. In
translation studies literature they are most commonly referred to as two opposing
translation strategies (dating back to Friedrich Schleiermacher), but as this case
indicates, foreignising can equally well be an effect brought about by a seemingly
unassuming translation (Venuti 1995, 1998).

The primary role of the Russian language in Meidän kauppa is further reinforced
by the two temporary signs in the window; in them, Russian clearly occupies the
dominant role of the source language, and Finnish is the target language. However,
compared to the official, non-translation strategy discussed in the previous
subsection, the careful inclusion of a Finnish translation for all linguistic elements
creates a welcoming atmosphere of inclusion. While Meidän kauppa duly notes the
primary role of the Russian-speakers as the biggest group of non-Finnish-speakers
in the area, and while it participates in fostering a particularistic in-group community,
it does not create a sectarian attitude by excluding the dominant language. Meidän
kauppa is a newcomer to the linguistic landscape of Hervanta. It is a promising
sign of the increasing vitality of locally relevant languages in Hervanta, and a good
example of the way in which translations can be used to support community building

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and identity work without creating clear-cut boundaries between the targeted in-
group and others.

Conclusions

In this article, I examined the linguistic landscape of Hervanta from a translation


studies perspective. My analysis focused on translated signage, and the aim was
to identify the translation consequences of the increasing multilingualism in this
particular locale. At the outset, I thought I would be able to provide a translation-
specific classification model to be available for other scholars interested in
translated signage, but that task proved too complicated. The task was to test
whether a translation studies perspective can shed new light on this kind of data.
It transpired that even a small data set like this one provides more material than I
was fully able to handle. Issues such as authorship, directionality, target audiences,
overlapping and partial translations, not to mention power, cultural identity and
assimilation were too diverse to be integrated confidently into one classification
model. More material and more research is needed. Instead of a refined model I
have introduced a number of potentially relevant aspects and directions for future
work. These include the notions of covert and overt translations, target- and source-
orientedness, domestication and foreignisation, as well as the notion of pragmatic
adaptations. In this concluding section, I would like to introduce yet another concept
pair, one that summarises and bridges the more micro-level translation strategies.

Michael Cronin (2006, 52) identifies two global translation strategies as the
translation consequences of globalisation: translational assimilation and translational
accommodation. According to Cronin, these are the two ways in which immigrants
themselves can respond to their new linguistic situation, that is, by seeking either
to translate themselves into the dominant language (assimilation) or by using
translation as a means of maintaining their languages of origin (accommodation). In
my view, these two can also be seen as the two opposing strategies the community
as a whole can adopt. In the case of Hervanta, the City of Tampere seems to favour
translational assimilation; no scaffolding is provided for the newcomer, and it is
the task of the immigrant to bridge the linguistic divide. The religious communities
functioning in the area, and the companies owned and run by people who have
moved to Finland from elsewhere, seem to support translational accommodation.
Using Finnish side by side with the other languages is indeed a practical way of
maintaining and supporting the immigrants’ languages of origin without excluding
the speakers of the dominant language.

The question which must be asked by all immigrant communities at some


stage is: What is their attitude to translation? In other words, is all the translation
to be unidirectional and assimilationist or is there a moment when the refusal to

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be translated into the dominant language or the demand for translation into the
immigrant’s language becomes a conscious form of resistance, a desire to assert
language rights, namely those relating to the maintenance of the mother tongue
(Cronin 2006, 56)? In a similar vein, linguistic landscape researchers might wish
to ask what their own attitude to translation is. I trust this article has been able
to show the relevance of translation in multilingual signage and to indicate some
useful viewpoints that can be adopted to enhance our understanding of the role of
translation in the “symbolic construction of the public space” (Ben-Rafael 2009, 41).

References
Backhaus, P. 2007. Linguistic Landscapes. A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in
Tokyo. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Ben-Rafael, E. 2009. A sociological approach to the study of linguistic landscapes. In E.
Shohamy & D. Gorter (eds.) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery. New York &
London: Routledge. 40–54.
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Ethnic Diversity and Creative
Urban Practice:
The Case of Bradford’s Mughal Garden1
Charles Husband
Centre for Applied Social Research
University of Bradford

Yunis Alam
Centre for Applied Social Research
University of Bradford

This paper examines the significance of the construction of a Mughal garden within
a nineteenth-century civic park in the northern English city of Bradford. We explore
the semiotic environment of the streetscape in the surrounding inner city area of
Manningham in which Lister Park is located. The framing discourse surrounding
Manningham has defined it as a multiethnic area with a reputation of suffering from
inner-city decline and ethnic tension. This context is significant for any reading
of the streetscape within this area. It is argued that the signage, street furniture
and local inhabitants / residents give this area a strong sense of its predominantly
Pakistani heritage population. At the same time, the architecture in this area reflects
both the nineteenth-century heritage of industry and Christianity into which more
recently there have arrived visible aspects of Muslim culture and lifestyle. It is into
this territorial context that the local council placed a contemporary representation
of a traditional Mughal garden. The article explores the background of this process
and examines the cultural symbolism and value of this garden for its varied users.

Introduction

This paper provides an account of the planning background to the development


of an innovatory architectural statement that sought to respond to the changed

1 This paper is written as an outcome of the research project, ‘Immigration, Figuration, Conflict. A
Comparative Space Analysis in Bradford and Duisberg’, DFG (Deutsche Forshungsgemeinschaft),
undertaken with co-applicants Prof. William Heitmeyer (Director of The Institute for Interdisciplinary
Research on Conflict and Violence, IKG, University of Bielefeld) and Dr. Jörg Hüttermann. We
wish to thank Mr. Ian Day, of the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, for his invaluable
knowledge and guidance in the preparation of this paper.

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 93 –114.
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

ethnic demography of the potential user population of an inner city area. We firstly
examine the context in which an inner city area – Manningham in Bradford, England
– with a reputation as a problematic ‘Muslim ghetto’ (see Simpson 2007; Burlet &
Reid 1998) has in fact an urban streetscape and social life that de facto belies this
stereotype. This inner city has a numerically significant population2 of South Asian
heritage, and Muslim faith, who have built a community in this area over 50 years.
For many of these residents, therefore, Manningham is a familiar area with family
attachments across generations. Furthermore, there is also an active commitment
to the area as a place that provides the infrastructural necessities that sustains
cultural identity through the provision of culturally relevant foodstuffs, clothing and
other community resources. As an inner city area with a prior history as a place of
settlement for Irish and Polish communities (Taylor & Gibson 2010), it has much
of the character of a traditional zone of transition. Today, Manningham has a very
strong established presence of people of Muslim, Pakistani heritage who have in
recent years been complemented by a new influx of Polish migrant workers, other
Eastern European migrants, and some asylum seekers from Iraq and elsewhere.

Consequently Manningham within Bradford, and probably over a wider area,


is well known as a place in which a diversity of ethnic minority goods is available:
this includes food and clothing, as well as literature and music that address
distinctive cultural needs. This infrastructure has been a means of the Muslim
community retaining a capacity for sustaining their faith and diasporic identities;
and consequently the emergence over time of mosques, madrasas and schools
has been integral to making Manningham an area that has substantial appeal to
its largest faith minority. The physical presence of this cultural infrastructure in
the form of buildings with specific ethnic identities and typically with appropriate
signage has added significantly to the construction of the South Asian / Muslim
gestalt that frames the perception of the area.

At the same time Manningham has acquired a deeply entrenched reputation


in wider Bradford and elsewhere as being an ‘edgy place’ where inter-ethnic
rivalries are likely to result in hostility and even violence: and more generally this
is seen as an area in which the former majority white population have become
a minority presence. Manningham has over the last fifty years been associated
with prostitution, drug abuse, the ‘underclass’ and squalid social housing, and with
immigrant tensions including riots (Bagguley & Hussain 2008). Thus, at various times
the substantive reality may have provided a veridical basis for these stereotypes,
but the dissolute reputation of Manningham in the popular imagination has always

2 The Pakistani and Bangladeshi population, almost entirely Muslim, was 75,188 at the 2001
census, approximately 16% of the city’s population (http://www.ons.gov.uk). It’s worth noting,
however, that these numbers have increased due to natural growth and in migrations of non-South
Asian Muslims from Europe, North and Sub-Saharan Africa as well as the Middle East.

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Husband & Alam

been a florid exaggeration of reality: often nurtured by local and national political
ideologies and interests.

Thus in this paper we must note the circulation of popular discourses in which
a particular inner-city area of a city in Northern England construct an image of
Manningham as being outside the comfort zone of the majority white population.
It is a necessary recognition of the social construction of a specific urban area as
being populated by ‘the other’ and being permeated by tropes of both the exotic
and the dangerous. We will demonstrate that in a deeply multiethnic area there
are competing semiotic signifiers of ethnic identity through the ‘Englishness’ of the
banal content of street signage and through the contrasting presence of ‘Asian’ shop
signage. Individual street signs and shop-front signage may be regarded as units of
semiotic meaning in the streetscape (Gorter 2006) but the cumulative assemblage
of visual signs in an area may be regarded as constituting a Gestalt (Ben-Rafael
et al. 2006, 8). It is exactly this recurrent presence of linguistic and visual cues that
marks Manningham as an inner-city area that possesses a strong and distinctive
ethnic character. It is in the context of this popular perception of Manningham as
a multiethnic area that we will examine the introduction of a Mughal garden into a
quintessentially nineteenth-century civic park that borders this area.

The linguistic marking of areas such as Manningham as ghettoes in the national


discourse of urban social cohesion is also noted in relation to the framing of this
area and its population (see Cantle 2008, 14). The national discourse since 2001
on ‘community cohesion’ and the assertion that British Muslim populations live in
‘parallel cultures’ and practice a politics of ‘self-segregation’ has made the banal
presence of ethnic difference, and particularly Muslim difference, highly salient to
the majority population (Ouseley 2001; Phillips 2005; see Husband & Alam 2011
for an overview). Thus, the streetscapes such as those in inner city Bradford are
likely to be read with a heightened awareness of ethnic identities; and of territory.
Reciprocally, the rise of Islamophobia in the United Kingdom has made more salient
the faith identity of the local South Asian populations, as Muslims, whereas at an
earlier point they would have predominantly seen their identities defined through
their diasporic experience as being Pakistani, Bangladeshi or, at the local/regional
level, as either Mirpuri or Sylheti correspondingly.

In our discussion, we will sketch the current status of banal life within the
mundane streetscape of Manningham based on recent fieldwork carried out under
the aegis of the Deutsche Forshungsgemeinschaft funded project. This account
will provide a context for properly understanding the imagination that underlay the
proposal to develop a Mughal garden in Lister Park:3 a large nineteenth-century
Victorian civic park that tracks one boundary of Manningham. The descriptive

3 Also known as ‘Manningham Park’.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

account of the streetscape of Manningham will itself lead us to consider the civic
context of planning and civic policy which shapes this environment; and this theme
will be followed through our account of the development and utilisation of the
innovatory Mughal Garden.

The City Context

Bradford is a major city in West Yorkshire, in the North of England. Now part of
a large metropolitan authority, it incorporates other distinct townships such as
Keighley, Shipley and Ilkley, with their own demographic profiles and histories. The
city of Bradford itself has a proud history and a particular current visibility in the
national imagination. Like many towns and cities in England, Bradford’s current
physical fabric owes much to the radical transformations that were carried out in
the construction of urban Britain during the industrial revolution. Located south of
the still largely rural, and scenic Yorkshire Dales, Bradford too is built into the steep
hillsides of valleys that flow into what is now the city centre. Coming to Bradford
from the major East–West motorway (the M62) a linking motorway (the M606) is
accessed until Bradford is entered, as it were, from above. Looking down from
what would have been hilltops across the urban spread of Bradford, an immediate
impression that may impact upon the unfamiliar visitor is the strong assertion of
faith and industry. For, the striking feature from above remains Manningham Mills:
a massive nineteenth-century textile mill whose huge stone chimney dominates
the city skyline. Its assertion of the centrality of the textile trade to the history of
Bradford is echoed by the still-visible stone mill buildings that, despite a creative
combination of arson and redevelopment over the last forty years, remain visible
and lasting reminders of the previous dominance of the textile industry in Bradford’s
fortunes. A second immanent visual impression takes shape through observation
of the number of iconic religious structures. Seen from above, one cannot fail to
observe the juxtaposition of church spires, minarets and cupolas that speak of the
significant presence of non-Christian faiths. These first impressions do not deceive,
for in fact Bradford is heavily marked by an industrial, predominantly textile, past
which has helped shaped the city’s current multiethnic demography.

In the nineteenth century Bradford expanded rapidly and successfully as a


centre of textile manufacturing. Its pre-eminence in this field brought to Bradford
the very significant wealth that became expressed in the large stone-built mill
properties, and in the mix of spacious stone built Victorian genteel housing for the
bourgeoisie, and the ranks of back-to-back housing for the factory labour force
(Taylor & Gibson 2010). The civic virtues that accompanied this era of commercial
capital accumulation became concrete in such expansive architectural statements
as the City Hall, St. George’s Hall, and Cartwright Hall (a museum and art gallery

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standing in Lister Park). This era provided a great deal of the urban fabric that lies
at the heart of this analysis.

However, the twentieth century has not been so generous to Bradford as new
international competition, that was central to the developing globalisation of trade,
progressively, and then dramatically in the 1970s, tore the heart out of Bradford’s
industrial base. The textile industry imploded and the migrant workers that had
been brought into Bradford to service this industry found themselves at the
forefront of the consequent collapse in employment. Families that had developed
from the initial arrival of predominantly single men into multi-occupied dwellings
around the mills in the 1960s now find themselves as first, second and the third
generation Britons living in a Bradford in which employment is a major challenge.
Communities that had developed through a cumulative process of migration and
family reunion spanning thirty years and more have shaped the creation of distinct
neighbourhoods that, typically, strongly reflect specific points of origin in Pakistan
or Bangladesh (Hiro 1966; Phillips et al. 2009: 12). These communities and their
neighbourhoods in the inner city of Bradford, have like all immigrant communities,
attracted hostility from segments of the majority population. Since 9/11 the Islamic
status of a large majority of these Pakistani-British Bradfordians (see Alam &
Husband 2006; Alam 2006) has given a heightened significance to their faith as a
marker of their difference.

Nor in fact does this recent visibility of the Muslim population in Bradford emerge
from their past neglect in the public gaze. In the mid-1980s the issue of halal meals
in state schools in Bradford achieved national visibility, as did the major struggle
between the Pakistani parents of children in Drummond Middle School over the
views of the headmaster, Ray Honeyford. What became known as ‘the Honeyford
Affair4’ came to be something of a national cause celebre involving Margaret
Thatcher and her government (Halstead 1988). Not long after this, Bradford
again figured dramatically within the international furore over the ‘Rushdie Affair’
(Appignanesi & Maitland 1988; Ruthven 1990). Following the burning of Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses in Bradford’s city centre: Bradford became, ‘partly as an accident of
timing, the newly discovered citadel of Muslim radicalism.’ (Akhtar 1989, 43).

Subsequently the ‘British credentials’ of Bradford’s Muslim population were


brought into question in the media during the First Gulf War of 1990–91, while

4 In early 1984, Ray Honeyford, a Headmaster at Drummond Middle School in Bradford, wrote
an article for a right leaning magazine, The Salisbury Review, exploring education and ethnicity in
which he asserted, amongst other points, that the presence of black and minority ethnic children had
an adverse impact on the educational attainment of white, ‘British’ children. The controversy came
to include protests from local parents, a call for the Headmasters’s resignation from Bradford’s, and
Britain’s, first Asian Lord Mayor, as well as support for him from the then Prime Minister, Margaret
Thatcher, who invited Honeyford to a ‘private lunch in 10 Downing Street’. (Oldman 1987, 29.)

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the riots of 1995 and 2001 provided further opportunity for the ‘problematic’5
status of Bradford’s Muslim populations to be further questioned. Additionally
this ‘incident led’ basis for regarding the whole of the Muslim population of
Bradford as problematic resulted in a second layer of the representation of their
‘problematic difference’ through television, literature and the cinema as authors
sought credibility and context for their scenarios by situating their narratives in
the context of multiethnic Bradford. The media in Britain, national and local, have
had a significant role in the persuasive normalisation of a range of inherently anti-
Muslim discourse and imagery (Poole 2002; Poole & Richardson 2006; Morey &
Yaqin 2011). In this socio-political context, Manningham, an area in the heart of the
city, became identified in the public mind as the iconic expression of the challenge
of Islam in Britain.

Manningham

Manningham is a district in central Bradford. In the nineteenth century it still had a


rather middle-class character, although it contained the biggest textile factory in the
whole British Empire: a manufacturing base surrounded by workers’ accommodation.
In the second half of the twentieth century the wealthier and often much larger
residences were converted into small flats for workers. Labour immigration, above
all from West Pakistan and to a lesser extent from the Indian states of Punjab and
Gujarat as well as from East Pakistan (to become independent as Bangladesh in
1971), increased hugely after 1968 and has made Manningham today a centre of
the presence of Muslims in Bradford: approximately 70 percent of the population
in Manningham and 16 percent in the city as a whole (http://www.ons.gov.uk).
Finney and Simpson (2009) have shown that Bradford’s Muslim populations have
experienced internal processes of economic change. This process has seen the
development of an affluent minority, many (but by no means all) of whom have
chosen to move out of Manningham.

Writing in 2005, the authors of the Manningham Masterplan stated, that

With an unemployment rate within the study area of 8.72% double the District rate of
4.37% and much higher than the regional rate of 3.7% (Source 2001 Census), it is not
surprising that nearly three quarters of residents feel that a lack of job opportunities is
a major issue in Manningham. (Bradford Metropolitan District Council and Yorkshire
Forward 2005, 36)

Beyond this baseline, there are further details that shed further light on the socio-
economic position of Manningham’s black and ethnic minority (BME) populations.

5 For example, one recurring aspect of the status of Muslims in Britain, and the ‘West’ more
generally, was their purported irreconcilability with non-Western values and ways of life.

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Husband & Alam

For example, the economically active proportion of the population is lower than the
average for the city as a whole and the same applies to the qualification structure
of the economically active population in Manningham compared to Bradford as a
whole. In 2011 Phillips et al. reported that in Manningham and the adjacent ward
of Girlington housing tenure was: ‘51% owner occupation, 28% social rental, and
21% private rental’ (Phillips et al. 2010, 13). Manningham is an area with a very
diverse housing stock (Fig. 1); ranging from short rows of eighteenth- and early-
nineteenth-century cottages that have become embedded in streets of nineteenth-
century working class terraces built rapidly to house the expanding population of
textile workers. Interspersed across the area are handsome streets, squares and
crescents of substantial bourgeois housing that have now often been converted for
multiple occupation.

Figure 1. A 19th century terrace: enlarged by the addition of dormer windows. Photo: C.
Husband.

In 2007 the streets of working-class housing surrounding the old textiles


factories in the area were complemented by the conversion of Manningham Mills
into luxury flats – a development which, not least because of the surrounding wall
and the police headquarters opposite, has aspects of a gated community; and thus
offers a new layer of housing demarcation into the existing mix of properties in
the area. At the same time, over the last decade at least, a further transformation
can be observed occurring in the local economy. Pakistanis are achieving
business success no longer only in the catering trade (curry houses) and the taxi

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

business, but also for example in retailing, tourism and music. The local schools
are increasingly dominated numerically by the ethnic minority and the University
of Bradford in the adjacent inner city district today attracts a large number of local
students of Pakistani heritage. Manningham also elects local Asian politicians to
the city council. It is in sum an inner-city area with high levels of social deprivation,
a mixed housing stock and a multiethnic resident population. In the twenty-first
century, Manningham continues to act as a place of settlement for new migrant
populations; and currently has a significant presence of new immigrants from the
recent accession states of the European Union: particularly from Poland. It is a
distinctly multiethnic inner city area that has a visibly predominant presence of
people with a South Asian heritage.

This is an area that has a capacity to attract strong bonds of attachment from
its residents. Because of the distinctive neighbourhood cultural infrastructure, it
serves cosmopolitan white residents as well as the settled members of the local
Pakistani communities who believe that this is an area in which they can ‘feel safe’
(see Phillips 2007). However, to the majority population of Bradford, and in the
national media, Manningham has been seen as representing the urban dislocation
and sense of pervasive threat that has become a stereotypical representation of
Islam in the inner cities of Britain: characterised by their perceived ‘self-segregation’
and habit of ‘living parallel cultural lives’ (see, for example Ouseley 2001; Cantle
2008). Thus, the local community dynamics that encapsulate the story of the
Mughal Garden cover a time frame from its planning in 1996 to its current usage in
2012. This period charts a Bradford, and Manningham, framed by issues of ethnic
identities constructed through the language of racism, multiculturalism and local
issues around schooling and policing, to a current situation where the dominant
discursive trope is that of Islam, assimilation and counter-terrorism.

The Streetscape of Manningham

City walkers traverse interlacing ‘grids of difference’ and find themselves taking up
particular subject positions in relation to the various (religiously, ethnically, or class-
based) communities and spaces that organise their spatial trajectories. As their
footsteps narrate urban stories – fixing, assembling, traversing, and transforming
urban boundaries – urban travellers become active participants in the production of
difference, identity and citizenship. (Secor 2004, 358)

Set against the externally imposed image of Manningham as an alien and ‘edgy’
ghetto, many hours of fieldwork walking6 through the area provides the basis for
a very different sense of the built environment. The prevailing sense that arises
from walking through the area is of quiet domestication; with the housing being in

6 This walker is male, white, and stereotypically ‘English’ looking.

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Husband & Alam

good repair and the front gardens tidy, and lacking the detritus of old furniture and
domestic rubbish that might be expected of this mythic ghetto. Similarly it is difficult
to find any graffiti: this is not an area scarred by a proliferation of gang tags and
random aerosol paint abuse. The streets are also singularly lacking in litter: and
this includes the back lanes behind the closely built nineteenth-century terraces.
By the standards of contemporary urban inner city zones, occupied by people
of predominantly relatively poor personal income, this is an area that stands in
contradiction to the dominant stereotype of urban malaise. This may to some extent
reflect the impact of the local expression of such national policies as New Deal
for Communities, and the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal where
national funding was made available to local authorities to address the challenge of
neighbourhood malaise. Certainly Bradford Metropolitan Authority has addressed
itself to the physical fabric of Manningham through a number of initiatives: and
there is evidence that such initiatives can have a positive effect (see for example,
Power 2009; Tunstall & Coulter 2006; DCLG 2010).

Signage

Since this is an area of predominantly South Asian, Muslim settlement we might


reasonably consider the extent to which the streetscape reflects their demographic
dominance and marks the terrain as theirs (Fig. 2). Certainly the shops in the area
are predominantly, and visibly, in South Asian ownership; but their signage does not
exclude the majority white population (Fig 3.). Very frequently (most often), the shop
signs are in English and will declare the premise as a Halal butcher or as a ‘food
store’; and where the dominant text is not in English, an English equivalent will be
adjacent to it. Indeed in Manningham, as elsewhere in Bradford, Pakistani owned
commercial premises are increasingly employing a signage that reveals nothing
of the ethnicity of the ownership. In terms of the toponymy of the street names
the power of the ‘banal naming practices’ of the local authority (Rose-Redwood &
Alderman 2011) have historically laid down a linguistic terrain redolent of English
imperial history with for example streets named after successful nineteenth-
century military leaders; and the taken for granted status of Christianity is echoed
in the saints names such as St. Paul’s Road and St. Mary’s Road among others,
at the heart of the area. The signscape of Manningham provides the walker with a
polysemic semiotic environment that is fully capable of partisan interpretation. For
the person of Muslim/Pakistani heritage there is here a familiar re-assertion of this
as being a terrain in which a familiar and comfortable belonging can be asserted.
Its cultural resonance with their diasporic identity makes Manningham comfortably
home. The same signscape for the white majority cosmopolitan, along with the
other ethnic features of clothing, foodstuffs and other elements of the streets-
scene, provides a welcome sense of différance (Hall 1993; 1997). This is place
where they can celebrate their relish for the enriching possibilities of a multicultural

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neighbourhood. Yet again, for the xenophobic or racist member of the majority
community this streetscape is redolent of the sense of symbolic and realistic threat
(Stephan & Stephan 1996; Stephan et al. 2005). It is a terrain stripped of the mythic
monoculturalism that they have retained as a definitive marker of their ownership
of this territory and this city.

Figure 2. Sign attached to a Madrasah. Photo: C. Husband.

Figure 3. Shop signage on Oak Lane. Photo: C. Husband.

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Something of the friability and negotiability of signage is indicated in Hall and


Datta’s (2010) account of Walworth Road in London. They argue that:

The distribution and valuation of capital through visual signscapes on the Walworth
Road, and its possibilities of exchange are not objective, but actors on the street are
quickly able to lean the ‘rules of the game’, (Bordieu 2002), that are implicitly agreed
upon… A key feature of these signages is that they are contingent upon the particular
combination of social, cultural and economic capital vested in both entrepreneurs and
clients. (Hall & Datta 2010, 71)

Notably in Bradford the signscape clearly suggests that the owners of


businesses are accepting of the usefulness of the English language as a means
to communicate to their potential customers, some of whom may well be ‘native’,
or indigenous speakers. Others, however, while also native, are of South Asian
heritage. What this demonstrates, or rather signifies, is a shift in mindset. Today,
South Asians are educated and socialised through the English language. To ignore
this fact would be impossible, not to mention, from a business point of view, counter
productive. In short, the signage is emblematic of social change and, contrary to
the still dominant discourse around social cohesion, is indicative of the extent to
which Bradford’s Muslims are integrated.

Architecture

The different faiths operative in the area are routinely signalled in the architecture
of places of worship that would be regarded as abnormal and highly problematic
in other European countries. The ascendancy of the Christian faith during the
nineteenth century as an integral element of the building of British Imperial identity
is highly evident in the substantial churches in the area, with their spires and towers
asserting their presence against the skyline. In contemporary Bradford as a whole,
and in Manningham also, this Christian architectural hegemony is now challenged
by the visible growth of substantial mosques. Granted, some of these are extant
Victorian buildings including a pub and an industrial building that have been
converted for new use, but others are robust assertions of the substantial presence
of Islam as an inherent part of the social infrastructure of the area. The distinctly
Muslim identity of these places of worship is further underlined by the minarets and
cupolas that introduce an ‘Eastern’ architectural presence into the urban eyeline
(Fig. 4). Unlike the situation in other European countries, and other European cities,
this significant change to the built environment of Bradford attracted no substantial
resistance from the resident majority population (Husband 1994). With the mosques
of course has come also the call to prayer and indeed a soundmark (Bull 2000;
2008) of this area might be regarded as being the call to prayer: listened for by the
substantial number of practicing Muslims, an ambient statement of their legitimate
presence for many more; and doubtless for some majority white residents a less

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than welcome reminder of how extensively the demography and characteristics of


the area has changed over the last fifty years.

Figure 4. Jamia Masjid Hanfia Mosque, Carlisle Road.

Walking the streets of Manningham one does not encounter the hustle and
bustle of crowded pavements that might be invited by thinking of other inner-
city areas of multiethnic settlement. For example, a main shopping street such
as Oak Lake does not echo to the contested voice of street traders and there is
no cacophony of people idling away the time on a busy street. The street is not
crowded and its dominant ethnic demography is signalled by the variety of fruits on
display outside grocers, by the signage of businesses, and by the clothing of many
of the local population, where many of the men will be wearing salwar kameez
and the bright clothes of the women and young girls wearing ‘traditional clothing’
signals the ethnic diversity of the area.

Thus Manningham is an inner-city area with a distinct ethnic profile in which


the built environment is composed essentially of nineteenth century stock that
has in many instances been radically internally modified for contemporary use.
It is a multiethnic ethnic area with a marked predominance of people of South
Asian heritage; but importantly it cannot be argued that this is an area which in its
dominant streetscape can be said to exclude the majority white population of wider
Bradford. In its built environment and in its banal daily habitus this is an inner city
area that stands in remarkable contrast to the stereotypical expectations that would

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come with the label ‘Muslim ghetto’ (see, for example Wacquant 2008, for a critique
of the use and abuse of the term ghetto in the European context).

Local Politics and Policy

Manningham, as we have seen, is an inner-city area that has had a particular


stereotypical reputation attached to it, whilst currently being a neighbourhood
whose banal daily operation stands in marked contrast to that reputation. Since
our concern is with the action of a local council in choosing to respond to the ethnic
demography of the locale it may be worth considering how this current context has
emerged. Certainly we would have to start by acknowledging the fact that Bradford
has over the last five decades demonstrated a capacity to develop actively a
multicultural policy. Whilst there have been very significant swings in policy as local
council control has changed between parties, where under some ruling groups it
could not be said that a positive commitment to multiculturalism was a defining
feature of their policy, the demography of Bradford has meant that the ‘Asian vote’
has for a long time been a significant feature of local elections. Recognition of the
intersection of the challenge of ethnic diversity and of concentrations of areas of
deprivation has shaped Bradford local authority’s concerns in engaging with its inner
city social and physical fabric, and they have been active in drawing upon central
government funds that might benefit their local population (They have also engaged
with the challenge of white working class estates elsewhere in the metropolitan
area). Thus the physical and social fabric of Manningham described above is to
some extent a reflection of past and current local authority policies: where as we
have seen Government programmes such as New deal for Communities (1998),
Sure Start (1999) and the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (2001)
provided a context where resources could be targeted into inner-city Bradford.
Bradford Council has been very aware of its multiethnic demography and of the
challenges that come with it, and consequently the initiative described below must
be seen as being consistent with an established policy capacity, rather than as a
unique and almost random event.

The Mughal Garden

Lister Park (Fig. 5) stands on the east side of Manningham and was a classic
example of Victorian urban planning with the creation of a large landscaped park in
which the local population could pursue the benefits of ‘rational recreation’ (Bailey
1987).

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Figure 5. Cartwright Hall seen on entering Lister Park. Photo: C. Husband.

By the late 1980s many of its amenities had become eroded and were looking
increasingly shabby and had lost much of their attraction for many potential users. It
was in this context that Bradford Council considered its redevelopment. The Mughal
Garden was developed as part of a successful £4.2 million restoration scheme for
the park, with the support of a £3.2 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund-
Urban Parks Programme, awarded in the autumn of 1996. In the original proposal
document submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund, Bradford Council stated that:

…The Mughal garden, like Mughal architecture is a synthesis between Islamic and
Hindu architectural styles prevalent in the Indian sub-continent… Mughal Gardens
were invariably square or rectangular, subdivide into smaller square parterres with tall
imposing entrance ways.

The primary feature or focal point of the gardens centred on stone or brick edged
canals falling from various levels within the gardens in smooth cascades or rushing
over carved water chutes…

These magnificent gardens which form the basis of the horticultural heritage of India
and South Asia are remembered and spoken of with great affection by the Asian
population who have moved to the British Isles and made their home in this country.

The inclusion of a Mughal garden within the proposals for Lister Park is fundamental
to creating harmony between the cultural exhibits in Cartwright hall, the park and the

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culturally diverse community in Manningham and the wider area of Bradford. (Proposal
17)

These quotations from Proposal 17 which set out the case for the Mughal
Garden in the Council’s submission to the Heritage Lottery Fund provide an
insight into the linkages that are being suggested in pursuing this initiative. Firstly
it is an expression of South Asian architectural heritage which is likely to have
cultural resonance with the established South Asian communities of Manningham
and Bradford. Additionally, to the extent that ‘the Raj’ has a significant cultural
presence in the majority English culture this architectural feature would not be
entirely alien to the majority eye. Indeed the incorporation of water features into the
formal gardens of European and British aristocracy would render such a feature
both familiar and attach to it a cache of elitism. The existing flowerbeds of Lister
Park would also provide an initial context that would in themselves carry echoes of
the wider structure of a Mughal garden. Thus the addition of a Mughal garden to
an extant Victorian public park could reasonably be seen as both complementing
and enhancing the existing terrain, whilst simultaneously making an explicit and
concrete gesture of publicly recognizing the cultural diversity of the surrounding
area. In this, the initiative both responded to, and addressed, some of the demand
characteristics of the Heritage Lottery fund criteria for applicants, which required
that applicants should demonstrate how the project would restore the ‘heritage
asset’, whilst also demonstrating innovation and creativity. Thus the Mughal Garden
was included in the application to the Heritage lottery fund as a new feature that
satisfied the need for innovation, whilst simultaneously having synergy with the
design of the adjacent formal gardens and with the legacy of parkland features
provided by Victorian industrialists in Britain, and the Mughal emperors in the Asian
sub-continent.

There was perhaps a gentle irony in the fact that the wealth of a nineteenth-
century textile barons, operating within the beneficial commercial context of the still
lucrative Imperial swathe of British political and economic power, created the wealth
that provided the basis for making the park available to Bradford’s citizens. The
grandeur of nineteenth century British wealth is still expressed in the architecture
of Cartwright Hall within the park, and the Imperial British engagement with the
nature and social roles of the garden in India (Herbert 2011) had resulted in an
importation of plants and garden topography into Britain: a process of horticultural
incorporation that had its precedents from the seventeenth century onwards. Thus
the late-twentieth-century construction of a Mughal garden in Lister Park forms a
complex cultural linkage with a shared past. Under the Mughal dynasty gardens
such as this were associated variously with joyous sensualism, and with political
and religious symbolism. That the construction of Mughal garden in Bradford
would require some sensitive adjustment to its Indian precedents was in itself a
continuation of a Mughal tradition where, as Herbert (2011, 206–216) points out

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Mughal gardens in their Indian development were prone to adaptation to the


local climate, terrain and botanical possibilities. There was in fact something of a
suspended temporal synergy in bringing a Mughal garden to the heart of a city and
a park that owed so much to British Imperial power.

This initiative did not, however, come out of a planning vacuum, and was not the
expression of an individual executive whim. In the words of a senior planning officer
in Bradford Council, interviewed in July 2011:

Consultation on the Lister Park scheme was one of the largest consultation exercises
undertaken by the Park Service. Individual letters and questionnaires were distributed
to all properties within a 1.5 kilometre radius of the park. The Telegraph and Argus
[Bradford’s local newspaper with a very high level of penetration into the population of
greater Bradford], provided support through editorials and appeals for old photographs
of the park. Displays were also held at the Bradford Festival Mela [an annual South
Asian musical and cultural festival], and the proposals were discussed at community
meetings and Neighbourhood Forums.

A key element in the development of the proposal for a Mughal garden revolved
around the physical space that was under consideration for redevelopment. The
area in question was relatively close to Cartwright Hall, and hence a potentially
easily accessible area that would have a natural flow of potential visitors in those
who came to visit the museum and art gallery. Just as significant was the fact that
this rectangular piece of land was, at the time, an eyesore. Originally part of the
open parkland, it had in the 1930s been converted to a hard area to be used by
children on bicycles and roller skates: and as a site for a miniature railway. At the
time of the bid the area was used as an overspill car park for events taking place
at Cartwright Hall. The typical dimensions of a Mughal garden proved to be a most
opportune fit with this unfortunate tract of land. As the bid document was pleased
to assert:

The linear site criteria provides an ideal opportunity to create a Mughal garden. Utilizing
research on numerous gardens in the Indian sub-continent the design reflects many of
the important components, whilst complementing Cartwright Hall. (Proposal 17)

Thus the proposed Mughal garden not only met the criterion of being ‘innovatory’,
it also very directly addressed the concern with widening participation in the civic
life of British cities and in addressing the demands of cultural diversity; which at
that time still enjoyed a wider political salience in British governmental policy than
might now be found in a policy environment suffused by the new received wisdom
of ‘the end of multiculturalism;’ and the new assertive assimilationist rhetoric from
central government (Husband & Alam 2011; Lentin & Titley 2011). Additionally,
whether intentionally or not, this proposal also appealed to architectural and design
professionalism in finding an innovatory and creative use of an ‘awkward plot’.

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The extensive consultation process doubtless added significantly to the credibility


of the bid; but it also was central to the local council ‘owning’ this initiative and being
confident in its potential. Not that the feedback was universally positive. Some of
the elder majority white population saw this proposal as turning an established, if
underused, element of Bradford’s fabric into ‘an Asian park’ and as a capitulation
to the erosion of whiteness and Christianity in British life. In other words there was
evidence of the symbolic threat which so often is found when collective assets
are being allocated to specific purposes in multiethnic urban locations (Stephan &
Stephan 1996; Stephan et al. 1999). In the context of a city like Bradford where the
Islamic presence had become a feature of national, as well as local, Islamophobic
discourse; and where Manningham itself had specifically attracted attention as a
supposedly classic instance of Muslim inner-city tension (even prior to the 2001
riots), such sentiments were to be expected. There were those who asserted that
Manningham was in essence a ‘no-go area’ for the majority population, and that
the garden would be trashed by the local youth. However, the overall impact of the
consultation, and the developmental research, was highly positive. So much so that
it persuaded the planning team of the ‘added value’ that the Mughal Garden could
offer the total refurbishment plan; as a consequence, they decided to shift additional
resources within the bid to ensuring a high quality outcome to the Mughal Garden
(Fig. 6). In its execution the Mughal Garden employed York Stone for the extensive
hard design, thus incorporating local materials, and value, in the construction of a
South Asian cultural statement within a large Northern inner-city public space.

Figure 6. A view of the Mughal Garden. Photo: C. Husband.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Follow Through and Outcomes

Upon its completion the whole of the Lister Park development was widely viewed
as an outstanding success; and its merit was recognised in a number of awards.
The Mughal Garden has made a significant difference to the feel and experience
of Lister Park. No longer is the park a domain of uniquely English provenance,
which admittedly offers a spacious and beautiful retreat from urban housing and
hectic traffic which has generic properties. Now the local, and not so local, South
Asian population on entering the park can easily find that they are specifically
acknowledged as culturally present in the physical topography of the park. Not
only architecturally present, but there is signage which explains the heritage of
this distinctive feature of the park (Fig. 7). For the non-South Asian visitor there
is a possibility to share a sense that here they are able to share something that is
distinctively representative of the ethnic diversity that defines Bradford. Hopefully,
not something that is theirs, but rather something that is ours.

Figure 7. A sign adjacent to the Mughal Garden. Photo: C. Husband.

The intended significance of the Mughal Garden is designed into its physical
structure and planting, and the aesthetic they represent. This perhaps assumes a
knowledge and appreciation of this design and of the territorialized cultural values
that it is intended to invoke. In essence, in order to appreciate fully the symbolic
content of the Mughal Garden, it is possible to argue that the observer is required
to have a sense of the ‘historicity’ of this design. It is consequently questionable to

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what extent this can be assumed of the range of users of Lister Park. It can thus be
asked whether, if it were not labelled as the Mughal Garden with an explanatory sign,
the architectural features themselves would be sufficient to convey the symbolic
reference to a South Asian Mughal tradition, and hence signal the intentional
valorisation of the local ‘migrant’ culture in the heart of Bradford. For the majority
of Bradfordians the answer is very probably ‘no’. Hence the signage is significant
in establishing the identity of this addition within the park and contributing to its
general usage among the local population.

It would be naïve and hopelessly optimistic, however, to believe that a change in


the physical features of the park would in themselves be sufficient to carry forward
a dramatic change in the demographic profile of the park’s users. Other things
have happened. Just as the presence of appropriate expertise in South Asian
culture and a creative mindset facilitated the initial spark for this innovation, so
too the experience of developing the Mughal Garden has had an impact on the
relationship between the Park Service and Cartwright Hall, the art gallery within the
park. Whereas in the past these two elements of Bradford Council’s administration
existed in relatively parallel universes, having little formal contact, there is now a
much more open synergy between the two, with, for example, exhibits from within
Cartwright Hall being brought out into the park.

In addition, a health initiative developed within the local Primary Care Trust,
concerned with the problems of diabetes and other health issues in the local South
Asian population, introduced a programme called Walking For Health. An element
of this programme introduced ‘walk leaders’ who brought South Asian women and
elders into the park to encourage them to get into a routine of taking exercise.
One feature of morning walks through the park now is to see South Asian women
and men walking. The park has rediscovered the Victorian joys of ‘promenading’.
Similarly the new ambiance of the park has enabled it to become an attractive
locale for school trips of young children and for organised trips of people who are
in some way disabled. The demographic profile of the park users has changed
dramatically since its refurbishment.

The current Lister Park, and the Mughal Garden within it, has added significantly
to the considerable, and politically disturbing, misfit between the stereotypical
public perception of Manningham and the substantive reality of its physical and
social existence.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the construction of a Mughal garden within an inner city
civic park as a deliberate policy initiative to reflect the ethnic demography of the

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

inner city area in the physical environment of a major neighbourhood amenity. It


cannot be said that the introduction of a culturally salient physical element into
the refurbishment of Lister Park was in itself a sufficient basis for encouraging
the local South Asian population to start to use the park in increasing numbers.
But it can be suggested that the introduction of this element into the planned
refurbishment of the park initiated a distinctive culturally sensitive edge to the
whole process of repositioning the park in the lives of the neighbourhood that had
continuing effects. The dynamics between different local council teams changed
in the process of developing this initiative, and the Mughal Garden is a substantive
and not unimportant statement to the city’s wider population of the city council’s
commitment to respecting and reflecting diversity in their policies.

There remains a suspicion that for some of those citizens elsewhere in Bradford
who take some pride in the existence of the refurbished Lister Park, and possibly
occasionally travel to use it, that they somehow fail to see it as being in Manningham.
The stereotype may still be stronger than the reality.

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Capitalising on the City:
Edinburgh’s Linguistic Identities

Maggie Scott1
University of Salford

This paper examines the linguistic identities of Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city,
and the contexts in which they are currently used. The city is known by a range of
different names that are linked with its historical and contemporary identities as
they are represented in Scottish Gaelic, Scottish English and Scots. In terms of its
etymology, the name Edinburgh is part Celtic and part Germanic, but in modern
usage it exists within the official and standard discourses of the dominant language
variety, Scottish English. It is the form of the name most usually employed in other
British and International Englishes. In modern Scottish Gaelic, the city is called
Dùn Èideann, and of those designations which could qualify as Scots, the best
known is probably the nickname Auld Reekie “Old Smoky”, made popular in 18th
century literature and still in use today. Particular attention is drawn here to the role
that these toponymic identities play in relation to the place identity of the city. Each
name resonates with different narratives of history and culture, which, although
subjectively shaped at the individual level, share at least sufficient prototypical
meaning for them to be employed effectively (and further shaped and manipulated)
in a variety of public and commercial contexts. It is argued here that the ways in
which these three toponymic layers describe the city reveal a complex paradigm
of contested space, and that by better understanding the uses of these names we
can better understand the linguistic politics of the city’s image and the current roles
played by Scotland’s languages.

Place Image, Place Identity and Linguistic Heritage

Toponymy exists at the intersection of many different disciplines including linguistics,


history, geography and cultural studies. For this reason, this paper draws on several
of these intersecting layers, borrowing a number of terms from each. Specifically,
in studies of place branding, it has been recognised that “heritage can be used
within deliberately promoted place images destined to shape the perceptions of

1 I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 115 –131.
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

a place as a suitable location for investment, enterprise, residence or recreation


destination” (Tunbridge & Ashworth 1996, 59). The concept of “place image” may
be characterised as “the total set of impressions of a place, or an individual’s overall
perception”, or “‘a mental portrayal or prototype’ of what the travel experience might
look like” (Govers & Go 2009, 18). This is a useful term that relates to the present
study because, in the case of Edinburgh, even the name of the city itself may be
presented in a number of different ways which each contribute to place image,
drawing on their cultural and historical legacies and connotations. Place image
is, however, a protean concept; it is recognised that “Different projections and
perceptions are individual or community constructions, and different individuals
and communities might have different or fragmented insights” (Govers & Go 2009,
18).2 The concept of “place identity” is also relevant to this paper, which will focus
particularly on aspects of history, symbolism and communication as they are
represented through the multiple identities of the city.3 Place identity is defined
by Govers and Go as being “constructed through historical, political, religious and
cultural discourses” (ibid., 17). I follow their use of the term here, focusing on the
toponymic and linguistic dimensions to the cultural discourse. However, I do not
restrict my discussion to the linguistic landscape visible in the marketing of the city
and its attractions, but also draw on evidence provided from other cultural contexts,
where language plays a significant role.

While necessity dictates a certain degree of selection, which tends to foreground


“prevailing” or “dominant” views, it should be remembered that many “imagined
identities” are widely recognised within Scottish culture (Corbett 2007, 337). While
the focus on Edinburgh may provide insights into these multiple identities, the
discussion here does not attempt to be exhaustive. Viewed through the lens of
heritage tourism, the picture is further complicated by the fact that “the tourist is an
undefinable entity” (Tunbridge & Ashworth 1996, 64). The definition of “tourism”,
then, has to be flexible enough to avoid overt stereotyping, and is perhaps best
understood as broadly relating to “the activities of persons travelling to and staying
in places outside their usual environment” (Govers & Go 2009, 20). The tourist who
visits Edinburgh may have preconceptions about the city’s cultural and linguistic
identities, and during their visit may encounter different pronunciations of its
names, rendered in Scottish Gaelic, Scots, (Scottish) English, and even Latin. It is
argued here that a further dimension – that of the virtual tourist – is also deserving

2 The term ‘place image’ is also understood here, not as definitive, but as “the ‘dominant view’
or the tendency towards stereotyping place … keeping in mind that it is in fact an individualized
construct that incorporates many variations and interpretations” (Govers & Go 2009, 18).

3 Some commentators have sought to refine this interpretation. Noordman (2004) regards history
as a “structural” element of place identity, whereas he sees symbolism and communication as
representing its more subjective “colouring” elements.

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Scott

of particular consideration.4 By limiting the discourse to the semiotics of the visible


landscape, we may miss the alternative views and realities presented elsewhere,
including the webscape, where the landscape is presented to prospective visitors.

Edinburgh as a “Brand” Identity

In terms of a national “brand” identity, then, Edinburgh can be viewed as representing


Scotland in microcosm. Its names are often associated with national products such
as whiskies, as well as heritage and cultural tourism through its special status as
a UNESCO City of Literature, and though notable events and landmarks such as
The Edinburgh Festival and Edinburgh Castle. It is beyond the scope of this paper
to conduct an exhaustive search of all of the contexts in which Edinburgh itself is
used as a marketing tool, but these few illustrative examples are very high profile
in terms of “branding the nation”. Summing up the status of Scotland’s “brand”
identity, Morgan et al. (2004, 23) make the following observation:

Scotland is OK: although it is a small country, it has been around for a long time; it has
tartans, kilts, Scotch whisky, the Highlands, Braveheart and the Edinburgh Festival.

Much of the tartanry associated with Scotland’s brand identity can be attributed
to Sir Walter Scott’s (1771-1872) deliberate cultivation of a distinctive image for
Scotland, partly through the romanticised ideals he projected through his historical
novels, but especially in his orchestration of the visit of King George IV to Edinburgh
in 1822 (McCrone et al. 1995, 113). Indeed, he is sometimes seen as “single-
handedly ‘invent[ing]’ the image of modern Scotland” (Morgan et al. 2004, 34).
Scott’s literary endeavours are echoed in the pseudo-historical imagined Scotland
of Braveheart, and it is perhaps these creative visions that carry more weight than
kitsch “souvenir” Scotland with its bagpipe-playing dolls, furry Loch Ness monsters
and whisky miniatures.

In the case of a capital city such as Edinburgh, which has been widely
represented in literary contexts for hundreds of years, the images of Edinburgh
evoked in those contexts play an important role in shaping perceptions of the place
itself. To fully appreciate the breadth and depth of Edinburgh’s place image and
place identity, we must therefore acknowledge the effect of the Edinburghs of the
mind, found for example in James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner (1824), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde (1886), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), and Ian Rankin’s “Rebus”
novels (1987–2007). But if language in all of its guises is viewed as the primary

4 It is also recognised that some researchers will draw a line between the ‘tourist’ and the
‘recreationalist’ (Hall & Page 2006, 2) but I do not attempt to do so here.

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conduit of culture, then it is necessary to take a closer look in order to locate the
city within the broader, national, linguistic landscape.

The Linguistic Background: Scots, Scottish


English and Scottish Gaelic

Modern Scotland is broadly recognised as having three main linguistic identities


(Murdoch 1996, 2; McLeod & Smith 2007, 21). One of these is a Celtic language,
Scottish Gaelic, while the other two are Scots and (Scottish) English, two closely
related varieties with an intertwined and complex political history.5 Each one has
its own rich literary and cultural traditions within Scotland, and all three linguistic
identities are reflected in the names applied to the capital city. By extension,
each name’s connections to linguistic and cultural heritage can be exploited and
explored by different groups in pursuit of various political, social, cultural, linguistic
and economic agendas.

Scots and Scottish English are both “descendants” of the dialects brought to
these islands by Germanic peoples in the Middle Ages (Macafee & Aitken 2002).
Speakers often code-switch between Scots and Scottish English, and the close
relationship between the two, which share a considerable proportion of lexis and
grammar, is often characterised as that of a “linguistic continuum” (Corbett et al.
2003). While Scottish Gaelic does not suffer from all of the same identity problems
as Scots – many of which are due to the latter’s close affinities with English – it
also bears a historic legacy of inequality and marginalisation. From the evidence of
the 2001 census, the number of Gaelic speakers in Scotland has been estimated
at around sixty thousand; more specifically, 92,400 respondents to the Scottish
Census in 2001 identified themselves as being able to read, write, speak or
understand the language (Scottish Parliament 2009, 1). Prior to the 2011 Census,
no question was ever asked about the numbers of Scottish residents who read,
write, speak or understand Scots, with the result that estimates of the numbers of
Scots speakers have been even more difficult to determine. The picture is further
complicated by lack of education about Scots, making it very difficult for speakers
to confidently self-identify.6 Focusing on the speakers themselves, McLeod and
Smith (2007, 22) note that “whether one speaks Scots or English seems to be
a matter of opinion, often with a political significance”. In the two most detailed
surveys to date, conducted in the mid-1990s, 30% of Maté’s sample group and

5 For further information on these varieties, I would recommend the textbooks on Gaelic and
Scots in the ‘Edinburgh Companions’ series (Watson & Macleod 2010; Corbett et al. 2003).

6 At the time of writing, the results of the 2011 Census were not yet available. In order to attempt
to counteract the problem of Scots speakers being able to self-identify, the website ‘Aye Can’ <www.
ayecan.com> (all references to online sources are accurate as of 30 September 2011) was set up by
a group of individuals and organisations with interests in Scots.

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Scott

57% of Murdoch’s identified themselves as Scots speakers (Stuart-Smith 2004,


50), but these figures may not be reliable, and there is much to be done to clarify
what “Scots” is in the mind of the general public. Until such time as there is a
widespread agreed understanding of its linguistic identity, it may be impossible to
obtain accurate figures. Murdoch himself concluded that: “figures for speakers vary
from zero to 5,000,000 depending on who is reporting them” (1996, 3).

Scots and Scottish English have often been described as diametrically opposed
in terms of their stereotypical connections with different social strata. Stuart-
Smith (2004, 47) characterises the situation as follows: “Scots is generally, but not
always, spoken by the working classes, while Scottish Standard English is typical of
educated middle class speakers”. The relatively “high-brow” status of Scots names
such as Auld Reekie, firmly linked with historical and literary tradition, interfere with
this polarisation. Since the Vernacular Revival of the eighteenth century, Scots
has often been employed by writers who sought in some way to challenge the
“establishment” by expressing ideas in “the language of the people” (McClure
2000; Kay 2006). However, this opposition of identities – perhaps most precisely
summed up by MacDiarmid’s “Caledonian Antisyzygy” (Duncan 2007, 250) – have
been challenged as commentators move towards a more hybrid paradigm that
acknowledges a multiplicity of voices (Dosa 2009).

Set against this complex linguistic and historical background, we find a wide
range of names applied to the city of Edinburgh. It is Dùn Èideann in modern
Scottish Gaelic, Embra or Embro in (colloquial) Scots, 7 Auld Reekie in (poetic,
literary) Scots, Edinburgh in (Scottish) English, Edina in its Latinised form,8 and has
been nicknamed The Athens of the North in (Scottish) English. By choosing to use
any one of these names at a given time, the writer or speaker is making a political
decision to ally themselves with particular historical and contested discourses
about the city, and perhaps about Scottish identity more generally.

It may be tempting to look for polar oppositions within this discourse that
resonate with historical divisions, Scots versus Scottish English, Scottish Gaelic
versus Scottish English, and so forth, but that course is not advised here. Rather,
it is argued here that this situation is similar to those discussed in other toponymic
critical literature, where although names from different languages and cultures
may vie with one another for status and recognition, those differences should not
be automatically equated with the speaker’s own ideology of identity.9 As Kearns

7 As the city is represented by the latter, for example, on Billy Kay’s (1993) Scots Map.

8 A name that has been adopted, for example, as the title of a UK-wide data centre based at the
University of Edinburgh <edina.ac.uk/about>.

9 The need to sub-categorise the linguistic labels above (e.g. (Scottish) English) attests to some
of the contested identities themselves, and my own attempt to represent different readings of those
identities as equally valid.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

and Berg (2009, 163) point out, such assumptions have often been assumed in
discussions of Maori and Pakeha (i.e. “non-Maori”) place-names in New Zealand.
They argue that this polarisation obscures a number of realities, and that:

… the underlying identity logic of biculturalism needs to be re-thought as “both/and”


rather than “either/or”. Thus it is important to remember that both Maori and Pakeha
can be found on both sides of the colonial/anti-colonial divide (Kearns & Berg 2009,
163).

Similar points can be made with regard to Scotland’s trilingual identity. While
there have been various attempts to place Scotland in the role of a “colonised”
country rather than a partner in the political Union with England (and Wales) in
1707, many modern commentators have rejected this view. As Schoene (2008,
75–76) argues:

Scottishness must be articulated inclusively and directly, true to the distinct ways
in which it emerges from its historical and transcultural contexts, not categorically
estranged by postcolonial demarcation from Britain (of which it has been, and continues
to be, an integral part).

The position of Gaelic, Highland Scotland in relation to colonisation is not


straightforward, and it could be argued that, in the wake of the Jacobite risings, a
form of “internal colonisation” took place (Hechter 1975). But there is little popular
support for the idea that all of Scotland suffered this fate as part of the United
Kingdom (Hechter 1999, xviii). While the historical relations between different
factions may be interrogated in this way, it is suggested here that such polarisations
are unhelpful for understanding modern Scotland. The diverse linguistic landscape
of Scotland’s capital city can therefore be read as a living metaphor for the hybridity
of the nation itself.

Names for This Place: The Etymological Narrative

In the United Kingdom, traditional accounts of name histories typically present


the material in the form of a chronological timeline showing changes in spelling
as documented in various records and sources.10 These linear histories may by
their very layout seem to imply an evolutionary progression towards the modern
standard form, and accounts of the history of the name Edinburgh are no different,
e.g.

10 This methodology was adopted by the English Place-Name Society in the early 1920s for their
county surveys of England, which are still ongoing in very much the same format. Dictionaries of
English and British place-names tend to follow this style, albeit in an abridged fashion to save space
(Ekwall 1960; Mills 2003).

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Scott

Edinburgh Edin. Eidyn c. 600 Edenburge 1126. “Fortification at Eidyn”. OE burh. The
meaning of Eidyn is unknown. (Mills 2003, 173)

Little interpretation here is provided, except to identify the second element of the
twelfth-century name as Old English (OE), and although we are told that the meaning
of Eidyn is “unknown”, we are not told that it is generally believed to be Celtic.
Further context is provided by the prevailing historical narrative which explains that
under the rule of King Oswald of Bernicia (633–641), “the fortress of Edinburgh
or Cumbric Eidyn was besieged and captured” by the Angles (Nicolaisen 2001,
88). The early forms, Eidyn and Din Eidyn are recorded in the sixth-century Welsh
Gododdin, placing them firmly in a Celtic context (Gelling, Nicolaisen & Richards
1986, 82; Harris 1996, 236).11 Some accounts also discuss the folk-derivation of the
place-name from the name of St Edwin, king of Northumbria in the seventh century
(Mills 2003, xxv). While these folk-narratives make an interesting contribution
towards the place identity of the modern city, their lack of “factual” accuracy can
lead scholars to summarily dismiss them in the interests of philological accuracy. In
The Names of Towns and Cities in Britain, for example, Nicolaisen notes:

“Edwin’s fortress” is ... a scribal etymology of the twelfth century which is impossible
to defend but which has lingered on in history books as a convenient explanation,
especially in view of the fact that we do not know what Eidyn, the name of the fortification,
meant. (Gelling et al. 1986, 83).

Although the political dimension of naming and re-naming poses some


interesting analytical challenges when so far removed in time from the present day,
Nicolaisen also hints at this process as it was practiced in the medieval period.
“Both Gaels and Angles had to be content with a part-translation, rendering Din
as Dùn and -burgh respectively” (Gelling et al. 1986, 83). From this account, and
the dates of the historical forms, it can be seen that several different linguistic
and cultural groups had already applied distinctive labels to the settlement by the
twelfth century.

Scotland’s Languages and the Capital’s Names

In some environments, tri-lingual Scotland is represented through multi-layered


forms of the names of the city. Edinburgh became the first UNESCO City of
Literature in 2004, and the website currently uses four alternating banner headings:
“Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature”; “Welcome tae Auld Reekie”; “Fàilte gu Dùn

11 Various terms have been employed to identify this P-Celtic language, the precursor of modern
Welsh. While in some ways, ‘Welsh’ may be the most straightforward label, some commentators use
‘British’, while others including Nicolaisen follow Kenneth Jackson in the use of the term ‘Cumbric’
for this variety as it was used in Southern Scotland from around the second to ninth centuries (see
Scott 2003, 21).

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Èideann”; and “Welcome to Edinburgh”.12 While all three “Welcome” statements


have equal authority, it is significant that the language in which the purpose of the
site is expressed is (Scottish) English, the variety that clearly carries the greatest
“authority”. The use of Gaelic and Scots in this context also goes beyond “tokenism”,
though it could be argued that a further Scots translation, “Walcome tae Embra”
would more effectively identify the city with Scots speakers.13 Scotland’s languages
are explicitly discussed in the organisation’s accompanying guidebook:

The Scots tongue has been the vehicle for some of Scotland’s outstanding literary
works, and its wealth of colourful vocabulary and idiom have conveyed the fiery
imagination, intellect, stoicism and affection of the Scottish character to the world.
During the Middle Ages, Scots was the official language of the courts, of state, and of
kings. Following the Union in 1707, English became the language of government and
polite society. This trend continued into the Enlightenment, when the use of English
implied elevated class status. However, the continued use of Scots in popular poetry
and fiction had a major impact on the Scottish people’s sense of identity and kept their
culture intact. It is the living language spoken daily by millions of Scots. Although Gaelic
is now spoken by only a small fraction of the Scottish population, it has a cultural profile
and influence far greater than such a statistic might suggest. Gaelic has contributed
a wealth of cultural assets to the nation in terms of music, songs, dance, poetry and
storytelling. (UNESCO City of Literature 2005.)

I quote this passage in full as it provides an interesting account of the history of


Scots and presents it in a fairly positive light and recognises its complex political
relations with English. Scottish Gaelic, on the other hand, is covered rather fleetingly,
and very little is said about the problematic history of the Highland Clearances and
the suppression of Gaelic language and culture. To some extent, this paragraph
reflects the linguistic reality that Scots is widely spoken; visitors to the capital are
certainly far more likely to encounter Scots than Gaelic unless they seek out, for
example, a Gaelic church service at Greyfriars Kirk.14 This type of marketing may
signal some “rehabilitation” of positive attitudes to Scots, albeit ring-fenced within
a tourism-oriented discourse.

Gaelic Edinburgh

The reinstatement of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 after nearly three hundred
years of absence has visually highlighted the use of Scottish Gaelic in several high-
profile contexts associated with the organisation (Puzey 2012, 134–136). Bilingual
signage is visible both inside and outside the Scottish Parliament building, and

12 See <www.cityofliterature.com>.

13 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for rightly drawing my attention to this
point.
14 ‘Kirk’, the Scots word for ‘Church’, is in general use as part of the name of this notable landmark.

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Scott

the website displays its main title, “The Scottish Parliament”, above the Gaelic
form “Pàrlamaid na h-Alba”.15 A National Gaelic Language Plan has recently been
published by Bòrd na Gàidhlig in accordance with the Gaelic Language (Scotland)
Act 2005,16 and an increasing number of local councils across the country are now
implementing Gaelic Language Plans.17

Gaelic place-names in Scotland are widely represented on bilingual road signs


across the traditional Gaelic heartland of the Scottish Highlands, with policies and
ongoing developments detailed on the website of Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba (AÀA),
“Gaelic Place-Names of Scotland”.18 Although Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba works “to
agree correct forms of Gaelic place-names for maps, signs and general use”,19 there
are many Scottish place-names whose Gaelic forms are not widely known or used
outside the Gaelic-speaking world. Edinburgh is rather unusual in this regard, as its
Gaelic name is comparatively visible in the virtual and actual linguistic landscape,
and although Dùn Èideann is most often found in Gaelic contexts (apart from its
uses in signage), it also appears in environments where no other Gaelic occurs.

Several uses of Dùn Èideann in commercial contexts relate to companies that


are local to Edinburgh, such as the eponymous Sea Kayaking company based
on the Firth of Forth north of the city.20 The name Dùn Èideann is also used for a
range of whiskies produced by Signatory, an independent whisky bottling company
whose headquarters are based in the Newhaven district of Edinburgh.21 A search
of the database of Companies House, which records all registered companies in
the UK, reveals some interesting results. Dùn Èideann is not widely represented
here – at least, there are only two results for this spelling of the name: the Dun
Eideann Scotch Whisky Company Limited, based at the Edradour Distillery (now
owned by Signatory), and the cleaning company Dun Eideann Services Ltd,
which is based in Fife and provides services for estate agents throughout Perth,
Edinburgh, St Andrews, Cupar and Glenrothes.22 A search for Dùn Èideann in the
lists of dissolved companies only added one further example to the tally – Dun
Eideann Exports (dissolved 1992).

15 The Scottish Parliament <www.scottish.parliament.uk>.

16 See <www.gaidhlig.org.uk/en/national-plan-for-gaelic>.

17 See <www.edinburgh.gov.uk/info/20084/gaelic_language_and_cultural_support/954/gaelic_
language_ plan/1> for details of Edinburgh City Council’s Gaelic Language Plan.

18 See <www.gaelicplacenames.org>. This organisation is supported by a number of local councils


and cultural organisations, the latter including the Scottish Place-Name Society.

19 See <www.gaelicplacenames.org>.

20 See <www.duneideannseakayaking.com> .

21 See <www.whisky-distilleries.info/EI_Signatory_EN.shtml>.

22 See <www.duneideannservices.co.uk>.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

A search for the anglicised form of Dùn Èideann (i.e. Dunedin) reveals a
considerably larger number of results. The picture is somewhat complicated by the
existence of a companies and organisations using the name of the New Zealand
city of Dunedin, itself named after Edinburgh by settlers who emigrated there
from Scotland, and it is not always possible to deduce whether historic Edinburgh
or modern Dunedin lies behind these examples. The New Zealand city is the
inspiration for such names as that of the British warship, HMS Dunedin (1918–
1941) which served the New Zealand division of the Royal Navy.23 Dunedin is also
the name of a town in Ontario, Canada and another in Florida in the United States.
According to the Companies House database, Dunedin appears in the names
of over two hundred company names in the United Kingdom (including those
dissolved or going through liquidation).24 Companies and organisations that use
this name are located across the UK and include a private equity firm with offices
in London and Edinburgh, a property company based in London, an Edinburgh taxi
firm, and a Musselburgh company that disposes of waste oil.25 Dunedin is a bed
and breakfast in Kirkcaldy, Fife and a guest house in Edinburgh;26 Dunedin Consort
are an Edinburgh-based group of classical musicians who play music “from the
Middle Ages to the present day”;27 and The Dunedin Dancers is a charity based in
Edinburgh.28

While many of these organisations (especially those involved in finance and


property management) are not especially visible in the linguistic landscape, it is
clear even from this brief survey that the name Dunedin is very popular in brand
identities compared to the modern Gaelic form, Dùn Èideann. The anglicised form is
perhaps a popular choice as it is accessible to the non-Gaelic-speaking population
(and by extension the majority of the tourist population), yet perceived as distinctively
Scottish. If we follow Landry and Bourhis’s (1997, 26) assertion that “the linguistic
landscape can … provide information about the sociolinguistic composition of
the language groups inhabiting the territory in question”, the comparatively wide
range of uses of Dunedin reflect an echo of a historical Edinburgh with ties to a
Celtic heritage, while the comparative absence of Dùn Èideann reflects a lack of
connection with a modern Scottish Gaelic identity.

23 See <www.hmsdunedin.co.uk>.

24 Search conducted using the WebCHeck [sic.] database <www.companieshouse.gov.uk>.

25 See, respectively, Dunedin <www.dunedin.com>; Dunedin Property Ltd <www.dunedinproperty.


co.uk>; Dunedin Executive Cars Ltd; Dunedin Oils Ltd.

26 See <www.dunedinhouse.com> and <www.dunedinguesthouse.co.uk>.

27 See <www.dunedin-consort.org.uk>.

28 See <www.dunedindancers.org.uk>.

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Scots Edinburgh

The name Auld Reekie emerged in the literature of Scottish vernacular revivalist
writers in the eighteenth century (SND s.v. auld adj. 9. [16]), whose deliberate
focus on Scots probably encouraged the re-coinage of the name of the capital city,
arguably reclaiming it from the competing Scottish English linguistic hegemony.
The name, which literally means “Old Smoky”, can be read as either a “familiar” or
potentially “irreverent” designation for the capital city, focusing as it does on one of
the less attractive, everyday features of the city at that time.

In present-day Scotland, Auld Reekie is also the name of a ten-year-old Scotch


Whisky produced by Duncan Taylor;29 a guest house in Edinburgh;30 and an
Edinburgh-based Ceilidh Band (not to be confused with Auld Reekie Sawbones).31
Auld Reekie Photography is based in Edinburgh and specialises in weddings;32
also in Edinburgh is Auld Reekie Feet, which provides chiropody and podiatry
services (apparently punning on the word reekie “smelly”).33 The current records
of Companies House reveal five examples of commercial uses of the name: Auld
Reekie Ltd; Auld Reekie Investments No 3 Ltd; Auld Reekie Roller Girls Ltd; Auld
Reekie Solutions Ltd; and Auld Reekie Taxis Ltd.34 Auld Reekie Ltd was a window-
cleaning company based in Edinburgh. Auld Reekie Investments was not based
in Scotland and no longer exists, although a New Zealand based company of the
same name is still trading. Auld Reekie Roller Girls, “Edinburgh’s first women’s flat
track roller derby team” explain that they are: “Named after the city of Edinburgh,
affectionately known as ‘Auld Reekie’ (Scots for Old Smoky)”.35 Auld Reekie
Solutions Ltd provides computer services in Edinburgh, and Auld Reekie Taxis Ltd
speaks for itself. Further searches of the database for companies no longer trading
reveals that Edinburgh had a gardening company called Auld Reekie Garden
Angels (dissolved 2007); an Auld Reekie Brewery (dissolved 2006); an Auld Reekie
Painter and Decorator (dissolved 2009); Auld Reekie Removals (dissolved 2007);
an Auld Reekie Bakehouse (dissolved 1992); and an Auld Reekie Pub Company
that changed its name in 2008.36 Web searches reveal a number of other uses of

29 See <www.duncantaylor.com/products/auld_reekie.htm>.

30 See <www.auldreekie-guesthouse.co.uk>.

31 See <www.auld-reekie-ceilidh-band.com> and <auldreekiesawbones.co.uk>.

32 See <www.auldreekie-photography.co.uk>.

33 See <www.auldreekiefeet.co.uk>.

34 Search conducted using the WebCHeck [sic.] database <www.companieshouse.gov.uk>. The


first two companies are listed as “dissolved”.

35 See <www.arrg.co.uk/about.php>.

36 Search conducted using the WebCHeck [sic.] database <www.companieshouse.gov.uk>.

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this name. A. Auld Reekie is, aptly, a Chimney Sweeping company.37 Auld Reekie
Tours take visitors on walking trips around historic Edinburgh.38 They explain the
name’s etymology as follows:

This is the Victorian nick name for the city of Edinburgh. It translates as “old smoky” or
“old smelly” and was used by locals and those who travelled to Edinburgh to describe
the city.

This account says nothing about Scots, and (like Auld Reekie Feet, above)
plays on English reek “a fume or odour emanating from a body or substance; (now
chiefly) a strong and unpleasant smell, a stench; impure, fetid atmosphere” (OED
s.v. reek n.1 3a., 3.c.). This use of the word was rare in eighteenth century Scottish
texts, where the sense “smoky” was widely used (OED s.v. reek n.1 1; SND s.v.
reek n.1). Furthermore, the vernacular poet Allan Ramsay’s reference to “Auld
Reekie’s Ingle” (i.e. Edinburgh’s fireplace) in “An Epistle to Lieutenant Hamilton”
(1721), one of the earliest known examples of the name (SND s.v. auld adj. 9.
[16]),39 puts a strong emphasis on a “smoky” rather than a “smelly” fireside context.
In etymological terms, then, “smoky” is the more plausible historical meaning, but
it should be pointed out that the way a name is understood or explained, and the
way in which it therefore becomes most culturally “meaningful” may not echo the
historical etymology. Folk-interpretation is, of necessity, relevant to the folk. It may
also be the case that a “smelly” Edinburgh better serves the marketing purposes of
a company that specialises in “scary” theatrical tours, often conducted late at night.
As they say on their website:

The fermenting slums of the old town also left a mark on the landscape and whispers of
body snatchers raiding the graves of the recently deceased filled the lantern lit air. Our
guides will take you on a journey through these exact streets and slums where you will
hear all about life in old Edinburgh. For these reasons we believe that the name Auld
Reekie’s best suits our tours and their content.40

The interpretation of the name as “Old Smoky” still has sufficient general currency for it
to be used, for example, on buses in Edinburgh to emphasise that they are less destructive
to the environment. A current slogan reads: “With a new low emission exhaust, this bus is
Auld but not Reekie!”41 This meaning is also perhaps reinforced by other well-known
Scots expressions such as “lang may your lum reek”, which translates as “long may
your chimney smoke” (i.e. because you are fit/ healthy/ wealthy enough to provide it
with fuel; it is often used as a way of wishing someone well on parting, and is even

37 See <www.auldreekie-edinburgh.co.uk>.

38 See <www.auldreekietours.com>.

39 See the entry for Auld Reekie s.v. auld adj. 9 (16) in the Scottish National Dictionary.

40 See <www.auldreekietours.com>.

41 I am grateful to Guy Puzey for drawing this example to my attention.

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Scott

used by speakers who might ordinarily make little use of Scots in their speech; see
SND s.v. reek n.1, v. II. 1. (a)).

With the exception of the investment company, all of the businesses noted
above are or were based in Edinburgh, with many of them contributing to the Scots
semiotics of the linguistic landscape. Certainly the central position of Auld Reekie
Tours near Greyfriars Kirk makes it a very prominent commercial example of Scots
in the city. Auld Reekie has sufficient cultural weight to transcend the class-driven
polarisation that so typically accompanies descriptions of the Scots continuum. In
contrast, the Scots variants Embra and Embro do not appear to have been widely
adopted for use in the names of Scottish companies, although they do appear quite
frequently in the Scots webscape.42

British Edinburgh

The city has also been known as The Athens of the North since at least the early
nineteenth century, and this name is often employed by writers drawing comparisons
between the architectural splendour of Edinburgh’s New Town and that of Ancient
Greece.43 It also owes something to the creative and intellectual enterprises of
the Scottish Enlightenment, which provoked similar parallels. However, early
comparisons between Edinburgh and Athens were not always entirely favourable.
John Galt’s reference to “the soidisant intellectual metropolis and modern Athens
of Edinburgh” in The Entail (1823, 143) is decidedly tongue-in-cheek, as his
description of “the company consisting chiefly of lawyers, –– as dinner parties
unfortunately are in the modern Athens” (ibid., 217). This comparison with Athens
is more a matter of pretension than prestige.

The designation The Athens of the North also (perhaps unintentionally) overwrites
the native linguistic and cultural nomenclature with a colourless “English” phrase
bearing no outward hallmarks of distinctive “Scottishness”. Considering the high
degree of similarity between Scottish English and English English in their written
forms, The Athens of the North can also be read as a “Scottish English” designation
that embraces a new, united British identity, speaking the same language, albeit
with different accents. “The North” may be read as synonymous with “Scotland”,
in the style of the “North British” identity advocated by some after the Act of Union
in 1603 (for an early example see Bacon 1604). Against this backdrop, at the time
of its inception, the concept of The Athens of the North may be read as politically
charged, repositioning the national status of Scotland’s capital within the new

42 For example, in articles featured by the Scots Language Society <www.scotslanguage.com>.

43 Examples from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century can be found in the
online Supplement to the Scottish National Dictionary (2005) s.v. The Athens of the North prop.n.

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

United Kingdom. In more recent uses, however, which are considerably removed
from the construction of Scotland as “North Britain”, this name tends to be used in
celebration of the capital’s architectural history. Articles in the press are likely to
invoke this identity when protesting about the state of specific buildings. In relation
to one local issue in 2003, the Edinburgh Evening News asked: “So in a city world
renowned for its built heritage, we are the Athens of the North after all, why is it
that buildings owned by the council are being allowed to crumble?” and the Daily
Record employed the term very similarly in 2004: “It’s said to be the Athens of the
North but one street in Edinburgh is more like the slums of Naples”. Connections
with the Greek city of Athens also provoke use of the name, as in the following
extract from The News of the World (2004) which capitalises on the link to the
Olympic games: “Born in Edinburgh – the Athens of the North – Butler booked her
place in the UK team with a strong run in the 10km trials at Watford”.44

Alongside this “British” designation, which has no overt link to Scotland as a


nation, we might also usefully consider cases in which the city’s name is noticeably
absent. A recent literary example is provided by Anne Donovan in Buddha Da,
where she draws attention to the problematic representation of national locations
in “official” narratives. The novel is written in Scots, which is not restricted to the
speech of the characters. When the two young Glaswegian girls, Anne Marie and
Nisha, consult an atlas in the public library to research Tibet, they struggle to find it:

“Tibet’s no in this.” … “Anne Marie, that’s it. It’s no a country.” “Aye it is, that’s where
the lamas come fae.” … Nisha turned tae the back of the atlas. “Look here it is … in
the index. Tibet – see Xizang Zizhiqu, China.” It gied me a shock, seein it like that.
(Donovan 2003, 261)

This metaphor for national and political power is further complicated by their
search for Scotland in the atlas. Nisha even predicts that they may encounter
difficulties:

“Bet you Scotland’s no in it either.” And it wasnae. No as a country anyway, just part of
the UK. (Capital: London. Status: Monarchy.) And nae flag either. Or languages of wer
ain. (Ibid., 262)

While a direct comparison between Tibet and Scotland may seem extreme,
given their radically different political realities, this passage renders both nations
as subaltern by omission. Donovan would thus disagree with Schoene’s argument
that Scotland should not be viewed through a postcolonial lens. Rather, with regard
to both Scotland and Tibet, she makes her own contribution to the idea that “the
writings that emanated from anti-colonial movements … continue to rail against

44 Supplement to the Scottish National Dictionary (2005) s.v. The Athens of the North prop.n.

128
Scott

injustice, and to use the power of language to convince us that other worlds are
possible” (Gilmartin & Berg 2007, 120).

Conclusion

While Edinburgh remains the virtually unchallenged official name for the city, the
Gaelic and Scots identities for the city have taken on a range of roles in relation to
its identity. Both Dùn Èideann and Auld Reekie are found in contexts associated
with tourism and leisure. The names are used to brand national products such
as whiskies and other goods, and cultural “experiences” such as walking tours,
events and exhibitions. However, Auld Reekie is by far the more prominent name
of the two, with the Gaelic name more often occurring in business and commercial
contexts in its anglicised form Dunedin. It may work to commercial advantage to
have the nickname Auld Reekie available as an alternative name for the city, and
one which, by being Scots, appears to connect more directly with “the language of
the people” than the official map name. With its long-standing literary connections,
Auld Reekie situates Edinburgh within a tradition of creativity, and perhaps also with
some of the sentiments of the Vernacular Revivalist poets, allowing the city to be
reclaimed from official discourse by those who feel a strong connection to it. This
may be part of the motive behind the name for Ralph Lownie’s recent collection of
writing, Auld Reekie: An Edinburgh Anthology (2008), as it allows him to draw on
both an “unofficial” and an “official” city identity. It is unlikely that any of the larger
international events such as The Edinburgh Festival, the Edinburgh International
Film Festival, or even Edinburgh’s Hogmanay (Scots for “New Year’s Eve”) would
ever replace the Edinburgh of their official titles with Auld Reekie. Nevertheless,
in tourism and marketing terms, Auld Reekie is a strong and enduring brand that
has been used to endear people to the city since it first appeared in literature in
the eighteenth century. Both Auld Reekie and The Athens of the North have been
reinterpreted in different contexts based on the different possible meanings they
might convey, and this is interesting in terms of the folk-narrative that has grown
up around each name, reconfiguring its linguistic and cultural identities. Another
contender for the Scots title is Embra or Embro, although it has yet to achieve
widespread recognition.

Each of the names for Edinburgh has its own cultural footprint and may be
employed for different purposes, and each has contributed something to the place
image and place identity of the city. Landry and Bourhis (1997, 29) argue that the
linguistic landscape may be regarded as an “observable and immediate index of the
relative power and status of the linguistic communities inhabiting a given territory”.
If we therefore apply this metric to the physical and virtual linguistic landscape
observable through the names for the city, we see a fairly close parallel to the national
position of Scotland’s three languages. (Scottish) English dominates and Gaelic is

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

not well represented, although anglicised forms like Dunedin attempt to convey
something of its muted heritage status. Scots has a fairly healthy representation,
but is much more visible as Auld Reekie, with its marketable, prestigious literary
associations, not as the vernacular Embra or Embro.

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131
Textually Produced
Landscape Spectacles?
A Debordian Reading of
Finnish Namescapes and
English Soccerscapes

Jani Vuolteenaho
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Sami Kolamo
University of Tampere

In this article, a critical attempt is made to read the language of contemporary


urban boosterism – its eulogistic adjectives and slogans, escapist evocations
in nomenclature, nostalgic narratives, etc. – through the lens of The Society of
the Spectacle (1995, orig. 1967), Guy Debord’s controversial theoretico-political
manifesto. Through discussion of empirical examples, the authors shed light on
different types of in-situ landscape texts in Finnish and English cities. In the former
national context, culturally escapist and non-native names given to leisurescapes
and technoscapes have mushroomed over the last quarter century. While this
process represents a semi-hegemonic rather than hegemonic trend, many
developers’ reliance on the “independent” representational power of language
has substantially reshaped naming practices in the non-Anglophone country. The
analysis of different types of promotional texts at England’s major soccerscapes
evinces the co-presence of nostalgic evocations of local history amidst the
hypercommodification of space. Arguably, the culturally self-sufficient, tradition-
aware representational strategies in current English football stem from pressure
from fans, the country’s status as the cradle of modern football, and a privileged
possibility to promote the game’s “native” meanings via a globally-spoken language.
Finally, this article addresses the pros and cons of using the spectacle theoretical
framework to analyse critically language-based urban boosterism and branding
under the current conditions of neoliberal urbanism.

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 132–158.
Vuolteenaho & Kolamo

Introduction

Any closer look at today’s “superlative cities” (Beauregard 2003) suggests that
not only eye-catching sights in the strict sense, but also various types of textual,
aural and participatory elements and messages (from exotic evocations and
memorial texts to drama-enhancing music and orchestrated cheers) count as the
spectacularisation of space.1 However, preoccupation with the issues of visuality
has characterised spectacle theory and its urban applications until today (e.g.
Pinder 2000; Kellner 2003). Following Guy Debord (1995; orig. 1967) and other
Situationists, the concept of spectacle has been most (in)famously used as a rubric
for the “totality” of (visual) enticements in capitalist-consumerist societies. In this line
of critical theory, commodification, advertising and mass-mediatisation are seen as
forces that colonise people’s everyday wants under the ceaseless stream of the
images of idealised bodies, activities and spaces. By the same token, the analysts
of post-industrial urban spectacles have been characteristically preoccupied with
mega-size events and architectural landmarks created for spectators (Ley & Olds
1988; Harvey 1989, 66–98; Kearns 1993; Gotham 2005; Davis 2006; Hetherington
2007; Frank & Steets 2010). Marxist critics absorbing insights from Debord’s
(1995) The Society of the Spectacle, in particular, have emphasised the nature of
contemporary capitalist developments as the visually enthralling expressions of
a profit-hungry neoliberal attention economy that are regularly “accompanied by
a sort of spatial gentrification, with the expulsion of the poorest people from the
intervention areas” (e.g. Fessler Vaz & Berenstein 2009, 249–250; Krupar & Al
forthcoming).

While the aim of this article is not to question the significance of visuality in
urban spectacle-making, its approach differs considerably from the aforementioned
research orientations by re-focussing attention on the language of contemporary
urban boosterism and, specifically, its textually evoked thought-images (cf. Barthes
1980; Benjamin 1999; Weigel 1996, 49–60). It is suggested here that spectacle
theory can open conceptually fruitful and empirically applicable tools that combine
critical insights from social and spatial theory with the study of the concrete power-
related workings of language in contemporary cities. Debord (1995, 15) himself
held that “to analyze the spectacle means talking its language to some degree”,
and by way of a linguistic metaphor, saw “the monologue of self-praise” as a
defining feature of the spectacle (ibid., 19).2 In the current neoliberal context of
advanced spectacularisation (Debord 1998, 3) and professionalised place branding

1 On a generalised theory of spectacularisation as attention-seeking, see Crary 2000.

2 In fact, for the avant-gardist art movement, Letterist International, to which Guy Debord belonged
in 1952–1957, and somewhat less specifically for its politically radicalised heir apparent Situationist
International, too, experiments with anti-spectacular language-uses were among key concerns (see
e.g. Sadler 1999: 95–103; Khayati 2006; Murray 2008). More recently, Giorgio Agamben has also
ruminated on the spectacularity of the “words [that] work on behalf of the ruling organization of life”
from a Debord- and Heidegger-influenced philosophical angle (Murray 2008, 173–175; see also
Murray 2010).

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practices (e.g. Eisenschitz 2010; Krupar & Al forthcoming; Kolamo & Vuolteenaho
forthcoming), there are well-grounded reasons to assume that marketers and other
powerful urban actors, increasingly calculatedly, deploy language to “imagineer”
(in some cases more plausibly and successfully than in others) local landscapes
as global magnets for consumption, tourist flows and investments. Arguably, what
is at issue is an acute but under-explored cultural ramification of the neoliberal
commodification of space, with profound consequences for the symbolic
construction of places as well as people’s everyday language-based meaning-
making in today’s image-dominated world.

To analyse the processes and contexts of textual spectacularisation, and


simultaneously to critically interrogate the significance of language as a promotional
tool, this article distils relevant conceptual notions from The Society of the Spectacle
and applies these to the study of in-situ landscape texts in Finnish and English
cities. After Debord (1995, 19), we insist, first of all, on the monologues of self-
praise as indispensable components in the textual spectacularisation of space. In
this direct mode of touting a landscape as a “saleable” commodity, place promotion
takes advantage of exaggerations, superlatives (the “newest”, the “largest”, etc.)
and otherwise straightforwardly boosterist language to proclaim the high status
of a location. Secondly, by taking its cue from Debord’s (1995, 120) provocative
terminology on the “interchangeability” of places, the article analyses the language-
based weaving of semiotic associations as a spectacularisation strategy that is
closely akin to cultural theming (see Gottdiener 2001). As former studies on “themed
environments” conducted especially in North America have shown (ibid.; Hopkins
1990; Sorkin 1992), the associative-semiotic means to enhance the recognisability
and market-appeal of landscapes fall into several subcategories. Inter alia, this
spectacularisation strategy can operate through the spatio-temporally escapist
evocations of better-known and better-esteemed places (see on the landscapes
of elsewhereness: Hopkins 1990) and times (fabulous pasts, futuristic visions) or
more abstract or ethereal ideals (e.g. “cultural universals” such as power, richness,
speed, happiness and authenticity), not forgetting that the medium is a crucial part
of the message; some languages are more credible than others in the global market
place (e.g. Crystal 2004; Shohamy & Gorter 2009). Thirdly, this article probes
into the seemingly contradictory temporal characteristics of spectacularisation.
Intriguingly, spectacularisation has been equated both with “global simultaneity”
(based on the instant circulation of the same spatio-temporal representations on
the planetary scale) and “the break with historical time”, on the one hand, and
on the other, the commodified and ceremonial staging of heroicised pasts (e.g.
Debord 1995, 42–46, 120; Augé 1995; Pinder 2000; Hetherington 2008).3 Lastly,
inspired by the well-known Debordian distinction (e.g Debord 1995, 41, 46; 1998, 8)

3 Debord’s (1995) own equivocalness on the issue is telling: while he saw spectacularisation
as a process for which “nothing is stable” (ibid., 46), on other occasions he nostalgically noted, for
instance, a paradox of the destruction of the old city centres and the turning of “the same ancients
sections… into museums” (ibid., 42–43; see also Pinder 2000; Bonnett 2006).

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between the ideologically and symbolically diffuse and concentrated forms of the
spectacle, this article traces both multi-voiced and univocal manifestations of the
spectacularisation of space across textualised landscapes.

Concisely stated, a common thread in different textual modes of the


spectacularisation of space is arguably their “independent existence” as
representations (Debord 1995, 17). At the same time, whether a directly eulogistic
or associative spectacularisation strategy is in question, the aim of developers is to
make a landscape’s sign-value (see also Lash & Urry 1994) imaginatively “bigger”
by means of language – an inclination which we refer to here as “bigness fetish”.
Equally crucial for this article’s methodological design, the above-referred forms of
textual spectacularisation are not deployed indiscriminately, but as context-specific
tools of place marketing. In actual urban settings, variable combinations of language-
based tools can be used by developers to facilitate the attractive appearance of
landscapes in the eyes and minds of targeted groups. Here, the focus will be on
three basic repertoires: (i) superlative words, slogans and depictions; (ii) names,
narratives and other elements of language through which different types of spatio-
temporal and cultural motifs are conjured up and associated with a promoted
place; and (iii) linguistic choices in favour of specific globally and/ or locally spoken
languages.

To analyse tentatively the functions of spectacular textuality in two different


geographical settings, and pave the way for case-specific and more systematically
comparative analyses on the subject in other national and urban contexts, this
article re-interprets material collected in two separate research projects. The
former examined the politics of urban place naming in Finland (Vuolteenaho &
Ainiala 2009) while the latter examined spectacle-making in English football
(Kolamo & Vuolteenaho 2011a; Kolamo & Vuolteenaho 2011b). In the comparatively
economically-peripheral and non-Anglophone Finnish context, we focus on
paradigmatically spectacular instances of place naming and associated marketing
statements (logos, slogans, etc.) across the different types of consumer- or
business-targeted urban developments. In the context of England, characterised by
stronger economic and linguistic ties to North America and other hubs of the world
economy, we examine a broader range of promotional texts (from advertisements
and stadium names to nostalgic evocations) found at the stadiums of prominent
football clubs. Importantly in both study contexts, we remain simultaneously alert
to co-existing textual practices that seem to run counter to the aforementioned
hallmarks of textual spectacularisation. On the basis of associated media reports,
advertisements, Internet-pages, photographs and above all observation data
collected in each country (in Finland on a continuing basis since 2007; in England
during two week-long fieldwork periods in 2009 and 2011), our explorations in both
case studies revolve around the following research questions:

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

• To what extent does superlative self-praise characterise the promotion of


the analysed landscape-types in Finland and England?
• What types of escapist associations with “other” places, times, fictional
worlds and cultural externalities are favoured in the two contexts? What
roles, if any, do the historically rooted representations of localness play in
the spectacularisation of the analysed landscapes? What kinds of textual
forms of diffuse/concentrated spectacularisation are found in the two
countries?
• What kinds of linguistic choices dominate the textual practices of spectacle-
making in the analysed countries? As regards of Finland, do the so-called
global languages override major native tongues (Finnish 90%, Swedish
5%) in newer spatial nomenclature? In more general terms, how is the non-
Anglophone/Anglophone context reflected in the language of spectacular
place promotion?

Throughout the article, we present our observations in relation to the above-


outlined spectacle theoretical framework. In the concluding section, we draw
together factors that seem to explain the (un)popularity of specific types of
spectacular textuality in the two national contexts. We also query the limits of the
“independent” representational power of language-based boosterism and discuss
the article’s findings from the wider point of view of neoliberal place-branding
practices.

Finnish Namescapes: Extremities and Variations in the


Spectacular Theming of Leisurescapes and Technoscapes

If a place has a name like Paradise, you obviously are going to have a different attitude
towards it.
Kostanski (2009, 157)

Increasingly, the naming of landscapes is used as a deliberate place-marketing


instrument along with more well-trodden promotional tools such as advertising, “wow”
architecture, sleek office towers and “high-tech” industrial estates, entertainment
and sport megastructures, heritage precincts, cultural events, and the like. Although
still a less systematically studied promotional practice, the role of naming in the
revamping and spectacularisation of cities and their flagship developments has not
gone unnoticed in urban research (e.g. Vuolteenaho & Ainiala 2009; Berg 2010). In
his much-read Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja (1989, 245) portrayed the
namescape of Los Angeles as a collage of “outlandish representations of urban
locality” – a spectacular namescape of global simultaneity in which “the ‘once’ and
the ‘there’ are packaged to serve the needs of the here and the now”. In a similar

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Vuolteenaho & Kolamo

vein, analysts have depicted Las Vegas as the pacesetter in the escapist theming
and naming of landscapes ever since the opening of Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo
casino-hotel in 1946 (e.g. Gottdiener 2001, 105–116; Raento & Douglass 2001;
Douglass & Raento 2005). Thus, according to Mark Gottdiener (2001, 111–113),
the Las Vegas Strip – with its tens of mega-size casino-hotels like the New York–
New York, the Tropicana, the Sahara, the simulated Egyptian pyramid of the Luxor
and the medieval fantasy castle of the Excalibur – epitomises “the new themed
economy” in which the accumulation of all sorts of borrowed signs within a single
landscape can become a world-class attraction in itself.

The spectacular theming of landscapes and spatial nomenclatures has more


recently exploded well beyond the United States, “the spiritual home of place
marketing” (Ward 1998, 236). Variably in different national and local settings, the
last few decades have witnessed a range of instances of the spread of “the wildly
associative logic of commercial naming” (Sjöblom 2007) across the hitherto non-
commodified domains of place naming. Moreover, the neoliberal practice of selling
of the naming rights of sports and entertainment venues, in particular, to corporate
sponsors has accelerated worldwide (Boyd 2000). In what specific ways have these
global tendencies taken place in the non-Anglophone context of Finland? In this
section, we first concentrate on blatant cases of escapist spectacularisation, and
subsequently contextualise these findings vis-à-vis extant naming practices that
deviate from the hallmarks of spectacular textuality as defined in the introduction.

Let us commence with Finnish indoor waterparks, representing a relatively early


wave of unabashedly escapist-spectacular coinages. In his book, The Theming of
America, Gottdiener (2001, 177, 187) traces the origin of the promotional use of the
motif of “tropical paradise” to Rio’s Copacabana Beach in the 1920s. Since then,
usages of this motif have appeared in diverse settings including “third world places
desiring a tourist industry” and innumerable “tropical” indoor worlds with winter-
and wind-protected conditions, irrespective of geographical location. In Finland, the
first “real” waterparks were created in the “yuppie years” of the 1980s. Ever since,
their construction has been accompanied by the evocations of a tropical paradise:
names like Tropiikki, Caribia and Eden, all indisputably exotic epithets from a north
European perspective, have become commonplace across the country. As a recent
example, the entertainment and spa complex in Vantaa, on the northern outskirts
of Helsinki, is dubbed Flamingo after a (sub-)tropical bird species. Besides this
name’s familiarity from the history of Las Vegas Strip (e.g. Douglass & Raento
2005; see below), this “oasis of sensations” also boasts a logo whose design is
virtually identical to that of the “original” Flamingo hotel-casino. In the spirit of
“places’ interchangeability” (Debord 1995, 120), its waterslides such as Jungle
River, Maya Kamikaze and Magic Maya further enhance the feeling of outlandish
extravaganza, as if promising visitors an imaginary journey to “anywhere, anywhen,
safely and right now” (Raento 2009). Undoubtedly, “the biggest entertainment

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

centre in Scandinavia” is a prominent Finnish instance of how superlative rhetoric


and spatio-temporally escapist naming practices, often in tandem, contribute to the
spectacularisation of space in the context of contemporary place promotion.

Nor have other types of leisurescapes in the country remained resistant to


“parasitic” names akin to the simulated Vegasian streetscape. Some grandiloquent
names of shopping malls, for instance, are paradigmatic in this regard (but cf. Table
1 on page 143, with examples of both recognisably escapist and non-escapist mall
names). Opened in large numbers over the last quarter century, relatively many
of these variants of the “signifying edifices” of the globalised consumer culture
(Langman 1992, 40) carry appellations devoid of any conceivable connotations to
inherently local or national imageries. To take the mall Zeppelin as an example,
despite its name being suggestive of the world-famous German airships, these
historic technological marvels never visited the region of the provincial capital of
Oulu, where the eponymous shopping complex was opened in 1992. Neither did
the Cristobál Colón navigate on the shores of eastern Helsinki, where, after a half
millennium, the local Columbus mall dallies textually with the legendary south-
European seafarer and discoverer of the Americas!

At this point, it is pertinent to pay closer attention to the qualities of the names
Zeppelin and Columbus as “independent” representations in the Debordian sense.
As implied, both names – reproduced in innumerable logos on facades and interiors
of the malls as the key constituents of their place identities – have been derived
ex nihilo in geo-historical terms (cf. Debord 1995, 123). Equally noteworthy, only
a few cues in the built environment correspond to the textuality of the landscape:
while a sail-shaped mock construction on the roof of the Columbus mall might
be read as a far-fetched association with its eponym, the interior of Zeppelin is
modestly decorated by a few cloud-shaped pendants and prints of early-twentieth
century airships. Whether due to the lack of imagination or insufficient resources
for the more thorough-going theming of space on the part of the developers, the
textual signification of space functions in these spaces almost without support
from architectural-symbolic statements. The contrast is striking in comparison
to more thoroughly themed megamalls, theme parks and other “landscapes of
elsewhereness” in which physical design substantially assists, in the words of Jeff
Hopkins (1990), to “surpass the associative attributes of specific words”, or even
succeeds in “the near duplication of the characteristics and uses of other places
or times” (see also Gottdiener 2001; above on the climate-controlled waterparks).
In a word, the reading of the interplay between the language of architecture and
literal in-situ textuality at Zeppelin and Columbus demonstrates that their globally
recognisable names border on representational independence in a double sense
of the Debordian concept.

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Vuolteenaho & Kolamo

However, it needs to be underscored that the above types of unabashedly


escapist name-loans represent only a specific type of spectacular naming strategy
deployed across recent developments in the country. A broader look shows that the
spectacularisation of the national namescape has progressed through coinages
based on one or more of the following thematic and linguistic repertoires:

• spatio-temporal escapism
• power, money, centrality, (big) size
• speed, technological advancement
• positively valued cultural universals
(happiness, good fortune, sunshine, etc.)
• English & other global languages

Notably, many if not all of the above-listed “motifs of appeal” have been perennials
in the legacy of urban boosterism, especially in North America (e.g. Room 1982;
Holcomb 1994; Short 1996; Ward 1998; Norris 1999). For their part, the list’s
second, third and fourth bullet points tally with prestigious English-language “trade
name power words”, catalogued by the name scholar Adrian Room (1982; see also
Raento & Douglass 2001). One extreme Finnish example is the motor sports and
entertainment complex PowerPark which opened in the mid-2000s. Very overtly, it
has inscribed various references to power and speed onto a landscape in the middle
of rustic Ostrobothnia (Fig. 1). Simultaneously, this development is an example par
excellence of a symbolically diffuse spectacularisation strategy (cf. Debord 1995;
1998): its amenities and attractions perplexingly also incorporate direct name-loans
from world-famous American landmarks (Rio Grande Camping), central European
regions (Tirol Cabins), and tele-familiar cities and circuits associated with Formula
One motor-racing (Silverstone Cabins, Hotel San Marino & Monza, Pitlane Cafe)
as well as futuristic motifs (Future Cabins). In all, namescape comprises a multi-
voiced mix of “macro- and micro-simulations” (Soja 1989, 244) until recently more
typical of all-American leisurescapes.

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Figure 1. An entrance of the amusement park PowerLand in PowerPark, South Ostrobothnia


– probably the ultimate in Disney-style architecture and make-believe namescape of global
simultaneity in contemporary Finland. Photo: J. Vuolteenaho.

Some other Finnish namescapes, in which the motifs of wealth and fortune have
been combined, come close to Roberts’ (2003, 66) notion of the spectacle as the
wishful projection of “unimaginable riches and wonders”. In this regard, a notable
case of a concentrated spectacularisation strategy is found in Tuuri (fortuitously
meaning “fortune” in colloquial Finnish), where the village lent its name to a modest
cluster of shops in the early 1970s. Ironically, a subsequent explosion in local trade
has been accompanied with the semiotic multiplication and re-imagining of this
native settlement name. Nowadays, via its horse shoe-shaped monuments and
logos, themed attractions and stores, and the disproportionately gigantic Lucky
Star hotel, the formerly quiet village (to quote one of its marketing slogans) boasts
of being “the wild statue of liberty in the Finnish retail”. While turning a blind eye
to the village’s rural history and less spectacular etymological aspects behind its
name, the architectural and textual “brandscape” of the Tuuri retail complex is thick
with presentist representations of chance, wealth and fortune-making as anchors
of its place identity.

As many of the above instances have already implied, the favouring of words
and linguistic elements from specific languages of “world-class-credibility” –
preponderantly from English and to a lesser degree from languages such as
German and Italian – has been a further aspect in the symbolic revamping of

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Finland’s leisurescapes.4 Unmistakeably, however, the valuing of the hegemonic


lingua franca of global economy as more seductive than native Finnish or Swedish
has reached its zenith across the country’s high-tech industrial estates. Indeed,
borrowings from English, incorporating terms of classical Latin and Greek derivation
with a protracted usage in the Anglophone world, seem to have been the only
plausible options for the developers, wishing to inscribe their ambitious business
schemes onto the landscape. In both major cities and smaller municipalities, dozens
of clusters of high-tech industry have been bestowed with trite spatial brand names
such as DataCity, Digipolis, EuroCity, EastKey Business District, Micropolis,
Portaali Business Park, Technopolis Oulu – virtually all of them compiled out of a
limited range of commercially credible “power words” (cf. Room 1982: 4–5).

In the terminology of Marc Augé (1995), the linguistically and thematically


concentrated naming strategy (cf. Debord 1995) in question illustrates how the need
for “a generalised vocabulary” generates “linguistic enfeeblement” in the presentist,
ahistorical “non-places” (Augé 1995) such as technoparks. What is the lure behind
the continuing blossoming of such “overworked globalisms” in the nomenclatures
of business and high-tech spaces across Finland and much of the rest of the world?
Certainly, part of the explanation lies in making these namescapes as easy to read
as possible by desired overseas partners, investors and professionals. At the same
time, one cannot but infer that the choice of language also relates to the increasingly
stratified labour markets on the national scale. In more precise terms, the use of
English in our “non-Anglophone” national context arguably functions as a heroising
social index of professionals employed in the technoscapes, allegedly standing
out from the rest of population by their overwhelming expertise, hypermobility and
worldwide business connections (see on “reflexivity winners and losers”: Lash
1995). Illustrative of the sociolinguistically concentrated spectacularisation strategy
at issue, in the marketing of Aviapolis (“Flight City”) around the Helsinki-Vantaa
Airport, the district’s superiority as “a community where motion never ceases” is
put on a pedestal through representations of it as the stronghold of “internationally
operating businesses in Finland” as well as a living space for “people who travel a
lot” (Brand Book 2011) (Fig. 2).

4 In this connection, it is pertinent to note that lexical borrowing and the use of non-native lettering
– exemplified by the aforementioned malls Columbus (in standard Finnish orthography the name
would read Kolumbus) and Zeppelin (with its non-Finnish initial Z adopted to a key graphic element
in the mall’s logo) – has become a subtle way of investing developments with international flavour.

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Figure 2. A street view in “the only real edge city5 in Finland”, as one the superlative
marketing slogans of Aviapolis has gone. In the photograph, a hierarchy between the
spectacularised world of globally connected businesses and the mundane functionality of
urban space is actualised as a dichotomous landscape of non-native language (in this case
English and Italian) brand names (e.g. Gate 8, Vivace [“Vibrant”] and Allegro [“Joyous”]) and
much more modest-looking native-language street signage (Perintötie [“Inheritance Road”])
Photo: S. Vuolteenaho.

In all, the above cases demonstrate that variable associative ways of


spectacularising space via naming and related textual practices have been
exploited by urban developers in Finland in the last quarter century. Before making
any definite interpretations, however, it must be remembered that the discussed
cases do not represent a panoptic layer in the national neo-nomenclature. In
reality, alongside names that conjure up thematically escapist and/or non-native
associations to “other” places, times or cultural externalities, more conventional
or otherwise non-spectacular names still play a role in the naming of the country’s
urban landscapes. To exemplify this bifurcation within the national namescape,
Table 1 (below) lists the current (and when relevant, former) names of Finland’s top-
ranking shopping malls, high rise buildings (the newest of which typically represent
office towers occupied by technological companies) and ice hockey and skating
venues (ice hockey being the most popular and lucrative sport in Finland):

5 On the concept of edge city, initially used in the North American context of decentralised
urbanism, see: Garreau 1992.

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Table 1. Fifteen leading shopping malls (by annual visitors in 2009), high rises (the tallest
office and residential buildings completed by 2011) and ice hockey venues (maximum
capacity in 2012) in Finland. Interpreted in line with the article’s theoretical framework, and
against the backdrop of more conventional post-war urban nomenclature in the country, an
asterisk indicates a name’s affinity with spectacular characteristic(s). When relevant, the
literal English translations of Finnish names are given. Main sources: Kauppakeskukset
2010. Finnish Shopping Centers. <http://www.rakli.fi/kky/attachements/2010-03-
17T23-25-0465.pdf>; Emporis.com Commercial Real Estate Information and Construction
Data. <http://www.emporis.com/application/?nav=index>.

Ice halls/multi-purpose
Shopping malls High rises venues (city, year of
(city, year of [re]naming) (city, year of [re]naming) [re]naming)
* Hartwall-areena
Kamppi (Helsinki, 2006) * Cirrus (Helsinki, 2006) (Helsinki, 1997)
Itis (Helsinki, 2012) * HK-areena (Turku, 2010)
- formerly: Itäkeskus * Fortum (Espoo, 1976) - formerly: * Typhoon, * Elysée,
‘East Centre’ Turkuhalli ’Hall of Turku’
* Maamerkki ’Landmark’ Helsingin jäähalli ’Helsinki
Sello (Espoo, 2003) (Helsinki, 1987) icehall’ (Helsinki, 1966)
* City Forum Tampereen jäähalli ’Tampere
* Panorama Tower (Espoo, 2008)
(Helsinki, 1985) icehall’ (Tampere, 1965)
* Barona-areena
Hansa (Turku, 1984) Kone Building (Espoo, 2001) (Espoo, 2009)
- formerly: * LänsiAuto-areena
* Pitäjänmäki Tower * Oulun Energia -areena
(Helsinki, 2010) (Oulu, 2006)
* Jumbo (Vantaa, 1998) - formerly: * SysOpen Tower, - formerly: Oulun jäähalli
* SysOpen Digia Tower, * Digia Tower ’Oulu Icehall’
* Iso Omena ‘Big Apple’ Hotel Torni ’Hotel Tower’ Porin jäähalli ’Pori icehall’
(Espoo, 2001) (Helsinki, 1931) (Pori, 1971)

* Columbus (Helsinki, 1998) Meritorni ’Seatower’ (Espoo, 1999) Kouvolan jäähalli ’Kouvola
icehall’ (Kouvola, 1982)
* Isku-areena (Lahti, 2005)
* IdeaPark Leppävaaran torni - formerly: Lahden jäähalli
(Lempäälä, 2006) ’Leppävaara tower’ (Espoo, 2010) ’Lahti icehall’
Reimarintorni ‘Spar buoy tower’ Kokkolan jäähalli ’Kokkola
Myyrmanni (Vantaa, 1994) (Espoo, 1990) icehall’ (Kokkola, 1988)
* Kivikylän Areena
(Rauma, 2010)
Malmintori ’Malmi square’ Itämerentori ´Baltic Sea square’ - formerly: Rauman jäähalli
(Helsinki, 1987) (Helsinki, 2000) ‘Rauma icehall’, * Lännen
Puhelin Areena, * DNA-areena
* Ritari-areena ’Knight-arena’
(Hämeenlinna, 2010)
* Malmin Nova ’Malmi Nova’ Hotel Ilves ’Hotel Lynx’ - formerly: Hämeenlinnan jäähalli
(Helsinki, 1987) (Tampere, 1986) ’Hämeenlinna icehall’, * Ritarihalli,
* Patria-areena
Kuopion jäähalli ’Kuopio
* Trio (Lahti, 1977) * Micro Tower (Kuopio, 2004) icehall’ (Kuopio, 1979)
Koskikeskus ‘Rapids Centre’ Haapaniemenkatu 7-96 Kisapuiston jäähalli ’Kisapuisto
(Tampere, 1998) (Helsinki, 1974) icehall’ (Lappeenranta, 1972)
Mehtimäen jäähalli ’Mehtimäki
Mylly ’Mill’ (Raisio, 2001) * Innova (Jyväskylä, 2002) icehall’ (Joensuu, 1982)

6 After a street address.

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A couple of remarks based on the table suffice to illuminate the broader national
context of this section’s findings. Along with recognisably spectacular coinages,
the table incorporates more traditional types of Finnish urban names (most of
them presumably incomprehensible for non-Finnish readers). At the same time,
considerable dissimilarities between naming practices in the three landscape
categories are exhibited. As regards mall names, mundane locational evocations
like Itis (a folksy abbreviation of the mall’s former name Itäkeskus, “East Centre”),
inter alia, exist side by side with the spatially extroverted (e.g. Iso Omena, literally “Big
Apple”, with an obvious hint at the nickname of New York City), ethereal (IdeaPark)
and bigness-connoting (Jumbo) appellations. Moreover, nostalgic signifiers such
as Kamppi (a name of centuries-old autochthonous derivation), Mylly (“The Mill”,
harking back to legacy of the town Raisio as a hub of food industry) and Hansa (a
reference to the Hanseatic League) represent aberrations from a definition of the
spectacle as the break with historical time (Debord 1995; Hetherington 2008; on
malls as contrived heritage sites: e.g. Shields 1992, 49; Judd 1995).

The table also shows that the newer high-rise nomenclature given since 2001 –
pregnant with non- or semi-native brand names commemorating corporate owners
(Kone Building, SysOpen Digia Tower) and “sky-soaring” appellations (Cirrus,
Panorama Tower) – is largely compatible with the “internationally suitable” names
of the Finnish technoscapes discussed above. Last, the newly built or re-named
ice halls (some of which are actually multi-purpose entertainment facilities) have
been invariably named “are(e)nas”, utilising an internationally fashionable generic
term not used in the naming of the built form in Finnish cities until recent decades.
Moreover, specific terms in the venue names echo another American-originated
naming fad: the neoliberal practice of using name sponsorships as a means of
generating income for the owners of sportscapes (e.g. Boyd 2000; Rose-Redwood
2012). Compared to the tersely descriptive traditional venue names such as
Porin jäähalli (“Pori’s icehall”), the burgeoning naming right deals have inevitably
facilitated the commodified signification of space in many Finnish cities. However, it
is less clear whether this particular trend has been in line with the “bigness fetish” of
spectacularisation: characteristically, sponsors found for the country’s sportscapes
have been relatively “unspectacular” firms and institutions, operating nationally or
regionally, and definitely not globally acknowledged corporate giants and brands.

In sum, the language-based spectacularisation of urban space through naming


models, adopted from the Anglophone world in particular, has been a prominent
but not universal trend in contemporary Finnish cities. In the exemplary cases
scrutinised in this section, spectacular appellations for landscapes were composed
via thematic associations to foreign places, distant times, generic motifs of cross-
cultural appeal, and the prestige of the so-called world-languages. The culturally
escapist naming in line with “new themed economy” (Gottdiener 2001) seem to
have achieved a semi-hegemonic status across Finnish leisurescapes, whereas

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the hegemony of the English language in the naming of the country’s technoscapes
is currently dominant. Given Finland’s relative marginality on the global map of
capital flows and linguistic power relations, these naming strategies – along with
the superlative self-praising techniques documented here – have arguably grown
in prominence as cost-efficient substitutes for more capital-intensive promotional
tools. Seemingly drawing on the belief that language possesses the independent
representational power (Debord 1995, 17) to “liberate” places imaginatively from
their inherited ties, many Finnish developers have engaged with escapist and
non-native naming in order to create a “global appearance” for their promoted
landscapes.

In the next section, we will turn to a broader range of promotional texts exploited
in the spectacularisation of England’s football landscapes.

English Soccerscapes: Amalgamations of Commercial


Spectacle-making with Heritage Production

If a professionally-based economy of sport was first established by the enclosure of


sport grounds and charging for attendance at matches against visiting teams, then the
capacity to carry sports action, advertising, and promotional messages enabled that
economy to take first a national and then an inter- and transnational character, as the
game was transformed from a practice to a spectacle.
Miller et al. (2001, 16)

By all standards, the last few decades have seen a dramatic, market-led reshaping
of English football and its venues. As an influential milestone, the implementation
of the so-called Taylor Report (an authoritative response specifically to the tragedy
of Hillsborough in 1989), stipulating that clubs modernise their stadiums, triggered
a break with the game’s traditional working-class affiliations in many regards
(Taylor 1990; Bale 1993; King 1998; Boyle & Haynes 2000). Arguably even more
importantly, the establishment of the Premier League in 1992, coupled with the
selling of its televising rights to BSkyB, a satellite pay-TV company owned by the
media baron Robert Murdoch, set in motion the mutation of English football into
a fully-fledged, globally marketed branch of a spectacle-producing entertainment
industry. Inevitably, all this has had fundamental ramifications for the textual
spectacularisation of the venues of the world’s most famous sport, in its country
of origin. Reminiscent of sponsor-named ice hockey venues in Finland (discussed
above), for instance, a substantial share of major English soccerscapes have been
lately (re-)textualised as “landscape advertisements” in their own right via naming
right deals – characteristically for sums that exceed many times the value of name
sponsorships in Finland and other remoter corners of the world-economy.

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As much as the spectacular novelties in the Finnish namescape have echoed


the American-originated fad of theming space and underline the hegemony of
English as the global business language, so have the quantum leaps at English
soccerscapes been manifestations of market-led transformation of sportscapes
taking place on a global scale. Right from the start, however, it has to be stressed
that the current hubs of English football also feature a plethora of locally-grounded
and time-honoured motifs that cast doubt on the view of the “spectacle” as a break
with historical time (e.g. Debord 1995; Pinder 2000; Hetherington 2008). In this
regard, the country’s soccerscapes considerably differ from the analysed Finnish
namescapes, where sporadic nostalgic signifiers were dwarfed by the number of
escapist and non-native coinages. How do we interpret the salient presence of
memorial spatial texts in the midst of hypercommodified English football venues
from the point of view of spectacle theory?

In searching for explanations for this seeming incongruity, let us first concentrate
on advertising texts as the most pervasive textual ingredient in today’s English
soccerscapes. Irrespective of their prestige or size, the stadiums are blanketed
with “advertising spaces”, from those on players’ kits to electronic scoreboards
and tiers of advertising panels. On closer inspection, however, differences in the
make-up of advertising between the grounds of higher and lower prestige conjure
up Debord’s (1995) distinction between the diffuse and concentrated forms of the
spectacle as an apt interpretative framework. On the one hand, essentially diffuse
forms of all-visible commercialism characterise the stadiums of lower-league and
many smaller Premier League clubs, too. There, the abundance of all sorts of ads
of locally, nationally and transnationally operating corporations and their products
typically borders on the chaotic. On the other, the number of advertised non-football
commodities is severely reduced in favour of a limited range of advertised brands
at the elite stadiums of the relatively few clubs. In the latter spaces, needless to
stress, the concentrated spectacle-making is not aligned with totalitarian political
ideologies à la Nazism or state-socialism (e.g. Debord 1998, 8), but with commercial
univocality that allows merely the symbols of a club itself and a privileged group of
its prevailing partners to figure in the landscape.

Already in the immediate proximity of venues, the distinction between the


concentrated and diffuse forms of commodified spectacularity is striking. During
our field work periods in 2009 and 2011, we found commercially univocal stadium
exteriors in the extreme, inter alia, in the pedestrianised Chelsea Village around
Stamford Bridge (where the monologue of self-praise focused on Samsung and
Adidas along with the club itself) and within the plot of Old Trafford (an area
strictly cleared not only of the signage of non-partner corporations, but also of
the ‘Love United, Hate Glazer’ -stickers, directed against the club’s American
owners, that otherwise littered the neighbourhood). In differing combinations, the
textual hallmarks – touted with large-size letters and big initials – of such spaces

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included the superlative marketing of the game’s upcoming highlights, variously


dubbed “mega”-stores, grandiloquently-labelled entrances for VIPs (such as the
Diamond Club at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium), themed kiosks and eateries with
club logos and liveries, and hoardings in which a club’s star-players advertised
specific “star-commodities” (see Debord 1995, 38–42). Diffuse commercialism in
which football-related ads and window displays sporadically interpenetrated the
blend of non-commercial and commercial signs of the mundane streetscape (see
e.g. Cronin 2010), typical in the vicinity of smaller stadiums, was strikingly absent
at the aforementioned professionally-branded soccerscapes.

Across stadium interiors of differing prestige, the gap between diffuse and
concentrated forms of commercialism was equally manifest. As a rule of thumb,
state-of-the-art digital scoreboards and perimeter signage systems heightened the
sense of the spectacle in the stadiums of current and former Premier League clubs
only. During Premier League matches, the electronic rapid-fire on the pitch-side
media consists of messages of a dozen or so advertisers, repeated over and over
again in roughly 5–15 second cycles. In essence this is a self-laudatory “genre”
of textual spectacularisation, as a sample of televised messages from White Hart
Lane’s pitchside in January 2012 illustrates: “Autonomy. The Proud Sponsor of
Tottenham” … “Don’t Just Look. Book at www.thomascook.com” ... “Carlsberg –
Official Beer of Spurs” … “Barclays Spaces for Sports”. Also in other Premier League
stadiums, the digital stream of ads during matches concentrate on the Premier
League and Barclays bank as its current sponsor, Sky Sports pay-tv packages,
betting firms, airlines and travel agencies, sportswear giants, automobiles, high-
tech gadgets, beverage brands, occasional club-specific partners, and of course,
the promotion of the club itself.

Speaking of in-stadium printed ads, the gulf between top clubs and more
impecunious ones is, if possible, even more startling. In the grounds of the
Championships and lower-league clubs, and even in smaller Premier League
venues, dozens of advertisers maintain a high presence. At the other extreme, the
most luxurious stadiums are exclusively embroidered by stylised references to a
handful of brands. Crucially, the concentration of advertising mirrors a shift from the
opportunistic quest for revenue streams by the enterprise sector to professional “co-
branding” strategies adopted by the elite clubs’ marketing machineries (Ross 2004;
Edensor & Millington 2008; Bridgewater 2010; see also Kolamo & Vuolteenaho
forthcoming). Increasingly confident about their attractiveness as world-class
business partners, the leading clubs nowadays prefer close-knit alliances with
a few multinational or nationally-prestigious non-football corporations, with a
fundamental impact on the symbolic spectacularisation of space. Analysed through
this article’s theoretical framework, this doubled elitism has led to the amalgamation
of the bigness fetish with the principle of “less is more” across the most prestigious
English soccerscapes. A concomitant spatial outcome has been that the

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streamlined “textual appearances” of the most distinguished English soccerscapes


considerably differ not only from the country’s smaller grounds (Figures 3a–b), but
also from the thematically exorbitant spectacularisation strategies à la Las Vegas
and many Finnish leisurescapes alike.

Fig. 3a–b. Commercial polyvocality vs. univocality – Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park vs.
Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, two stadium interiors in metropolitan London in 2009. The
diffuse, recognisably more old-fashioned textual look of the former soccerscape is
characterised by a near-chaos of miscellaneous commercial messages and strident colours.
Instead, alongside the harmonious design of blue and white, the concentrated make-up of
few but all the more salient texts in the latter stadium aims at the stylistic co-branding of
Chelsea and its major sponsors. Photos: S. Kolamo.

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At this point, it is appropriate to address the relative scarcity of blatantly escapist


messages in the cultural sense within the English soccerscapes – a characteristic
that applies to both diffusedly and concentratedly commodified stadiums. It is
true that some advertising representations in these contexts carry recognisably
“non-English” denotations or connotations. To take an obvious example related to
the recent selling of a considerable share of England’s football clubs to overseas
investors (e.g. Giulianotti & Robertson 2009), Manchester City’s newly re-named
Etihad (a transliteration from the Arabic ‫داحتا‬, meaning “union”) Stadium, eponymous
with a super-rich airline from the United Arab Emirates, is self-evidently meant to
conjure up the club’s overseas patron. Ethereal advertising slogans such as The
Real Thing (Coca-Cola) and Impossible Is Nothing (Adidas) – apparently trumpeting
the “universal” virtues of authenticity and the omnipotence of everyone’s wants
and wills – also feature as commonly at English soccerscapes as at prestigious
sports arenas all over the world. Moreover, generic fantasy motifs have gained
some ground in the make-believe representations of the bigger stadiums as the
consumer-centric dream worlds of football culture: the marketing moniker of Old
Trafford, The Theatre of Dreams, for instance, promises nothing but a vacation
from everyday reality (cf. Morse 1990). In spite of these types of instances of
commercial escapism,7 however, spectacularisation strategies based on deliberate
cultural borrowing à la Finnish leisurescapes have remained comparatively rare
within English soccerscapes. Rather, it is symptomatic that occasional attempts to
wittingly market the game via “global” icons of non-football-oriented popular culture
have provoked loud protests among the clubs’ tradition-aware fans.8

By contrast, and as accentuated in the beginning of this section, the second


ubiquitous spectacularisation strategy in today’s English football is the tradition-
aware, culturally introverted praising of the game’s organic rootedness in English
cities, towns and neighbourhoods. In and around both history-rooted and newly-
built stadiums, visitors are virtually besieged by the evocations of club history and
place-rooted community emblems, from large-size slogans (“The People’s Club”
at Everton’s Goodison Park) and sentimental pavement engravings (“SAFC till I
die” at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light) to purpose-built exhibitionary spaces. In
the museum of Chelsea, for instance, it is boasted that the inherited magnetism
of the club’s “ancestral home”, Stamford Bridge, “has not worn off”, although
the “cosmopolitan philosophical tribe down in West London … accepts change,
knowing that nothing remains static”. Even in cases where a club has moved to
an ultramodern stadium, narrative links with organic football culture are invariably

7 Further instances of connotatively “escapist” advertising messages include, inter alia, the
presence of the sportswear giant Nike – originally derived from the name of the Greek goddess
of victory – at many stadiums, although the brand name’s etymology is hardly acknowledged by
average stadium visitors.

8 See e.g. on the statue of the late American pop singer Michael Jackson at Fulham’s Craven
Cottage: Ronay 2011; also see on local resistance to the re-naming of the stadiums below).

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

underscored. Witness how the visitors are addressed in Arsenal’s museum next to
its Emirates Stadium, again named after an airline from the United Arab Emirates:

It was with the same pioneering spirit of the men who developed Highbury, that the club
nearby a century on in 2006, took the short but bold journey to Emirates Stadium, a
modern home steeped in the values and spirit of the club where Arsenal can continue
to progress.

If anything, the co-existence of sentimentally nostalgic “topophilic” texts amidst


plain commercialism casts doubt on views of spectacular landscapes as the
“antitheses of the places of memory” in the context of English football (cf. Augé
1995, 55; Bale 1993). For one symptomatic textual category, dialectal or otherwise
autochthonous linguistic markers frequently play a role in the self-sufficient
underscoring of the contributions of specific clubs to the glorious continuum of
“England’s game”. “Ha’way lads into the light” appears in the local dialect on a retro-
designed gate to Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, allegedly lending its spectacular
name at once to a closed colliery (memorialised around the stadium via authentic
mining equipment) and the brighter future of the locality. By the same token, the club
legend Dennis Wise’s “language courses” are celebrated in Chelsea’s museum as
an unofficial academy through which the members of the club’s multi-ethnic squad
became fluent Cockney-speakers. In the terminology of Coupland (1995), specific
narratives, words and other native language-elements function in these cases as
“rich points of culture” through which the idiosyncrasies of club history are brought
into discursive existence and made part of the spectacularisation of space.

Why this emphasis on history- and community-bound symbols? As Bélanger


(2000, 380, 388) has suggested with respect to North American sportscapes,
at least part of the rationale is to earn acceptance for the game’s thoroughgoing
market-led transformation. It appears that top-level Premier League clubs, in
particular, are trying their best to disqualify claims on the loss of the authentic spirit
of football through all sorts of monuments, heritage items, memorial tablets and
obituaries. Vis-à-vis accusations criticising the stadium’s fake and dull atmosphere,
an “Arsenalisation” campaign at the Emirates was launched in 2009. Equally tellingly,
while many smaller clubs have embarked on naming stadium compartments with
sponsor-names like Tesco East Stand (Coventry) and West Toyota Stand (Derby),
the bigger Premier League clubs have avoided this novelty that is at odds with the
custom of naming stands after cardinal directions, adjacent streets or legendary
players and managers (Football Grounds 2008; see also Adams 2007). One can
also surmise that in England, in particular, the organic markers of football heritage
are simultaneously co-opted to enhance the historic sign-value of the nation’s
soccerscapes as the primordial stages of the now globalised game – an analogy to
how “the greatness of a past era” is celebrated in the country’s countless industrial

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heritage sites does not, therefore, seem far-fetched at all (Bélanger 2000, 387;
Hewison 1987; Harris 1989).

Even so, the double-edged promotion of the game – at once celebrating


its lucrative marriages with the corporate world and its place- and community-
rootedness – has not occurred without tensions. At this point, it is particularly
relevant to re-address the issue of selling sportscape naming rights in the present
English context. In fact, hardly anywhere has the dilemma between trading
off and sticking with the tradition been more acute than in this regard. On the
one hand, an incrementally growing number of corporate name sponsors have
become “more than merely names on advertising boards” (Miller et al. 2001, 107)
especially in the most recently-built stadiums. Clubs in lower national divisions have
neither remained immune to the revenue-generating novelty. Moreover, even the
replacement of time-honoured stadium names with sponsored ones is a budding
trend. On the other hand, the majority of clubs have stuck by their inherited stadium
names at least for the time being: at the time of writing, seven out of twenty Premier
League stadia bore corporate names eponymous with leading sports equipment
trademarks, airlines, etc. On rare occasions, even the de-commodification of
sponsored stadium names has occurred in the face of fan pressure and potential
negative consequences of blatant commercialism – the rehabilitations of St.
Mary’s Stadium in Southampton and St. James Park in Newcastle are cases in
point. However, counter-currents like this are anomalies in the present time. As
naming rights deals are currently cherished by a number of clubs, it is likely that the
proliferation of name alliances within the corporate sector will continue to enhance
the symbolically concentrated manifestations of commodified spectacle-making in
English football for the foreseeable future.

In sum, current English soccerscapes are rife with straightforwardly commercial


messages, but they also embrace characteristics incommensurable with Debord’s
(1995, 46) view of spectacularisation as a process for which “nothing is stable”.
Remarkably, from this article’s comparative perspective, this emphasis on localness
has largely taken place at the price of the culturally escapist thematic strategies
of place promotion in the fashion of many Finnish namescapes and American
theme parks (e.g. Hopkins 1990; Gottdiener 2001). Ultimately, however, this
devotion to local history should not lead us to think that the spectacular inclination
towards the theming of urban space, per se, would be an alien promotional
strategy in contemporary English football. Quite the contrary, the self-sufficient,
historically-aware representational strategies documented in this section appear
to rely precisely on an inherent cultural motif of worldwide recognisability: it is
the globalised but England-originated game that is played in the stadiums. In a
word, if contemporary football, as a spectacle-producing entertainment industry,

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forms a global “subsystem”9 – comprised of its own economic, institutional and


performative hierarchicity as well as distinctive textual repertoires – then England
undeniably enjoys a privileged standing within it. Based on this section’s findings,
both historical causes (the country’s status as the cradle of modern football) and
an intrinsic possibility to promote the game’s “native” meanings through a readily
international vocabulary (via English, the modern-day lingua franca) likely explain
the at once increasingly concentrated and culturally self-sufficient strategies of
textual spectacularisation peculiar to major English soccerscapes.

Conclusions

Notwithstanding the qualified comparability of the article’s case studies, it is safe to


argue that the Finnish namescapes and English soccerscapes under examination
feature certain points of resemblance in broad spectacle theoretical terms. In line
with the bigness fetish peculiar to the spectacular signification of space, unabashed
“big talk” about landscapes’ grandness, pre-eminence, world-class quality,
imagineered ties to places of global repute, authenticity, brave history, or any other
“superlative” quality, has proliferated in both national contexts. The more intensively
marketed a development, the more unhesitating the self-encomiums. In this regard,
we identified pertinent instances across Finnish leisure- and technoscapes, from
the tropically themed Flamingo water park (“the biggest entertainment centre in
Scandinavia”) to Tuuri shopping village (“the wild statue of liberty in the Finnish
retail”), the PowerPark entertainment complex (epitomising the Las Vegas-type of
semiotic excess) and Aviapolis “edge city” (“the only real” one in Finland) marketed
for the hyper-mobile elites. Meanwhile, there were two foci in the laudatory
spectacularisation of space, especially at the richer end of the spectrum of English
soccerscapes: representations through which the professionally branded elite
clubs’ concentrated alliances with corporate giants reigned over the landscape,
on the one hand, and accolades with an emphasis on club history and community
spirit, on the other.

At the same time, our analyses demonstrate that context matters a great deal
in the spectacularisation of space through language-based means. In terms of
the prevailing types of semiotic associations and uses of native languages in
textual spectacle-making, dissimilarities between the two national settings were
paramount. A distinctive feature in the naming of Finnish leisurescapes was the
semi-hegemony of escapist motifs à la the American-originated themed economy
(Gottdiener 2001), mirroring developers’ reliance on apparently “global” language-
based recognisability as a widespread promotional strategy. Conversely, taking
pride in and spectacularising the globalised game’s local roots gave a distinctive

9 On the concept of subsystem, see: Lefebvre 2000, 99–101.

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Vuolteenaho & Kolamo

flavour to the promotion of the hypercommodified stadiums of English football clubs.


In part due to fan pressure, emphasis on the soccerscapes’ “inherited magnetism”
reflected the marketers’ will to avoid their labelling as purely profit-motivated cash
machines, or even worse, the clichéd stages of global popular culture in the generic
sense. Inevitably, the intrinsic possibility of promoting football’s “native” landscapes
via a globally accessible lingua franca has bolstered the culturally self-confident
marketing of the game in England. Conversely, a perception of the inferiority of
native Finnish (or Swedish) as a language of entertainment and business has led
to it being increasingly shunned, in the naming of the non-Anglophone country’s
newer leisurescapes and technoparks, in particular.

Eventually, it is pertinent to reflect upon advantages and problems in the


applicability of Debordian spectacle theory as a critical tool for analysing urban
place promotion in the light of this research. For such an assessment, it is necessary
to bear in mind the very nature of The Society of the Spectacle as a vehement
theoretico-political manifesto, rather than as a robust empirical study. Although
many of the ideas that Debord expressed nearly half a century ago seem today
utterly prescient, it is not inconsequential that the intend behind his unorthodox
Marxist-humanist theorisations was to “do harm to spectacular society”, where
appearances reign over all aspects of human life and where “a fallacious paradise…
is no longer projected onto the heavens but finds its place instead within material
life itself” (Debord 1995, 7–18). Indeed, Debord’s politically uncompromising and
context-levelling theory has been often criticised for its “totalism” at the expense
of historical and analytical differentiation (e.g. Roberts 2003; Bonnett 2006). In our
research, the ideas distilled from the book did not always prove readily applicable
for deciphering the spectacularity of actual promotional language. In this regard,
we feel that commenting upon two specific conceptual difficulties may be useful in
paving the way forward for the applications of spectacle theory in studies of place
boosterism in other national and urban settings.

On the problematic side, the first major interpretative conundrum faced in our
research stemmed from Debord’s reluctance to differentiate contextually between
the contrasting temporal characteristics of spectacularisation (Pinder 2000; Bonnett
2006; see also footnote 3 above). Our solution for circumventing this problem was
simply to accept the empirical plurality of history-rooted and history-negligent place
marketing approaches, and instead seek conceivable contextual explanations for
them. Indeed, it proved that both the salient staging of place-bound history and its
virtually thorough-going obliteration – as well as intermediate strategies between
these extremes – are prevalent strategies in the spectacular signification of today’s
urban landscapes (see also Augé 1995: 110). For one thing, the rationale behind
the pervasive cultural distinction (branding) strategy based on heritage-centred
messages at English soccerscapes amounted to an exact antithesis of Debord’s
(1995, 120) view of spectacularisation as a process that facilitates the worldwide

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

“interchangeability” of places. No less intriguingly, our observations from across


Finnish leisurescapes and technoscapes insinuated that “historically purified”–
leaning towards globally “readable” symbols and linguistic choices – strategies of
textual spectacle-making may be more widespread in urban and national settings
that are otherwise less strongly connected to transnational media infrastructure
and capital flows.

Second, another type of conceptual tension concerned the Debordian conviction


about the “independent existence” that representations allegedly take in spectacle-
making. Both in a historical sense and in terms of the spectacle’s inaccessibility “to
any review or correction” by human activity (ibid., 17), the heritage-oriented branding
of the English football stadiums, and the impact of fan pressure on their marketing,
cast doubt on the full empirical validity of this notion. Conversely, the developers’
reliance on the representational power of spatio-temporally free-floating signifiers
was often apparent in the Finnish namescapes analysed above. Even in escapist
leisurescapes such as Zeppelin and Columbus, however, the “language” of physical
design tended to underpin (even if sometimes in very modest ways) the textual
production of the landscape. This observation raises thought-provoking questions
on the interplay between language-based and extra-linguistic representations in
the promotional imagineering of place identities, hopefully to be more systemically
scrutinised in future research.

On the positive side, we contend that the article’s translation of Debord’s (1995)
overwhelmingly generalising and provocative notions into empirically researchable
questions nonetheless opened up a valuable, social theoretically informed lens for
studying the enhanced role of language-based boosterism in urban transformation.
Until today, the multifaceted complicity of language in the symbolic commodification
of space has been all too rarely systematically and critically addressed. With the
exception of a few promising research fronts such as linguistic landscape and
critical place name studies (e.g. Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Berg & Vuolteenaho
2009), even drastic “revolutions in language” (Benjamin 1999, 522) still tend to be
taken for granted – despite their profound ramifications for the ways in which urban
landscapes on the leading edge of local change are re-imagine(ere)d, and in turn
influence the everyday lived realities of people across the social classes. Precisely
because language easily becomes “just” an unreflected communicational medium
– “as indispensable to human life as the air we breathe” (Gadamer 1977, 68) – the
sudden intensification of market-led “language-engineering” on the global scale
should not go unnoticed as a “natural” exigency of our times. Rather, we argue,
the proliferation attention-accumulating strategies by linguistic means ought to be
brought under scrutiny as an “actually existing” cultural manifestation of neoliberal
urbanism and its professionalised (place) branding methods, in particular (Brenner
& Theodore 2002; Vuolteenaho & Ainiala 2009; Krupar & Al forthcoming; Kolamo
& Vuolteenaho forthcoming). In the light of this article’s inquiries, the spectacular

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Vuolteenaho & Kolamo

logic of language – with its monologues of self-praise, evocations of different sorts


of earthly paradises and obsession to value big over small – is already thriving in
contemporary cities. Whether grasped through Debordian or any other theoretical
framework, burning questions related to the language of contemporary urban place
promotion should not bypass critical scholarly attention.

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158
Crippled City:
Joel Lehtonen’s Krokelby as
a Radical Inversion of Finnish
National Romantic Landscapes
Lieven Ameel
University of Helsinki

In the novels Rakastunut rampa (A Cripple in Love, 1922) and Henkien taistelu (The
Battle of the Spirits, 1933), Joel Lehtonen has constructed an imaginary environment
that is at once one of the most disturbing and one of the most original landscapes
to be found in the Finnish literature of the last century: the suburb of Krokelby. This
deformed landscape, neither city nor countryside, is composed of disconcerting
natural elements and crooked houses, and inhabited by grotesque characters. This
article analyses the ways in which the literary landscape of Krokelby constitutes a
radical inversion of more traditional images of Finnish symbolic landscapes, such
as the national-romantic lake district of Eastern Finland, and the complex images
of turn-of-the-century Helsinki. In Lehtonen’s novels, we find a carnivalisation of
the proud and pure expanses of Karelia: a degenerate wasteland, filled with derelict
houses; a Dante-esque scatological nightmare. The satirical and pessimistic way
in which Lehtonen describes these suburban surroundings is prototypical for the
direction in which literary descriptions of Helsinki and its suburbs were gradually
evolving from the 1920s onwards: towards an ever more generic city, an in-between
landscape of uprooted countryside and deformed cityscape. These descriptions
foreshadow later representations of what arguably has become the most influential
symbolic landscape in modern Finnish movies and literature: the suburbs.

Introduction

In Finnish literature of the 1920s and the 1930s, new urban and suburban
environments appear, challenging more traditional national-romantic literary
landscapes and the earlier dichotomies of discourses on the city and the country.
These new environments include the burgeoning descriptions of particular and
often socially defined central urban neighbourhoods, but most importantly, the

Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 13.


Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. 159 –174.
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

generic fringes and the margins of the city in which the rapid changes of society
were also visible in their most urgent forms. One of the most original examples of
such new urban symbolic landscapes can be found in Joel Lehtonen’s final novel
Henkien taistelu (The Battle of the Spirits, 1933). It is a novel set largely in and
around the imaginary suburb of Krokelby, in surroundings that had earlier been
introduced by Lehtonen in Rakastunut rampa (A Cripple in Love, 1922). This essay
examines how, in both novels, the symbolic landscape of the suburbs is given
shape.

After a short introduction, I will analyse how space in Henkien taistelu is


constructed first of all as a satirical exaggeration or deformation of more traditional
Finnish natural landscapes. In Lehtonen’s novels, we find a carnivalised version of
the idealised Eastern Finnish forests and lake districts. Through overt references
to iconic Finnish landscapes, and through the self-reflexive manner in which the
narrator exhibits his use of literary conventions and genres, Joel Lehtonen takes
aim at some of the more conventional methods of framing and structuring the
landscape in literature and the arts, and at the value systems lying behind them. In
Rakastunut rampa and Henkien taistelu, the exploration of the suburban fringes of
the Finnish capital takes on the form of a dystopian critique of the present social,
cultural and political state of affairs: the diseased body of the city becomes a
symbol of the ailing body politic.

The Margins of the City as Testing Ground

Late in the year 1929, two fanciful characters are approaching Helsinki by train,
travelling by way of Turku at the end of a journey that began in Paris. These two men
have as their explicit purpose to explore the (sub)urban landscape of Krokelby in
order to gain a better understanding of the world in all its ramifications. They are an
unlikely couple. On the one hand, we find Kleophas Leanteri Sampila, a naïve and
good-humored graduate forester working for a forest industry company. Sampila
has taken a year’s leave from his position in order to get to know the world, but he is
already on his return journey to Finland after a short and disconcerting trip to Paris.
On the other hand, there is Victor Sorsimo, a beer factory owner who is, in fact, a devil
in disguise; a corporal in the army of Barbuel, the general of the demons. Sorsimo,
also known as “the devil in the bottle” (Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 13), has chosen as
his task to bring his companion Kleophas to destruction. The scene describing
the approach of Sampila and Sorsimo towards the Finnish capital comes some
one hundred pages into Lehtonen’s novel Henkien taistelu (1933/1966), a novel
which is primarily concerned with dissecting the urban landscape of Helsinki, its
imaginary suburb of Krokelby, and its inhabitants. The gloomy work, which has not
without reason been called misanthropic (Tarkka 1966, 92), would be Lehtonen’s

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Ameel

last novel; the year following the publication, in 1934, Lehtonen commited suicide
by hanging.

Traditionally, temptation by the devil is described as taking place in the wilderness


or in an empty desert – the temptation of Jesus Christ in the desert, and that of
the Saint Anthony, are two particularly well-attested cases. Another landscape
typically depicted as a tempting environment, a degenerating seedbed of vice to
which people eventually succumb, is, of course, the Metropolis, and even saints
such as Augustine and Jerome confessed to being “allured and teased by sensuous
images of Rome” (Mumford 1961, 246). In the case of our two companions, it is
significant that the devil in the bottle does not want to tempt the pious Kleophas in
a truly large metropolis – he would have had the chance to do so in Paris, where
they met – and not in a desert or god-forsaken wilderness. The devil is leading
his victim to a new urban symbolic landscape, one which will take on ever larger
proportions in literature and media representations of the city as the twentieth
century proceeds: the margins of the city, and the suburban landscape. By means
of the Helsinki suburb of Krokelby, the devil wants to show his victim the world in
all its viciousness. In his discussion with Sampila, however, the devil suggests that
Krokelby may be instructive in more positive terms: it is a place where “you can
see and learn a thing or two, if you should wish to” (Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 91).1
The Finnish capital and its suburb Krokelby thus take on the form of a particular
metaphorisation of the city, that of an imago mundi, which, in Henri Lefebvre’s
words, constructs the citizens’ “representation of space as a whole, of the earth, of
the world” (Lefebvre 1974/1991, 243–244). By an examination of the city, one might
claim to see metonymically the full world in its totality. Such a vision of the city
was already present in one of the many literary texts that function as inspirations
for Henkien taistelu: Alain-René Lesage’s satirical urban novel Le Diable Boiteux
(The Devil in the Bottle, 1739/1707), which in turn is based on the text El Diablo
Cojuelo (The Devil in the Bottle, 1960/1641) by the Spanish author Luis Vélez de
Guevara. In Lesage’s novel, the city is clearly and overtly approached as an imago
mundi: when the devil in disguise is about to guide an innocent student through the
Spanish capital, he claims that a tour through nightly Madrid will teach the student
about everything that happens in the world (Klotz 1969, 39).

In many respects, Henkien taistelu is still strikingly relevant today. In the novel,
Helsinki and its suburbs in 1929 are in the throes of the Prohibition2; there is talk of
a growing economic crisis, but while many live in poverty and need, in overcrowded
housing conditions, others are getting ever richer, buying and building the most
preposterous real estate. Politically, the country is in turmoil, the extreme right is

1 All translations are by myself, unless stated otherwise.

2 During the Finnish Prohibition (1929–1932), the production, smuggling and consumption of
illegal alcohol spiralled out of control, as did occurrences of alcohol-related crime (see Määttä
2007).

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gaining support, and large segments of the population are deeply dissatisfied with
how the country and its economy are run. The way the landscape is imagined and
experienced in this almost apocalyptic world view is firmly attuned to the pessimistic
message of the novel as a whole – the imagined landscape is presented here as
the quintessential symbol for both the dissatisfaction of the people and the poor
state of affairs in Finland. The dystopian vision of society and of the people that
inhabit the near-infernal landscape is thoroughly grounded in the cultural pessimism
that held much of Europe in its thrall in the inter-war period and that found its
expression in avant-garde movements like German expressionism, a movement to
which Lehtonen’s work is not unconnected.3 This cultural pessimism was exhibited
in the work of a whole series of authors and thinkers commenting on a world in
disarray, from Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918–1923) and Herman
Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos (1920) to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
and Huizinga’s In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935), and in Finland, Tatu Vaaskivi’s
Huomispäivän varjo (The Shadow of Tomorrow, 1938).

In terms of genre, the novel Henkien taistelu is closely related to earlier literary
genres with clear moral dimensions, in which characters and space take on
universalist proportions; genres such as the medieval mystery play, the renaissance
picaresque novel, and, in particular, the Menippean satire.4 The landscape is
thus quite literally a symbolic landscape, an environment that functions as an
“exemplum”, a moral warning one should bear in mind.5 This is most explicitly the
case if we choose to read Henkien taistelu as an exponent of the Menippean satire.
As such, the space in the novel is defined by two characteristics. First of all, we
find the three-layered spatial structure typical for the Menippea (heaven, earth, and
imagined hell). This juxtaposition of the image of the city with spheres belonging to
the religio-mythological is essential for the philosophical and universalist nature of
the novel, in which the plot is structured as the test of a philosophical idea. Second,

3 On the link between Lehtonen’s literary landscapes and those of contemporary Finnish fine
artists, see e.g. Sarajas 1965, 62.

4 Literary critics of Lehtonen’s novel have suggested various generic classifications; one, inspired
by the novel’s subtitle, would be the roman-à-clef (Kauppinen 1966); more commonly, Henkien
taistelu has been widely read as a picaresque novel, in which the protagonist’s journey through
various layers of society is described in fairly undetached fragments (see for example Turunen
1992, 111). One of the earliest critics, Rafael Koskimies, has drawn attention to the fact that the
picaresque is not much more than the generic starting point of Henkien taistelu, in which elements
of the traditional picaresque novel are used in order to produce a satirical critique with a distinctly
modern intellectual and artistic content (see Koskimies 1933/1936, 74–75). As H. Riikonen has
pointed out, Henkien taistelu can be considered a typical example of a Menippean satire (Riikonen
2007). On the characteristics of satire, see Kivistö 2007; on the characteristics of the Menippean
satire, see e.g. Bakhtin 1984, 114–119; Riikonen 1985; Käkelä-Puumala 2007.

5 In Joel Lehtonen’s work, the innovative use of literary genres and of complex intertextual
references is particularly significant. Lehtonen, a translator of amongst others the Decameron,
Stendahl, and the brothers Goncourt (Schoolfield 1998, 134), had a far-ranging knowledge of
international literature, which is visible in the staggering amount of intertextual references in Henkien
taistelu. A profuse amount of references to other texts is also a characteristic of the Menippean
satire, which can be considered as a exceptionally self-conscious genre. In Henkien taistelu, direct
reference is made to one of the most classical example of the Menippean satire: Petronius’ Satyricon.

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Ameel

the description of the spatial planes is profoundly carnivalised. It is viewed through


a satirical looking glass, turned inside out, and presented through extensive use of
oxymorons. The generic framework of the novel does not, however, remain stable
throughout; on the contrary, it shifts and moves constantly, and this is also true for
the narrative perspective. Towards the end of the novel, the experience of urban
space breaks away from a satirical tone couched in comical terms, and moves
into the realm which Irma Perttula has called the “subjective grotesque” (2010), a
change that adds a much more pessimistic layer of meaning.

A Diseased (Sub)Urban Landscape: Krokelby

The urban world we find in Lehtonen’s Rakastunut rampa and Henkien taistelu
resembles to a degree the gloomy London in Dickens’ later novels, a landscape
that has been described by Richard Lehan as a “strange, eerie, primitive world” at
the edges of the city, inhabited with “almost mutant outcasts”; a world in which the
city has turned itself and its near surroundings into a wasteland of “physical debris
and human dereliction” (Lehan 1998, 44, 41). In the case of Lehtonen’s novels, the
area which appears most prominently borders not only on the city and the country,
but also on the imaginary and the real. Krokelby is an imaginary suburb of Helsinki,
but it can be related to areas in or around the factual, geographically locatable
city of Helsinki. In both novels, Krokelby is situated at the eastern fringes of the
Helsinki peninsula, close to the Vanhakaupunki area (literally the old town) and
the mouth of the Vantaa River. Krokelby has been identified on various grounds
with a number of existing Helsinki suburbs, notably with Oulunkylä, Kumpula and
the western Helsinki area of Haaga-Huopalahti (Palmgren 1989; Pulkkinen 2004;
Kallinen 2011). I would like to stress, however, that Krokelby is precisely defined by
the fact that it is an imagined place. The neighbourhood does not have any location
in the physically and geographically identifiable city of Helsinki. This is one of the
reasons why it has the capacity to take on such strong and universalist symbolic
overtones.

In Henkien taistelu, the spatial environment – like all other elements of the
narration – is carnivalised, in the Bakhtinian sense, and is presented in a way that
turns familiar elements inside out: it is space which is, in Bakhtin’s words, “drawn
out of its usual rut, … to some extent ‘life turned inside out’, ‘the reverse side of the
world’ ‘monde à l’envers’)” (Bakhtin 1984, 122). The satirical reversal of the world is
described as a deliberate representational strategy at the very outset of the novel
by the limping devil who guides both the protagonist and the narration in Henkien
taistelu:

I intend to show him [the protagonist, Kleophas Sampila] what people, not without a
kind of pride, call life, as if in a film visited by the scissors of the censure, only with

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the difference that I shall cut out the harmless parts, the quiet, nice people, and shall
direct a blinding light from the projector on the corrupt sides of the average citizens and
even the exemplary ones. I shall represent it all, intentionally, as largely disconnected
episodes; the result, I hope, will be confused and imprecise, like the time in which the
world is now living. (Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 23)6

The devil, in his prologue, stresses how he will describe people in a satirical
light, and the novel’s subtitle, in particular (“A Story about Our Famous Citizens”),
draws the reader’s attention to the character description. But the devil’s words can
be equally applied to the carnivalesque description of the spatial surroundings in
Henkien taistelu, whose “confused and imprecise” description will be representative
of the contemporary times of turmoil.

The first and most radical carnivalisation or satirical exaggeration, with which we
can identify Krokelby, and which amounts to the most fundamental characteristic of
the suburban landscape in Lehtonen’s prose, is that of deformity; of being unnatural,
diseased, crooked, and crippled. Krokelby is a profoundly deformed landscape,
neither city nor countryside, made up of repulsive natural elements and crooked
houses, and the elements constituting the landscape are symbolically intertwined
with the grotesque and deformed characters that inhabit it. In the words of Sampila,
Krokelby seems to be “scrapped together with debris from the countryside and
refuse from Helsinki” (Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 232). The link between Krokelby
and deformity is a semantic one to begin with. The very name of this imaginary
environment is made up of two parts, the suffix -by, a common Nordic suffix in
toponyms, which today has the meaning “village”, added to the root Krokel. Krokel
resembles the Swedish word krokig, meaning “bent”, “crooked”, “hooked”. The
Swedish word krokryggig means “hunchbacked” and this brings us to the literary
character that was closely connected with the Krokelby environments: Sakris
Kukkelmann, the “Cripple in Love” in Lehtonen’s 1922 novel by the same name (see
Perttula 2006). Krokelby, then, could be translated as Crookedville or Crippleby: a
deformed, crippled city, symbolic of a society verging on moral bankruptcy.

From the very outset, Krokelby is referred to as a disease-like extension to the


body of Helsinki: the devil in the bottle introduces it to Sampila with the words that
it is a “village, which like a bump, has grown onto the side of Helsinki” (Lehtonen
1933/1966a, 91). This rendering draws on the traditional imagery of the city-as-
body, and reads the suburb as a deformity of the normal urban fabric. The body
is one of the most potent metaphors with which the city can be conceptualised, a
descriptive strategy to which, according to Lefebvre, recourse is especially made
when the city and its representatives feel under threat (Lefebvre 1974/1991, 274;
see also Grosz 1992). But the metaphor of the body can also be used in a sense
that equates the city with the body politic, attributing perceived diseases in society

6 The translation is by Ahokas 1973, 201–202.

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Ameel

to the ailing body of the city. This metaphorisation allows for the concept of the city
as a diseased body, which is an image that has been used in describing London,
in particular (Williams 1973, 146). Raymond Williams has pointed out that the
consequence of this image is a broader vision of society as rotten: if the city “was
seen as monstrous, or as a diseased growth, this had logically to be traced back
to the whole social order” (ibid.). Lehtonen is one of the first authors to apply such
thinking to the literary image of Helsinki and its suburbs, and in Henkien taistelu, the
vision of the expanding suburban environment as a deformed, unhealthy, crippled
landscape takes on ever stronger overtones as the novel proceeds.7 The idea of
deformity in the novel does not only pertain to the city, but in Henkien taistelu,
everything and everybody is to a greater or lesser extent disturbingly distorted.
The strangely deformed houses built in Krokelby are in fact literally referred to
as ‘mirroring’ their owners. One of the many bootlegging inhabitants of Krokelby
proudly proclaims that his house, a monstrous construction resembling a Kirgizian
yurt with galvanised sheet metal roof, “shines, so that I can see my reflection in it”
(Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 104).

Reversal of National-romantic Landscapes

If the city appears in these novels as a crippled body, and the suburb as a disease
infecting the ordered societal organism, Krokelby’s landscape is also presented as
a negative reversal of traditional Finnish natural environments and natural-romantic
symbolic landscapes. Landscapes, of course, are more than mere territorial
categories: they constitute ways of seeing and structuring cultural environments;
landscapes are produced, and as such, they entail specific value systems
(Raivo 1997). As Sharon Zukin points out, landscape “connotes a contentious,
compromised product of society” (Zukin 1991, 16), and in Henkien taistelu, the
deliberate juxtaposition of a marginal locality with iconic landscapes from the
Finnish national-romantic canon constitutes an integral part of Joel Lehtonen’s
endeavor to create a literary image of a society profoundly at odds with itself.

At the beginning of Henkien taistelu, the devil in disguise immediately points


out to his victim how ugly and unnatural the features of Krokelby’s landscape are,
arguing that the landscape significantly does not include a lake, “the soul of the
Finnish landscape” (Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 101–102). The devil, in his oxymoronic
style, continues almost immediately after this passage with a eulogy of how
natural, and indeed how typically Finnish, the very same suburban landscape in

7 Henkien taistelu can be (and has been) read as a political satire, up to the point where the
“spirits” in the title are defined as communism and fascism. This would, however, provide a profoundly
reductionist reading of the novel. The spiritual battle might as well refer to the moral or philosophical
testing of ideas, or conversely, to the “battle of the spirits” during the Finnish Prohibition (1919–
1932). Like the monstrously deformed landscape it conjures up before the reader, the fragmentary
and protean text of Henkien taistelu ultimately defies conclusive interpretation.

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fact is. In the devil’s words, Krokelby is situated like an ideal Finnish landscape
amidst swamps and forests, and he continues: “The swamp and the forest - they
are almost the metaphors of Finland, aren’t they?” (ibid., 102). But the speech of
the devil continues in a satirical tone, connecting these traditional metaphors of the
Finnish landscape with strong negative overtones:

A lonely, reclusive forest, and a submerged, icy bog – and amidst both, here at our feet,
this charming village that I would like to extol to you. (Ibid.)

That “charming village” of Krokelby, then, is situated in the middle of swamps


and forests, but the forest is described as “lonely” and “reclusive”, and the swamp
as a “submerged, icy bog”. The swamp, moreover, is often used in the prose of
Joel Lehtonen as a symbol of madness and atavistic instincts.8 The “positive”
description, then, with reference to traditional natural landscapes is infested with
negative meanings: the happy connection with these Finnish icons, the swamp
and the forest, are immediately turned upside down by the negative connotations
attached to both.

Krokelby is situated close to the waterfront, and from the highest storeys of its
villas not only is the river Vantaa visible, but also the sea bay near the rapids of the
Vanhakaupunki district. The waterscape of Helsinki, which one might suspect to
have potential for positive, even aesthetic experiences is on a number of occasions
negatively juxtaposed with the healthy waters of Eastern Finland. In Rakastunut
rampa, the novel with which Lehtonen introduced Krokelby, the comparison
between the healthy Finnish lake district and the unhealthy, unnatural coastal
area of Krokelby is explicitly spelled out. In this novel, young Nelma, a girl who is
originally from eastern Finland and who has moved to Helsinki, feels repulsed by
the city and its depressing natural surroundings. She hates “that gloomy sea, which
looked dreary, she found even its water disgustingly murky” (Lehtonen 1922/2006,
137). Nelma negatively juxtaposes the hateful waterfront of the Helsinki suburb,
which she calls “an oppressive and brooding landscape”, with the healthy bright
lakes at home:

... And again, that water: thick and sticky… The sea smelled bitter… she thought it
stank.
Forever were lost to her the bright-watered lakes of her home, and their sandy, quiet
beaches! (Ibid., 154)

8 In Henkien taistelu, the image of the swamp is repeatedly linked to the protagonist’s gradual
loss of mental balance towards the end of the novel. Sampila describes the atavistic, hereditary evil
within him, for example, as the “water at the bottom of a swamp” (Lehtonen 1933b, 270).

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In Rakastunut rampa, young Nelma can still dream of the “bright-watered lakes
of her home”, but in the dystopian world vision of Henkien taistelu, the lake district
no longer offers salvation. The pastoral qualities of the countryside have lost their
power, and when Sampila pathetically quotes Horace’s “O rus quando ego te
aspiciam” (“Oh countryside, when shall I see you again”) the effect is distinctly
comical (Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 178). The satirical attitude towards national-
romantic landscape imagery which is visible in the description of Krokelby is taken
to extremes in two mocking references in Henkien taistelu to what are arguably the
most iconic Finnish national romantic symbolic landscapes: Koli and Punkaharju.
Koli, in northeast Finland, is one of the most quintessentially Finnish landscapes.
In Lehtonen’s novel, this landscape, or more precisely, its representation in the
canonised painting by Eero Järnefelt, is ironically described by the devil as the
bombing of Port Arthur, the famous Russian naval fortress attacked by Japan in
the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905): “people think, for example, that Järnefelt’s
Koli is the bombing of Port Arthur, because it seems to have those puffy clouds
coming from an artillery gun barrel” (ibid., 154). The devil’s joke expresses a
deep lack of respect for Finnish canonical national-romantic landscapes – but it
can also be understood as a harsh critique which the poor knowledge the devil’s
contemporaries have of art (and, perhaps, also of recent history).

The carnivalisation of the Punkaharju landscape is more complex, and runs


through a variety of chapters of Henkien taistelu. The Punkaharju landscape is
one of the prime examples of a Finnish national-romantic landscape, and as such
an important cultural product, framed and to a considerable extent produced and
reproduced (Karjalainen 1989, 290). In Lehtonen’s novel, Punkaharju is the subject
of an elaborate economic scam devised by a parvenu businessman visiting Krokelby
on a number of occasions; the businessman intends to “buy” the landscape and to
turn its forest lands into profit. Not surprisingly, the plan eventually does not succeed,
but it is instructive for the way in which everything in the novel – people, houses
and landscapes alike – is presented as a potential commodity, and as a possible
target for commercialization. The processes involved in the Punkaharju scam are
symptomatic of the far-reaching commodification of the landscape, its features and
its inhabitants, that is discernable in Henkien taistelu. Similar processes have been
analysed in detail by Marxist thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) and David
Harvey (1989). Lefebvre argues that the early decades of the twentieth century saw
a rupture in the way space was experienced and produced, and describes the
advent of what he calls “abstract space”, which homogenises environments in the
way they are put into action in capitalist (late) industrial societies.

We already know several things about abstract space. As a product of violence and
war, it is political; instituted by a state, it is institutional. On first inspection, it appears
homogeneous; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula rasa of whatever
stands in their way, of whatever threatens them – in short, of differences. (Lefebvre
1974/1991, 285)

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What Lefebvre calls “abstract space” levels and homogenises the complex
layers of historical space, and reduces differences. Dominating space, it draws the
most heterogeneous elements into a process of commodification.9 Following the
thinking set out by Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974/1991), we can say
that the processes at work in the suburban space in Henkien taistelu involve the
“mobilisation of space for the purposes of its production”, and that they are guided
by the dictum that the “entirety of space must be endowed with exchange value”
and drawn into the orbit of the “commodity world” (Lefebvre 1974/1991, 336–337).
As Lefebvre points out, such a process inevitably leads to a gradual destruction
of nature, precipitated by “the economic wish to impose … traits and criteria of
interchangeability upon places”, with the result that places are gradually “deprived
of their specificity – or even abolished” (ibid., 343). The effect is a degradation of
both town and country “into an undifferentiated mass” (ibid., 55).

Ironically, in Lehtonen’s Henkien taistelu, Sampila himself is part of the machinery


that industrialises the idealised natural landscape of Finland: he is a forstmestari,
a “graduate forester” working for an industrial company. Abstract space and its
commodifying tabula rasa lies at the core of the critical view of landscapes visible in
Henkien taistelu: the suburban landscape is not only a disease, infecting the body
of the city, but landscapes themselves, like their inhabitants, can be corrupted, sold,
treated as commodities, dismembered and disfigured in the name of an economic
programme that disregards humanity itself. In Lehtonen’s prose, the threat of a
commodifying “abstract space” is present at all spatial and social levels, but the
effects are most immediately visible in the capital’s expanding fringes.

Gradually, throughout the novel, the monstrous characteristics of the


surroundings and of Krokelby’s inhabitants start to dawn on the protagonist. This
change from a satirical description towards an inwardly, personally felt misanthropic
vision is connected in the novel to a gradual change of perspective and focalisation.
As the novel proceeds, Sampila’s experiences are narrated less and less through
the satirical voice of the bottled devil, and more and more through focalisation of
Sampila himself, who is tossed between conflicting feelings of repulsion, irony and
despair. The workings of the devil start to have their effect, and Sampila begins to
feel so upset by how his opinions of society have changed, that he wants to leave
Krokelby:

9 The homogenizing process involved in abstract space can be considered as a more radical
expansion of the “levelling” brought about by the force of money in the Metropolis, as described
by Simmel (1903/1969). The effects of the accelerating expansion of what Lefebvre calls “abstract
space” also bear some similarities to the more recent notions of non-places, places set apart from
history and contrasted with “places of identity, of relations and of history”; a concept developed by
Marc Augé (1992, 43), and to Edward Relph’s notion of placelessness (1976). What is involved in
this levelling of complex personally lived places is, in part, a set of processes defined by Marshall
Berman in All That is Solid Melts in Air (1982/1989) as being informed by “a will to change … and by
a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart” (Berman 1982/1989, 13).

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Ameel

He really wanted to move away from this village, this half-city in the neighborhood of
Helsinki, which the struggle for life, as he called it in his thoughts, had certainly ruined,
distorted, brutalised… (Lehtonen 1933/1966a: 231)

A Landscape of Flesh and Dirt

The final and most disturbing reversal of the urban landscape in Henkien taistelu
is the change of a fertile childhood landscape into the derelict wasteland of human
refuse which takes place towards the very end of the novel. This happens in one
of the final chapters, aptly entitled “The Tombs”. Kleophas Leanteri Sampila has
a dream in which he finds the idyllic countryside environment of his childhood
suddenly transformed into a graveyard.10 It is an infernal landscape, but even worse
than hell, since there are no devils or dead souls, in fact nothing at all except filth
and flesh. The sudden, disconcerting vision of a hellish landscape of human flesh
is part of a larger frame of reference in the novel, which sees the humans passing
through the urban landscape in terms of the decaying flesh they will become when
nature runs its course. A crucial image in this respect is that of the late medieval
painting of the dance of death at the St. Mary Church in Lübeck, which Sampila
has seen during his travels (Lehtonen 1933/1966b, 250). But in the industrialising
world, the link between humans and mortal flesh takes on an even more distressing
meaning than the one found in the late medieval, plague-inspired image of the dance
of death. Industrial warfare and the dehumanising routines of grand-scale factory
work have shown that human beings, too, can become part of a rationalised and
devouring food chain. A profoundly pessimistic vision of humanity makes Kleophas
Sampila look with disgust at the spectacle of his fellow citizens sunbathing at the
Helsinki beach:

There’s also the kind of people that stroll in their bare shirts along the Helsinki streets,
glowing in the summer heat, and that plod to the public beach, where Kleophas, too,
once had strayed, as if this political turmoil did not concern them in the least. No, they
are just lounging about there in the sand, or throw a somersault in the sunshine, those
thousands, tens of thousands of people, almost naked, on their stomachs, on their
backs, eyes in the glaring sand – on their backs as if they are bronze statues cast
down, black like mulattoes, on their stomachs like dough – while the loudspeaker is
trumpeting wailing saxophone melodies. Healthiness: flirting, adventures! – And it’s like
that all over the country… such – flesh! To Kleophas it is flesh! It seems as if he feels a
strange repulsion towards flesh. (Lehtonen 1933/1966b, 178–179)

10 A visit in hell is a typical episode in Menippean satires (see Käkelä-Puumala 2007, 184–188),
as is the “crisis dream” (see Bakhtin 1984, 152–153). The profoundly misanthropic view expressed
in Sampila’s dream, however, and the disconcerting effect the hellish vision has on the protagonist,
run counter to the satirical and comical tone of the Menippea, and indicate a gradual shift of genre
away from satire, towards the subjective grotesque.

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The flirtatious mood of the age, accompanied by jazz music, sunbathing and
loose clothing, is sharply juxtaposed in Lehtonen’s novel with a vision of mortal
flesh awaiting its tribulations in hell. Immediately after the passage above, Sampila
is invited to the farewell party for the bottled devil. Looking down at the panorama
of Krokelby, which he perceives as a threatening painting by Da Vinci, he is able to
discern some sun-bathers on the rocks further off:

Further away, on the top of a rock, where the whitewashed tower of a villa shimmered,
small beings moved around: half-naked sun-bathers, – or they were lying motionless
on the rock as if on a torrid stove or as meat on a grill. (Ibid., 181–182)

In Sampila’s grotesque vision, the tiny sun-bathing figures visible in the


panoramic view of Krokelby literally appear as meat on a grill. The description of
the Krokelby rock as a “torrid stove” on which to grill human flesh is one of a number
of recurring and disturbing references to human beings in terms of flesh in the
novel, which reaches a climax in the image of the slaughterhouse. In the chapter
immediately following the nightmare vision in the chapter “The Tombs,” Sampila’s
mental balance is decisively shaken when he is confronted with a hellish scene
taking place within the Krokelby slaughterhouse he happens to pass by – a building
which is conveniently situated next to a sausage factory (Lehtonen 1933/1966b,
258ff). The disturbing view of brutal slaughter, in which, amongst others, a bull
is being stabbed and bleeding profusely, the head of a pig is being crushed with
an axe-hammer, everything accompanied by the defining roar of the various
animals, functions as a concretization of the inferno Sampila has just encountered
in his nightmare. The fact that most of the characters in Henkien taistelu have
animal names and often animal-like characteristics makes the presence of a
slaughterhouse in the middle of Krokelby all the more forbidding (Tarkka 1966). It
can be interpreted as a tangible reminder of the industrialisation of the food chain,
which bodes ill for the future of the human beings in Krokelby, too. The link between
flesh and the slaughterhouse might have been received with added disgust by
contemporary readers, since only a few years before the appearance of Henkien
taistelu, in 1931, Helsinki had been shocked by the findings of human body parts
in the outskirts of the capital (not that far, in fact, from the Old Town area), and a
widely mediatised rumor claimed that human flesh had been mingled into food at a
local meat grinding factory (Häkkinen & Similä 2010).

Landscape and Class

The slaughterhouse is not the only non-residential building that takes on symbolic
significance in the novel. Mention is made on various occasions, significantly, of
the beer factory of Vihtori Sorsimo – the medium of the devil in the bottle – and
of a cement brick factory, buildings that can be seen to represent, respectively,
the degenerative alcoholism fought by the Prohibition, and the grotesque building

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projects disfiguring the face of the Helsinki cityscape. In Rakastunut rampa, the
picture of disruptive industrialisation and commodification is completed with a
fourth building in the setting of Krokelby: that of the shelter for fallen women. The
presence of these four symbolically-charged buildings in the suburban landscape
can be seen as symptomatic of the way in which the suburb in Lehtonen’s prose
has become the symbol for the gradual, sprawling dispersion of industrialisation’s
disruptive influence throughout space, and the crippling, debilitating effects of this
evolution.

If the suburban landscape in Lehtonen’s novels is defined by the processes


of industrialisation and commodification, the way the characters in these novels
experience their surrounding space and their movements through space, is guided
by the social class they belong to. Examined from this perspective one can say
that the description of Krokelby in Lehtonen’s novels also represents a reversal of
earlier representations of the social geography of turn-of-the century Helsinki, with
its clearly structured social boundaries that were hardly ever transgressed except
through elaborate ritual. Krokelby does not only present a motley environment
in terms of its buildings and the way it combines elements of various symbolic
landscapes; it is also extremely diverse in its combination of various classes of
people. This is a world in which the parvenus found in Onerva’s 1911’s collection
of short stories Nousukkaita (Parvenus) have risen to be the leading members of a
society gradually turning on itself. In the urban fringes of Lehtonen’s novels, we find
prostitutes, liquor runners, working class people on their way upward in society,
and men of position on their way downward.

In the centre of the city, and in a number of clearly-defined working-class


districts, a particular locality signifies belonging to a particular social class – as
people move through these localities, their social class changes accordingly, and
in this sense, the characters’ trajectories through the urban landscape function as
metaphors for social rise and fall. The formerly successful Myyrimö, for example,
has been forced to take up residence in a gloomy cellar in the environment of the
working class districts of Sörnäinen and Vallila, a “terrible place”, which Sampila
imagines to be inhabited by dangerous gang members looking like Apaches from
the Western movies, and with people planning their shady business in the shadows
and the fog (Lehtonen 1933/1966b, 43–45). Another of Sampila’s acquaintances,
the successful art dealer and swindler Mikael Reineck (a reference to Goethe’s
Reineke Fuchs), has made a journey in a different direction, ending up in a large
private palace in the up-market Kaivopuisto neighbourhood (ibid., 51). And when
Sampila takes a tram to leave the center of the city, he meets yet another of his
acquaintances, Maimanen, who is an impoverished drunkard, and lives in the area
around the street Hämeentie, a locality which constitutes, again, a clear marker of
the character’s downward social mobility (ibid., 111).

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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements

The wanderings of the protagonist of Henkien taistelu stand outside such social
trajectories, since Kleophas Sampila’s position is by definition that of an eternal
outsider and spectator: he does not belong to the environment he comments upon.
Neither does he really represent a social class, but rather an (at first optimistic) idea
of society which is tested by exposure to the suburban environment. In the course
of the novel, Sampila’s excursions into Krokelby and Helsinki shatter his optimistic
view of the world. The “struggle for life”, which so fatefully has “ruined, distorted,
brutalised” (Lehtonen 1933/1966a, 231) Krokelby and its inhabitants, also starts
to weigh down on him, and the extended sojourn in this depressing suburban
symbolic landscape is to prove his ruin. At the side of some nondescript forest road
in the vicinity of Krokelby, Sampila, disillusioned and resigned to his fate, is killed
by a tramp for no particular reason or purpose.

Conclusion

In the novels Rakastunut rampa and Henkien taistelu, Joel Lehtonen has constructed
an imaginary environment that is at once one of the most disturbing and one of
the most original landscapes to be found in Finnish literature of the last century.
The imaginary suburb of Krokelby is a deformed landscape which is neither city
nor countryside, but constitutes a radical inversion of more traditional images of
Finnish symbolic landscapes, such as the national-romantic lake district of Eastern
Finland, and the complex images of turn-of-the-century Helsinki. The satirical
and pessimistic way in which Lehtonen describes these suburban surroundings is
prototypical for the direction in which descriptions of Helsinki and its suburbs were
gradually evolving from the 1920s onwards, foreshadowing later representations
of what arguably has become the most influential symbolic landscape in modern
Finnish movies and literature: the suburbs.

172
Ameel

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174
List of Contributors
Yunis Alam is a lecturer in the School of Social and International Studies at the
University of Bradford, with teaching and research interests in qualitative research
methods, ethnic relations, popular culture and postcolonial literatures. He is also a
novelist, writer of short stories and has edited anthologies of crime fiction and oral
history.

Lieven Ameel is a PhD student of Finnish literature at the Helsinki University.


He works on the emergence of literary Helsinki during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. His main research interests include the experience of
the literary city, and contemporary urban practices. Together with Sirpa Tani he
has published several articles on the innovative urban practice parkour. He is the
coordinator of the Helsinki Literature and the City Network.

Nicolas Bencherki is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Technology


Management of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. He researches
organizational culture from a sociomaterial and language-based perspective.
Bencherki holds a dual PhD in organizational communication from Université de
Montréal and in sociology of action from Sciences Po Paris. He has also been
a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the sociology of innovation at the Paris
Mines School. His work concerns the relationship between language, materiality
and action, inasmuch as it explains the constitution, endurance and agency of
collectives.

Charles Husband is professor of social analysis and co-director of the Centre for
Applied Social Research at Bradford University; and docent at the University of
Helsinki. His research has focused upon ethnic relations and the critical application
of social science theory and research to contemporary social policy issues. His
most recent book, with Yunis Alam, is Social Cohesion and Counter-terrorism: A
Policy Contradiction? (Policy Press, 2011).

Sami Kolamo is trained both in human geography (University of Oulu) and


media studies (University of Tampere). He is currently researcher at the School
of Communication, Media and Theatre, University of Tampere. His main research
interests deal with sports mega-events, mediated urban environments and fan
activities. His PhD dissertation on football media spectacles will be published in
December 2013.

175
Kaisa Koskinen is professor of translation studies at the University of Eastern
Finland in Joensuu. She is the author of Beyond Ambivalence. Postmodernity and
the Ethics of Translation (2000) and Translating Institutions. An Ethnographic Study
of EU Translation (St Jerome, 2008); co-author of Käyttäjäkeskeinen kääntäminen
(‘User-centred Translation’, 2012) and co-editor of Translators’ Agency (2010).
Her current research interests include usability and translation, retranslation, and
the city of Tampere as a translation space. The edited volume Tulkattu Tampere
(‘Translated Tampere’) will appear in 2013.

Andrew G. Newby is Finnish Academy Senior Research Fellow and Docent in


European Area and Cultural Studies, University of Helsinki. He is a Fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His
research deals with the history and society of northern Europe from 1800 to the
present day.

Yannik Porsché is a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University


of Mainz and the Université de Bourgogne. His research and publications focus on
discourse and interaction analysis. He concentrates on topics of migration and
museums and concepts of the public, representation and epistemic cultures, and
identity. Previously, he studied psychology and philosophy in the UK and France.

Maggie Scott is lecturer in English language at the University of Salford. She has
a long-standing interest in onomastics, completing her PhD on the place-names of
Southern Scotland in 2004, and is currently the editor of Nomina, the journal of the
Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland.

Jani Vuolteenaho (Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies) is an urban


geographer whose research record covers a range of topics from spatial theory to
the historical and contemporary politics of place and street naming, urban
regeneration projects, place branding and the mundane spaces of poverty in
contemporary cities. He has edited numerous journals, anthologies and theme
issues, including Terra – Geographical Journal, the cultural magazine Särö
(‘Rupture’), COLLeGIUM: Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social
Sciences and Critical Toponymies (Ashgate, 2009), a ground-breaking collection
of essays on naming-related power struggles.

176

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