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Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of Meaning

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DOI: 10.1080/07293682.2012.757413

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Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of

Meaning
a
Stewart Williams
a
School of Geography and Environmental Studies , University of Tasmania , Hobart ,
Tasmania , Australia
Published online: 02 May 2013.

To cite this article: Stewart Williams (2013): Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of Meaning, Australian Planner,
50:1, 84-86

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 84 Book Reviews
usual’, heads down, just keep on planning); or critical
(planning or doing something else in light of mounting
evidence of potential dis-equilibration of environmen-
tal systems as a result of human intervention). Given
Dauvergne’s demonstration that rich societies are
freighting their need for solutions concerning resource
availability and pollution to the developing world, the
more prescient planners might recognise that the real
frontier now lies in the human psyche itself. At this
point, a discipline based around the ‘rational’ method
should start questioning the foundations on which
armchair theorists have regularly founded their mod-
elling and on which régimes have built their power.
As the (P)(A)(T) elements expand inexorably,
planetary finiteness tightens, certainty defers to un-
certainty (by way of unanticipated environmental
kickbacks) and assumptions of an absolutist global
Downloaded by [University of Tasmania] at 15:14 02 May 2013
rationality look threadbare. There is no reason why
reflective planners ‘with a view’ cannot join other
social scientists, who, as the herd thunders past,
choose to probe the boundaries of rationality and
irrationality in the hope that in the not-so-long run,
the pen will be mightier than the sword. With the
earth hotting up and glaciers in retreat, support for
reason and sanity is the proper territory for realists
interested in positive action. Despite evidence in The
Shadows of Consumption that a limited number of
sub-optimal technologies and practices have been
arrested, Dauvergne finds it ‘deeply troubling’ (215)
that environmentalism is failing to produce sustain-
able global patterns of supply and demand. It will
take ‘years of consultations and negotiations’ (219)
for the Green movement to control the shadows of
consumption. He can only ‘begin the conversation’
(219) by pointing out practical ways to balance
consumers, corporations, trade and financial flows.
Philosophically, one could go further, doubting
that any broad IPAT consciousness or planning is
inherent in human development. Increasingly, the
supranational scale needs additional expertise to
counter its maverick and improbable elements, like
the casino economy. The book’s dog-whistle to the
discipline is that we need more planners with a big,
rather than a small, focus and those of proactive,
rather than reactive, intent. Their role would be to
condition certain elements prone to get out of
control, namely, global demography and human
aspiration and organisation.
In the interim, it is to disciplines like environ-
mental management and political economy and to
polished authors like Dauvergne that credit must go.
He has helped uncover the macro elements
the
disturbed settings, in which, vocationally, most plan-
ners have to neglect the imposing effect of function
and still seek to merely manage form. Greater
participation by senior and strategic planners at a
wider level, by use of existing disciplinary skills,
focused enquiry, public commentary, incisive advo-
cacy and the simple act of saying ‘enough’ (Coyle
2011), could take the profession to an altogether
higher level of critique, scholarly development and
long-term public relevance.
References
Coyle, D. 2011. The Economics of Enough: How to Run the
Economy as if the Future Matters. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Ehrlich, P. R., and J. P. Holdren. 1971. ‘‘Impact of
population growth.’’ Science 171 (3977): 1212
1217.
Jayne, M. 2006. Cities and Consumption. London: Routledge.
Wadley, D. A. 2011. ‘‘Review: M. Leach, I. Scoones and A.
Stirling. 2010. Dynamic Sustainabilities: Technology,
Environment, Social Justice.’’ Australian Planner 48 (3):
241
242.
Wynne, D., J. O’Connor, and D. Phillips. 1998. ‘‘Con-
sumption and the postmodern city.’’ Urban Studies 35
(6): 841
864.
David A. Wadley
School of Geography, Planning and Environmental
Management
The University of Queensland
Queensland
Australia
Email: d.wadley@uq.edu.au
# 2013, David A. Wadley
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07293682.2012.757412
Cities and Fascination: Beyond the Surplus of Meaning,
edited by Heiko Schmid, Wolf-Dietrich Sahr and John
Urry, Farnham UK and Burlington USA, Ashgate
(www.ashgate.com), 2011, i
xvii243 pp. (17 figures;
1 table), ISBN 978-1-4094-1853-5 (hardback)
The book Cities and Fascination is an edited collection
of essays and the result of a symposium held at
Heidelberg, Germany, in 2007. Both event and book
cohere to the familiar motifs of production and
consumption in the spectacular and themed, as well
as ‘fascinating’, urban landscapes of our contemporary
modern-cum-postmodern world. After the introduc-
tion, it has four sections, ranging from the theoretical
to empirical in coverage. The first section is a
theoretical entrée to fascination (comprising four
chapters); the second has some practical inflection
with its two chapters; the third part delivers four case
studies (on Heidelberg-Emmertsgrund, the Ruhr dis-
trict, Hamburg and Macao); and the fourth section

looks forward to new horizons, with the book’s final
chapter considering urban fascination and excess in
relation to climate.
The participants at Heidelberg who contributed to
this book are established academics primarily from
two different worlds
one Anglo-American, the
other German
which makes for interesting observa-
tions. First, this book grapples with difficulties of
re-engagement, rapprochement and overcoming, as it
re-situates the urban question in neo- or post-Marxist
terrain, beyond modernist structures, pushing past
the objectivity/subjectivity distinction as it aims to
reconcile aesthetics, semiotics, discourse and design
with material realities and practices. The most
inspiring chapters are by unusually situated aca-
demics
Jacques Lévy (a Swiss geographer at
Lausanne, who has held the Reclus Chair in Mexico
Downloaded by [University of Tasmania] at 15:14 02 May 2013
City), Wolf-Dietrich Sahr (another geographer, based
at Curitiba, but working in Germany and elsewhere
in Europe) and Tim Simpson (a social scientist at
Macao)
all of whom I discuss in further detail
below. So it is very much as a dialogue with its own
problems (and successes) of translation and integra-
tion that this project is presented by the editors.
However, the Anglo-American and German lines of
difference are a strong feature, which certainly
influenced my view of the book.
To follow on here, the former group of contribu-
tors includes such well-known Anglo-American scho-
lars from urban and regional planning, geography
and sociology as Michael Dear, Neil Smith and John
Urry, respectively. Their chapters draw on material
and approaches already familiar to this reviewer (and,
no doubt, familiar to readers of this journal). Dear
synthesises earlier work, including that with Flusty on
postmodern urbanisation and individualised experi-
ences described in terms of ‘Keno capitalism’, whilst
Smith continues his Marxian critique of the city in
cleaving appearances and structured realities and
Urry reiterates his recent arguments about climate
change, catastrophe, excessive consumption, peak oil,
mobility and complexity. These chapters are dis-
persed throughout the book, but ordered with Dear
and Urry effectively ‘book-ending’ the collection if
one overlooks the excellent introduction by all three
editors, which opens the collection with some neat
definitive summations. There is a good sense of
progression to the ideas encapsulated in this book,
but an editorial conclusion could have tied up all the
ideas and hinted at how we might anticipate their
relevance into the future. With these authors (as with
the others), the content is high calibre, but their work
simply seems to have been adapted to note how
spectacle and fascination have been party to the
phenomena that each of them usually discusses.
Book Reviews 85
There is little to surprise anyone who has been
keeping up with the literature for any length of time.
In the wake of Dear, it is Lévy’s chapter, ‘The city
is back (in our minds)’, that really starts to excite. The
author resets the agenda for research into urban
studies as he revisits our approach to the city as a
problem of reflexivity. Thus, he pursues a negative
archaeology to assess urban studies critically to date,
and he poses some hard comments and questions
pointing at our continued failure to engage with what
is going on in, and with, our cities. Likewise, in light
of the comments above, he states: ‘Opposing con-
structivism to realism instead of articulating them is a
severe hindrance for the social sciences’ (37). His is a
refreshingly honest, incisive and insightful, even if
also unsettling, critique.
Discovery of the most fascinating aspects of this
book came, as a delightful surprise, from the Germa-
nic quarters, starting with its theoretical underpinning
upwards. All authors refer variously to seminal
thinkers, including Lefebvre, Harvey, Foucault and
Giddens, as well as such relevant commentators as
Michael Sorkin and Mark Gottdiener, but there are
other compelling connections which are also made.
For example, amongst the Anglo-Americans, Smith
refers to the work of Steve Graham on urban militar-
ism. The Germans, though, introduce the most
thorough philosophical grounding with their onto-
epistemological moves, from Kant, von Durckheim,
Weber and Heidegger via modern urbanists such as
Simmel and Wirth, through to the less famous, but
now, it seems, burgeoning figures of Gernot Böhme,
Hermann Schmitz and Peter Sloterdijk.
For this reviewer, the value of Cities and
Fascination arises from its sophisticated explication
of the subjective aspects of urban experience
be they
emotion, affect, meaning or atmospheres
interpreted
through Böhme, Schmitz and Sloterdijk, but also as
seen in actual practice. Therefore, Jürgen Hasse’s
chapter (‘Emotions in an urban environment’) is worth
a mention, as it draws on the humanities
namely
psychology, psychiatry and philosophy
to look at
how we feel and experience city life. Rather than accept
the privileging of, say, science, which results from a
‘binary contradiction’ and ‘opposition between ration-
ality and irrationality’ (71) that prevails in our
perception of the city, he examines the lighting,
gardens and architecture of public space to reveal
how pathic attitudes and performative practices are
implicated in systemic, as well as personal, lifeworlds.
Of the empirico-theoretical chapters, the first is by
Smith (‘The most dangerous knack’), and it is
unsurprising that his neo-Marxian reworking of the
urban question focuses on realigning ideal and
material worlds through a concept such as fetish,
 86 Book Reviews
as well as fascination. The other chapter here
(‘The urban staging of politics’) is Sahr’s enlightening
contribution, which combines Sloterdijk’s ‘atmo-
spheric’ ideas with Deleuzo-Guattarian ones of ‘faci-
ality’, in order to discuss the representations and
perceptions of urban planning and design in Curitiba,
Brazil. This pleasantly exotic inclusion sits in a
selection of otherwise mostly Anglo-American and
German empirics, with its sameness tacitly admitted
by the references (sadly, made mostly merely in
passing) to cities elsewhere, such as Dubai. Another
exception is Simpson’s ‘Neoliberalism with Chinese
characteristics’ as a case study of casino develop-
ments in Macao. It uses lenses of neoliberalism and
governmentality to explain the constitution of new
subjectivities and spaces through gaming. Curiously,
though, it is in Urry’s contribution (‘Excess, fascina-
Downloaded by [University of Tasmania] at 15:14 02 May 2013
tion and climates’) that we see references to addiction
as bodily habit made in relation to other, albeit
equally unsustainable behaviours, wants and desires.
Of course, as an unrepentant Francophilic post-
structuralist, I can’t help but comment on how the
book’s references to excess and surplus fail to make
linkages to Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, Zizek and
others. This remark is made in light of both Lévy’s
observation that we are: ‘yet to bridge the gap with
poststructuralist social theory’ (37) and the teasing
intimations of the book’s title. Even the leading UK
geographer writing in such a manner on urban
fascination (Steve Pile) gets minimal airplay here.
But then this book is already quite theoretical and
will be celebrated most, I suspect, for reminding us of
how helpful the ongoing developments in German
phenomenology might be to a reinvigorated urban
studies.
In conclusion, I imagine that Cities and Fascination
will be of greatest interest to those planners and
urbanists, as well as human geographers, anthropolo-
gists and others, who are academics (both staff and
students), rather than practitioners. It will certainly
appeal to those of us wanting to reconcile the divide(s)
in our disciplines, to progress the material semiotics of
Gottdiener and others or to see how aesthetics and
affect can play out in the political and cultural
economy of the city and its (increasingly global)
hinterland.
Stewart Williams
School of Geography and Environmental Studies
University of Tasmania
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Stewart.Williams@utas.edu.au
# 2013, Stewart Williams
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07293682.2012.757413
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Inventive City-Regions: Path Dependence and Creative
Knowledge Strategies, by Marco Bontje, Sako Musterd
and Peter Pelzer, Urban and Regional Planning and
Development Series, UK/USA, Ashgate, 2011, xi266
pp., $105, ISBN 9781409417729 (hardback), ISBN
9781409417736 (e-book)
Knowledge-based development of city-regions
As the authors of the book stated, during the last
decade of the twentieth century, the academic,
political and societal discourse around urban and
regional development changed radically. Particularly
after the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist economy
and society, a new paradigm shift is witnessed around
the turn of the twenty-first century. This upcoming
development paradigm suggests that the economic
future of city-regions increasingly depends upon
the capacity to attract, generate, retain and foster
creativity, knowledge and innovation. This new
paradigm, namely ‘knowledge-based urban develop-
ment’, is the transformation of knowledge resources
into local development, which could provide a basis
for sustainable development. Specifically, knowledge-
based urban development is the new development
paradigm of the knowledge era that aims to bring
economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, a
just socio-spatial order and good governance to cities.
Along with this, knowledge-based urban development
produces a city purposefully designed to encourage
the production and circulation of knowledge in an
environmentally conserved, economically secure,
socially just and well-governed human setting
a
knowledge city or, as interchangeably used through-
out this book, ‘an inventive city’.
Inventive city-regions
This book on ‘inventive city-regions’ aims to scruti-
nise the knowledge-based urban development
achievements of western European city-regions,
with a new perspective considering the connections
between their past and present, i.e. mainly based on
their trends, paths, strategies and strengths. With this
aim in mind, the book focuses on and attempts to
address the following four key questions:
(1) What are the strengths and weaknesses of
European city-regions as locations for creative
and knowledge-intensive industries?
(2) What are the economic development strategies
of European city-regions, and what is the role
of creativity, innovation and knowledge in
them?