Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Urban Entanglements
Edited by
Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott
VOLUME 13
Contents
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
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.
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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott
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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)
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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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).
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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott
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.
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
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.
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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
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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.
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
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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott
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.
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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.
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Vuolteenaho, Ameel, Newby & Scott
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
Introduction
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
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.
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).
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.”
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.
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.”
35
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
References
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Bencherki, N. & F. Cooren. 2011. To have or not to be: The possessive constitution of
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Gastil, J. & P. Levine. 2005. The Deliberative Democracy Handbook: Strategies for Effective
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–––– 1988. A relativistic account of Einstein’s relativity. Social Studies of Science 18, 3–44.
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–––– & É. Hermant. 1998. Paris ville invisible. Paris: La Decouverte / Les Empecheurs de
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44
Public Representations of
Immigrants in Museums
Towards a Microsociological
Contextualisation Analysis1
Yannik Porsché
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz / Université de Bourgogne
Introduction
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
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).
46
Porsché
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
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
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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Porsché
49
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.
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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Porsché
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.
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
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.
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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Porsché
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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?].
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:
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.
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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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.
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
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.
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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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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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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.
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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
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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
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References
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Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday.
–––– 1967. Interaction Ritual. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
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72
Linguistic Landscape as
a Translational Space:
The Case of Hervanta, Tampere
Kaisa Koskinen
University of Eastern Finland
Introduction
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
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)
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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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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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.
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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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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
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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.
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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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.
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.
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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)
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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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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Koskinen
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.
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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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
and identity work without creating clear-cut boundaries between the targeted in-
group and others.
Conclusions
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.
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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.
Ben-Rafael, E., E. Shohamy & M. Barni 2010. Introduction: An approach to an ‘ordered disorder’.
In E. Shohamy, E. Ben-Rafael & M. Barni (eds.) 2010. Linguistic Landscape in the City.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
City of Tampere 2011a. Tampereen väestö 31.12.2010. Tilastokeskuksen väestötiedot
ikäryhmittäin ja osa-alueittain [Data on the Population of Tampere]. Available online at
<http://www.tampere.fi/material/attachments/v/5yY2luK0K/vaesto2010_5.7.2011.pdf.0>
(visited 3 April 2012)
City of Tampere 2011b. Tampereen väestö kielen ja osa-alueen mukaan 13.6.2011 [Population
of Tampere according to language and subdivision 13.6.2011]. Unpublished excel-
document.
Cronin, M. 2006. Translation and Identity. New York & London: Routledge.
Edelman, L. 2010. Linguistic Landscapes in the Netherlands A Study of Multilingualism in
Amsterdam and Friesland. Academic dissertation. University of Amsterdam. Available
online at <www.lotpublications.nl/publish/articles/004126/bookpart.pdf> (visited 23
September 2011).
Hanauer, D. I. 2009. Science and the linguistic landscape: A genre analysis of representational
wall space in a microbiology laboratory. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (eds.) Linguistic
Landscape: Expanding the Scenery. New York & London: Routledge. 287–301.
House, J. 1977. A Model for Translation Quality Assessment. Tübingen, Gunter Narr.
Hult, F. M. 2009. Language ecology and linguistic landscape analysis. In E. Shohamy & D.
Gorter (eds.) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery. New York & London:
Routledge. 88–104.
Language Act [kielilaki] 423/2003. Available online in English at <www.finlex.fi/en/laki/
kaannokset/2003/en20030423> (visited 23 September 2011).
Reh, M. 2004. Multilingual writing: A reader-oriented typology – with examples from Lira
Municipality (Uganda). International Journal of the Sociology of Language 170, 1–41.
Scollon, R. & S. W. Scollon 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World. New
York & London: Routledge.
Shohamy, E., E. Ben-Rafael & M. Barni (eds.) 2010. Linguistic Landscape in the City. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
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92
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
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
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.
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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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.
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
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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.
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.
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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).
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
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.
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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.
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
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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
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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.
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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)
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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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.
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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).
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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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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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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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Husband & Alam
109
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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.
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
110
Husband & Alam
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.
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
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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114
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.
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
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
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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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
conduit of culture, then it is necessary to take a closer look in order to locate the
city within the broader, national, linguistic landscape.
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
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:
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).
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).
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
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.)
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.
122
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
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.
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
23 See <www.hmsdunedin.co.uk>.
27 See <www.dunedin-consort.org.uk>.
28 See <www.dunedindancers.org.uk>.
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Scott
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.
29 See <www.duncantaylor.com/products/auld_reekie.htm>.
30 See <www.auldreekie-guesthouse.co.uk>.
32 See <www.auldreekie-photography.co.uk>.
33 See <www.auldreekiefeet.co.uk>.
35 See <www.arrg.co.uk/about.php>.
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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>.
126
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
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.
127
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
“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
129
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
Jani Vuolteenaho, Lieven Ameel, Andrew Newby & Maggie Scott (eds.) 2012
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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
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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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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.
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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Vuolteenaho & Kolamo
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.
135
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
If a place has a name like Paradise, you obviously are going to have a different attitude
towards it.
Kostanski (2009, 157)
136
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.
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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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
• 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.
139
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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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Vuolteenaho & Kolamo
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.
141
Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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.
5 On the concept of edge city, initially used in the North American context of decentralised
urbanism, see: Garreau 1992.
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Vuolteenaho & Kolamo
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)
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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.
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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.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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heritage sites does not, therefore, seem far-fetched at all (Bélanger 2000, 387;
Hewison 1987; Harris 1989).
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Conclusions
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
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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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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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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
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.
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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last novel; the year following the publication, in 1934, Lehtonen commited suicide
by hanging.
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
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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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.
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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).
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.
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.)
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).
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).
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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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)
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)
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.
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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.
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References
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Language, Space and Power: Urban Entanglements
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.
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).
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.
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.
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