(Literary Urban Studies) Benjamin Linder - Invisible Cities - and The Urban Imagination-Palgrave Macmillan (2022)

LITERARY URBAN STUDIES
Invisible Cities and the

Urban Imagination
Edited by Benjamin Linder
Literary Urban Studies
Series Editors
Lieven Ameel
Comparative Literature
Tampere University
Tampere, Finland
Patricia García
University of Alcalá
Madrid, Spain
Eric Prieto
Department of French and Italian
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Markku Salmela
English Language, Literature & Translation
Tampere University
Tampere, Finland
The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary media-
tions and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in
developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of
literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or
literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “citiness” of its
study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban con-
dition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material and
what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series’
focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as
urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no
restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source
material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series
actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international
and cross-disciplinary audience.
Editorial board:
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Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK
Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA
Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium
Benjamin Linder
Editor
Invisible Cities and the

Urban Imagination
Editor
Benjamin Linder
International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
Leiden University
Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic)

Literary Urban Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-13047-2 ISBN 978-3-031-13048-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9
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Praise for Invisible Cities and the Urban
Imagination
“Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a miraculously fascinating work, a postmodern

tour-de-force that fires the imagination of the reader and, with each re-reading,
discloses new spaces and new ways of seeing. This collection of essays does justice
to Calvino’s masterpiece, as its contributors widely explore the novel’s seemingly
infinite territories, combining theoretical sophistication with close readings. The
result is a fascinating study of both Calvino and the urban imagination that will be
welcome by all who find themselves enchanted in cities.”
—Robert T. Tally Jr., Professor of English, Texas State University, USA
“Built environment professionals and researchers, social scientists, and literary

enthusiasts and scholars will appreciate this excellent interdisciplinary engagement
with Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the concreteness and elusiveness of urban life, and
the order and disorder of cities.”
—Vinit Mukhija, Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA Luskin
School of Public Affairs
“A lively, fresh, and wide-ranging encounter with Calvino’s wonderful Invisible

Cities. A great read that brings the thinking, writing, and imagination of Calvino’s
book into new conversations with urban theory and politics, revealing its power to
illuminate urban life and to inform creative writing and pedagogy.”
—Colin McFarlane, Professor of Urban Geography, Durham University
Contents
1 I ntroduction: Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination 1

Benjamin Linder
Part I Cities & Theory 27
2 Invisible
Cities: Learning to Recognize Urban Society 29
Mark Purcell
3 How
to Map the Invisible 39
Mario Vrbančić
4 Invisible
Cities and the Work of Storying the Future 49
Rachel Prentice
5 Paris,
Latour, and Calvino 59
Daniel Little
6 Queer
Cities, Bodies & Desire: Reading Nicole Brossard
Alongside Italo Calvino 69
Lianne Moyes
7 On
the Epistemic Ruins of Existence 83
Luisa Cortesi
vii
viii Contents
Part II Cities & Cities 95
8 “The
Void not Filled with Words”: The Role of Venice in
Invisible Cities 97
Sophia Psarra
9 A
Tale of Two Ethnographers: Urban Anthropologists
Read Invisible Cities117
Emanuela Guano and Cristina Moretti
10 Fifty
Years of Soul City: Lessons of a Black Utopia131
Isabel Elson
11 Tirana
Visible and Invisible151
Matthew Rosen and Smoki Musaraj
12 The
Lost City: The Pathos of Arab Jerusalem165
Arpan Roy and Carlos Diz
13 “Submerging
the City in Its Own Past”: Tracing
Glasgow’s Architectures of Inhabitation175
Ursula Lang
14 Poetics
of the Invisible, Poetics of Rubble185
Irene Brunotti
15 Encountering
Urban Mutualities and Indeterminacy
with a Dar es Salaam Taxi Driver199
James Ellison
16 Reconstructing
Memory and Desire in Bhaktapur, Nepal209
Vanicka Arora
17 The
Weight of the City: The Burden and Opportunities
of Urban Villages225
Irna Nurlina Masron and Emily Soh
Contents ix
18 Don’t
Nuisance the Relented City: Community Barriers
and Urban “Keepers” in Haedo, Buenos Aires239
María Florencia Blanco Esmoris
Part III Cities & Practice 249
19 The Architect and Invisible Cities251

Nicola Fucigna
20 Visible
Cities: Calvino in Performance265
Kyle Gillette
21 The
Pedagogy of Storytelling in Invisible Cities279
Scott Palmer
22 Invisible Smart Cities293

Regev Nathansohn
23 Peripheral
Visions of Empire: Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo
(Homage to Calvino)303
Jeremy F. Walton
24 Imagining
São Paulo with Invisible Cities319
Derek Pardue
25 Desires
and Fears in the Invisible Eternal City329
Ana Ivasiuc
26 Nyctopolis,
the City of Darkness337
Nick Dunn
27 Epilogue:
A Comparative Palimpsest of Urban
Plenitude and Difference349
Ato Quayson
Index357
Notes on Contributors
Vanicka Arora is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Culture and

Society, Western Sydney University. She has been examining ongoing
reconstruction of built heritage in Bhaktapur, Nepal following the 2015
Gorkha Earthquake.
María Florencia Blanco Esmoris is a researcher at the Centro de
Investigaciones Sociales (CIS-CONICET/IDES) interested in urban and
housing studies. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from EIDAES-
UNSAM (Argentina), where she also serves as an assistant professor.
Irene Brunotti is Lecturer in Swahili Language and Studies at University
of Leipzig. She is interested in literature, popular culture, digital publics,
urban practices, and materialities (words, dreams, desires, affect, memory,
bodies, matter).
Luisa Cortesi is Assistant Professor of Water, Disasters, and Environ
mental Justice at the International Institute of Social Sciences (ISS), the
Netherlands. Her research weaves in the social sciences with the natural
ones, with strands from the philosophy of knowledge and semiotics. She
also founded and leads the Water Justice and Adaptation Lab.
Carlos Diz is an anthropologist interested in cities. He is a lecturer at the
University of A Coruña and member of the Societies in Motion
Research Team (ESOMI).
Nick Dunn is Professor of Urban Design and Executive Director of
ImaginationLancaster, the design and architecture research lab at Lancaster
University, UK.
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
James Ellison is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer. He studies

political and economic changes in Tanzania and is currently writing about
populism and infrastructures in the country.
Isabel Elson is an art historian focused on twentieth-century visual cul-
ture of the Americas. She is pursuing her PhD at The Graduate Center at
the City University of New York (CUNY).
Nicola Fucigna is a designer and marketing coordinator at Rowell
Brokaw Architects in Eugene, Oregon. She has edited for several literary
magazines and has published nonfiction and poetry.
Kyle Gillette is Professor of Theatre at Trinity University in San Antonio.
His research includes books and essays on metatheatre, modernist drama,
perception, travel, and cities. Kyle’s most recent book is The Invisible City:
Travel, Attention, and Performance (2020).
Emanuela Guano is Ackerman Professor of Anthropology at Georgia
State University. Her research interests range from neoliberal urbanism
and urban revitalization to the aesthetic, sensuous, and affective underpin-
nings of the urban everyday.
Ana Ivasiuc is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Crime and Security at
Maynooth University, Ireland. She has carried out urban ethnographic
research on policing of the Roma in Rome.
Ursula Lang is a research affiliate with the Minnesota Design Center,
University of Minnesota. A cultural geographer and ethnographer, she
studies urban environments and the natures of property and the com-
mons. Her most recent book is Living with Yards: Negotiating Nature
and the Habits of Home (2022).
Benjamin Linder is an anthropologist and cultural geographer with
interests in transnational mobilities, cultural transformation, and urban
place-making in Kathmandu, Nepal. He is based at the International
Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Daniel Little is Professor of Philosophy, Sociology, and Public Policy at
the University of Michigan-Dearborn. His most recent book is A New
Social Ontology of Government (Palgrave, 2020).
Irna Nurlina Masron is a doctoral student at the Department of
Geography, Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
include urban politics, heritage, and housing issues in Southeast Asia. She
holds a PhD scholarship from the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore.
Cristina Moretti is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser
University. She is interested in the politics of public space and in the rela-
tionship between sensory emplacement, vision, local visual cultures, and
city spaces.
Lianne Moyes is Professeure titulaire at Université de Montréal. Her
research interests include feminist and queer poetics; alternative under-
standings of homelessness, citizenship, and urban public space; Indigenous
literatures; and the interface between Canadian and Anglo-Québec
literatures.
Smoki Musaraj is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University.
She is the author of Tales of Albarado: Ponzi Logics of Accumulation in
Postsocialist Albania (2020).
Regev Nathansohn has a PhD in Anthropology (University of Michigan).
He is a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Sapir College
and conducts ethnographic research on “smart cities.”
Scott Palmer teaches courses on writing and cultural studies at New York
University Florence. His research focuses on nineteenth-century literature
and visual culture, especially the intersection between mobility, race, and
image-making.
Derek Pardue is Associate Professor in the Global Studies Department at
Aarhus University. He has published on urbanism, migration, and expres-
sive culture based on research in Brazil, Portugal, Cape Verde, and
Denmark.
Rachel Prentice is Associate Professor in the Department of Science &
Technology Studies at Cornell University. She is currently working on an
ethnography about attunement between humans and horses.
Sophia Psarra is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design, and
Director of the Architectural and Urban History and Theory PhD
Programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College
London. Her research interests are in theories of knowledge as well as in
the history, theory, and morphology of space, form, and society.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Mark Purcell is a professor in the Department of Urban Design &

Planning at the University of Washington, where he studies cities, political
theory, and democracy. He is the author of The Down-Deep Delight of
Democracy (2013) and numerous articles in journals. His website is at
https://home.foreveroverhead.cloud.
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary
Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford University.
His book Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of
Transnationalism (2014) was co-winner of the Urban History Association’s
Best Book Prize (non-North America) for 2015 and was also named by
The Guardian as one of the ten Best Books on Cities in 2014. He is an
elected fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal
Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.
Matthew Rosen is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Ohio
University. He is the author of Tirana Modern: Biblio-Ethnography on the
Margins of Europe (2022).
Arpan Roy is Research Associate in the Program in Islamic Studies at
Johns Hopkins University. He researches various topics based around
themes of religion, ethics, language, and the experience of difference
in the Arab world.
Emily Soh is Lady Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of
Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her current research
focus is on urban food system transitions of small states.
Mario Vrbančić is Professor of Comparative Literature in the English
Department at the University of Zadar. He has written two books and a
number of academic articles on postmodern literature and culture.
Jeremy F. Walton leads the research group “REVENANT—Revivals of
Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” (ERC #101002908) at the
Department of Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities and
Social Sciences of the University of Rijeka.
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Graphic representation of the structure of Invisible Cities.

(Figure by Benjamin Linder, adapted from Calvino [2014, 447]) 8
Fig. 8.1 Closeness centrality values, capturing the most frequently
crossed paths of the pedestrian network. (Drawing by Sophia
Psarra, The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural
Imagination, 2018, UCL Press) 101
Fig. 8.2 Closeness centrality of combined pedestrian and canal
networks, Venice. (Drawing by Sophia Psarra, The Venice
Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination, 2018, UCL
Press)102
Fig. 8.3 Notation of the grid structure of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
(Drawing by Sophia Psarra, The Venice Variations: Tracing the
Architectural Imagination, 2018, UCL Press) 106
Fig. 8.4 The network of thematic categories (top) and four symmetries
in a tessellation (bottom). (Drawings by Sophia Psarra, The
Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination, 2018,
UCL Press) 107
Fig. 8.5 Integration values of pedestrian network in Venice. Integrated
spaces are easy to reach from every other space in a layout,
constituting the spaces where movement paths converge. In
contrast, segregated spaces can be accessed through paths that
involve many changes of direction, expressing status or social
difference. (Drawing by Sophia Psarra, The Venice Variations:
Tracing the Architectural Imagination, 2018, UCL Press) 109
Fig. 10.1 Green Duke House and NPS sign for McKissick Soul City Civil
Rights Center, Norlina, North Carolina. (Photograph by Isabel
Elson, July 28, 2021) 134
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 10.2 Brochure for Soul City, 1973. Floyd B. McKissick Papers
#4930, Southern Historical Collection of the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the African American
Resources Collection of North Carolina Central University.
Folder 1755 136
Fig. 10.3 Warren Regional Planning Corporation & Gantt/Huberman
Associates, Soul City: 30 Year Plan, Land Use Plan, May 1973.
Floyd B. McKissick Papers #4930, Southern Historical
Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and the African American Resources Collection of North
Carolina Central University. OP-4930/180 144
Fig. 12.1 The village of Silwan, now a part of Jerusalem. (Photograph by
Arpan Roy) 168
Fig. 12.2 Palimpsest of Jerusalem’s walls. (Photograph by Jaime
Gutiérrez Moreno) 170
Fig. 16.1 Ongoing reconstruction of the Faasi Dega in January 2020.
(Photograph by Vanicka Arora) 214
Fig. 16.2 The various iterations of the Silu Mahadev Temple before and
after the Bihar-Nepal Earthquake of 1934, drawn from various
photographic references circulating among residents. (Figures
by Vanicka Arora) 215
Fig. 16.3 The various iterations of the Silu Mahadev Temple before and
after the Gorkha Earthquake of 2015, drawn from various
photographic references circulating among residents. (Figures
by Vanicka Arora) 215
Fig. 16.4 A house in Khauma Tole damaged during the 2015
Earthquake. (Photograph by Vanicka Arora, 2019) 218
Fig. 19.1 Copy of Hertzberger’s diagram of the De Schalm project’s
evolution over time. (Diagram by Nicola Fucigna, based on
Hertzberger [1991, 113]) 256
Fig. 19.2 Diagram of the structure of Invisible Cities. (Diagram by
Nicola Fucigna) 257
Fig. 23.1 The dilapidation of Mirogoj. (Photograph by
Jeremy F. Walton) 308
Fig. 23.2 Waterways that once divided Belgrade now unite it.
(Photograph by Jeremy F. Walton) 310
Fig. 23.3 A provocatively deceitful urban symbol. (Photograph by
Jeremy F. Walton) 314
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Invisible Cities and the Urban

Imagination
Benjamin Linder
Returning to Invisible Cities

Fifty years have passed since the original publication of Italo Calvino’s
magisterial book Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili).1 Despite its brevity,
the work’s themes and poetics are expansive, challenging traditional con-
ventions of genre and academic discipline. Much has been written about
the book as a piece of literature, but Invisible Cities has long been a favor-
ite among social scientists and planners as well. This collection serves as
both appreciation and critical engagement, tribute and extension. To
commemorate the 50th anniversary, the essays in this volume grapple with
the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Invisible Cities. The
chapters, by and large, approach the novel not only as a novel but as a work
of urban theory, a work of evocative ethnography, a work of place-writing.
Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike book offer to scholars and
B. Linder (*)
International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University,
Leiden, The Netherlands
e-mail: b.linder@iias.nl
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
B. Linder (ed.), Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination,
Literary Urban Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_1
2 B. LINDER
practitioners interested in actually existing urban life? This is a collection

for anyone interested in Invisible Cities, but also for anyone interested in
cities generally, “invisible” or otherwise. It will certainly help to have read
Calvino’s text before embarking, but there is much in the following chap-
ters even for those who have not.
Recent decades have witnessed a flourishing of interest in the complex
relations between text and spatiality. Such work coalesced around the
intersection of the “cultural turn” in human geography and the “spatial
turn” in the humanities (Alexander 2015). Many labels have been applied
to this scholarship: geocriticism, literary geographies, spatial literary stud-
ies, literary urban studies (Westphal 2011; Finch 2016; Tally 2011, 2017;
Hones 2014; Tambling 2016). I do not wish to paper over the very real
distinctions between these labels and the diverse literatures they purport-
edly encompass (see, e.g., Hones 2018; Tally 2020). Nevertheless, all of
them share a central concern for the multivalent connections between lit-
erature and geography: the spatial sites of literary production/circula-
tion/reception, the textual representation of “real” spaces, the literary
creation of imaginary spaces, the geographical context of authorship/
readership. Taken together, such work has laid bare the artifice of aca-
demic divides, producing fertile transdisciplinary conversations that com-
plement both the social sciences and humanities while simultaneously
forging new directions.
Invisible Cities is an ideal text to bring into such discussions. Given its
iconic status among literary theorists and geographers alike, it is ripe for
just the sort of collaborative, inter-disciplinary engagement attempted in
this volume. For the most part, the aim of our chapters is neither interpre-
tation nor literary criticism. In other words, this is not exactly a volume
about Calvino’s book, but rather a series of critical exercises in engaging
Calvino’s book as a tool with which to think, teach, and write about actual
cities. In extant treatments, the overwhelming focus of scholarly attention
has been primarily literary in nature—that is, focused on the book’s unsta-
ble position between modern and postmodern forms, its (meta-)concern
with questions of authorship and interpretation, its balance of rigid struc-
ture and glittering poetics. In the next section, such previous work is
acknowledged and discussed insofar as it introduces the academic, histori-
cal, and artistic contexts within which Invisible Cities was written and
received. However, the remainder of this introduction and volume is con-
cerned with an alternative reading of the book—namely, one that high-
lights its value as a fundamentally urban text. Reading Invisible Cities—its
1 INTRODUCTION: INVISIBLE CITIES AND THE URBAN IMAGINATION 3
55 cities, its framing conceit (a conversation between Marco Polo and

Kublai Khan), and the interlaced numerical structure that gives shape to
the whole—leaves one with the impression of wandering around someone
else’s dreams. Yet, despite its surreal, ethereal quality, the text speaks
directly to the more substantive, material concerns of so much contempo-
rary urban theory.
I first read Invisible Cities around 2012, as a first-year graduate student
in anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A cohort-mate
had organized an informal book club. Overwhelmed by our core theory
classes by day, we welcomed an excuse to socialize and enjoy more literary
fare. When the week for Invisible Cities came around, I was instantly cap-
tivated. My dissertation research—a street-corner ethnography of Thamel,
a cosmopolitan neighborhood in Kathmandu, Nepal—was beginning to
take shape. I had decided to study how Thamel spatialized a variety of
socio-spatial shifts in Kathmandu’s recent decades, from increased trans-
national mobilities and mass media to transgressive cultural practices and
contestations over national identity. At our book club meeting, I recall
darkly joking that everything I intended to say in my dissertation had been
said by Calvino, 40 years earlier, and with far better poetics. Several others
felt similarly. While Invisible Cities is fantastical and imaginative, it never-
theless resonated against the real cities in which we live, work, and con-
duct our research.
As I progressively gravitated toward explicitly place-based frameworks in
my work—urbanism, (post)humanistic geography, spatial ethnography,
mobilities—it became clear that we were not alone. Countless scholars
before us had also found academic inspiration in Invisible Cities. One can-
not read far in urban (sub-)disciplines without encountering prominent
epigraphs from the book. The prevalence of such quotations reveals the
impact Calvino has had on those of us interested not only in fantastical,
fictive cities, but in lived, material ones as well.2 Every time I re-read
Invisible Cities, it feels as though I have discovered a different book. Its
openness to divergent interpretations is one of its key characteristics and,
indeed, is a central concern within the text itself. The chapters that follow
reflect that open field of possible readings: essays linking Calvino’s insights
to diverse research in far-flung locales; readings of Invisible Cities in conver-
sation with theoretical texts in anthropology, geography, and philosophy;
architecture and design reflections; creative nonfiction. For many, Calvino
is an academic influence as much as a beloved author. We ultimately opted
for short chapters for two reasons: (1) to mirror the brief, episodic nature
4 B. LINDER
of Invisible Cities itself, and (2) to make space for more essays, thereby
maximizing the diversity of perspectives from different disciplines, profes-
sions, demographics, and geographies. The essays each can stand alone,
but, taken together, they constitute a sustained engagement with Calvino’s
book as a device for thinking differently about urban space/place.
The rest of this introduction proceeds as follows. In the next section, I
contextualize Invisible Cities within both the biography of Calvino himself
and the historical-geographic context in which he wrote the book. Special
attention is paid to the literary nature of the text, focusing on its multiple
layers of meaning and its enigmatic structure. The following section then
turns squarely to the aims of this volume by highlighting Invisible Cities’
(and Calvino’s) fundamental concern with “real” city life. The final, con-
cluding section outlines the remainder of the book and introduces the
essays contained within it.
The Author, The Text

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba on October 15, 1923 to an agronomist
father (Mario Calvino) and a botanist mother (Eva Mameli).3 Two years
later, the family returned to their native Italy, settling in San Remo, a land-
scape that would inflect Italo’s writing for the rest of his career (Nocentini
2000). After beginning studies in agriculture at the University of Turin
and the University of Florence in the early 1940s, Calvino refused con-
scripted service for the Fascist government and went into hiding. He
joined the Garibaldi partisans in 1944 and remained a committed
Communist for years to come. After the war, in 1945, Calvino re-enrolled
at the University of Turin, earning a degree in English Literature in 1947
with a thesis on Joseph Conrad. His early work testifies to his political
commitments. Alongside his articles in left-wing newspapers, he published
his first novel (The Path to the Spiders’ Nest) in 1947, a neorealist account
of war. That same year, he joined the Einaudi publishing house in Turin,
where he would rise through the ranks and maintain a professional rela-
tionship for most of the rest of his life.
By the 1950s, his work had begun its turn away from realist modes of
representation with the publication of Italian Folktales and the Our
Ancestors trilogy, comprising The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees,
and The Nonexistent Knight. The progressive turn away from neorealism
was related to Calvino’s shifting political commitments during this period.
In 1957, he officially resigned from the Italian Communist Party (PCI),
owing to disagreements about de-Stalinization and, more acutely, to the

violent suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet forces in 1956.
McLaughlin (1998) identifies 1963–1964 as the real pivot point in
Calvino’s writing style, the years in which he published his last “tradi-
tional” novel (The Watcher) as well as his last essay of militant Marxism
(“The Working Class as Antithesis”). He also published Marcovaldo, or
The Seasons in the City during that period, his first novel using “a series of
microtexts to form a macrotext” (ibid., xiv), a formula that would serve
him well in all of his books over the next two decades. As Petsota (2012)
puts it,
If the early 60’s are a landmark for Calvino, signifying the epitome of the
crisis of engaged literature, and specifically of the communist enterprise,
they are also indicative of the beginning of a new utopian project, or even
better: the same utopian drive rose again, reborn after the previous intel-
lectual failure, richer in more rigorous intellectual effort, and even more
flourishing literary images. (Petsota 2012, 12)
Beyond such stylistic and political changes, it was also a period of personal
transformation for the author. In 1964, he married the Argentinian trans-
lator Esther Singer, and the following year they gave birth to their daugh-
ter Giovanna.
Calvino’s shift toward a more experimental literature (and away from
overt political themes) was furthered by his family’s relocation to Paris in
the late 1960s. Paris for Calvino became “the city of reading par excel-
lence, singular in its encyclopedic discourse, in its global culture” (Modena
2011, 7). The author’s time in Paris would yield some of his most beloved
and complex works, including Invisible Cities, The Castle of Crossed
Destinies, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.4 In 1979, Calvino returned
to Italy, where he died of a stroke in September 1985. By the time of his
death, he had become a luminary in the global literary scene, something
of a writer’s writer, admired and championed by the likes of Gore Vidal
(1974, 1985) and Salman Rushdie (1981). He was a writer of “polyhedric
disposition” (Cavallaro 2010, 4), comfortable with a wide variety of
themes and genres: war stories and folk tales, surreal experimentalism and
scientific discovery.
Invisible Cities is clearly a product of Calvino’s time in Paris, which in
the late 1960s and early 1970s was a political, literary, and intellectual
hotbed. Paris was where he conversed with Raymond Queneau, Georges
6 B. LINDER
Perec, and the rest of the OuLiPo group, who experimented with mathe-
matical-scientific insights and arbitrary constraints in pursuit of new forms
of literary expression. It was where new strands of Leftism emerged in the
wake of May 1968. It was a city reading Charles Fourier’s utopian social-
ism and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. France was the epicenter of
structuralist and poststructuralist thought: the home of Louis Althusser
and Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, Jacques
Derrida and Roland Barthes. These thinkers and more influenced Calvino’s
emergent approach to literature: “His fictional and critical work is solidly
placed at the crossroads of the major issues in contemporary social, cul-
tural, and literary theory—Marxism and structuralism, anthropology and
semiotics, popular culture and anti-narrative” (de Lauretis 1975, 414).
Calvino has rightly been pegged as something of a literary philosopher,
alongside the likes of his literary kin Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco
(Gracia, Korsmeyer, and Gasché 2002).
These influences, intellectual pursuits, and social relationships echo in
different ways across Invisible Cities. Calvino began writing the text in
1970, and at first expressed uncertainty about what it might become. In a
letter to Pietro Citati from September 12, 1970, Calvino waxes about the
English novel before concluding thusly:
Perhaps in all this there is a reaction and dissatisfaction on my part with the
work I’ve started writing this summer, pushing myself as never before
toward preciosity, Alexandrinism, the prose poem: a rewriting of Marco
Polo’s Il Milione (Travels) all made up of brief descriptions of imaginary
cities. I don’t know at this stage if it will work out. (Calvino 2014, 389)
This was not Calvino’s first attempt at writing the character of Marco
Polo. A decade earlier, he worked on a screenplay about Polo’s travels
(McLaughlin 2008). Though it never came to fruition, his letters about it
already conceptualize Polo as a vehicle for re-enchantment (Calvino
2014). It makes sense that Polo’s Travels (Il Milione) resonated with the
Italian author. Polo’s text is itself unstable, of debatable authorship and
veracity, such that we are left with questionable copies (Jackson 1998).
Polo’s Travels and Thomas More’s Utopia are the two texts most directly
evoked in both the style and content of Invisible Cities.
Invisible Cities is exceedingly difficult to summarize—in fact, the unde-
cidability of final interpretation is one of its central themes. Broadly, the
text has at least three levels, of increasing abstraction. First, most of the
text takes the form of 55 descriptions of fantastical cities, bordering on the

mythical and surreal. Each city evokes particular emotions and affects—
nostalgia, desire, hope, despair, regret. During the process of crafting the
cities, Calvino kept a “diary which kept closely to my moods and reflec-
tions: everything ended up being transformed into images of cities—the
books I read, the art exhibitions I visited, and discussions with friends”
(Calvino 2004, 177). What emerges is a series of dreamlike urban land-
scapes—or, alternatively, interior landscapes rendered creatively into imag-
ined cities. Second, the cities are ostensibly being narrated by the Venetian
traveler Marco Polo to the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan. This is the
framing conceit within which readers encounter the cities themselves, but
also through which readers are given meta-commentary about the text’s
literary and philosophical concerns (see below). Third, the complex
numerical structure of the chapters—the interlaced ordering of the Table
of Contents—creates a sense of both structure and openness.
Carolyn Springer (1985) refers to the extra-diegetic structure of the
book—that is, its peculiar numerical ordering—as “both intricate and gra-
tuitous” (ibid., 290). This characterization evinces Calvino’s relationship
with the OuLiPo group, who delighted in imposing intricate structures
and gratuitous constraints on their writing as both challenge and prompt.
Calvino divides his 55 cities evenly into 11 thematic categories (e.g., Cities
& Memory, Thin Cities, Cities & Signs, etc.), such that each category
contains five cities. These are dispersed across nine chapters. Each chapter
contains five cities, except the first and last, which each contain ten.
Calvino then interlaces cities from each category in a sophisticated pat-
tern, whereby cities of new categories are regularly introduced and cities
of previous categories gradually fall away. Within categories, cities appear
sequentially (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Within each chapter, however, cities of differ-
ent categories are reversed into a countdown sequence (5, 4, 3, 2, 1). If all
11 categories are assigned a letter (A-K), and each city within a category is
assigned a number (1–5), the pattern of most chapters looks something
like this: A5, B4, C3, D2, E1, a simultaneous ascension (A, B, C, D, E)
and descension (5, 4, 3, 2, 1). This pattern holds true for all of the “mid-
dle” chapters, where each of the five cities are from different categories.
The first and last chapters, meanwhile, stage a “build-up” (A1, A2, B1,
A3, B2, C1, A4, B3, C2, D1) and “draw-down” (H5, I4, J3, K2, I5, J4,
K3, J5, K4, K5), respectively.
As the previous, unfortunate paragraph demonstrates, Calvino’s struc-
ture resists clear description. This has led many to depict it graphically,
8 B. LINDER
Fig. 1.1 Graphic

representation of the
structure of Invisible
Cities. (Figure by
Benjamin Linder,
adapted from Calvino
[2014, 447])
through various visualizations in which the patterns become easier to

grasp.5 Calvino mentions his own diagram, and recreates it, in a letter
from August 18, 1974 (Fig. 1.1). When one reads the diagram from left-
to-right and top-to-bottom, the cities are presented in the order they
appear in the text. The Roman numerals on the left represent chapters.
Each vertical column, while not labeled, represents a category of city.
Looking at the diagram, one is overwhelmed by the crystal precision of
the structure, and also by the multiple patterns and shapes that can be
traced within it. According to Calvino, the architecture of Invisible Cities
ultimately “carried the entire book; it became the plot of a book that had
no plot” (Calvino 1992).
Part of what makes the structure so fascinating is the way it suggests
and encourages multiple routes through the text (Serravalle de Sá 2009).
One can read Invisible Cities sequentially, page by page. But one might
also move through the text in reverse (right-to-left, down-up), from cat-
egory to category (i.e., top-down, left-to right), from categorical position
to categorical position (i.e., falling diagonals). The point is that the struc-
ture itself calls for readers to encounter the text in multiple ways: “Some
could see the shape of a diamond in it, others the pattern of the sextet.
Someone else, keener still on numbers, recalculated the lot and produced
the magic figure of 666. The number for the Beast” (Pedriali 2005, 168).
Calvino himself claimed he was merely attempting “the simplest method
for ensuring that cities were not all either grouped together or separate
but rather linked to each other creating a lively and varied movement”
(2014, 446). He expressed good-natured bafflement that readers “thought
it was heaven knows what kind of cabala” (ibid., 430).
Beyond structure, the two remaining “layers” of Invisible Cities are the
cities themselves and the framing sections that find Marco Polo conversing
with Kublai Khan. In the latter, Polo is ostensibly there to describe the
cities of the Khan’s Empire. In fact, the two meander through mystifying
discussions of language, interpretation, semiotics, (dis)order, representa-
tion, and more. The relationship between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan
dramatizes many of the book’s central tensions: “Kublai wishes to come to
know his empire by studying his atlases at Marco’s side; Marco, on the
other hand, wishes to escape from the premapped with stories of one who
has visited and experienced, even if briefly, every single city” (Chiesa 2016,
87). Polo is the author to Khan’s reader (Springer 1985; Breiner 1988).
The former generates diverse imagery while the latter seeks unified textual
meaning (Ricci 2001). Polo represents a thirst for enchantment and par-
ticularity, contrasted with Kublai Khan’s quest for a commanding, total-
izing knowledge. The two characters thus can be read as embodying a
whole suite of binaries that the book engages and ultimately deconstructs:
modern/postmodern, past/present, langue/parole, closed/open, cyni-
cism/optimism, objectivity/subjectivity, presence/absence, legibility/
illegibility, universality/particularity, generalization/exactitude, visibility/
invisibility, etc.
One of the book’s central tensions concerns the interplay of order and
chaos (Sbragia 1993; Mukhija 2015). As McLaughlin (1998, 103) puts it:
“The whole book plays on this ambivalence between symmetry and irreg-
ularity, between the neatness of numerical structures and the messiness of
the real world, hovering between utopian dream and dystopic pessimism.”
Of course, binaries like this served as recurring concerns for the structural-
ist and poststructuralist thinkers of the time. Moreover, this reading
accords with how Calvino himself thought about the book, and about
literature in general. In a letter from March 2, 1969, he wrote:
Literary value is conferred when a mythical-archetypal structure clashes with

Menippean-Carnivalizing aggression. Not when the structure feeds quietly
on itself, nor when the Menippean-Carnivalesque does not grind against
anything, goes around in neutral, without anything to rub against it or resist
it. (Calvino 2014, 368)
10 B. LINDER
Calvino only imposed the infamous structure of Invisible Cities after he

had begun writing the city descriptions in a piecemeal fashion. Cities were
shifted and re-categorized, new categories were added and others deleted.
The framing dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo thus medi-
ates between the intricate structure and the dazzling diversity of the city
descriptions. The book becomes a meditation on the interplay of terms in
binary opposition: the need for structure, order, and reproducibility in
order to communicate, yet with a keen awareness of the inability of such
systems to fully capture the messiness, particularity, and ineffability of
experience. Khan seeks a model to holistically explain his empire as a total-
ity, but in so doing flattens the nuance and peculiarity upon which Polo
insists (Cannon 1981).
Finally, there are the 55 descriptions of cities themselves, the most
prominent “layer” of the text. One can hardly summarize them better
than Calvino himself, but an impressive effect of the descriptions is the
way each is simultaneously unique-yet-relatable. In each imagined
cityscape, readers cannot help but find echoes of cities they themselves
have known. Superficially, all of the cities are patently unreal, impossible,
mere figments of an artistic imagination. They are no-where. Yet, each
urban reflection also seems to speak about all cities, every city, an arche-
typal city. In one sense, each of the cities contains real insights about how
we experience and conceptualize all cities. Pyne (2018) argues that the
book is really an ideal travelogue, as it evokes something about every city
and forces a recognition of the fundamentally imaginative, subjective
nature of all travel. In another sense, readers of the text cannot help but
see in the prose a particular actual city with which they are familiar, a sort
of Ur-city against which we make sense of all subsequent urban experi-
ences. Polo the character may well be describing his native Venice. Calvino
the author may well be describing San Remo, or cities that would later
leave impressions on him (e.g., Turin, New York, Paris). When I read
Invisible Cities, I find clear expressions of Indianapolis and its suburbs
(where I grew up), and also of other cities I’ve called home (e.g., Chicago,
Berlin). But the book’s pages speak to me of nowhere so much as
Kathmandu, the primary city of my academic fieldwork and the one clos-
est to mind when I first encountered Invisible Cities. As the following
chapters amply demonstrate, however, there are many other urban spaces
that evoke Calvino’s imaginary ones, from Jerusalem to Dar es Salaam,
Tirana to Soul City.
Taken together, the book’s three layers—its numerical structure, its

framing conceit, and its city descriptions—yield a text open to radically
divergent interpretations. Here one sees the influence of (post)structuralism
and semiotics, particularly the work of Roland Barthes. Calvino once
claimed that Barthes was “perhaps the contemporary critic I admire the
most” (Calvino 2014, 310). Their works clearly echo one another. Barthes’
reader-centered approach to literary interpretation shows up prominently
in Calvino’s fiction from the 1970s. Just as “The Death of the Author”
(Barthes 1977 [1967]) appeared, Calvino was already engaging with a
similar idea in his lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts” (1986 [1967]). For
both, authorial intent and an author’s biography do not fully close a text
to alternative meanings generated through the act of reading. In a lecture
on Invisible Cities, Calvino said: “Here it becomes clear that the author’s
view no longer counts: it is as if the book, as I have explained, wrote itself,
and it is only the text as it stands which can authorize or rule out this or
that reading of it” (Calvino 2004, 182). Barthes’ reflection on the Japanese
haiku might as well have been describing Invisible Cities:
The number and the dispersion of haikus on the one hand, the brevity and
closure of each one on the other, seem to divide, to classify the world to
infinity, to constitute a space of pure fragments, a dust of events which noth-
ing, by a kind of escheat of signification, can or should coagulate, construct,
direct, terminate. (Barthes 1982, 78)6
In classic postmodern fashion, meaning is always unsettled in Invisible

Cities. Readers are a crucial part of the meaning-generating process (Weiss
1993). The seemingly rigid structure belies the book’s radical openness,
such that “we are tricked into seeing substantial structures where Calvino
has in fact only suggested or alluded to them” (Breiner 1988, 572). The
structure itself is repeatedly unable to fully contain the diversity of cities,
even on its own terms. The cities, categories, and numbers spill across dif-
ferent imposed boundaries, while also suggesting multiple sequences
through which readers might traverse the text. Furthermore, the structure
implies still other cities and categories yet to be written (Palmore 1990).
Both within the text and beyond it, chess becomes the key metaphor, as it
had been for a long line of (post)structuralist thinkers—a game of rigid
structure, yet also of nearly endless possibilities (Calvino 1986). Even each
individual city description lends itself to this sort of open interpretation.
12 B. LINDER
Semiotics is key to Calvino’s writerly disposition (Krysinski 2002).

Along with the likes of Borges, his work directly confronts the challenge
of representing totalizing systems and finding means of escape (Sussman
2002). Readers enter the world of Invisible Cities with their own bio-
graphical histories and cultural foundations, such that “interpretation
originates outside the text and depends mainly on the acts of the reader—
on his dictionary and his own ‘encyclopedia,’ as Umberto Eco would say”
(Brera 2011, 273–274). Calvino encouraged and relished in divergent
interpretations of Invisible Cities. He “enables the reader to shape his own
experience of the text by reading it in whatever order he pleases, filling in
the blank pages, imagining and composing his own cities in the margins as
the Khan is eager to do” (Springer 1985, 293). The book exemplifies
Calvino’s writing style in general, concerned with “hinting and suggest-
ing, making memorable shapes and images, rather than giving information
or offering explanations” (Wood 2014, xi). In this way, the book can be
read as a dramatic staging of poststructuralism’s critique of logocentrism,
with Khan representing the Western intellectual tradition and Polo staging
repeated displacements and deconstructions (Franke 1989). The text’s
nonlinearity—structurally and spatially, but also temporally (Panigrahi
2017)—creates an open field of possible interpretations (Cavallaro 2010).
There is a void at the text’s core waiting to be filled from outside by read-
ers. As many have noted, the city at the “center” of Invisible Cities, Baucis,
is a landscape characterized by absence.7
But what does all this have to do with real cities and the actual experi-
ence of contemporary urbanism? Much of what scholars have written
about Invisible Cities concerns the text’s categorization in literary move-
ments, particularly its unstable position on the cusp of modernism and
postmodernism, structuralism and poststructuralism (e.g., James 1982;
Weiss 1993; Markey 1999). In general, the scholarship, with a few notable
exceptions, has been fundamentally literary in nature:
Passages from Calvino’s 1972 novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calen-

dars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reduc-
ing the work to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking
outside the box. The shadow of postmodern literary studies has had a simi-
larly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ulti-
mately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive
deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-
referentiality. (Modena 2011, 12)
The aim of this volume is precisely to extend engagement with the text as
a book of urban imagination. Indeed, there are many reasons to believe
this was a crucial part of Calvino’s project, and the book’s staying power
in urban planning, architecture, and urban social sciences calls for just this
sort of engagement.
Invisible Cities, Lived Cities

It is tempting to read Invisible Cities—as many scholars have done—as an
intellectual exercise, a postmodern literary game, or a philosophical medi-
tation. After all, the book is all of these things, but that is far from all it is.
Such characterizations largely bypass one of the text’s major academic
audiences. For decades, scholars of cities—geographers, urban planners,
anthropologists/sociologists, architects, etc.—have found inspiration and
critical insight in the pages of Invisible Cities. This is not surprising. The
thinkers populating Calvino’s intellectual universe in Paris are the very
same that had a remarkable impact on spatial theory from the 1970s
onward. The postmodern/poststructuralist turn has substantial roots in
linguistic and literary theory, but of course it quickly left its indelible mark
across the social sciences more broadly. We in the social sciences read
Calvino differently. The themes discussed in the previous section remain
salient, but they get applied to urban-cultural questions rather than
textual-literary ones. It is obvious to say that Invisible Cities is about cities.
We all know it, and yet the overwhelming balance of scholarship about the
book does not reflect this.
A fundamentally urban reading of Invisible Cities is at least as justified
as the foregoing literary-philosophical readings. Again, the author’s own
words support this:
I have heard from a number of friends in town planning that the book
touches on some of the questions that they are faced with in their work; and
this is no coincidence, as the background from which the book springs is the
same as theirs. And it is not only towards the end of the book that the “big
number” metropolis appears; for even the pieces which seem to evoke
ancient cities only make sense insofar as they have been thought out and
written with the city of today in mind. (Calvino 2004, 180)
Postmodern literary theory tends to employ spatial language in ways that

confuse definitions, whereby geographic terms (e.g., location, position,
14 B. LINDER
map, territory) get applied to phenomena that are not strictly geographic
(Smith 1992; Smith and Katz 1993). Something similar seems to have
happened with Invisible Cities. Calvino’s cities become a metaphor for
something else—philosophical questions, subjective states, the cosmos,
the human condition. However, according to Calvino himself, each city
description in the book “holds good for all cities or for the city in general”
(Calvino 2004, 177). Calvino was deeply influenced by urban thinkers of
his day (Modena 2011). His city descriptions are not only metaphors or
symbols. They quite clearly aim to say something about real, actual cities
as well.
Invisible Cities can be read as a treatise on urban life in general, or as a
text through which we might better apprehend urban theory and geo-
graphical concepts. The possibilities for such a reading are as diverse as
contemporary spatial thinking. Polo’s descriptive accounts directly address,
for example, the concerns of humanistic geography, the anthropology of
place, and phenomenology (Tuan 2001; Bachelard 1964; Feld and Basso
1996; Casey 1996). In Despina, the city presents itself differently to trav-
elers entering from different trajectories: for those traversing the desert
and longing for the sea, its skyline appears in the shape of ship; for those
approaching by water, longing for land, its skyline appears in the shape of
a camel. Likewise, in Zemrude, it is the interiority of the perceiver that
gives the city its form. Cities in general are far more than collections of
buildings, streets, crowds, and infrastructures. They are not only material
productions, but subjective and imaginative productions as well. They are
produced by humans, and also dialectically produce new modes of identity
and subjectivity. In a very real sense, we give form to the cities that give
form to us. This suggests a progressive sense of place, a la Doreen Massey
(1994, 2005), one that is open and dynamic rather than closed or static.8
Invisible Cities is also concerned with questions of language and narra-
tive—not only for their own sake, but for how these contribute to senses
of place even without any direct phenomenological engagement. Trotsky
(1924) once mused,
A poem which sings the skyscrapers, the dirigibles and the submarines can
be written in a faraway corner of some Russian province on yellow paper and
with a broken stub of pencil. In order to inflame the bright imagination of
that province, it is quite enough if the skyscrapers, the dirigibles and the
submarines are in America. The human word is the most portable of all
materials.
Calvino echoes this sentiment: “Before being a city of the real world, Paris
for me, as for millions of other people in every country, has been a city that
I have imagined through books, a city that you appropriate when you
read” (Calvino 2003, 167). Readers of Invisible Cities are repeatedly
reminded that much of the communication between Polo and Khan
occurs through arrayed objects and gestures. Even when Polo has mas-
tered the Khan’s language, the latter is nevertheless always experiencing
the cities of his empire vicariously, through the mediation of signs. I can-
not help but think of the Western tourists who have flooded into Nepal
since the 1950s, carrying an array of fantastical, Orientalist imaginaries in
tow—Shangri-la, spiritual enlightenment, remote exoticism (Howard
2017). Arriving in Kathmandu can be a disorienting experience for such
tourists precisely because the material reality—a cosmopolitan metropolis
overcrowded and bustling with smoky traffic—refuses to align with their
expectations. And yet, tourists always seem to find the Nepal of their
imagined expectations nonetheless (Liechty 2017). As in Calvino’s
Maurilia, this leads to contestations between groups over what the “real”
city “really” means. Indeed, as so much geocritical theory argues, we can
form strong senses of a place without having been there (Westphal 2011).
Without ever leaving home, Paris becomes a quintessential city of romance
and light, Los Angeles a quintessential city of sprawl and glamor, Timbuktu
a quintessential shorthand for remoteness.
At the same time, Invisible Cities also suggests the impossibility of fully
capturing the lived experience of city life. All representational systems,
linguistic or otherwise, fall short in this way. In casting an arbitrary struc-
tural net over reality, such systems necessarily leave a remainder. In recent
decades, this has led to a surge of scholarship interested in recuperating
these extra-discursive and more-than-human elements. Scholars have
framed this pursuit by developing intertwined theories of nonrepresenta-
tional geography, affect, haptics, and emotional geographies.9 As Polo
gradually becomes able to communicate in the Khan’s language,
[...]words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most
important things of every province and city—monuments, markets, cos-
tumes, fauna and flora—and yet when Polo began to talk about how life
must be in those places, day after day, evening after evening, words failed
him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces,
glances. (Calvino 1974, 39)
16 B. LINDER
Before long, even the sign system of objects and gestures “tended to
become closed, stable. The pleasure of falling back on it also diminished in
both; in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and
immobile” (ibid., 39). Again, this bespeaks both the necessity of sign sys-
tems for communication as well as their ultimate, inevitable failure at fully
representing contemporary cities and the experiences we have in them.
The inability of representation—the Plan, the langue, the structure—to
capture city life opens a space to think politically about Invisible Cities, to
put it in conversation with various strands of critical geography. Many crit-
ics have noted a drift away from political concerns in the latter half of
Calvino’s career (e.g., Ricciardi 1999). In this account, Calvino’s works
became progressively disengaged from questions of power and inequality
beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the rest of his life.
However, even if the author shed the overt ideological commitments of
his earlier work, his politics merely changed form in later work, taking on
the more nebulous project of imagining alternative lives and otherwise
worlds (Petsota 2012; Nachtomy 2016; de Lauretis 1975). For example,
de Lauretis (1984) interprets the city of Zobeide as a metaphor for the
paradoxical position of women in culture generally—namely, as that which
fuels representations while simultaneously being excluded from (and held
captive by) such representations.10 Beyond gender, Invisible Cities engages
deeply with the politics of representation, including representations of
space (Welsh 2007; Ryan 2016). The text challenges hegemonic represen-
tations, much as scholars like Lefebvre (1991), de Certeau (1984), and
Said (1978) all did as well in their own distinctive ways.
As many have observed, the Khan represents the imperial, modernist
gaze, the hegemonic perspective seeking mastery, knowledge, and territo-
rial control. Polo constantly resists these machinations of power, seeking
means of escaping totalizing, rationalist projects (Vrbančić 2012; Ryan
2016). In a letter from November 1972, Calvino addresses this political
point specifically, arguing that the correct politics would “deny that what
one is fighting can be a system, in order to distinguish its components,
contradictions, loopholes, and to defeat it bit by bit” (Calvino 2014, 417).
When considered in terms of actual urban planning, this is not only a
theoretical question, but a practical one as well: “To American readers,
however, [Invisible Cities] struck a tender nerve, evoking the duplicity of
the American metropolis: its gleaming steel surface barely concealing cor-
roded underpinnings” (Markey 1985). Pilz (2003) argues that the text’s
tension between modernism and postmodernism maps onto the tension
between New York and Venice, respectively. One can hardly find a clearer
critique of High Modernist planning than in Calvino’s city of Perinthia.
An ideal city planned to perfection by astronomers in accordance with the
sky, the actual Perinthia has become horrific and dystopian, such that the
astronomers/planners must confront two (im)possible explanations:
“Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their
figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the
order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters” (Calvino
1974, 145). The ideals of technocratic planners—particularly of the High
Modernist variety—simply fail to account for the needs, desires, and lives
of actual inhabitants (see Jacobs 1961; Scott 1998; Holston 1989).
New Directions, Other Cities

Even if Calvino’s “foremost accomplishment hardly looms as a contribu-
tion to urban studies” (Domini 2014), this does not diminish his substan-
tial contribution to the field. Fifty years later, scholars of the urban
continue to find ripe ideas in the book’s pages, even if, until now, there
have been relatively few publications devoted to this. In Modena (2011),
one of the exceptional books in English that takes seriously Calvino’s
interfacing with urban theory/planning, she calls for a redress of this
oversight:
Scholars in cultural studies, architecture, urban studies and planning, and art
history, as well as artists, architects, and urbanists should one day join
together in a lively and sustained conversation about the practical applica-
tions of Calvino’s 1972 fiction, Six Memos, and his other works, as well as
their pedagogical relevance in this digital millennium. (Modena 2011, 186)
This is exactly the challenge taken up in this volume. The chapters that
follow all use Invisible Cities as a conceptual launchpad, a point of depar-
ture from which to understand contemporary urbanism in general, and
specific cities around the world in particular. As Erin Moore Daly suggests
in her consideration of post-Katrina New Orleans: “Perhaps all cities are
invisible in the way that Calvino’s Venice is invisible; perhaps all cities con-
tain an infinite number of invisible cities within” (Daly 2006, 133).
The remainder of this volume, in several ways, is meant to evoke and
extend Calvino’s text as much as it is meant to pay homage. It is divided
into three thematic sections.
18 B. LINDER
Part I (“Cities & Theory”) comprises essays that link Calvino’s text to
contemporary currents in social theory and philosophy. Mark Purcell dis-
cusses Invisible Cities in relation to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “urban
society,” ruminating on the possibility of radical democracy and spatial
justice (Chap. 2). Mario Vrbančić explores the postmodern, zig-zagging,
rhizomatic cartographies of the text (Chap. 3). Rachel Prentice puts
Calvino in conversation with contemporary anthropological theory, high-
lighting how the text serves as an “epistemological engine” to generate
new stories for our crisis-ridden world (Chap. 4). Turning to the real-and-
imagined city of Paris, where Calvino composed Invisible Cities, Daniel
Little compares the text to an experimental work by Bruno Latour (Chap.
5). In Chap. 6, Lianne Moyes introduces Nicole Brossard’s Montreal-
based novel French Kiss, arguing that both Brossard and Calvino offer
ways of challenging and re-thinking gender and/in the city. Finally, Luisa
Cortesi offers a theoretical meditation on knowledge, epistemological lim-
its, and the non-human agency of the cities in Calvino’s text (Chap. 7).
Part II (“Cities & Cities”) presents empirical case studies of actually
existing cities around the world. Each, in their own way, probes how
Invisible Cities comes to bear on all manner of urban research. Sophia
Psarra discusses Venice, both as an actual city of multiple “variations” and
as the “real” city most closely associated with Calvino’s text (Chap. 8).
Drawing on both Italy and Canada, Emanuela Guano and Cristina Moretti
reflect on the utility of Invisible Cities as a tool and inspiration for urban
ethnographers (Chap. 9). With the novel as both touchstone and guide,
we are then taken on a tour of diverse cities around the world. Isabel Elson
recounts the history of Soul City, North Carolina, a Black utopia that
might have been (Chap. 10). A common theme is the way in which his-
tory leaves its material traces in our present cities, from Tirana (Matthew
Rosen and Smoki Musaraj, Chap. 11) to Jerusalem (Arpan Roy and Carlos
Diz, Chap. 12) to Glasgow (Ursula Lang, Chap. 13). Two essays about
Africa follow: Irene Brunotti eulogizes the House of Wonders in Tanzania
and reflects on the significance of matter—a “poetics of rubble”—in con-
temporary Zanzibar (Chap. 14). Staying in Tanzania, James Ellison
recounts the story of a taxi driver in Dar es Salaam to illuminate the entan-
gled histories of automobility, urban transformation, and city life (Chap.
15). Vanicka Arora then explores the contested imaginaries of heritage and
architectural reconstruction in Bhaktapur, a mythical and historic city that
sustained heavy damage during the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal (Chap.
16). To close Part II, two chapters highlight Calvino’s relevance for two
very different types of urban settlements: Irna Nurlina Masron and Emily
Soh use Calvino’s cities of Leonia, Berenice, and Andria to explicate the
challenges and opportunities of urban villages—commonly disparaged as
informal settlements or slums—in Jakarta and Shenzhen (Chap. 17).
Finally, María Florencia Blanco Esmoris describes the cultural politics of
exclusion and inclusion in the community of Haedo, Buenos Aires
(Chap. 18).
Part III (“Cities & Practice”) highlights various modes of bringing
Calvino’s text into the real world and/or using it as a model of creative
academic writing. In Chap. 19, Nicola Fucigna compares Calvino’s vision-
ary cityscapes to contemporary architectural practice through a discussion
of four buildings: Il Teatro del Mondo (Venice), De Schalm Community
Centre (Deventer), The Guggenheim (New York City), and The Shed
(New York City). Following this, Kyle Gillette describes various attempts
to bring Invisible Cities to the stage and beyond (Chap. 20). He pays par-
ticular attention to Teatro Potlach’s Invisible Cities, a show meant to (re-)
enchant the city and which is customized to each particular city in which
it is performed, from Mazatlán to Palermo to Tehran. Scott Palmer then
highlights the pedagogical value of Calvino’s text, drawing on his substan-
tial experience with university students studying abroad at NYU-Florence
(Chap. 21). In particular, Palmer grapples with many of the challenges
inherent in overseas educational experiences (e.g., the sometimes blurry
distinction between tourists and students, the ambivalent politics of travel
and its histories, the perceived separation between classroom and city,
etc.). In quite a different practical application, Regev Nathansohn reflects
on the promising and cautionary lessons that “smart city” stakeholders
might draw from Invisible Cities (Chap. 22). The last four chapters of the
text find scholars experimenting with alternative modes of academic writ-
ing, inspired directly by Calvino’s prose. Jeremy F. Walton does so to
engage (post-)imperial histories in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo (Chap.
23); Derek Pardue revisits a Calvino-esque field note from his research in
São Paulo to underscore the utility of ethnographic fiction (Chap. 24);
Ana Ivasiuc suggests reading Invisible Cities as an “ethnography of all
urban ethnographies,” and her vignettes from Rome are suffused with the
text (Chap. 25); and finally, Nick Dunn employs creative nonfiction as a
means of grappling with the urban night in Manchester (Chap. 26).
Cities & Theory. Cities & Cities. Cities & Practice. Three vantages
from which to view the persistent relevance of Invisible Cities. Just as in
Calvino’s text, however, these externally imposed categories—meant to
20 B. LINDER
instill coherence, order, and flow—nevertheless cannot contain the rich

diversity of the chapters themselves. The truth is that all chapters deal with
issues of theory; all of them deal with empirical urban questions; and all of
them are simultaneously creative and practical. Just as in Calvino, the cat-
egories we impose upon any collection of texts—that is, the curatorial
boundaries and conceptual lines we draw—might have always been other-
wise. Moreover, the following chapters, while written independently, nev-
ertheless resonate against each other. They do not repeat; they echo,
contradict, fortify, expand, and complicate one another. Therefore, much
like Invisible Cities, this book rewards readings that are non-linear, dis-
jointed, piecemeal, and repeated. Readers are welcome to traverse the text
however they wish, finding new patterns and insights in the arrangement
of its chapters.
Of course, this volume is not an exhaustive treatment, and much more
remains to be written and debated about Invisible Cities. Certain limits
necessarily had to be imposed upon the scope of this book.11 There are
countless avenues left open for future exploration, and Ato Quayson ges-
tures toward some of these in his Epilogue (Chap. 27). Fifty years after its
original publication, Invisible Cities remains a touchstone. It has been
adapted in multiple theatrical productions and has inspired other works of
fiction and visual art. It is a staple on many university syllabi, from archi-
tecture to geography, literature to urban planning. The diverse contribu-
tions in this volume are yet another testament to the text’s relevance to
scholars of urban space and place.
Calvino himself loved to write about cities, space, and cartography
(e.g., Calvino 2003, 2013). In many ways, Invisible Cities is the highest
expression of his concern for urban life in all of its imagination and mate-
riality, tragedy and magic. Calvino’s book distills and crystallizes the ques-
tion of why we build cities and how we inhabit them. The text resonates
with urban thinkers across disciplines for precisely this reason, and it will
no doubt continue to do so for more decades to come.
Notes
1. The book was originally published in Italian (Calvino 1972). William
Weaver’s English translation came out two years later (Calvino 1974).
2. One of the key insights of geocritical thinking, however, is precisely that
the distinction between “real” and “imaginary” spaces is far from obvious
or stable. The most fantastical cities ultimately rely on some understanding
of “real” geography, even if only as foil; meanwhile, the experience of

“real” cities often relies on the production of imaginative and fantastical
impressions forged through literarature and other representational sources.
3. My overview of Calvino’s life and works is heavily indebted to previous
scholarship, especially McLaughlin (1998), but also Cannon (1981),
Markey (1999), Jeannet (2000), Cavallaro (2010), Petsota (2012), Weiss
(1993), and Hume (1992).
4. Mclaughlin (1998, 100) goes so far as to group these three novels into an
unofficial trilogy.
5. See Springer (1985), Palmore (1990), McLaughlin (1998), and Serravalle
de Sá (2009) for some examples.
6. L’Empire des signes (Barthes 1970) was published only two years before Le
città invisibili (Calvino 1972), around the time Calvino started writing the
latter. There is a deep affinity between these two texts. Both are composed
of brief, impressionistic, fragmentary accounts of “foreign” places. In
Barthes’ Japan, as in Calvino’s imaginary cities, meaning is always unfixed
and elusive. As Barthes further muses about the haiku in that book, “what
is abolished is not meaning but any notion of finality” (Barthes 1982, 82).
7. This, too, echoes a recurring theme in Empire of Signs, where Barthes
writes: “The city I am talking about (Tokyo) offers this precious paradox:
it does possess a center, but this center is empty. The entire city turns
around a site both forbidden and indifferent, a residence concealed beneath
foliage, protected by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen,
which is to say, literally, by no one knows who.[...] One of the two most
powerful cities of modernity is thereby built around an opaque ring of
walls, streams, roofs, and trees whose own center is no more than an evap-
orated notion, subsisting here, not in order to irradiate power, but to give
to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness, forcing
the traffic to make a perpetual detour” (Barthes 1982, 30–32).
8. Others see in the text the postmodern city (Beville 2013), a “non-place”
devoid of relationality whose meaning has eroded away (e.g., Augé 2008;
Jameson 1991).
9. For some foundational and recent interventions along these lines, see
Thrift (2004), Lorimer (2005, 2008), Anderson and Harrison (2010),
Davidson (2003), Davidson and Milligan (2004), Bennett (2004, 2009),
Bondi (2005), Straughan (2012), Paterson (2009), and Crang (2003).
10. Myk (2009), in contrast, takes a more critical stance toward Calvino’s
treatment of femininity in the text, arguing that woman only appear as
anodyne objects of desire and exploitation.
11. One example that deserves special mention is the dominance of English,
which manifests in at least three ways. First, each chapter’s engagement
with the text is mediated by William Weaver’s English translation, which is
22 B. LINDER
highly praised but which does not come without problems (see, e.g.,
McLaughlin 2010). While several contributors’ chapters are informed by
readings of non-English versions (especially the original Italian), we have
on the whole eschewed questions of translation per se, though such critical
discussions are certainly worthwhile. Second, while there is ample Italian-
language scholarship on Calvino and his work, this volume is mostly
restricted to Anglophone scholarship. Third, Invisible Cities has been
widely translated, and so future research might (and should) also engage
with its reception beyond both English- and Italian-speaking audiences.
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PART I
Cities & Theory

CHAPTER 2
Invisible Cities: Learning to Recognize

Urban Society
Mark Purcell
Introduction
Today, in 2021, nearly 50 years after Invisible Cities was published, we are
adrift. We flail about trying to bring ourselves out of a global pandemic.
We resolutely continue causing global climate change, despite the screamed
warnings the planet is issuing. We witness, in almost every corner of the
world, an increasing desire to return to fascism. It seems, more than ever,
that we are on the precipice of a global collapse, faced with an existential
challenge to our species. In a context like that, what is to be done? How
can we take action to stave off disaster and ensure we are able to go on
living? I don’t have the answer. But what I want to do in this chapter is to
suggest a way to think about the question—an intellectual and emotional
orientation—that I think can help. Unsurprisingly, I find this orientation
in Invisible Cities, but I find it too in one of Calvino’s contemporaries,
M. Purcell (*)
Department of Urban Planning & Design, University of Washington,
Seattle, WA, USA
e-mail: mpurcell@uw.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_2
30 M. PURCELL
Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theorization of cities—and especially some-

thing he calls “urban society”—resonates strongly with Calvino’s book. In
both sources, what we find is not a mournful incantation of our struggles,
but rather the joyous and insistent search for our own strength. We will
need to discover this strength, I think, and learn to use it wisely, if we are
to save our lives.
Invisible Cities and The Urban Revolution

It is in the famous last lines of Invisible Cities that this search for our own
strength comes into full bloom, when Marco says to the Great Khan,
“seek and learn to recognize, who and what, in the midst of inferno, are
not inferno, and help them endure, give them space” (Calvino 1974,
165). I want to spend some time understanding that line in the context of
the book as a whole, so that we can fully grasp the project that Marco is
proposing. I also want to articulate just how similar that project is to the
urban project Lefebvre was committed to.
Calvino’s book is framed, as readers know, by a conversation between
Marco Polo and the Great Khan. The Great Khan has asked Marco to
travel through his empire, examine its cities, and describe them to him.
Marco’s tales are wonderful to read for their poetry alone. Calvino clearly
loves language and the joyful music it is capable of. His writing is strewn
with allegory, image, and metaphor. We can see both of these traits, I
think, as a celebration of creation, invention, and imagination. Calvino is
irrepressible in his invention of new sounds, new images, and new juxta-
positions to create fanciful—and often just plain weird—worlds for us to
experience. This relentless creation matters to him, and we should not fail
to appreciate that fact. But it is also true that the allegory and image is a
way to package, and maybe even also cloak, an explicit political project
that Calvino has in mind. It is a political project that very much resonates
with what Lefebvre had in mind. Let me try to explain what I mean
by that.
In the beginning of the book Kublai Khan is greatly worried that his
empire is collapsing, that “corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be
healed,” and that nothing he can do will save it (Calvino 1974, 5). In the
face of this decline, Marco’s tales offer solace and perhaps even an alterna-
tive, another way to live: “Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan
able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the
tracery of a pattern so subtle in could escape the termites’ gnawing” (ibid.,
2 INVISIBLE CITIES: LEARNING TO RECOGNIZE URBAN SOCIETY 31
5–6). The whole of the book, by my reading, is a plea for us to be attentive

to this “tracery of a pattern,” and to not let our focus be consumed by the
corruption.
Lefebvre (2003 [1970]) makes very much the same plea. In his book
Urban Revolution, published two years before Invisible Cities, he sets out
a distinction between the capitalist city as it exists today and what he calls
“urban society” (Lefebvre 2003). In the capitalist city, private property
and exchange value (rather than use value) are the dominant ways to con-
ceive of and value the city (ibid., 155). The people in this city, its inhabit-
ants, are trained to become consumers rather than citizens. They are
separated from each other, socially and spatially, unable to engage with
each other. Their isolation renders them politically passive. It mutes their
capacity for creative action. Space in the capitalist city is strictly segregated
and classified into homogeneous categories so that it can become inter-
changeable and exchangeable. The purpose of this capitalist city is to pro-
duce and sell standardized commodities in order to maximize accumulation.
Cities are engines of capitalist economic growth. Today, we would call this
the neoliberal city. Guy Debord (1983 [1967]), writing at about the same
time as Lefebvre, called it The Society of the Spectacle.
Lefebvre’s concept of “urban society” is his way to imagine a city that
is other than the capitalist city. It is his “tracery of a pattern” in the midst
of corruption. In urban society, he says, urban space is valued for how
inhabitants use it (Lefebvre 2003, 19). It encourages a different kind of
city, a city that overcomes the separation and segregation of the capitalist
city and draws inhabitants together into common spaces. In these spaces,
inhabitants encounter each other and engage in meaningful interactions.
Through this sustained social contact, inhabitants become active both
socially and politically. They establish and multiply connections with each
other, building solidarity, trust, and the collective capacity to analyze, use,
and manage the city themselves. As they engage in this new activity, as
they practice being together and managing the city, their democratic abili-
ties grow stronger. Their creative potential is nourished, and they use it to
produce their own unique work (oeuvre), rather than standardized com-
modities. In urban society, the purpose of the city is not the accumulation
of capital, but the development of human potential.1
Urban society is not a mere fantasy Lefebvre conjured up in his mind.
It very much exists, he argues, today, in the city we inhabit (Lefebvre
2003, 17). At the same time, it is not a fully formed reality in the same way
the capitalist city is (ibid., 16–17). Urban society is what he calls a “virtual
32 M. PURCELL
object” (ibid., 58), an idea of a possible urban world that is already here,
already being imagined and practiced in the city. This virtual object is an
existing ground that we can discover, cultivate, and try to enlarge. But it
is also a horizon in thought that can provide a vision of the city toward
which we can move. For Lefebvre, urban society is very much not a utopia
in the way we usually mean it: a “no-place” that cannot be realized. On
the contrary, it is the extrapolation in thought of real practices that already
exist in urban life. These practices are very real, but at the same time, they
are inchoate, ephemeral, emerging. They are less common and less domi-
nant than the norms and practices of the capitalist city. It is thus often hard
to notice urban society amid the blinding spectacle of capitalism (ibid.,
29). Urban society, he says elsewhere, is like “the shadow of a future object
in the light of the rising sun” (Lefebvre 1996, 148). To help urban society
emerge, we must both theorize it, extrapolate the concept in thought, and
attend to the real practices of urban society that already exist, to search for
them, to notice them, to name them, narrate them, celebrate them, cri-
tique them, nurture them, and help them develop (Lefebvre 2003, 31).
Urban society as a virtual object thus operates for Lefebvre in much the
same way the “tracery of a pattern” operates for Kublai Khan: something
other, creative, and affirmative that we can seek out and attend to in the
midst of gathering ruin. I think those of us who are asking what is to be
done, politically, today, especially in cities, should listen to what Lefebvre
and Marco are trying to tell us.
Marco tells us the aim of his explorations in the first part of the book.
He says that in “examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I
gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is
around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the
distance” (Calvino 1974, 59). His “faint lights” are an inversion of
Lefebvre’s shadows against the rising sun, but they point us to the same
project: to search for and be able to perceive the traces of happiness that
are found in human community. Later in the book the Great Khan con-
firms the content of Marco’s project:
I am the prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all the forms of
human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imag-
ining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the
invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead,
they will come to life again. (Calvino 1974, 135–136)
The tales Marco tells are imaginative renderings of the faint lights and
invisible reasons. Calvino’s agenda, his mission almost, is to help us see
those faint lights more clearly. They come upon us over and over, like a
refrain, incantation, or mantra. Each city is a variation on the same theme.
For example, Marco tells us about Fedora, which is a city of morose gray
stone, but which has at its center a building that is full of glass globes, in
each of which is a model of a different Fedora, a Fedora that might have
existed (Calvino 1974, 32). These “possible futures” are just toys, of
course, but they are nevertheless there, and every inhabitant visits the
building to contemplate the possible Fedora that corresponds to his or her
desires. Marco tells us that both cities are at once real and imagined, and
both are equally present in the life of Fedora: the actualized stone Fedora
and the little Fedoras that imagine the possible. Another example is the
city of Berenice, where “all the future Berenices are already present in this
instant, wrapped within one another, confined, crammed, inextricable”
(ibid., 163).
Throughout Marco’s tales we find this co-existence of the present with
its possible futures, which is precisely what Lefebvre’s virtual object is try-
ing to capture. Whereas in Fedora these future cities are contemplated by
individuals alone, in a city called Zobeide the contemplation is a much
more collective act. The city was founded by people living in far-flung
places who all had an identical dream, set in the same imagined city. When
they awoke, they all began to search for the city in their dream. None
found it, but they encountered each other as they were searching. Brought
together in this way, they decided together to build a city like the one in
their dream (Calvino 1974, 45).
In Chloe, we get an even stronger sense of the social exchange that is
so central to Lefebvre’s urban society. Chloe is a large trading city, an eco-
nomic center. All the inhabitants are strangers to each other, and as they
come into proximity, they actively imagine the many interactions they
could have. However, strangely, no one acts on their imagination. We get
the impression that the city somehow suppresses such interaction. But
even so, “something runs among them,” their desire to engage each other
pulses powerfully under the surface.2 And that desire is strikingly vivid:
[…] when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter
from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar,
or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copu-
lations, orgies are consummated among them without a word exchanged,
34 M. PURCELL
without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.

(Calvino 1974, 51)
This drive to connect, and to exchange, is there in the city, even though it
is not actualized. It is present, churning, and eager to burst forth.
Marco tells a very similar story about Raissa (Calvino 1974, 148–149).
“In Raissa, life is not happy,” he says, and most of his tale is taken up by a
description of that unhappiness. And still, even in this unhappy place,
“there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a
moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as
it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city
contains a happy city unaware of its own existence” (ibid., 149). However
ephemeral, the happy city is there, Marco says, but the inhabitants are
unaware of its existence. In Aglaura, similarly, the good city is there, but
in this case people are unable to articulate it. Aglaura “is a colorless city,
without character,” and yet,
[…] at certain hours, in certain places along the street, you see opening
before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent;
you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura
imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat rather than say.
Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which
grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that
grows on the ground. And even I, who would like to keep the two cities
distinct in my memory, can speak only of the one, because the recollection
of the other, in the lack of words to fix it, has been lost. (Calvino 1974, 67–68)
Here it is a question not of seeing, of shadows and faint lights, but of say-
ing. We are used to speaking about the realized city; we don’t yet have the
words to articulate this magnificent something, this possible future. Here
Marco suggests we need to keep speaking this other city, to build up a
vocabulary and a grammar, to learn to articulate to each other our desire
for happiness, and our desire for each other.
Perhaps the most breathtaking of Marco’s cities is Marozia. Like many
others, it consists of two cities. The present city is a city of rats, marked by
oppression, domination, and competition. But,
It also happens that, if you move along Marozia’s compact walls, when you
least expect it, you see a crack open and a different city appear. Then, an
instant later, it has already vanished. Perhaps everything lies in knowing
what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and
rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for
someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his
pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change,
all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transpar-
ent as a dragonfly. But everything must happen as if by chance, without
attaching too much importance to it, without insisting that you are per-
forming a decisive operation, remembering clearly that any moment the old
Marozia will return and solder its ceiling of stone, cobwebs, and mold over
all heads. (Calvino 1974, 155)
Perhaps, Marco suggests again, the answer is to invent new words, a new
way of speaking. Or maybe it is merely to live, to act for the sheer pleasure
of it, and to transmit that pleasure to others. But Marco says we cannot
force this possible Marozia to exist. We cannot burst through the crack,
declare a revolution, and make urban society arrive all at once. Rather the
crystalline Marozia must emerge on its own. We must allow events to
unfold, Marco says, because in the midst of the city of rats “a new century
is about to begin in which all the inhabitants of Marozia will fly like swal-
lows in the summer sky […] tracing with their wings’ blade the curve of
an opening horizon” (ibid., 154). Marco proposes that “Marozia consists
of two cities, the rat’s and the swallow’s; both change with time, but their
relationship does not change; the second is the one about to free itself
from the first” (ibid., 155). He reminds us that the inhabitants of Marozia,
too, are dual; they are both rats and swallows.
What Is to Be Done?
The book ends with a last exchange between Marco and the Great Khan.
They are looking over the Great Khan’s atlas, which contains “promised
lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded” (Calvino
1974, 164). Marco tells the Great Khan that, despite his many travels, he
is unable to chart a route to these promised lands. He can only affirm that
we must continue to search for them. The Great Khan, frustrated and
despairing, replies that the search is then useless. If we cannot make the
promised lands come about, then we are doomed, he says, to land finally
in the infernal city, where the currents are drawing us in ever-narrowing
circles. But Marco suggests there is another path to take:
36 M. PURCELL
The inferno of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is
that which is already here, the inferno that we inhabit every day, that we
create by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first
is easy for most: accept the inferno and become such a complete part of it
that you no longer know it is there. The second is risky and requires vigi-
lance and continuous attention: seek and learn to recognize who and what,
in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, and help them endure, give them
space. (Calvino 1974, 165)
We have to seek and learn to recognize this not-inferno, this Marozia of

swallows, this urban society. It isn’t easy. Urban society is ephemeral,
emergent, a faint light, a shadow in the light of the rising sun. Our eyes are
not trained to see it. We may not have the words to articulate it. Marco’s
project requires vigilance and continuous attention. It asks us to turn our
attention on ourselves. We are rats, to be sure. We are consumer-inhabitants
of the capitalist city. We create the inferno together. But we are also swal-
lows. We carry within us the desire for interaction and connection that will
explode the capitalist city. The inferno is very much within us, but the
not-inferno is within us too. Even though it seems impossible, we are in
fact able to fly, able to trace with our wings’ blade the curve of an opening
horizon. We can see urban society, we can articulate it, and we can help it
endure. It is a difficult project, it is risky, and it can never be finally com-
pleted. But it is a project we must undertake. And I think once we dive in,
once we begin practicing, we will get better at seeing, better at saying. We
will discover, I think, that it is a project that will bring us delight.
Notes
1. This way to understand the city runs all the way back to Aristotle (1998),
who would have been aghast at the capitalist city because he insisted that the
purpose of the polis was the development of human potential. Economic
activity, for him, was a vulgar activity that should be kept as hidden as
possible.
2. On the question of desire, see also the tale of Zenobia (Calvino 1974, 35).
References
Aristotle. 1998. Politics. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Debord, Guy. 1983 [1967]. Society of the Spectacle. St. Petersburg: Detroit:
Black and Red.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore
Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Cambridge: Blackwell.
———. 2003 [1970]. The Urban Revolution. Translated by Robert Bononno.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
CHAPTER 3
How to Map the Invisible
Mario Vrbančić
Maps, cities, and narratives are always interrelated and interconnected.

The density and complexity of the life and fabric of cities cannot be easily
mapped because there is an immense concentration of diverse hybridity.
Cities are like a text, full of different intersections, points of view, inten-
tions, desires; cities form plans, structures; they are the complex layering
of power, from its most general pre-textual forms to the ideology of the
city plan or text itself. Semioticians feast on the city stroll since everything
opens up in textual tapestry: texts of streets; texts of movies, television
programs, and magazines; texts of towers, bridges, dark and desolate blind
alleys. Hence, we repeatedly encounter the metaphor of a map that con-
tains in itself this painful ambiguity and that brings up the possibility of
interplay between reading and navigating, walking through the city and
reading the city, between the reader and the traveler. The metaphor of the
This essay is the revised version of “A Dream of the Perfect Map—Calvino’s

Invisible Cities” published in SIC: a Journal of Literature, Culture and
Translation, Vol.2. No.2.
M. Vrbančić (*)
English Department, University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_3
40 M. VRBANČIĆ
map opens up the texts, enabling different points of entrances that, like
cities, become infinite storehouses of citations, echoes and references,
crosses and recrosses. Consequently, maps are related to narratives, and
narratology to cartography. As Andrew Gibson (1996) claims, the narra-
tological imaginary has always been haunted by dreams of geometry, like
maps with perfectly straight lines, like the cartographers’ dream of a map
equal to territory. In Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Gibson
“protests” against a geometrization of textual space, against the attempts
to establish narrative grammars based on the idea of universal forms of
narrative that are often taken to be geometric in nature.
Italo Calvino’s (1974) Invisible Cities reveals narratology’s roots in
structuralism and its tendency toward geometric schematization and clas-
sification. Calvino’s invisible cities (55 cities) are divided into nine chap-
ters, which together comprise 11 sets of 5 cities. The cities of Invisible
Cities—their streets, their squares, their stone arches that shape the past
and desire—are like words or sentences sprawling in a vast network, where
the inside and the outside are blurred. However, dispersed or scattering
structures, whose amplitude we can no longer subsume under the whole/
totality, calls for different reading: are these cities characterized by mon-
strous propinquity, like Michel Foucault’s (1986) heterotopia, or are there
some other possible connections, networks, and spirals to spark a different
narrative?
In this essay I focus on Calvino’s narrative strategies in Invisible Cities
and his attempt to map the invisible. Calvino’s “maps” converge with
theories that emphasize openness, decentered-ness, multiplicities, and
multivocality. Such theories manifest in Roland Barthes’ idea of the text
under the motto, “My name is legion for we are many” (1986, 60). I will
show that Calvino’s ways to map the invisible crystallize the tension
between structuralist spatialization on the one hand and heterotopic frag-
mentation on the other, which ultimately results in the hymn for a new
multiplicity, for a new mapping exemplified by the rhizomic sprouting of
a zigzag line. My intention is to evoke a vivid tapestry of a lateral anti-
hierarchical map (i.e., a rhizome) crisscrossed and awash with this untram-
meled flow of Desire, an energy of reading or mapping that cannot be
contained by rigid structures. There are innumerable entrances in Invisible
Cities. Its architectures and urban blueprints defy plain and acceptable
Euclidean geometry. Entrances could be anywhere, even in the dark of a
sewer, full of rats and rodents, where the Signifier lies in the dark. The city
3 HOW TO MAP THE INVISIBLE 41
of Esmeralda is exemplary here (Calvino 1974, 88). To move around

Esmeralda may at the same time suggest how to read Invisible Cities itself.
Calvino describes Esmeralda as having networks of streets and canals,
which facilitates endless possibilities for residents to reach any given
destination:
To go from one place to another you have always the choice between land
and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda
is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes,
the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they
increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry
land. (Calvino 1974, 88)
But the networks of Esmeralda do not exist only on the ground level, but
“follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered
bridges, hanging streets” (ibid.). Smugglers, rats, and conspirators can
thusly move about the subterranean sewers. Illicit lovers, cats, and thieves
move higher up, along the drainpipes and balconies. Marco Polo’s descrip-
tion of Esmeralda ends on a cartographic note. The traveler suggests that
any map of the city ought to include all these possible routes—“solid and
liquid, evident and hidden” (ibid., 89)—despite acknowledging the diffi-
culty of producing such a map. In what follows, I argue that this descrip-
tion does not only concern traversing Esmeralda itself, but also suggests
Calvino’s ideal means of traversing the literary text within which Esmeralda
is contained.
The city is Esmeralda: the city of numerous routes, hanging streets, and
canals, where each passerby has multiple options that constantly increase.
The same goes for the reader of Invisible Cities: multiple lines and routes
through the text, endless interpretations and possible meanings. The nar-
rative stratum is not characterized by homogeneity. There is no center, no
consolation of unifying meaning. Thus, the critic or theorist becomes an
urban planner of constantly shifting, changing routes. Esmeralda is full of
narrators, perspectives, lines, and alleys that a divine but absent presence
tries to subsume under its hierarchical model. Passersby are immersed in
the labyrinth of streets, with infinite possible narrations (depending on
their route), or, on the other hand, with infinite possibilities of interpret-
ing their routes (so that there is no repetition). This multiplicity—even
infinity—raises a troubling question: How, then, one can know if
Esmeralda exists?
42 M. VRBANČIĆ
Esmeralda resembles our contemporary sense of space—the loss of the

dimensional mechanics of ancient Greek geometry, the loss of conformity
in unity and symmetry. Ours “is a world of dispersed or scattering struc-
tures whose amplitude—contrary to the structuralists—we can no longer
measure” (Paul Virilio, quoted in Gibson 1996, 9). Hence, in terms of
narrative theory, we are faced with the inability to cope with an explosion
of different, disparate spaces and stories. Virilio (1991) claims that this
spatial confusion since the Renaissance onwards leads to a crisis of descrip-
tion and representation as well: “The crisis of the grand narrative that
gives rise to the micro-narrative finally becomes the crisis of the narrative
of the grand and the petty” (Virilio 1991, 25). Esmeralda anticipates this
crisis and rejects the possibility of an omniscient narrator as well as the
unified meaning spatialized in the central square. One can no more map
the totality of Esmeralda than one could map the swallows flying over
Esmeralda, dominating “from every point of their airy paths all the points
of the city” (Calvino 1974, 89). In addition, the innumerable combina-
tions of possible routes create a labyrinth without labyrinth, since their
fortuitous routes neither have the same nor any final destination. How,
then, to map these trails, spatially and narratively? Esmeralda epitomizes a
possible way of reading, one not only contained within its material
urban design.
Calvino’s Esmeralda opposes narrative theory that constructs the space
of the text as a unitary, homogenous, and constant space. Esmeralda defies
the supposed clarity, uniformity, purity, and universality of narrative space.
It consists not only of a pluralized conception of space per se, but it also
pluralizes the spaces of knowledge. Hence, traditional narratology, with its
roots in an overly schematic approach to texts, cannot map the invisible.
Perhaps because of that, the mapping of Kublai Khan’s empire seems so
confusing in Invisible Cities. The efforts of various critics to explain even
the simplest routes remain unresolved. “The question which subtends the
entire novel is whether such a map exists, whether the chaotic and disor-
dered worlds can be reduced to a human law” (Cannon 1981, 84). Even
the simplest statement of location proves to be too complicated, as some
critics strain to find something—a real city?—that might finally unify the
text. Even the notion that the whole text is ultimately about Venice dis-
credits and discards not only other possible places, but also other possible
interpretations of any particular dreamlike travelogue. Bruno Ferraro
(1988) maps Invisible Cities by comparing its complex structure to the
combination of “two sets of notions—narrative as a combinatory process
and literature as challenger to the labyrinthine complexity of the world”

(1988, 57). Carol P. James (1982) states that the novel shows a hesitant
balancing on the threshold between the modern and postmodern: a dou-
ble structure of narrativity and seriality. A secret numerology of the cities
bears no relation to the narrative. Also, despite the structure’s palindromic
and symmetrical aspects (the 5-4-3-2-1 and the 1-2-3-4-5, see Chap. 1),
there is a threat that mathesis universalis prevails in some platonic meta-
phor, suffocating the richness and uniqueness of the particular cities.
But the aporia—as James (1982) dubs the tension between the novel’s
seriality and narrative—is not just between numbers and story. Each city is
built on contradiction, on a paroxysm of opposition that freezes narrative
in a crystalline structure in which inner existential tensions are illustrated
in the city’s architecture, in streets, in thousands of details or signs that
create the rich texture and text of the city. And while the anxieties and
dilemmas of their inhabitants are so clearly geometrized, the city plan stays
unresolved. There is one such dichotomy in Irene: “There is the city where
you arrive for the first time, and there is another city which you leave never
to return. Each deserves a different name” (Calvino 1974, 125). Another
appears in Marozia: one Marozia of rats, one Marozia of swallows (ibid.,
154). There is no simple line or finality in any of Calvino’s cities. Each line
is blocked, forcing progression in multiplicity. As in the city of Esmeralda,
the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line but a zigzag
that ramifies routes.
In a sense, all attempts at mapping Invisible Cities illuminate something
of the text’s “invisibility”—as a labyrinth, as a prototype city (e.g., Venice),
as an aporia between seriality and narrativity, as a threshold between
modernity and postmodernity. At the same time, however, they fail to see
the emerging of an unusual space. This space cannot be described by old
terminology since it is, as Umberto Eco (1979) would classify it, an
“impossible world.” Invisible Cities and the cities it contains are built on
contradictions. They encapsulate, at the same time, the true and the false.
Instead of meditating on the “impossibility” of Calvino’s project, Brian
McHale (1987) emphasizes what kind of space is capable of accommodat-
ing so many incommensurable and mutually exclusive worlds: “What para-
doxical kind of space does this Empire occupy? What kind of world is
this?” (McHale 1987, 43). McHale’s answer is in Foucault’s concept of
heterotopia:
44 M. VRBANČIĆ
The empire of Calvino’s Great Khan is just such a heterotopia. Radically

discontinuous and inconsistent, it juxtaposes worlds of incompatible struc-
ture. It violates the law of the excluded middle: logically, either Trude is
everywhere or Cecilia is everywhere; in the Empire of Invisible Cities, both
are everywhere, and so are Penthesilea and the other continuous cities.
(McHale 1987, 44)
Postulated as a model to describe narrative, heterotopia generates confu-

sion and anxiety by its unmasterable, unclassified profusions.
Calvino’s cities are not static, not examples or cases but nodes in circu-
lation. Although their maps refuse to give themselves over to a thematic
pattern that would support, replicate, or mirror the numerical pattern, the
cities are somehow connected nevertheless. The reading of each city shows
it to contain its other. The doubling within the cities takes many forms.
They remain incomplete, forever moving from one state to another. Each
city alludes to other cities, and there is no absolute gap between them.
Topology is never just the mathematical becoming rhetorical. Maps and
themes interconnect to constitute an imaginary geography of Invisible
Cities. The catalogue of forms is endless: “until every shape has found its
city, new cities will continue to be born” (Calvino 1974, 139). Each city
in Calvino’s text produces narrative and logical uneasiness; each is seem-
ingly trapped in a paroxysm of contradiction, bitterly resisting one-
dimensional reading and subverting the Center. In this way, the text
screams and wages a war on all totalities. And yet, Calvino’s writing
machine preserves, in spite of all obstacles, a desire for story, a desire for
narrative.
Calvino’s Esmeralda paradoxically hints at a different strategy for read-
ing Invisible Cities: “the shortest distance between two points is not the
straight line but a zigzag” (Calvino 1974, 88). The statement defies our
knowledge of geometry and linearity as a basis of reading. This strongly
echoes Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and their preference for “being an
abstract and broken line, zigzag that slips ‘between’” (Deleuze and Parnet
1987, 40–41). There is no linear development of the text; there is no
simple orientation in its cities. It is as if Calvino’s writing machine advises
readers to pursue their own pathways. A broken, zigzag line. Calvino’s
work is a rhizome—an endless pattern in which everything is linked to
everything else, counterposed to any center, to any simple city plan, and
to any reading that would unify the text in some final interpretation.
A parallel reading of the Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizome and

Calvino’s (1974) Invisible Cities reveals many similarities. First, any point
of a rhizome can or must be connected to any other, just as imaginary city-
plans flow into one another through Marco Polo’s accounts, Kublai Khan’s
remarks, and/or the words of an invisible narrator. Second, in the rhi-
zome, just as in Invisible Cities, there are no points or positions, since
multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded. Points of fixed meaning in
Invisible Cities are eradicated by constant contradiction, both within each
city and among them on the broader Atlas. Third, a rhizome can be bro-
ken off at any point and reconnected following one of its lines (“in the
seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden” [Calvino 1974,
162]). Fourth, the rhizome has its own outside, with which it makes yet
another rhizome; therefore, the rhizomic whole has neither outside nor
inside. This, too, is explored in Calvino’s text, as the internal and external
of various cities in the text are constantly questioned and inverted. Fifth,
rhizomes and Calvino’s cities are in a state of constant modification. Sixth,
no one can provide a global description of the whole rhizome, just as
Kublai Khan cannot master his Empire through an abstract system of
signs. Seventh, whereas for heterotopias, the gaze from outside prevails,
Invisible Cities (like a rhizome) is a web of connections without an out-
side. Marco Polo, as well as Kublai Khan (although from another angle
and not through the immediacy of experience), can look at cities only
from the inside.
The concept of the rhizome is meant to signify an anti-hierarchical,
undisciplined form of lateral, multi-branching growth. The rhizome is an
attempt to resist subordination, classification, and any interpretation ren-
dering any part of its vast network into fixed meaning. At the same time,
the rhizome keeps these immeasurable multiplicities moving in their
numerous interrelations. The rhizome, like the infinite routes of Esmeralda,
is reducible “neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that
becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple
derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1)” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 6). Like Invisible Cities, the rhizome “pertains to a map
that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, con-
nectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and
its own lines of flights” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7).
The postmodern experience of spatiality stems from a profound sense
of ontological uncertainty. From this uncertainty, various conceptions of
space emerge, like heterotopia or a rhizome. The challenges and
46 M. VRBANČIĆ
conditions of postmodernity result in a deeper anxiety due to the loss of

any fixed point of reference. Mapping Invisible Cities undermines our
known, familiar geography through experimentation with different spaces
and connections. Such a multidisciplinary, hybrid approach—intertwining
different discourses, not based on any unifying theory—makes it difficult
to draw a conclusion. In addition, a final conclusion would be a deliberate
surrender to the demands of rigid structure, the opposite of a rhizomic
guerrilla strategy. Both heterotopia and the rhizome present different
modes of thinking and reading that challenge the narratological imagi-
nary. Both concepts destabilize unitary notions of space. But, as we have
shown, heterotopia is a more descriptive model of heterogeneous, impos-
sible hybridity seen from outside. Heterotopia produces gaps and discon-
tinuities, whereas Calvino’s cities multiply a proliferation of spaces and
interrelations among themselves. Again, the city of Esmeralda, with its
innumerable intersections of different networks and branching routes,
exemplifies this rhizomatic approach to space and text. Thus, readers of
the text, like a traveler to the cities it describes, are confused and bewil-
dered, constantly forced to find their way and satisfy their desire for narra-
tive. Traversing endless zigzag lines and rhizomatic circuits is a daunting
task, but one that Calvino’s text invites and encourages in the search for
new spatial and narrative possibilities.
References
Barthes, Roland. 1986. The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill and Wang.
———. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Cannon, JoAnn. 1981. Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic. Ravenna: Longo Editore.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Eco, Umberto. 1979. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ferraro, Bruno. 1988. Italo Calvino’s Le Città Invisibili and ‘La Sfida Al Labirinto’.
The Italianist 8 (1): 56–65.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (1): 22–27.
Gibson, Andrew. 1996. Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
James, Carol P. 1982. Seriality and Narrativity in Calvino’s Le cittá invisibili. MLN
97 (1): 144–161.
McHale, Brian. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.
Virilio, Paul. 1991. The Lost Dimension. New York: Semiotext(e).
CHAPTER 4
Invisible Cities and the Work of Storying

the Future
Rachel Prentice
In his 1967 lecture titled, “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” Italo Calvino said:
“The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
Dreams of progress and reason are haunted by nightmares” (Calvino
1986, 19). As the twenty-first century begins its third decade, our seem-
ingly enlightened houses look cracked to their foundations, haunted by
the remains of violence and devastation wrought on humans and the natu-
ral world in the name of colonialism, capitalism, and empire. Fires fueled
by climate change and bad forestry practices engulf the western United
States. Peat smoldering in melting Siberian tundra threatens to unleash
enough carbon for planetary cataclysm. COVID-19, a zoonotic virus, rav-
ages human populations, while conspiracists urge those suspicious of sci-
ence and government to swallow deadly and ineffective horse deworming
medicine. The specters of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the arms race that US
bombs begat haunted Calvino’s high-modernist moment. Yet, in the early
1970s, nuclear annihilation—and the possibility of the planet’s end—was
R. Prentice (*)
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_4
50 R. PRENTICE
a distant (if all too real) possibility controlled by distant men. The ghosts
of our moment haunt us, now, in our everyday lives and are all too likely
to lay waste to our civilization.
In 1979, Audre Lorde famously said, “For the master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house.” Lorde, speaking at the Second Sex
Conference in New York, sought a bigger, perhaps more fractious, and
potentially more generative, home for lesbians and women of color within
the confines of a too-white, too-privileged feminism. In the same speech,
she said, “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of
necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic”
(Lorde 1983, 95). The houses imagined by Calvino and Lorde—the
house that progress and reason built and the master’s house—are mirror
images of the same house: Wealthy white Europeans pulled themselves out
of daily struggles for survival and built their “Enlightened” houses by
enslaving and exploiting those usefully labeled “unenlightened” and other.
Unlike Lorde, Calvino was unconcerned with race, gender, or sexuality,
but the embrace of difference—the play of oppositions and reversals—is
the mobilizing force that gives Invisible Cities ongoing salience 50 years
after its publication.
This chapter explores Invisible Cities as an epistemological engine—an
apparatus built from dialogue and description that generates meanings
and imaginings not just about cities, but also about story, theory, and our
damaged world. In Invisible Cities, Polo’s reports—stories—are the means
of opening the emperor’s mind to new worlds that are always emerging
from old ones. Polo orients the Khan to the cities of his empire through
stories, revealing each city not only as it imagines itself to be, but also as it
once was, as it is, and as it might be. In most cases, the tension between
what people imagine a city to be and what it is reveals possibility and
responsibility.
In the “Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway (1991) argues that femi-
nists must not abandon the master’s tools—the technologies that made
the Earth’s destruction possible—to the men who made them. The tech-
nologies are too powerful. Instead, she argues, feminists must make partial
and sometimes unfaithful use of those technologies, avoiding the hard
binaries that equate men with technology and women with nature.
Similarly, Calvino asks us to avoid the binary polarities of his structuralist
moment and to find, like a yin-yang symbol that contains a dot of white
on the black side and a dot of black on the white side, elements of its
4 INVISIBLE CITIES AND THE WORK OF STORYING THE FUTURE 51
opposite within each pole of a dialectic, often elements that one cannot
plan for or control.
“It all begins with the first storyteller of the tribe,” Calvino tells us
(1986, 3). Stories are means of recounting events and their meanings.
Anthropologists have opened themselves and their readers to the indeter-
minacy of story as a means of revealing the nuanced challenges and obliga-
tions of the world we are making. Thom Van Dooren and Deborah Bird
Rose (2016) describe local volunteers who gather on Hawaiian beaches to
witness the arrival of monk seals, offer the protection of their presence to
the seals, and speak with human visitors about the ocean-going lives of
these peaceful creatures. They argue that volunteers and their seal stories
create a new kind of multi-species commitment and fellowship: “Telling
stories has consequences, one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn
into new connections and, with them, new accountabilities and obliga-
tions” (ibid., 89). They argue that storytelling—a deeply collective enter-
prise—is an inducement to sociality and responsibility.
As Invisible Cities opens, the Great Khan muses about his empire’s
decline, fearing that the empire is crumbling. Polo assuages those fears
with stories. Later, Khan asks Polo to help him discern the “invisible order
that sustains cities” in the patterns formed as emperor and explorer play
endless games of chess (Calvino 1974, 122):
By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had

arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the
empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to
a square of planed wood: nothingness …. (ibid., 123, ellipses in original)
Polo replies with a story that brings the natural and human worlds
together:
“The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring
of a trunk that grew in a year of drought; you see how its fibers are arranged?
Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a
premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist. […] This edge
was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the
next square, more protruding” […] The quantity of things that could be
read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo
was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that
come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows …. (ibid., 131–2)
52 R. PRENTICE
Polo’s stories bring Kublai back from nihilistic reductionism, turning him
toward the material and the empirical, asking him to open himself to the
natural and human histories that come together in the square of wood.
Polo engages in a quintessentially anthropological move. He starts
from the blank square of black wood and, like a sculptor or an ethnogra-
pher, teases out a natural history and a history of encounter, craft, trade,
and transformation. But Polo also needs Kublai—a listener who wants to
understand what the story means. Kublai’s provocations allow Polo to
pivot or to further open the story empirically, often providing the opposi-
tions out of which meanings emerge.
The unfolding of city descriptions framed by dialogue can usefully be
read as a series of methodological provocations for those attempting to
make sense of our cracked foundations and hungry ghosts. What follows
are a few of those provocations offered as rules for storying our dam-
aged planet.
Be Empirical
Anna Tsing treats ethnographic storytelling as a more capacious method
than the creation of concepts that cannot contain the world’s particularity
and indeterminacy. She writes, “Distilling general principles, theorists
expect that others will fill in the particulars, but ‘filling in’ is never so
simple” (2015, 159). Concepts, she argues, are intended to weed out the
non-scalable particularities of the world, reducing unique phenomena to a
series of examples. But the world itself is too unruly and dynamic to be
reduced this way (see also Laplantine 2014). Polo, too, eschews abstrac-
tions in favor of the empirical:
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers,
“but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak
to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.” (Calvino 1974, 82)
This snippet of dialogue speaks, among other things, to the construction

of Invisible Cities, of empires, and of ideas. Bridges and stones are empiri-
cal, material things. The arch is material and conceptual, structure and
figure. Without the stones, each of which has an architectural role and a
biography, an arch cannot materialize. It remains an idea, an abstraction.
Like the stones, Polo’s cities are the material of which empires are made,
each with its own story, each with its own particulars. But this is what
makes Calvino’s reversals so generative: the bridge cannot exist without
the arch, without the interplay between materials and concepts.
Calvino recognizes that a premature spring day or a night’s frost affects
the shape of a square of wood as much as the carver’s knife, revealing the
entwining of nature and craft. But this idea can be expanded. To extend
Calvino’s metaphor, we should consider not only the stories of the stones
that form the arch. We must also attend to stones that were chipped or
cracked or stained before arriving on the riverbank, stones that remain in
the ground, and stones that fell off the mason’s wheelbarrow, the feral
stones that cannot comfortably be incorporated into stories of progress,
human accomplishment, or rationalized construction strategies and yet
must be considered if the story of human bridges, cities, empires, and their
effects on the world is to be complete. In Anna Tsing’s (2015) ethnogra-
phy, The Mushroom at the End of the World, stories can be represented as
mushrooms, the fruiting bodies of extensive, symbiotic, hidden rhizom-
atic structures, fruiting bodies found through careful foraging in broken
ground. Whether stones or mushrooms, both metaphors ask us to focus
on the particulars, the empirical details, and the nuances before we build a
bridge into theory.
Perfect Control Is Impossible

In Theodora, one of the cities Polo describes, humans exterminate all spe-
cies that disturbed the human inhabitants, from condors to rats: “Man had
finally reestablished the order of the world which he had himself upset: no
other living species existed to cast any doubts” (Calvino 1974, 160).
Though the humans believed this, another “forgotten fauna was stirring
from its lethargy. […] Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, hircocervi,
harpies, hydras, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of their city”
(ibid.). Though the monsters of the present moment might be Lyme ticks,
Dutch elm disease, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and airborne viruses, these
oft-forgotten beings emerge despite human attempts at control.
Theodora’s ethos resembles that of the pork production corporation
detailed in Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis (2020). There, the corporate fan-
tasy of total vertical integration of the pork market, from the collection of
54 R. PRENTICE
hog semen for insemination to the pork product on the consumer’s plate,
results in extraordinary levels of control of pig bodies, worker bodies, and
the environment, all of which are both produced and consumed (or used
up) in these sites. But each new attempt at control results in new oppor-
tunities for the natural world to reassert itself. Mice and other vermin
crawl over specially planted inhospitable grasses to invade sheds for grain,
people risk disease transmission by touching the pigs, and airborne por-
cine viruses travel miles from an infected show barn to sheds filled with
thousands of hogs.
The vicissitudes of hog processing and the arrival of new creatures into
Theodora might easily be reduced to unintended consequences. But
something deeper and more interesting is taking place. Nature is dynamic.
It is mobile. It defies human categorizations and human controls.
Anthropologist François Laplantine (2014) argues that,
Categorical thought […] attributes properties to those things it isolates

from the flux of existence and cleaves to the logic of the excluded middle. It
is inimical to life and living (la vie et la vivant), which are processes of con-
tinuous transformation. Life itself is rhythmical, and to model or categorize
it (which is to say to fix it) is false, for the model eliminates the temporal and
the processual in the name of the essential. (Laplantine 2014, ix–x)
Like Laplantine, Calvino sees how time and change come to all human
endeavors. Abstract visions of pristine wilderness and total human control
are impossible. Neither can be fixed in place, leaving the other to dwindle.
Each is present with and in the other. Human efforts to box in the natural
world, whether in lonely cities, vertically integrated factories or social sci-
entific concepts, neglect the ways that the natural world shifts and changes
and escapes.
Be Aware of What Is Unsaid

Little appears to escape from the frame created by the dialogue between
explorer and conqueror. Yet, as Marco and Kublai become increasingly
able to communicate—first in gestures and symbols, and later in precise
words—ellipses begin to appear in the text. The dialogue picks up where
it left off or trails away into silence or marks a moment when one person
finishes another’s thought; that is, when the boundaries of speech begin to
fray. The world (both material and imagined) is always beyond one’s
ability to capture it in words, at first because the dialogue is too imprecise

and, later, because there is too much to say.
Calvino’s ellipses mark the hidden forces of the unsaid, the unsayable,
the past, the unconscious, and the silences that haunt human speech.
Increasingly, however, the world inserts itself into human thought and
action. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh (2016) argues that the
structure of the modern novel precludes the unpredictable events that the
era of climate change induces, thereby banishing stories about climate
change to the “outhouses” of science fiction. In the construction of his
elite literary mansion, Ghosh perhaps forgets that outhouses and equiva-
lent technologies are necessary to the functioning of even the fanciest
houses and that compost remakes the world. In Ghosh’s telling, however,
the world itself intrudes on this carefully constructed story of human con-
trol: “could it not also be said that the earth has itself intervened to revise
those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arro-
gates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to
every other kind of being?” (ibid., 31).
Stories Can Be Too Seductive

Seduced by the magic of the stories he tells, Polo speculates to the Khan
that, perhaps, their enterprise isn’t real, that their conversations are drawn
exclusively from their imaginations. The Khan grounds Polo in the mate-
rial world.
POLO: Unless porters, stonecutters, rubbish collectors, cooks clean-

ing the [entrails] of chickens, washerwoman bent over stones,
mothers stirring rice as they nurse their infants, exist only
because we think them.1
KUBLAI: To tell the truth, I never think them.
POLO: Then they do not exist.
KUBLAI: To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes.
Without them we could never remain here swaying, cocooned
in our hammocks. (Calvino 1974, 117)
Two lessons can be drawn from this dialogue. The first is abstract: stories
are seductive. They may entice us into thinking that the world exists only
in the imaginative games we play with narrative, with language, with our
minds. The Khan reminds us, though, that an entire human and material
56 R. PRENTICE
apparatus makes these genteel exchanges possible. The master’s house, the
houses that progress and reason built, and the ivory tower were assembled
and are maintained, often under cruel and exploitative conditions, by
those stonecutters and cooks. The too-often unconsidered workers are the
conditions of possibility for empire.
In an apparent reversal, Kublai, the emperor and philosopher, pulls
Polo away from seeing story all the way down. This appears to be a role
reversal, since Polo more often pulls Kublai away from abstraction. As
emperor, Kublai has the luxury of ignoring the material supports for his
empire, but he knows they are present and that they have made his life of
ease and philosophical speculation possible.
Tsing (2015) uses the term “alienation” to describe the assumption
that people and things can stand alone, without the material entangle-
ments that make lives and livelihoods possible: “Alienation obviates living-
space entanglement” (ibid., 5). The capitalist alienation that concerns
Tsing is the alienation of people and goods from their origins, a transplan-
tation that leaves lives and environments devastated. The alienation that
concerns the Khan is just as fundamental: we forget the material apparatus
that makes theorizing possible at our peril.
Don’t Despair
Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) writes that she once
asked her students to rate their understanding of the relations between
humans and the environment. Most students answered that humans had
contributed nothing to the Earth’s wellbeing. “Nearly every one of the
two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad
mix” (ibid., 6). This is a historical shift from our still-too-common confi-
dence that progress can improve on nature. Donna Haraway argues that
the narratives of salvation and destruction leave us with heaven or hell and
little in between. Both techno-optimism and anthropo-pessimism refuse
to shoulder the burden of making change. Instead, she advocates “staying
with the trouble” (Haraway 2016), that is, slowing down and dwelling
with the world we live in now without taking refuge in teleological fanta-
sies of technological salvation or the nihilism of thermonuclear apocalypse.
Calvino, too, urges us to find the seeds of new, better possibilities even
in the darkest moments: “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in
the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give
them space” (1974, 165). I like to think of contemporary anthropologists
and science studies scholars urgently combing the Earth, coaxing stories
and potentialities from peoples, animals, plants, and other natural phe-
nomena. These stories expand beyond the exclusively human, speaking of
other ways of being in the world, other ways of life, new ways of living
with and caring for each other and our world. These stories promise to
weave listeners into new ways of being in and with the natural world. It
will be up to us to decide whether to act on them.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank Luisa Cortesi for encouraging me to

write about Calvino again and for several great conversations about this essay.
Note
1. The 1974 edition of Invisible Cities renders the Italian phrase “le cuoche che
puliscono le interiora dei polli” as “cooks cleaning the lights of chickens.” In
place of “lights,” an obsolete term for “lungs” that I believe would be mis-
read by most English-speaking readers, I have put “entrails.” My thanks to
Luisa Cortesi for her help with the translation.
References
Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, & the
Factory Farm. Durham: Duke University Press.
Brace Jovanovich.
———. 1986. The Uses of Literature. Trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the
Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. The Cyborg Manifesto. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women:
The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Kimmerer, Robin. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific
Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Laplantine, François. 2014. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal
Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury.
Lorde, Audre. 1983. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s
House. In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed.
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 94–101. New York: Kitchen Table Press.
58 R. PRENTICE
Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life
in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Van Dooren, Thom, and Deborah Bird Rose. 2016. Lively Ethnography: Storying
Animist Worlds. Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 77–94.
CHAPTER 5
Paris, Latour, and Calvino
Daniel Little
Paris is well known—or so we think. It has a history: barricades in 1848,

the Commune, Haussmann, the German occupation, May 1968. It has a
geography: the Seine, the Left Bank, les banlieues. It has a city govern-
ment, municipal services, and eye-opening points of interest—Notre
Dame, Père Lachaise, Musée d’Orsay, Café de Flore. Paris is transparent if
any city is; everyone knows Paris. But Bruno Latour, one of the most pro-
lific sociologists in France since the 1980s, disagrees. In fact, he almost
goes so far as to say that Paris as such does not exist. Rather, Paris is a
concatenation of many different circuits, systems, controls, information
channels, and architectural processes, each with its own dynamics
and tempo.
Latour is a lifelong resident of Paris. In 1998 he collaborated with pho-
tographer Emilie Hermant in creating a unique work of inquiry, exposi-
tion, discovery, and whimsy. It is a large webpage called Paris ville invisible
(1998), consisting of photographs of Paris by Hermant and accompany-
ing text by Latour. It is a work of internet art, and it is a manifesto of
sociological theory. Throughout, it is stimulating, surprising, iconoclastic,
D. Little (*)
University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, MI, USA
e-mail: delittle@umich.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_5
60 D. LITTLE
and occasionally irritating. It represents a highly novel way of “knowing

Paris”—or rather, knowing some of the many associations and linkages
that contribute to the ensemble that we refer to as “Paris.”
The very beginning of Latour’s theoretical work Reassembling the
Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory includes this surprising
statement: “This somewhat austere book can be read in parallel with the
much lighter Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998), Paris ville invis-
ible, which tries to cover much of the same ground through a succession
of photographic essays” (Latour 2005, 1). This suggests that Paris ville
invisible illustrates and works out some of the implications of Latour’s
distinctive approach to social ontology and his notion of Actor-Network
Theory (ANT). The primary goals of this short chapter are to explore how
this parallel works, and what we can learn about the urban agglomeration
we call “Paris” from both works.
To begin, it is worth noting that Latour draws an intriguing parallel
with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974):
We often tend to contrast real and virtual, hard urban reality and electronic
utopias. This work tries to show that real cities have a lot in common with
Italo Calvino’s “invisible cities”. As congested, saturated and asphyxiated as
it may be, in the invisible city of Paris we may learn to breathe more easily,
provided we alter our social theory. (Latour and Hermant 1998, open-
ing matter)
At first glance, the parallel with Calvino is surprising: Calvino’s explorer

Marco Polo describes a series of imaginary cities in almost dream-like
terms, while Latour and Hermant describe a single real city at a specific
point in time in camera-precise detail. The conceit of Invisible Cities is that
Kublai Khan seeks to assemble full knowledge of “the boundless extension
of the territories we have conquered” (Calvino 1974, 5). But this aim has
been frustrated. Kublai Khan seeks exactness, and yet, these “invisible cit-
ies” of the realm described by Marco Polo are incorporeal and difficult to
resolve, imaginary and material.
Here, then, is the parallel. Both “geographical” accounts lead to incom-
mensurability of descriptions and an ineliminable lack of cohesiveness.
Marco Polo’s sketches of cities do not add up to a comprehensive and
objective representation of the geography of Kublai Khan’s empire. The
most that is available to Kublai Khan is a series of distinct and separate still
lifes of the invisible cities imagined and visited by Marco Polo. But Paris is
5 PARIS, LATOUR, AND CALVINO 61
like that, too, Latour seems to suggest: each circuit traces one pathway of
associations through the city, and there is no way of summing up these
circuits into a single all-encompassing whole. Latour returns again and
again to the point that there is no “panopticon”—no single privileged
viewpoint from which the whole city is laid bare. There is no iconic, mas-
ter description of the city; instead, there are many pathways through the
city that have points of overlap, while also conforming to different logics,
sociological causation, and aesthetics. The “Plans” of Paris villes invisibles
represent a handful of distinct but detailed tracings of the varied flows and
representations of this cacophony. The city, Paris, is invisible because we
cannot see its multiple systems and circulations all at once. They cannot be
combined into a single view.
It is thus Latour’s view, both in Paris ville invisible and in Reassembling
the Social, that Paris cannot be understood in one synoptic masterplan and
master view. More radically, Paris is not one unified thing. Instead, it can
only be (always partially) understood through imaginative tracings of the
various circulations that underlie the visible city. Latour considers the
water system, the telephone system, the weather-gathering system, the
circulation of sociological ideas, and numerous other “traces” of activity
and interaction that make up the heterogeneous ensemble that is Paris.
But here is the crucial point and the significant parallel with Calvino’s
Invisible Cities: these separate tracings—of plumbing, of architectural
planning, of policing—can no more be fused into a single integrated
“map” of Paris (i.e., the “real” Paris) than Marco Polo’s accounts of invis-
ible cities can be made into a concrete and exact geography of Kublai
Khan’s empire.
Calvino’s conceit flows from the imagination of an artist. Latour’s view,
on the other hand, flows from the ontological imagination of a gifted
sociologist, a theorist who has demanded of the social sciences that we
fundamentally reconceive our understandings of “the social world.”
Latour wants us to dispense entirely with traditional sociological concepts
when they purport to refer to fixed, stable social things—structures, insti-
tutions, roles, contexts, actors, Paris. He wants a new conceptual scheme
that puts the emphasis on relationships and associations, on dynamic pat-
terns of action and coordination, rather than on structures and institu-
tions. And, crucially, he wants to withdraw the privileged position of
human actors in sociological thinking, allowing all varieties of material
entities and systems to play a role in what was previously called “social
62 D. LITTLE
life.” In place of traditional ways of conceptualizing the city, Latour offers

Paris ville invisible as an illustration of actor-network-theory.
There is thus nothing traditional or paradigmatic about Latour’s
thought—whether about “society” or about “Paris.” He insists on think-
ing about sociology in a radically different way than the frameworks of
Durkheim, Weber, or Marx.1 Latour doubts the ontology of “society,”
social system, social structure, social actor, and social context. Instead, he
proposes that the scientist who wants to study “people-institutions-
networks-information-places-tools-technologies” (a neologism to replace
“the social world”) needs to reorient his or her inquiry by studying the
traces of associations among all these things over time. This “tracing” is
what animates the circuits of photographs and texts through the webpage
Paris ville invisible.
Latour’s treatment of Paris within the scheme of actor-network theory
finds a supportive theoretical companion in assemblage theory, first articu-
lated by Gilles Deleuze and various collaborators (Deleuze and Guattari
1987; see also DeLanda 2006). Deleuze’s theory of assemblage (agence-
ment) as a way of thinking about the social world has a great deal in com-
mon with Latour’s depiction of Paris. Fundamentally, the idea is that there
does not exist a fixed and stable ontology for the social world that pro-
ceeds from “atoms” to “molecules” to “materials”—no “Paris as such.”
Rather, social formations are assemblages of other complex configura-
tions, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations.
DeLanda (2006) aims to explain “assemblage” by saying what it is not.
First, assemblage theory is opposed to essentialism and reification.
DeLanda emphasizes that Deleuze’s concept resists the “organismic”
approach to conceptualizing the social, by which he means an approach
that looks at the whole as an inextricable combination of interrelated
parts. This implies that the parts are implicated in each other; the organis-
mic perspective emphasizes the internal connectedness of a thing. DeLanda
distinguishes between “interiority” and “exteriority” in conceptualizing
the components of a thing. For assemblage theory, the relations among
the parts are contingent, not necessary. Crucially, parts can be extracted
from one whole and inserted into another set of relations: “These rela-
tions imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be
detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its
interactions are different. In other words, the exteriority of relations
implies a certain autonomy for the terms they relate” (ibid., 10–11).
Another aspect of the theory, according to DeLanda, is the fact that it
does not privilege one level of organization over another. “Micro” is not
more fundamental than “macro.” Instead, social reality is “multiscaled”
(ibid., 38), with assemblages occurring at every level. Here again, Latour
is in agreement; he insists on a “flat” social ontology.
Now consider the urban assemblage presented in Paris ville invisible.
Here is how Latour describes its purpose:
The aim of this sociological opera is to wander through the city, in texts and
images, exploring some of the reasons why it cannot be captured at a glance.
Our photographic exploration takes us first to places usually hidden from
passers-by, in which the countless techniques making Parisians’ lives possible
are elaborated (water services, police force, ring road: various “oligopti-
cons” from which the city is seen in its entirety). This helps us to grasp the
importance of ordinary objects, starting with the street furniture constitut-
ing part of inhabitants’ daily environment and enabling them to move about
in the city without losing their way. It also makes us attentive to practical
problems posed by the coexistence of such large numbers of people on such
a small surface area. All these unusual visits may eventually enable us to take
a new look at a more theoretical question on the nature of the social link and
on the very particular ways in which society remains elusive. (Latour and
Hermant 1998, opening matter)
This passage illustrates both the core ideas of actor-network theory—that

the social ensemble must be understood as an open-ended series of trac-
ings and interactions—and of assemblage theory—that the urban “entity”
is assembled from numerous independent and modular parts.
Paris ville invisible is a fascinating and open-ended piece of work—not
philosophy, not sociological theory, not pure artistic creativity. Like
Invisible Cities itself, the project comprises some of all of these. The reader
navigates the web creation by choosing “Traversing,” “Proportioning,”
“Distributing,” and “Allowing” on the top bar, and then navigating from
Plan to Plan in the sidebar. It is possible, of course, to go through the
presentation in a fully linear mode; but it is also possible to jump easily
from “Traversing” to “Distributing” or from Plan to Plan. This funda-
mental non-linearity is a key reason why this work is perfectly suited to the
internet, with hyperlinks, embedded detours, and instantaneous jumps
from one topic or perspective to another.
So what does this evocation of “Paris” through multiple tracings show
us? What has Latour illustrated in this work that “covers much the same
ground” as Reassembling the Social? Here are a few observations.
64 D. LITTLE
First, the presentation highlights “invisibility”—the fact that this com-

plex social scrum is partially visible, but largely hidden, no matter what
perspective we take and no matter what thread we choose to trace.
Second, the issue of scale is problematized. We seem to zoom from
micro to macro to meso and back constantly through the presentation.
However, Latour rejects that “zoom” and “macro-micro” have meaning:
“We had visualized Paris like a set of Russian dolls fitting snugly into one
another. But in the virtual Paris the strands are all of the same dimension,
all equally flat” (Latour and Hermant 1998, Plan 20).
Third, the notion of “representation” is key: maps, street signs, depart-
ment store panoramas, satellite images. Part of the work of tracing is to
uncover the material processes through which a street sign is placed at one
intersection rather than another; and this involves going to a dusty office
in the city administration building.
Fourth, there is a persistent attention to technical knowledge and tech-
nical specialists throughout the essay: infrastructure specialists, computer
experts, GIS technicians, schedulers, drainage specialists, traffic engineers,
and so on. And much of what they do falls on the “invisible” end of the
spectrum for most observers. Their work cannot be viewed by the public,
not because viewing is forbidden, but because the circuits of information
and association are themselves invisible.
Fifth, there is a recurring theme of “composition”—the idea that the
social scrum of the city is an amalgam: “In this sociological opera we’re
going to move over from the cold and real Society to warm and virtual
plasma: from the entire Paris set in one view to the multiple Parises within
Paris, which together comprise all Paris and which nothing ever resem-
bles” (Latour and Hermant 1998, Plan 4). What we call “Paris” is no
more than the open-ended concatenation of these many circuits and
associations.
Finally, there is the idea that the “players” in social interactions are not
uniquely “human persons” or actors. The objects and gadgets of the city
play their roles. This is a key part of ANT—to withdraw the idea that social
actors make up the social world through their purposive actions, and to
recognize that there are dynamic interactions and linkages among a range
of entities, including purposive human beings and thermostats and sur-
veillance cameras.
Sociology of Paris
What might be involved in creating a new “Latourian” sociology of Paris?
Paris is a particularly good subject for a new urban sociology. It is a gritty,
diverse, and dynamic city, and a city displaying unceasing chaotic surges
and currents of social life. It is a global city, both in Saskia Sassen’s (2001)
sense and in the sense of being a magnet for immigrants from every part
of the world. It is an intellectual city, a conflictual city, a city with continu-
ous poverty and deprivation as well as conspicuous wealth, and a city with
high unemployment and aggressive policing. It is a city with ubiquitous
transit (dozens of lines serving hundreds of stations), implying thorough
urban mobility; but it is also a city of invisible boundaries marking the
edges of the circuits of various social and ethnic groups.
We might start our new sociological inquiry by attempting to under-
stand the racial and ethnic diversity the city contains and the circuits of
social life that these many groups traverse. Ride the RER from Chatelet to
Charles de Gaulle, and one may get an impression of a vast diversity of
humanity, all randomly mixed up on one long rail carriage. But this impres-
sion is mistaken: Didier Lapeyronnie’s (2008) analysis of the French
ghetto puts stop to that thought, highlighting the very sharp separations
that exist between immigrant neighborhoods and the rest of the French
cities. So, a sociology of Paris needs to uncover the distinct social worlds
it encompasses.
And we would want to map the terrain of poverty and deprivation in
Paris. Who are the poor? How is poverty caused and reproduced in Paris?
What groups are most likely to be homeless and hungry (SDF, sans domi-
cile fixe)? Recall the deadly fires in Paris in 2005, which befell temporary
housing facilities for homeless immigrants. A recent collaboration among
sociologists and journalists picks up this thread in La France invisible
(Beaud et al. 2006). The creators of the project have undertaken to give
voice to the many categories of poor and disempowered people in France:
accidentés au travail, banlieusards, délocalisés, discriminés, disparus, dis-
simulés, drogués, and more. These short pieces provide thumbnail descrip-
tions of the circumstances of life of the people involved in these categories,
often incorporating interviews with people in their neighborhoods. The
hope is to give to the reader a visceral glimpse of the life challenges
involved in these categories of disadvantage—so often invisible to the
upper- and middle-class observer. A related subject for a new descriptive
66 D. LITTLE
Latourian sociology of Paris has to do with the patterns of public health

that the city embodies.
What about employment and education? What are the mechanisms
through which education, social position, age, race, and ethnicity play out
across social groups to create the specific patterns of employment oppor-
tunity that Paris presents? Jobs and education are highly volatile issues
everywhere in France today—witness the recent waves of strikes and dem-
onstrations about unemployment and education reform. What are the
social mechanisms underlying these systems? To what extent do the con-
crete institutions of training, education, and job recruitment work to
reproduce significant inequalities across social groups? What are the trac-
ings and circuits through which children from different groups wind up
having very different life-prospects because of differential educational
opportunities?
Among others, these are all “circuits” of the city of Paris; they are part
of the assemblage of human activity, social networks, and systems of power
that make up the conditions of life for the people of Paris. Research efforts
like these can make visible what is too often invisible in most cities: the
series of transactions and interactions that lead to the transmission of social
disadvantage from one generation to another. Latour’s project can be seen
as an authentic research effort at discovering the “facts” of urban life in
Paris, one which succeeds in shedding light on the “invisible city.” Inquiries
like the ones described above are factual, empirical, and detailed; Calvino’s
are fantastical and surreal. Yet, they are all nevertheless interested in the
tracing processes and transactions through which features of urban life are
maintained and reproduced; they demonstrate the unavoidable incom-
pleteness of any telling of the story of the place, whether the empire of
Kublai Khan or Paris; and they are genuine contributions to the sociology
of the city.
Note
1. Latour (2002) acknowledges a much greater affinity to Gabriel Tarde, the
brilliant contemporary of Durkheim.
References
Beaud, Stephane, Joseph Confavreux, and Jade Lindgaard. 2006. La France
Invisible. Paris: Découverte.
Brace Jovanovich.
DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social
Complexity. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lapeyronnie, Didier. 2008. Ghetto urbain: Ségrégation, violence, pauvreté en France
aujourd’hui. Paris: Laffont.
Latour, Bruno. 2002. Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social. In The Social in
Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. Patrick Joyce,
117–132. London: Routledge.
———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno, and Emilie Hermant. 1998. Paris: Ville Invisible. http://www.
bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html. Accessed 12 Dec 2021.
Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
CHAPTER 6
Queer Cities, Bodies & Desire: Reading

Nicole Brossard Alongside Italo Calvino
Lianne Moyes
“Tell me another city”

You arrive in Montréal by bridge or by tunnel, through a weave of under-
passes and overpasses, around an ever-changing configuration of traffic cones.
In this city of neighborhoods spread out around a mountain, it is easy to forget
you are on an island. The sprawling grid of the New World city is interrupted
by mountain and river.
Everything depends upon the season. In winter, Montréal is a city of spiral
staircases encrusted with snow and ice. People tuck themselves away in cafés
and restaurants where they bring their own wine. In the night, giant snow-
blowers crawl through the city in tandem with trucks that bear the snow away
and make the streets passable once again. And then, as if all in one day,
Montréal turns green, and people spill onto sidewalks and balconies, cruise
bars, plant gardens, fill potholes, and repair crumbling concrete.
L. Moyes (*)
Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada
e-mail: lianne.moyes@umontreal.ca

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_6
70 L. MOYES
Montréal is a place of transformation, where streets turn into bike paths,

factories into condominiums, churches into universities, and quarries into
landfills (and then parks). It is a port city of languages and a city of never
entirely knowing which language you are about to speak. Peel back the layers
of empire and you find an Indigenous meeting place, returned to over thou-
sands of years, unceded, a meeting place, still today.
* * *
I do not know how Montreal might have figured in Italo Calvino’s (1974)
epistemology and imaginary of the city. It is not one of the cities men-
tioned in Invisible Cities. Yet if there are “forms of possible cities” that
“neither Marco nor the geographers know exist” (ibid., 137), then
Montreal is perhaps one of them. In any case, Invisible Cities does not so
much portray specific cities as offer a series of portraits whose language
tends toward the mythical and archetypal. The book interrupts that series
with an italicized frame that refers to cities, sometimes actual cities, yet in
a way that utterly entangles those references in space and time. My portrait
of Montreal has none of Calvino’s labyrinth; nor does it approximate
Nicole Brossard’s (1980, 1986) French Kiss, the text I bring into conver-
sation with Invisible Cities. My portrait serves as a way into the discussion,
an attempt to find a point of articulation between Calvino and Brossard
via the city of Montreal. As well as serving as a hinge, my portrait affords
a point of contrast with French Kiss. Brossard’s text works to make
Montreal known, to locate it among the cities of the world (Brossard
1990, 55), but not through recognizable practices of representation. In
French Kiss, as in Invisible Cities, there is little plot, characterization, or
narrative unity; and seriality takes the place of causality. Whereas my por-
trait projects the arrival of a traveler and a sojourn in Montreal, Brossard’s
text is in no way touristic: it anticipates a reader rather than a traveler, and
it offers that reader no anecdotes by which to know or navigate the city.
Change, transformation, is what Brossard’s text imagines and produces
rather than observes or records.
This chapter offers neither a comparison nor a study of influence.
Rather, it places Brossard’s text, published in French in 1974, alongside
Calvino’s text, published in Italian in 1972, in order to revisit feminist
responses to Invisible Cities, and address the two texts’ conceptions of the
city. The writing of both Calvino and Brossard is marked by changes in
thinking about literature, linguistics, and philosophy that accompanied
6 QUEER CITIES, BODIES & DESIRE: READING NICOLE BROSSARD… 71
the cultural and political upheaval of late-1960s France. Both Invisible

Cities and French Kiss can be understood as practices of metafiction, that
is, stories about telling stories, and city writing about writing the city.
Cities, in Calvino and Brossard, are made of words. But as Marco Polo
explains, “the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.
And yet between the one and the other there is a connection” (Calvino
1974, 61). Or, in the terms of French Kiss: “This is fiction but then I don’t
know what isn’t any more. Phantasize a writing. Marielle drives along a
Sherbrooke Street projected into space, a fragile mental ground where first
one word then another sprouts...” (Brossard 1986, 44). These cities are
made of words and entail all the referential complexities of text; they are
an undisciplined, multi-directional “tracery” (Calvino 1974, 6) that lends
materiality to movement and desire.
French Kiss is not an easy text to summarize. After piecing together its
bits of prose, poetry, manifesto, and comic, it is possible to find a story of
five characters whose relationship to the city and to each other is captured
in a moment of collective transformation. Marielle drives a car from one
end of Montreal to the other; Lucy strolls on St-Denis with her lover
Camomille; and Alexandre, a “queen bee in a hive of pleasure” (Brossard
1986, 13), frequents cabarets, dives, and drinking holes with his lover
Georges. But like a kaleidoscope, these fragments of fiction also rearrange
themselves to bring Georges together with Camomille or Lucy, and
Alexandre together with his sister Marielle. Brossard’s text, insofar as it
opens spaces for feminist and queer subjectivities within the city, helps
elucidate what feminist scholars are looking for in Calvino’s Invisible
Cities. French Kiss also explains why Calvino’s text itself gives such impor-
tance to the relationship between cities and desire.
Unruly Systems
In the italicized sections of Invisible Cities, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan
discuss the terms and “stakes” (Calvino 1974, 123) of various systems,
among them language, pantomime, chess, atlas, city, and empire. Marco
and the Khan are preoccupied, for example, with finding a model “from
which all possible cities can be deduced” (ibid., 69) and discerning the
pattern in which “knowledge of the empire was hidden” (ibid., 122). But
Calvino’s text casts doubt on the capacity of any of these systems to con-
vey a complete picture of Marco’s travels: “The Great Khan deciphered
the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained
72 L. MOYES
uncertain” (ibid., 22). Even when Marco masters the emperor’s language,
his early pantomimes continue to bear upon any new accounts, a form of
creative interference that demonstrates how “messages and codes act upon
one another […] and become passible of change” (de Lauretis 1978, 27).
Whereas the Khan persists in turning what Marco says into emblems of his
empire, Marco recognizes that the Khan’s desire to know and possess
everything will ultimately make him “an emblem among emblems”
(Calvino 1974, 23). In other words, the Khan does not stand outside the
system; he is implicated within its terms.
In light of this awareness of the structure of structure and of how sub-
jects are positioned in systems of representation, it is worth considering
another of the text’s mechanisms: the practice of giving the name of a
woman to each of the cities. Travelers in Invisible Cities are characterized
as he: “When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the
desire for a city” (Calvino 1974, 8). Cities are referred to as it and occa-
sionally as she: “Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages:
the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse,
and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the
names with which she defines herself and all her parts” (ibid., 14, emphasis
added). Even where the gender neutral “it” is used, the descriptions and
morphology of the city—the meanings given to its form—frequently refer
to a woman. As Teresa de Lauretis explains in her reading of Zobeide:
“The city is a text which tells the story of male desire by performing the
absence of woman and producing woman as text, as pure representation”
(1984, 13). The effect of this regime of representation, in her analysis, is
to place women in contradiction: how does a woman circulate in the city
when she is also a figure for the city? And from what position does a
woman write when she is also a text waiting to be read?
Brossard, in writing French Kiss, is writing through these contradic-
tions. “Theory is our city,” writes Lisa Robertson (2013, 17). To make
such an assertion is not to dwell in abstraction but to recognize that for
queer feminist writers, fiction is not enough. Using a form of “fiction-
theory” (Godard et al. 1986), Brossard’s text breaks the frame of repre-
sentation and locates within the text what might otherwise be considered
outside it: processes of writing and reading, critical questions about char-
acter or narration, reflections on gender and desire, and the effects of
words in lives and bodies. In this way, French Kiss is able to negotiate fic-
tional devices and representational practices that keep prevailing regimes
of sex and gender in place. Taking up the question of how to make women
lovers visible in the city, for example, Brossard’s text understands itself as
“a screen that reveals their pleasure, doesn’t hide it in some shadowed
fold, unthinkable circumstance” (Brossard 1986, 29).
Zobeide
Calvino cannot be understood simply as author of the contradictions that
make women part of the very structure of the city and, at the same time,
absent from it. He is also a writer who makes these relations legible, who
allows us to read and analyze them. In the exchange between Marco and
the Khan that precedes the portrait of Zobeide, for example, Calvino’s
text offers a reflection on the interface between built and imagined struc-
ture, between urban architecture and the scaffolding of desire: “Cities, like
dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse
is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything
conceals something else” (Calvino 1974, 44). While the Khan denies that
his dreams operate in this way, Marco insists on the structural relevance of
dreamwork: its contribution to holding up the walls of the city. At other
moments, they struggle over the (non-)existence of those subjects of
empire that the Khan never thinks about: “porters, stonecutters, rubbish
collectors, cooks cleaning the lights of chickens, washerwomen bent over
stones, mothers stirring rice as they nurse their infants” (ibid., 117). Yet
the Khan also recognizes his oversight: “Without them we could never
remain here swaying, cocooned in our hammocks” (ibid., 117). As these
citations demonstrate, Calvino’s text is aware of the radical continuity
between those who are and are not visible in the city, between the city and
the desires and fears it conceals. There is nonetheless a difference between
Calvino’s work of exposing such contradictions, and Brossard’s work of
writing through contradictions that are lived in the interface between cit-
ies, bodies, and desire.
Feminist readings of Zobeide and the problematic of (in)visibility range
widely. While it is not within the scope of this chapter to survey all of
them, it is worth noting two further examples. The introduction to a spe-
cial issue of Frontiers on “Gender and the City: The Awful Being of
Invisibility” presents Calvino’s story as “a fictional vision of the city as an
entrapment for women” (Flanagan and Valiulis 2011, xvi) and an illustra-
tion of “how across time and place a patriarchal idea has shaped women’s
experience and possibilities with the city” (ibid., xv). Meanwhile, Moira
Gatens (1996) cites the story of Zobeide at length in her consideration of
74 L. MOYES
male fantasies of the body politic and of the relationship between social
and sexual imaginaries. She characterizes the dream that gave rise to
Zobeide as “atypical” on the grounds that it “tells of the failure of the
desire to ‘capture’ and to ‘contain’ difference in a monument to unity”
and “speaks of masculine impotence in the face of a loss suffered but not
remembered” (ibid., 28). For Gatens, Zobeide is an allegory of the repro-
duction of sexual sameness, but it also signals potential breaks in the
closed-circuitry of the urban dream, notably in the movement of women
in the city. Gatens’ reading, like that of de Lauretis (1984), is also relevant
to French Kiss. The city of Montreal is, like Zobeide, a trace of the desires
of those who move around in it, but it is not only that. In French Kiss,
Montreal is not simply a structure, built and acted-upon; it is also a sensu-
ous system of moving parts that acts on and through the body politic in
ways that are neither binary nor heteronormative.
Traffic
In Invisible Cities, portraits of cities are tokens of exchange between men,
the textual and material ground of the relationship between Marco Polo
and Kublai Khan. The scenario of one man describing to another man cit-
ies with the names of women is reminiscent of the relations analyzed by
Gayle Rubin (1975) in “The Traffic in Women” and by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (1985) in Between Men. The former helps us understand from
an anthropological perspective that when women are transacted, “it is the
men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit
of a relationship rather than a partner to it” (Rubin 1975, 174). The lat-
ter, in analyzing “pattern[s] of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement,
rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality” (Sedgwick 1985, 1) in literature,
finds that men’s relationships of desire (sexual and otherwise) are often
mediated through a woman. My point here is not to argue for the possibil-
ity of queer readings of Marco and the Khan; nor is it to foreclose them.
It is rather to remember that the series of portraits of cities also takes the
form of a series of women and, with this in mind, to underline Rubin’s
point that women in this scenario “are in no position to realize the bene-
fits of their own circulation” (1975, 174). Their exchanges, via Marco’s
gift of “telling” cities (Calvino 1974, 85), nonetheless enable the men’s
desire to know through travel, trade, conquest, and cartography.
In French Kiss, a woman, Marielle Desaulniers (Elle), drives across the
island of Montreal, negotiating for herself her relationship to the traffic.
What is more, geography is embodied as a male character, Georges or

“Georgraphy” (Brossard 1986, 14; Williamson 1988, 78). Through this
creative reconfiguration of proper names, the text destabilizes prevailing
associations of men with conquest and women with space or place. But the
traffic is not simply what Marielle encounters in the car. It is also a form of
dense transfer and exchange at the textual level: “The words body and city
get confused and mingled with a geography; maps or is it cards on the
table, anatomical diagrams, systems” (Brossard 1986, 11). If the body is
“one of the most tenacious analogies for the city” (Highmore 2014, 28),
then Brossard’s text—with its theme of textual traffic—arguably inter-
venes in a key metaphor “through which the city is lived” (ibid., 26). In
the “verbal bottlenecks” of French Kiss (Brossard 1986, 12), words stand
in for each other and displace each other, not in the sense of outright eli-
sion or simple punning, but rather in the sense of transforming potential
meanings. Herein lies the intervention. Because the displacements and
substitutions move in ways that are not immediately culturally intelligible,
they resist fixing an image of the city or of subjects’ positions within it:
“The circulatory system’s transgressing its appointed laws. The traffic
too” (ibid., 27). By foregrounding material attributes shared by bodies,
cities, and texts—such as passages, surfaces, systems, sense, fluidity, block-
age, circulation—the text breaks down any “parallelism or isomorphism
between body and city” (Grosz 1995, 105). There is always a third term,
that of writing, mediating the body-city relation and proliferating the link-
ages. The textual economy of French Kiss is one of excess, of “expendi-
ture” (Brossard 1986, 77). Touching every aspect of the text, from the
polysemy of words to the spending of bodies, this economy takes the city
beyond a singular representation of the sexual.
Maps
Invisible Cities makes no pretense to anchor its enunciation in a specific
city. The scene of telling—the seat of empire—is a shifting landscape, and
even when Kublai Khan asks Marco Polo if he knows a “a city resembling
this one” (Calvino 1974, 85, emphasis added), Marco is circumspect.
French Kiss evokes Montreal through language, geography, landmarks,
and the names of streets. As Susan Squier (1994) has argued, the urban
space of women’s writing is more often an actual space than a symbolic
one, a space in which women mediate their relationship to the city, its
cultural and political institutions, and its sites of interaction and exchange.
76 L. MOYES
In Brossard’s text, references to maps play a role in producing this sense of

locatedness. But such references are as much about exploring the appara-
tus of the text as about mapping a route through the city: “Marielle will
move through this book as she will along Sherbrooke Street. Horizontally,
on an open map of the city” (Brossard 1986, 55). The comparison here
between map and book reminds readers that both are systems of signs,
co-extensive with a material reality, and that to move through the city is
also to remap it. For example, the kiss of the novel’s title,1 which takes
place in Montreal’s Latin Quarter not far from the historical red-light
district, underlines the doubleness of the characters’ experience of the city:
their nights spent in the more francophone east end and their days in the
anglophone business district further west (Simon 2006, 147–49).
Marielle’s drive across the city, past her flat on Colonial Street and her
place of work as a receptionist in a downtown office, breaks with routine
and places the disparate parts of the city in relation to one another.
Maps in French Kiss are also pretexts for addressing point of view: “A
crazy way to levitate … above the city, a huge map with dotted lines from
edge to edge […] Collage-montage of neighbourhoods in jigsaw puzzles
round the mountain” (Brossard 1986, 73). Looking down at a map
affords a view of the city as a whole and as an assemblage, an aerial perspec-
tive that is also grounded in neighborhoods where balconies “crack and
rot” (ibid., 72). This is not, however, the transcendent view of the atlas
that lends stability and order to Kublai Khan’s disintegrating empire
(Calvino 1974, 135). It has more to do with Marco Polo’s sense “that the
navigator and explorer, or better, observer, is always part of the map he or
she intends to draw” (Pilz 2003, 234–35). Maps, in Brossard’s text, dia-
gram the interface between subjects and city.
Names
The reader’s sense of Montreal in French Kiss is largely an effect of the
movements of characters. In the place of description, the reader finds a set
of traces. This trace-structure includes the names of landmarks and cross-
streets Marielle encounters in her east-west drive along Sherbrooke Street
(Hwy 138) from Charlemagne Bridge at the Eastern tip of the island past
Hippolyte Lafontaine Tunnel, Mount Royal, Westmount’s Victoria Hall
and Grosvenor Street, to the Mercier bridge and the Caughnawaga
reserve, south-west of the city (Brossard 1986). As Calvino’s text sug-
gests: “the names of places change as many times as there are foreign
languages” (1974, 137), and many of the names above take a different
form in the French original (Brossard 1980). Such names also provide a
sense of the complex colonial history of Montreal. Without comment or
anecdote, Brossard’s text registers the mark left on the surface of the city
by men such as Sir John Sherbrooke, British-born colonial administrator,
or Sir Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine, first Quebec-born premier of the
Province of Canada (jointly with James Baldwin).
Through subtle humor, French Kiss decolonizes its relationship to the
linguistic, literary, and cultural primacy of France (Forsyth 2011, 148) and
to the remains of British colonial privilege. It is no coincidence, for exam-
ple, that Marielle parks her car on a “sidestreet” that “could be Jeanne
d’Arc, d’Orléans or Bourbonnière” (Brossard 1986, 31, emphasis added).2
The text is equally tongue-in-cheek in forecasting the end of the kiss in the
anglophone part of the city: “We know beforehand that the kiss must end.
As surely as the population density decreases once Marielle has crossed the
intersection of Sherbrooke and Bleury Streets” (ibid., 68). But the work
of decolonization does not end there. For Lynne Huffer, Brossard’s text
is also a story “of the genocidal ‘kiss’ of death that is the legacy of the map-
makers, fur-trappers, conquerors, and colonizers of this planet” (1996,
112). Marielle drives off the island to the Mohawk community of
Caughnawaga—now self-identified as the Kanienkehaka of Kahnawake.3
And French Kiss ends with a citation from Jacques Cartier’s journals
describing Hochelaga, the Indigenous settlement that existed on the
island in the sixteenth century but was gone in the seventeenth century
when the French founded Montreal. In this way, the text extends its map
to Hochelaga, a city prior to Montreal, and to Kahnawake, a city of those
displaced by Montreal.
Chess
Throughout this chapter I have discussed various points of continuity and
discontinuity between Invisible Cities and French Kiss with regard to sys-
tems, desire, bodies, maps and names. In this section, I turn to the explicit
references each text makes to chess. This is a game Ferdinand de Saussure
and other Structuralists use to illustrate the difference between the rules
that govern a system of values and the set of possibilities available in each
successive state of play (de Saussure 1986, 87–89). In its evocation of
chess, Brossard’s text insists upon the enunciating I: “And Camomille
intervenes, forcing the I, making circumstances that require her presence
78 L. MOYES
in this text. Not a parasitic chess-game I but an I that’s exploring, autono-

mous, anarchistic” (Brossard 1986, 11, emphasis added). Sometimes in
the feminine, sometimes in the masculine (and sometimes both), this “I”
shifts sexual partners, switches languages, and steps inside and outside the
frame of representation. She defies the codes that structure literature, the
city, and the subject. Her moves are not dependent on those of another
player and her value or meaning is not prescribed by a single position
within the game.
Chess, in Calvino’s text, is also a mechanism for exploring the limits of
Structuralism. Kublai Khan reflects, “If each city is like a game of chess,
the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire,
even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains” (Calvino
1974, 121). According to this logic, the Khan does not need to know all
the cities because he knows the rules that govern their place in his empire.
For him, cities are like placeholders; they exist because of the relations
they entail within the overall system. Marco’s portraits, in contrast, furnish
the emperor with material evidence of the many disparate cities. But more
than that, Marco disrupts the game of chess he plays with the Khan by
“reading” the histories of drought, frost, caterpillar, harvest and carving in
the wood from which the board is made (ibid., 131). In Calvino’s text,
then, chess foregrounds what systems cannot see about themselves, includ-
ing the stakes of their operations and the conditions of their production.
Such contingencies are also important to Brossard’s text, but in the latter,
the reference to chess focuses on the players4 and squarely refuses the rules
of the game.
Kiss (By Way of Conclusion)

If in my introduction, I emphasize late-1960s France as common intel-
lectual ground for Brossard and Calvino, I want to close on their shared
preoccupation with textual practices of writing, reading, and narrating.
Brossard’s text, like Calvino’s, dramatizes these practices through interac-
tions among characters. The kiss of the text’s title, for example, occurs
simultaneously on the level of the story and on the level of the text’s pro-
duction. It takes place in a bar-restaurant among the five characters and it
takes place across the frame of fiction among writing subjects, narrators,
and characters. When Lucy (a writer) puts her tongue in the mouth of
Camomille (a narrator) or Georges (another narrator), her gesture figures
the way writers speak through narrators and characters. This gesture also
emblematizes the reader’s experience of never entirely knowing who is

speaking. The narrator in French Kiss is not a single point of enunciation
but a mechanism for the circulation of subjects and desire. Indeed, French
Kiss holds an important place in Brossard’s oeuvre. By opening the possi-
bility of a gendered writing subject (Dupré 1989, 95), it breaks with the
presumed “neutrality” of the self-generating texts of the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Yet in its exploration of sexuality at large, French Kiss also
differs from the women-focused writing of the late 1970s onwards.
Both Invisible Cities and French Kiss engage metafictionally with aspects
of their own production. If Brossard’s text is especially attentive to the
agency of the writing subject, Calvino’s draws attention to reading and
listening. The portraits of cities are ostensibly what Marco Polo “tells”
Kublai Khan, but the italicized frame is intriguing for its reflections on
what it means to listen (or to read). As the Khan exclaims, “This is what I
wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states
of grace, elegies!” (Calvino 1974, 98); or, from Marco’s perspective, “It is
not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear” (ibid., 135). This
emphasis upon reading becomes important for Brossard in Mauve Desert,
a novel whose epigraph is drawn from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveler: “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no
one yet knows what it will be….”5 Although the publication of Invisible
Cities and French Kiss predates Mauve Desert, this epigraph is nonetheless
an important trace of Brossard as a reader of Calvino. In the early 1970s,
both writers were engaged in the project of writing the city. As I have
argued in this chapter, Brossard’s French Kiss allows readers to imagine
Calvino’s paradigm of “Cities and Desire” otherwise, in terms that are
embodied, feminist, and queer.
Acknowledgments My thanks to William Brubacher and Ashley-Marie Maxwell

for research assistance, and to Fonds de recherche du Québec for the funding of
EREQQ, Équipe de recherche en études queer au Québec.
Notes
1. “French Kiss” is the title of the French original and of the translation. The
title is itself a French kiss in the sense of introducing an English term into a
text written in French.
2. References to the Bourbon-Orléans Royal Houses of France and the
fifteenth-century French victory against the English at Orléans.
80 L. MOYES
3. For the sovereignty and specificity of Kahnawake, see Kanienkehaka scholars

Audra Simpson (2014) and Gerald (Taiaiake) Alfred (1995, 2009).
4. Interestingly, the intention (agency and desire) of the player is one aspect of
chess that, for de Saussure, did not fit his sense of language as system (de
Saussure 1986, 88–89).
5. Note the gender of the pronoun in the French version of this epigraph:
“Lire, c’est aller à la rencontre d’une chose qui va exister mais dont per-
sonne ne sait encore ce qu’elle sera…” (Brossard 1987, 7, emphasis added).
In Brossard’s work, the pronoun elle [she] holds huge possibility.
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———. 2009. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Toronto:
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———. 1986. French Kiss or A Pang’s Progress. Trans. Patricia Claxton. Toronto:
Coach House.
———. 1987. Le Désert mauve: roman. Montréal: l’Hexagone.
———. 1990. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto:
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36 (Spring): 75–80.
CHAPTER 7
On the Epistemic Ruins of Existence
Luisa Cortesi
I
With each imaginary city a separate but coalescent epistemological riddle,
Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a meditation on the troubles of knowing the
world in which we live and our place in it. The only systematicity to be
found in Calvino’s ecology of knowledge is in the paradoxes; common
sense is playfully evaded in favor of illogical realism and non-Euclidean
quantum physics. Radical is, I argue, the a-systemic object ontology and
the agential epistemology Calvino offered 50 years ago, if interpreted as a
reflection on the limitations of knowledge. Logocentrism (i), the concept
of logical truth (ii), progressive timelines of accumulated wisdom (iii), and
the assumption of the possibility of objectivity (iv) leave instead space for
silent forms of communication and uncertainty (i), the primacy of doubt
(ii), and the redistribution in the world of time, agency, and cognition
(iii–iv), all of which flatten hierarchies and decenter the human. They also
oblige us to confront fears, desires, and assumptions in order to start
knowing and perhaps enjoying the difficulty of knowledge.
L. Cortesi (*)
International Institute of Social Sciences (ISS), The Hague, The Netherlands
e-mail: cortesi@iss.nl

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_7
84 L. CORTESI
The emperor Kublai Khan is perturbed by the realization of the impos-

sibility of knowing his own empire, “an endless, formless ruin” (Calvino
1974, 5). He trusts the explorer Marco Polo, Khan’s cognitive extension,
to expound on how such an empire is exuberantly rich with urban ecolo-
gies and epistemic wisdom.
Initially, the two men do not share the same language, and their non-
verbal communication occurs through two connected channels: imitation,
with Marco mimicking the cities he visited; and objects, the artifacts
Marco carried back to Kublai from his travels. But even when they start to
speak the same language, they quickly abandon it to converse through
their hands, and eventually resort to the most revealing form of commu-
nication, silence. It is not until late in the book that the emperor is sur-
prised to discover that Marco speaks his language fluently—yet, still, the
two prefer to communicate through things and silence rather than words.
II
Their taciturn communication well encapsulates the relationship between
Kublai and Marco, one of service more than friendship, but most impor-
tantly one of cognitive connection and intellectual complementarity. And
yet, Marco and Kublai, narrator and audience, are at the same time at the
service of the cities, which collectively serve as the principal character of
Calvino’s book. Kublai’s anxiety to know his empire betrays that the cities
have gotten hold of him, they have conquered the conqueror.
Exotically feminine agential beings, the cities reveal themselves in Marco’s
reports, only to remain mysterious and unpossessed. Neither their inhabit-
ants nor visitors decide anything about them: the cities are sovereign to
themselves, their citizens are only their servants. Although the Khan rules
out the possibility that they are imaginary—only to later return to the same
hypothesis, it does not really matter whether they really exist—if they don’t,
it is only in the sense that they have been able to escape conquest.
The cities possess the gnoseological capability of controlling knowledge
about themselves: they inform, modify, constrain memory; they confuse,
tamper with, and unravel the perception of time; they use their own eco-
logical limitations to determine how they are lived, visited, and known.
The cities tell their own stories.
It is the cities that send artifacts. Through the artifacts—at once traces
and signs, archives of desires and representations of what can only be
imagined—the cities make themselves known to the emperor. These
7 ON THE EPISTEMIC RUINS OF EXISTENCE 85
objects are not the medium of communication between Kublai and Marco,
but from the cities to Kublai and through Marco. Almost rephrasing
Heisenberg’s principle, “the Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the
connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain”
(Calvino 1974, 22). At a meta-narrative level, these artifacts represent the
loss at which knowers, including the Khan, find themselves unless they
surrender to the epistemic event initiated by the cities through their
own matter.
III
Travel, the archetype of the knowledge process, is presented as a function
of the city attended by the narration, the way in which each city controls
its new knowers. Visitors may be passers-by, if the city allows them to.
They may instead stay forever, if the city so resolves. Zora is the city that
cannot be forgotten. Zobeide is the city built by those who tried to catch
the woman they all—like quantum particles entangled by patriarchy—
dreamed about, only to be trapped in that place themselves. Visitors may
become disoriented, as in the case of the shepherd from Penthesilea, a city
that has silently grown around and would completely disorient him, if it
weren’t for his flock recognizing at the traffic lights the aromatic grasses
they once ate in the countryside.
It is necessary for Marco to travel, either in body or in his mind, to
know the cities and collect the artifacts, and therefore to hold on to the
relationship with Kublai. Artifacts attest to Marco’s travels in the eyes of
Kublai—they are holders of the two men’s relationship, but at the same
time mere signs of the broader epistemic ecology in which Kublai and his
power, Marco and his travels, are but a micro-event. Kublai, seeing Marco
in the garden every evening, questions whether he in fact travels: “I do not
know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to
me” (Calvino 1974, 103). The discussion continues on the enigmas of
quantum reality: “Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our
lowered eyelids” (ibid., 103), and later, “Perhaps the terraces of this gar-
den overlook only the lake of our mind” (ibid., 117). The exchange con-
cludes with a Schrödinger-worth paradox of superposition:
KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.

POLO: And here, in fact, we are. (ibid., 118)
86 L. CORTESI
Interestingly, the fact that Kublai does not consider the artifacts that
Marco extracts from his saddlebags as proof of his travels functions as a
literary device to involve the reader in the metaphysical conversation. The
reader wonders whether the objects, at this point unquestioned by the
Khan, remain anchors of reality, mooring the narrative in the realm of the
possible, or, despite their seemingly material existence, are to be reclassi-
fied as mere mirages, with both options coexistent possibilities.
IV
At the same time, the artifacts are mostly signs, used in each of Marco’s
performances to represent a variety of things that the Khan struggles to
interpret: “one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormo-
rant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through
fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a
round, white pearl” (Calvino 1974, 21–22).
But by this time, Calvino has already told us about Tamara, the city in
which everything is a sign, where, as a visitor, you learn an endless semiol-
ogy: you are apprised that things always refer to a chain of other possible
things. At the same time, reports Marco, you as a visitor are tricked by the
city that “says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse,
and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the
names with which she defines herself and all her parts” (ibid., 14). Visitors,
concludes Marco, will never be able to “comprehend which city Tamara is
beyond her overcast of signs” (ibid.).
But really, does Tamara spread signs everywhere, like dogs infuse their
smell in every corner? Marco concludes his description of Tamara with the
image of visitors blind to anything that is not a sign. Even outside—where
“the land stretches, empty, to the horizon, the sky opens, with speeding
clouds” (ibid., 14), people continue to recognize signs: “in the shape that
chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing
figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant” (ibid., 14). We anthropomor-
phize the environment around us, insert a connection by rendering it
similar to us.1 Tamara asks a profound and still—50 years later—difficult
ontological question: Can we, instead, acknowledge non-human agency
without humanizing the non-human?
Later in the text, Zoe is the city where hierarchies, represented by signs,
stop mattering. The visitor is then lost, unable to remember where to go:
“[The traveler] infers this: if existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe
is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist?
What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from
the howl of wolves?” (Calvino 1974, 34). Or, why do we need semiotic
systems, hierarchies, boundaries?
Naming, or the assignation of a verbal sign to an entity, is controversial.
With the complementary relationship between the two men established
prior to and independent of language, words quickly feel redundant even
after they are mastered. At a meta level, however, words are the bricks of
which the book is made. Risky, Calvino nonetheless seems to say, is to
believe in words. They can distort and transfigure reality, a reality from
which they aren’t anyway distinct.
The city of Hypatia also rejects the stereotypes behind semiotics; she
alerts Marco, the Khan, and us that every language is a fraud. “There is no
language without deceit” (Calvino 1974, 48). Yet Aglaura is a city taken
over by its own name (ibid., 67-68). The inhabitants of Aglaura live in the
Aglaura that is built on the name, not in the Aglaura that exists. Meanwhile,
the Aglaura that actually exists, since it has no words to describe itself,
does not exist anymore. This is the opposite of Pyrrha, the city that deletes
any previous imagination associated with its name (ibid., 92). But after
Aglaura also comes Olivia, the last of the “Cities & Signs” category,
instead the living proof that “falsehood is never in words; it is in things”
(ibid., 62). Words, like crystals, have orientations that differently reflect
how light is refracted on them (Calvino 1995).
V
The artifacts around which the relation of the Khan and of the explorer
eventually turns are not the exotic ones that Marco brings from the fringes
of the empire, but those the Khan already possesses: “Actually, it was use-
less for Marco’s speeches to employ all this bric-a-brac: a chessboard
would have sufficed, with its specific pieces” (Calvino 1974, 121). The
Khan’s chessboard, the epitome of power, stands as the most compact
representation not just of the empire in its entirety, but also of Kublai’s
mark in history through its conquests, his yearning for rule and rules, and
his determination to know and therefore possess. As a classical physicist
would say: “If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned
the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in
knowing all the cities it contains” (ibid., 121). Instead, the chessboard
88 L. CORTESI
allows Kublai to announce that definitive conquest and control results in a

fistful of air. At the end of the game, there is nothing but another start:
By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had

arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the
empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to
a square of planed wood: nothingness… (Calvino 1974, 123)
Kublai’s game of chess almost stands as a response to Einstein’s famous

provocation to express his skepticism for quantum theory: Is God (by
which, as a Spinozean’s atheist, he means nature) playing dice with the
universe? As Marco shows, the chessboard stands to tell, not just to repre-
sent, the infinite layer of multidimensional stories in all their realized and
unrealized possibilities that would never be contained in any systematiza-
tion: “the quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth
and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai” (ibid., 132). The chessboard
breaks the possibility of the system, of the whole predicating each element
in turn organically related to the others and allegorically standing for the
whole itself. Continuing the question I raised from Calvino’s dealings
with signs and names, are we willing to grant a specific ontology to objects
only in so far as we can relate to them, render them like us, in so far as we
can understand them, include them in a system?
VI
The Khan also possesses an atlas that represents everything, including the
cities that exist (“those whose walls rest on solid foundations” [ibid.,
137]), those that existed in the past and are no more (“those which fell in
ruins and were swallowed up by the sand” [ibid., 138]), and those that, at
the time of Marco and Kublai, do not exist just as yet (“those that will
exist one day and in whose place now only hares’ holes gape” [ibid., 138]).
The proleptic property of the atlas is to reveal the form of cities that are
yet to take shape. Archetypal and futuristic at the same time, the cities
consume the congregation of past and future. Bending time, the future
was already written in the past: in the Khan’s atlas you can find a city called
New York, with towers of steel and glass, on an oval-shaped island between
two rivers, with all straight roads but one called Broadway.
It is not clear whether the atlas clarifies the geography of the empire:
while the scope of an atlas is to represent relationships between
places—their reciprocal orientations—the cities Marco describes are posi-

tioned geographically so that each one’s spatial reference vis-à-vis the oth-
ers refers to nothing. So distinctly opaque is their geographical indication
that, when available, it is provided without orientation: “At the end of
three days, moving southward, you come upon Anastasia…” (Calvino
1974, 12).
While Calvino seems to have advocated for the “most detailed of maps”
(Calvino 1995: 118),2 this atlas seems instead to overcome Borges’ para-
dox of a map that from representation tends to become the thing itself
(Borges 1960).3 Instead of focusing on the proliferation of details that
invalidates the purpose of the representation (more on this below), or on
the extreme abstraction of the chessboard, the Khan’s atlas cuts across
time to reconcile our time-bound knowledge with an historical, and even
anticipative, perspective. Calvino’s sensitivity to objects that travel across
time in unexpected ways and the role of cities as their custodians is also
discussed elsewhere, where he commented on the “relicts from other
ages” that we hold in cities, relicts that “perhaps, in changed environmen-
tal conditions, will save our species from extinction” (Calvino 1995, 343).
VII
The cities are polyhedral, with sharp corners but smooth and circular, or thin
and raised, if not suspended. Often, they neither end nor begin; they con-
tinue yet they hide. And the book itself resembles them, apparently arranged
through a woven intersecting structure, but also open with many beginnings
and numerous conclusions, to additional centers and pluri-symmetries.
The structure of the book resembles that of a piece of music. No imita-
tion of any existing music, however: Calvino wrote his own musical com-
position with the sound of written words. The nine chapters of the book
have no apparent meanings, but are associated with 11 thematic catego-
ries. These themes are not sequential, as each category is overlapping and
interwoven with other categories. If we represent each theme with a letter
of the alphabet, the structure results as:
1: A-A-B-A-B-C-A-B-C-D
2: A-B-C-D-E
3: B-C-D-E-F
4: C-D-E-F-G
5: D-E-F-G-H
90 L. CORTESI
6: E-F-G-H-I
7: F-G-H-I-L
8: G-H-I-L-M
9: H-I-L-M-I-L-M-L-M-M
Note that the first and last chapters—both containing ten cities—share
an inverted symmetry, with one ascending (A-A-B-A-B-C) and the other
descending (I-L-M-L-M-M). Further, thematic categories are recalled in
cities of another category. To make just two examples, Diomira, a city of
memory (A), stands for feelings as the origin of desire (B). Zirma, the first
of the “City & Signs” category (C), attests to memory (A) as perspective
and life.
This structure conveys the lack of hierarchy that permeates the book.
The cities have no comparative importance: the relation between them
and surrounding space is only fictitious. Or quantistic. And so is the
authority of the Khan, denied by the very logic of the book, by his inability
to know his own empire, either to give it order or to empirically possess it.
More broadly, Calvino’s subversiveness results also in the fact that people
are not crucial in the structure—even wise people are often antithetical to
the idea of wisdom as hierarchy, smoking opioids or playing with chil-
dren’s toys as Hypatia’s sages.
VIII
The devil remains in the (observed) details. The empire is divulged by
Marco through each of its chaotic parts, in the enumeration of its pecu-
liarities. The description of each city opens with an inventory of small
images, recorded particulars; then explored by evoking its smells, sounds,
textures; further exposed through a description of its labyrinthine mean-
derings, where each apparent dead-end calls the reader’s attention to a
new chamber, a new secret. Those details are revealing because of their
contrasts, juxtapositions, conundrums, which tortuously yet elegantly
undermine the reader’s common sense and assumptions. The more details,
the more their total exceeds their sum.4
Details are not only descriptive; their a-systematic enumeration builds
up a horizontal anti-structure, a labyrinth, a matrix of possibilities. While
each chapter of the book is framed by a narration of the relation between
Marco and Kublai, the book itself does not have a plot nor a sense of con-
sequence—although later cities are more modern, dystopic, than the first
ones. The cities are described, although nested within each description are
smaller narrations that often result in a descriptive ending. This modality
of writing—without beginning or progression, with neither a goal nor an
end—values the process of knowledge as cumulative, but denies its pro-
gressiveness and purposefulness. We are going somewhere, but, as in a
labyrinth, we are not necessarily going out: being trapped is nothing but
the human condition.5
Calvino’s cities are an invitation to shed the common frameworks
through which we presume to know. If the structure of the book recalls
some exotic and exoteric sequences, the content of each part and of the
whole defies both formal logic and Euclidean space, invalidates the laws of
reasoning and of classic physics that we often assume constrain them. In
terms of logic, the propositions that X is false and that X is true, can be, at
the same time, both true. And false. We think in alterities, in dichotomies,
but such pairs are illusory: “the foreigner hesitating between two women
always encounters a third” (Calvino 1974, 8). In terms of space, cities
hang in space, some above earth and infused with legendary lightness.
Zenobia is elevated on poles despite the ground being dry; Armilla con-
sists of pipes; half of Beersheba is in the sky. And yet it is Octavia, sus-
pended between two mountain slopes, where life is less uncertain than
anywhere else.
IX
In this meta-novel on epistemology, knowledge is accrued by confronting
our desires and fears and letting go of our assumptions of certainty.
Because the cities, says Kublai, are but a combination of possibilities,
midway through the book Kublai stops Marco’s tales. Now it is his turn,
he says, to explore the matrix and describe the cities.6 Marco’s job will
then be to name each combination according to his experience. But the
explorer seems reluctant. To a city made up by Kublai, who excitedly
wants to know its name, he replies: “Sire, your mind has been wandering.
This is precisely the city I was telling you about when you interrupted me”
(Calvino 1974, 43). Marco was apparently narrating the same city, how-
ever, only to exclude it. Because everything can be imagined, but what
holds a city together is the desire and the fears that originate it: experi-
mental quantum theory provides the combinatorial matrix of possibilities.
Kublai believes, instead, in imagination and happenstance. Neither hap-
penstance nor imagination makes a city, intervenes Marco, who concludes:
92 L. CORTESI
“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the
answer it gives to a question of yours” (ibid., 44).
Knowledge is a conquest, necessarily ephemeral, but whose chasing is
inevitable: “On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco,
“shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?” And the Venetian answered:
“Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among
emblems” (ibid., 22-23). In other words, knowledge as appropriation is
impossible. Yet, Calvino seems to leave open the idea that there is some-
thing there to pursue, if not to seize.
Even before telling the reader who the characters of the book are, the
narrative starts with doubt, with the suspicion that Kublai does not neces-
sarily believe Marco, even if he pays more attention to him than to anyone
else. And the book closes with the uncertainty of communication—
because one sends messages without knowing if they will be picked up and
interpreted. And more broadly, it ends with the difficulty of knowing, not
only the future, but even the present and the past, an endeavor that
requires constant attention and tension toward learning as well as the abil-
ity to surrender to the paradoxes of such an enterprise.
Every language is deceptive—although in some ways co-extensive with,
or even generative of, reality. Knowledge, thus, does not pass through
language, which remains inevitable: even when the Khan and Polo keep
their mouths shut, Calvino writes about it. But because the lie is also in the
thing, neither can knowledge pass through matter, whose (in)existence is
tested and denied and retested.
The fact that travel, physical or imagined, is held as the main mecha-
nism of the process of knowing conveys the idea that getting to know
something means to get as close to it as possible, to get absorbed in it.
However, it is also clear that knowledge cannot be external, objective: the
knowledge seeker becomes part of the system, only to realize there is no
coherence in that system. No systems but entangled, superposed waves of
possibility.
Calvino reverses for us the theory of the extended mind: instead of
minds thinking through the world, it is the world that thinks through
its dwellers. We are left to observe and participate in it, but trapped by
our own ways of doing so, such as analogy and hierarchies, systematiza-
tion and reductionism. We are nothing but the artifacts sent around by
the cities/world, the traces they leave of themselves. We are their mes-
sengers and their extensions. We pay attention and surrender, are of
service and yet never fulfilled. We are always striving to pursue
knowledge, only to, or perhaps in order to, reach the awareness of its
limits. Our only reason to be, and even to aspire to enjoy our existence,
lies in the questions we ask.
Notes
1. Here Calvino is referring to considerations made by Robbe-Grillet in 1958
(collected in Robbe-Grillet 1965), on which Calvino commented in previ-
ous work (Calvino 1962).
2. While all quotations from Invisible Cities are Weaver’s translations (Calvino
1974), this and all other translations from Italian are the author’s.
3. Borges’ idea was borrowed from Lewis Carroll (1893), and further elabo-
rated upon by Eco (2016).
4. In an interview in 1970 (also in Calvino 1995), Calvino recounts the medi-
eval cities as carnivalesque, cities of “two lives”: a religious, subsumed, dog-
matic life; and one of fairs and festivals, ambivalent laughter, profanations
and obscenities. In these two-faced cities, contrasts are both admitted but
kept temporally separate by the seasonal and agricultural calendar.
5. On how the image of the labyrinth inspired the writers of his life-time, in
particular Borges, and is the prime metaphor to express the human condi-
tion, see Calvino 1962.
6. This is an example of Calvino’s combinatory narrative, a sort of mathematic
matrix that operates through the combination of a distinct set of elements as
theorized by Leibniz (2020 [1666]) with his Dissertatio de arte combinato-
ria. Calvino, inspired in particular by Borges (1941) and Queneau (1965),
discussed this theory in a text that was later published in Lezioni
Americane (1988).
References
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1941. El Jardín De Senderos Que Se Bifurcan. Buenos
Aires: SUR.
———. 1960. El Hacedor. Buenos Aires: Editorial Emecé.
Calvino, Italo. 1962. Il Menabò 5. Torino: Einaudi.
———. 1974. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.
———. 1988. Lezioni Americane. Milano: Garzanti.
———. 1995. Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e società. Milano:
Mondadori.
Carroll, Lewis. 1893. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. London: Macmillan.
Eco, Umberto. 2016. Come Viaggiare con un Salmone. Milano: La Nave di Teseo.
94 L. CORTESI
Leibniz, Gottfried. 2020 [1666]. Dissertation on Combinatorial Art. Trans.

Massimo Mugnai, Han van Ruler, and Martin Wilson. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Queneau, Raymond. 1965. Les fleurs bleues. Paris: Gallimard.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965. “Nature Humanism, and Tragedy.” In For a New
Novel: Essays on Fiction, Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press.
PART II
Cities & Cities

CHAPTER 8
“The Void not Filled with Words”: The Role

of Venice in Invisible Cities
Sophia Psarra
Introduction
From cosmic particles to gold-leaf tarot cards, Calvino’s fictions are varia-
tions on a theme, confronting literature, direct observation of the world,
and knowledge as kaleidoscopic games of narrative possibility. In Invisible
Cities, the theme of variations takes the form of 55 micro-texts and 18
dialogues grouped into an overarching text, a prose poem for cities that
recounts how Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the cities of the great
Khan’s empire. To the average reader, Invisible Cities is a collection of
freely interrelated narratives that can be read in sequence or at random.
What complicates matters more, as Kublai suspects, is that cities seem to
exchange their elements and come to resemble each other. In a visit to
Kin-Sai, a city in China built on a lake, the Great Khan asks Polo about his
native city, Venice. To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, Polo replies,
he must speak of a “first city” which remains “implicit,” and that every
S. Psarra (*)
Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, UK
e-mail: s.psarra@ucl.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_8
98 S. PSARRA
time he describes a city he says something about Venice. In response to

Kublai’s challenge to describe Venice “as it is,” Polo remarks that once
fixed in words, memories’ images are erased: “Perhaps I am afraid of los-
ing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities,
I have already lost it, little by little” (Calvino 1974, 86).
Reminiscent of the thirteenth-century travelogue, Il Milione, and
Moore’s Utopia, Invisible Cities has Venice at its heart, as a “secret water-
mark” of the fiction.1 The central role of Venice is reinforced by the posi-
tion of this particular dialogue at the numerical center of the book,
immediately after the fifth chapter. Venice was Polo’s native city, to which
he returned at the end of his travels, eventually dictating his adventures to
Rusticello da Pisa, a romance writer who wrote Il Milione, or Books of the
Travels of the World (1295) (Man 2009). Venice was also an empire, like
the Great Khan’s, dominating over trading routes in the Eastern
Mediterranean. Thus, Venice forms a context for Invisible Cities, a reposi-
tory of Polo’s memories, feeding his imagination in a continuous experi-
mental process of cities created as Venice’s variations.
Polo’s hesitation to explicitly speak of his native city sets the thought of
Venice in the mind of the Khan, and in the mind of the readers, stimulat-
ing a quest for the perfect city from which the others derive. Invisible
Cities is meant to provoke thought rather than lead toward disclosure. Yet,
as the final dialogue centers on the question of utopia, Venice features
again in absentia, imperceptibly woven into the narrative. Alluding to the
assortment of individual city-tales, Polo states that his perfect city is made
of fragments: “I will put together piece by piece, the perfect city, made of
fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, signals
one sends out, now knowing who receives them” (Calvino 1974, 167).
The matching of expressions—“little-by-little” in the central dialogue
on the lagoon city and “piece-by-piece” in the final one—recenters the
fiction on Venice. Poised between being lost through the narration of
other cities presented as narrative fragments, and being regained through
the same mechanism of fragments, Venice is revealed as a template for the
entire fiction. Calvino implies that Invisible Cities contains multiple other
Venices, gradually building up a fiction that is comparable to Venice. But
these other cities inspired by Venice may also threaten the coherence of
the “first city” and, hence, of the novel. In Six Memos for the Next
Millennium, Calvino (2009) described Invisible Cities as a space into
which the reader must enter, roam around, and even lose direction,
8 “THE VOID NOT FILLED WITH WORDS”: THE ROLE OF VENICE… 99
indicating that the open-ended structure of the book exemplifies a city’s

spatial network:
The book in which I think I managed to say most remains Invisible Cities,
because I was able to concentrate all my reflections, experiments, and con-
jectures on a single symbol [the city]; and also because I built-up a many-
faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that
does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one
can follow multiple routes and draw multiple ramified conclusions.
(Calvino 2009, 71)
In spite of the author’s illuminations, Invisible Cities remains an enigmatic

book blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, reality and imagi-
nation. These strategies create disorientation, strengthening the need for
intelligibility. The questions Kublai asks Polo and his search for a model
that makes his empire cohere mirror the questions in the readers’ mind:
what makes a story out of these units, a fiction out of micro-texts, a whole
out of these fragments? Each time the emperor, and we the readers, think
we have discovered a thread, we find ourselves back where we started,
confounded by allegories and mist effects. Can Invisible Cities illuminate
Venice, and can the city explain the enigmatic qualities of Calvino’s fiction?
In what follows there are two interwoven accounts, Venice’s history
and urban form, and Calvino’s literary strategies in the novel, engaging
the morphological and conceptual exchanges between the two artifacts. I
approach this subject neither as a literary critic nor as geographer or urban
planner, but as an architect-scholar, looking at what makes literary form
“speak” to space and form in cities and architecture. It is important,
though, to issue a few words of warning: first, by focusing this study on
Venice, the range of fantastic and real-world cities in Calvino’s text inevi-
tably recedes to the background. This does not mean that the contribu-
tion these other cities make to the fiction should be underestimated.
Second, the common factors in Venice and Invisible Cities must not be
taken literally or exaggerated. Throughout its history, Venice defined itself
as a mythical place. Yet it is a real-world context experienced through spa-
tial immersion and direct observation. Invisible Cities, on the other hand,
is a work of fantastic literature, experienced in thought through ambiguity
and metaphor.
I argue that Venice in Invisible Cities is an analogical model for litera-
ture, constructed with extraordinary care through a play of textual
100 S. PSARRA
symmetries, adventurous combinations, and echoes. In his attempts to

capture the unspeakable variety of cities and the visible world through
language, Calvino locates Venice at the border between the sayable and
the unsayable, dream and reality, as the eternal place of urban and literary
pleasures. Mentioned only a few times in the text, Venice, I suggest, is not
explicitly constructed through words, but in the spaces between one word
and another. Ultimately, Venice in Invisible Cities reveals itself as the
quintessential city for the space-making and story-making, the architec-
tural and literary imagination.
The City and Literature as Networks

Venice has a long history as an archipelago reaching back to the Dark Ages
in the sixth century, when residents from the Paduan plains fled to the
Venetian lagoon to escape the Lombards’ invasion. The city emerged from
the lagoon century after century, conquering new territory by dredging,
annexing pieces of land, and linking isolated islands. By the late fifteenth
century, Venice had been transformed into a compact city, crisscrossed by
canals, an extensive pedestrian network, and a dense urban fabric. The
earliest map of the city shows a landmass perforated by canals.2 Some 90
churches are shown on this map, most of which are still standing in the
same squares, or campi, as the squares are known in Venice. If we look
closely at the churches and campi of Venice, we see that they are joined in
a pervasive network of routes by a property that in network theory is called
“betweenness centrality” (Psarra 2018) (Fig. 8.1). This property captures
the simplest paths that are most frequently crossed by movement between
any pairs of streets in an urban complex. When we connect the canal and
pedestrian networks at the points in which they overlap through loading
steps, and disconnect them at the bridges, we see that the squares are still
interlinked in a network of continuous routes (ibid.) (Fig. 8.2). This
means that the squares feature as nodes in the overlap of the two net-
works, canals and alleys. The nodal position of the campi can be traced to
the time the islands were separated and campi were directly serviced by
boat. As the islands were joined, the squares became interconnected by
both water and land, facilitating the unloading of merchandise and people.
This property captures a pattern of evolution based on social and eco-
nomic activity since early times. The campi, the churches, and houses built
around them were the urban and social nuclei of parish islands that dotted
the archipelago (Howard 2002). Parish squares formed semi-autonomous
Fig. 8.1 Closeness centrality values, capturing the most frequently crossed paths
of the pedestrian network. (Drawing by Sophia Psarra, The Venice Variations:
Tracing the Architectural Imagination, 2018, UCL Press)
community centers that contained the houses of leading families. They

were places of worship, accommodating markets and artisans’ shops and
serviced by their proximity to a canal. Squares also facilitated the collection
of fresh water through underground cisterns and channels. This is evident
through the wellheads, hundreds of which are still present in Venice today.
The parishes were the fundamental units of the Venetian society, with many
nurturing their own social and economic identity and allegiance to particu-
lar saints (Muir 1981). The network of parish squares and their nodal posi-
tion in the two infrastructural systems, therefore, embodies the origins of
the urban and social structure of Venice in island communities, each serv-
ing as a “microcosm of the city as a whole” (ibid., 148).
For Calvino (1984), cities are all, or almost all, the result of successive
adaptations to various functions, not foreseen in their previous plan.
Similarly, “a work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which
the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning—not fixed, not
definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an
102 S. PSARRA
Fig. 8.2 Closeness centrality of combined pedestrian and canal networks, Venice.
(Drawing by Sophia Psarra, The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural
Imagination, 2018, UCL Press)
organism” (Calvino 2009, 70). In Invisible Cities, the organic metaphor is

set against the metaphor of the mineral as a paradigm of knowledge, as
many of the cities Polo describes undergo transformations, expanding in
concentric circles, adjusting their streets in response to a recurring dream,
or growing to amorphous suburbs. The organic metaphor also relates to
the ways in which Invisible Cities was born, one piece at a time, with the
individual units written on different pieces of paper (Calvino 2004).
Calvino gradually grouped these units into “an overarching macrotext
with the frame, a beginning, a middle and an end”3 (McLaughlin 1998,
100). As to the composition of the fiction, Venice’s urban structure—
based on islands separated by canals and threaded by alleys—seems analo-
gous to the individual city-tales, circumscribed by the dialogues and clearly
distinguished from the rest of the text, like water and land, by italics.
The second key characteristic Calvino draws from Venice is its urban
networks. This is expressed by the cities of Esmeralda and Phyllis follow-
ing the dialogue on Venice. Consisting of alleys and canals, the two cities
offer many optional routes on dry land or water. To these itineraries,
Calvino adds the discontinuous pathways of “cats, thieves and illicit lov-
ers” on balconies and rooftops, the subterranean networks of the sewers,
and the invisible parabolas of the birds, “all marked in different colored
inks […] solid and liquid, evident and hidden” (1974, 80). Images of
networks proliferate in the fiction, in the caravan routes, branches of the
past, strings between houses marking social relationships, and the emper-
or’s atlas containing the ships’ routes between the “most illustrious
metropolises and the most opulent ports” (ibid., 136). Calvino admired
Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a short story referring to a laby-
rinthine novel and a garden. In Invisible Cities, he encourages readers to
engage with the narrative in the same way people employ multiple itinerar-
ies in the lagoon city, taking experimental pathways through the fiction.
However, Venice is not simply a figure for circulation. It is also a store-
house of urban forms, from monuments to everyday structures. Similarly,
Calvino’s cities consist of a wide range of figures exchanging objects or
trading memories “at every solstice and every equinox” (ibid., 36).
Interchangeable Data and Permutations

As Venice’s islands coalesced, squares, churches, palaces, warehouses, trad-
ing posts, and markets combined to produce familiar typological struc-
tures. These structures comprise in turn a collection of micro-elements:
balconies, windows, steps, loading bays, bridges, wellheads, and bell tow-
ers. Invisible Cities is also characterized by an excess of features, events,
and human types, from monuments to materials and wares, from the liv-
ing to the dead and the unborn, including preoccupations, memories, and
desires. Calvino valued classic texts from Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, and
Dante to modern classics (McLaughlin 1998). In Six Memos for the Next
Millennium (2009), he attributed Lucretius’ dissolution of the world into
minimal units to the value of lightness, making language into a cloud “or
better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still a field of magnetic impulses”
(ibid., 15). Inspired by Lucretius’ weightless atomic constructions, he
depicted cities as entities that are infinitely divisible, dissolving them into
minimal units and micro-structures.
The mechanisms that render cities divisible are not only the glass the-
aters, pinnacles, skyscrapers, pistachio nuts, wine, or tobacco leaves, but
also the images resulting from their combinations. In one of the dialogues,
Kublai thinks of his empire as “a reflection in a desert of labile and inter-
changeable data, like grains of sand” (Calvino 1974, 22). In Zenobia, the
104 S. PSARRA
inhabitants imagine a quite different city by combining features from an

ideal model. Isaura, Zenobia, Armilla, Sophronia, and Octavia (Thin
Cities) are lightweight constructions consisting of roughly similar ele-
ments—showers, reservoirs, windlasses, weathercocks, and fountains—in
different combinations. In Clarice, a given number of objects are shuffled,
repurposed, and assembled over time. In Melania, typical roles such as the
“tyrant,” the “benefactor,” or the “hypocrite” are exchanged between
people. In the penultimate dialogue, even real cities are made of combina-
tions out of a catalogue of forms. In New York, previously called New
Amsterdam, Polo and Kublai recognize the Dutch city of Amsterdam and
the English city of York, a hybrid of deep canals and glass towers, a fusion
of names and urban types.
To the strategy of permutation Calvino adds the motifs of rarefaction
(e.g., Thin Cities), bifurcation (the Borgesian theme of forking paths),
multiplication, scaling, and mise en abyme. In Eutropia, multiple copies of
the city are scattered over a vast rolling plateau. In Fedora, miniature
models of the city are placed in glass globes inside a museum. In some
cases, the exchange occurring from one place to the next concerns not
individual things but their meanings. In Hypatia, the traveler realizes he
must free himself “from the images which in the past had announced to
me the things I sought” (ibid., 48). Images of machines with turning
wheels, carousels, and dirigibles in Polo’s tales strengthen the idea of com-
binations, implying a generative network of elements and experiences.
Through repetition, such images install the notions of permutation, trans-
formation, and combinatorial possibility in the readers’ minds.
Resulting from pre-industrial craftmanship, the architectural heritage
of Venice also has a legacy of familiar configurations, producing composite
urban structures. The campi are the most characteristic ensembles, com-
prising a church with its tower, one or more wellheads, a palace accessible
from a canal and a campo, one or more canals bordering the campo, one or
more bridges arching over the canals and loading steps, all laced together
and repeated throughout the city’s quarters. The campi differ from each
other in terms of shape, size, and orientation, but are all enlivened by the
same scenes and built forms. In between these elements, one finds other
more mundane activities and features: cafes, restaurants, and shops fre-
quented by residents and visitors, benches with gossiping locals, children
playing, tourists resting on the curved steps of the wellheads, and boats
unloading materials and delivering supplies. As with the squares of Diomira
and Isidora, arousing memories in the traveler’s mind, Venice’s squares
awaken a multiplicity of sensations and associations, related to neighbor-

hood congregations, histories, chronicles, festivals, celebrations, and
records. Venice’s campi are spatial, semantic, and cognitive crossroads,
joined together into a network of periodic composite structures.
Calvino had an interest in mathematical patterns going back into his
other works and the experiments of the OuLiPo,4 particularly those by
Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, who explored possibilities in lit-
erature through mathematical constraints. Invisible Cities opens with a list
of contents, outlining the work’s structure. Based on this list, the micro-
texts can be assembled into a diamond shape representing the organiza-
tion of the book with its cities, thematic categories, index numbers and
chapters (McLaughlin 1998) (Figs. 8.3 and 8.4). Latently present in this
diagram is combinatorial possibility, through four symmetries expressed in
mathematics as transformations that allow all nodes to shift on a plane
(translation), mirror each other (reflection), mirror and shift place (glide
reflection), and revolve returning to the starting point (rotation). Whether
reflected on water (Valdrada—reflection) or moving on a vast plateau
(Eutropia—translation), or copying the innovations of its underground
city (Eusapia—glide reflection), or departing and returning to the same
place (Sophronia—rotation), cities in the individual texts evoke concep-
tual relationships that express variations in the tessellation (Psarra 2018).
Embedded in the city descriptions alongside the motifs of rarefaction,
bifurcation, multiplication, scaling and mys-en-byme, these transformations
construct the representation of the narrative as a combinatorial network in
the readers’ mind. Kublai’s interest in a paradigm, a perfect city, a chess
game, a splendid hard diamond or a diaphanous pattern that explains how
the empire—and by analogy the fiction—coheres is thus, reflected in this
diamond shape and the embedded symmetries that structure the book’s
contents.
Calvino wrote about the “long tradition of thinkers for whom the
world’s secrets were contained in the combinatoria of the signs used in
writing” (Calvino 2009, 26). The generative capacity of literature is one
of his main preoccupations in Invisible Cities. Once divisible units and
their transformations register in our perception, there opens up a vast field
of probabilities in the composition of cities, memories, and desires. Against
Venice’s secret watermark, Calvino exposes readers to a wealth of unex-
pected associations, training their imagination so that they can produce
their own invisible cities.
106 S. PSARRA
CITIES AND THE DEAD

CITIES AND TRADING
CITIES AND MEMORY
CONTINUOUS CITIES
CITIES AND THE SKY
CITIES AND DESIRE
CITIES AND NAMES

CITIES AND SIGNS
CITIES AND EYES
HIDDEN CITIES
THIN CITIES
1
Diomira
2 1
Isodora Dorothea
3 2 1
Zaira Anastasia Tamara

Chapter 1
4 3 2 1
Zora Despina Zirma Isaura

5 4 3 2 1
Maurilia Fedora Zoe Zenobia Euphemia

Chapter 2
5 4 3 2 1
Zobaide Hypatia Armilia Chloe Valdrada

Chapter 3
5 4 3 2 1
Olivia Sophronia Eutropia Zemrude Aglaura

Chapter 4
5 4 3 2 1
Octavia Ersilia Baucis Leandra Melania

Chapter 5
5 4 3 2 1
Phyllis Esmerada Pyrrha Adelma Eudoxia

Chapter 6
5 4 3 2 1
Moriana Clarice Eusapia Beerhseba Leonia

Chapter 7
5 4 3 2 1
Irene Argia Thekla Trude Olinda

Chapter 8
5 4 3 2
Laudomia Perinthia Procopia Raissa
5 4 3
Andria Cecilia Marozia

Chapter 9
5 4
Penthesilia Theodora
Berenice
Fig. 8.3 Notation of the grid structure of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Venice and Its Discourse

At the numerical center of the text—between Chaps. 5 and 6—Polo
describes a bridge, alluding to bridges linking Venice’s islands. Comparable
to Venice’s waterways establishing a global network of communication,
the interstitial material of the dialogues provides a foreground network of
discourse framing the descriptions of cities. Calvino’s proposition is that,
mem(1)
mem(2) des(1)
mem(3) des(2) sign(1)
mem(4) des(3) sign(2) thin(1)
mem(5) des(4) sign(3) thin(2) trade(1)
des(5) sign(4) thin(3) trade(2) eyes(1)
sign(5) thin(4) trade(3) eyes(2) names(1)
thin(5) trade(4) eyes(3) names(2) dead(1)
trade(5) eyes(4) names(3) dead(2) sky(1)
eyes(5) names(4) dead(3) sky(2) con(1)
names(5) dead(4) sky(3) con(2) hid(1)
dead(5) sky(4) con(3) hid(2)
sky(5) con(4) hid(3)
con(5) hid(4)
hid(5)
reflection glide translation
translation rotation
Fig. 8.4 The network of thematic categories (top) and four symmetries in a tes-
sellation (bottom). (Drawings by Sophia Psarra, The Venice Variations: Tracing the
Architectural Imagination, 2018, UCL Press)
108 S. PSARRA
although these descriptions have their own independent existence, the

dialogues illuminate them. If our understanding of anything is associated
with the language used to describe it, our knowledge of cities cannot
escape the ways in which they are represented in discursive, linguistic,
symbolic, and cultural systems. Discourse is language used in a context, in
social action and interaction, including a social construction of reality as a
form of knowledge (Markus and Cameron 2002). The constitution of the
two characters and their production of reality, therefore, is based on their
social status, practices, and enunciations.
Calvino explains that Kublai Khan personifies the “intellectual tendency
towards rationalisation, geometry and algebra, reducing knowledge of his
empire to the combinatorial pieces on a chessboard” (2009, 72). The
emperor thrives on autocratic power, order, rules, classifications, diminish-
ing the heterogeneity of cities, people and wares to a splendid hard dia-
mond, a model city, a chess game (Breiner 1988). The Venetian merchant,
on the other hand, rejoices in the rich variety of the things he buys and
sells, the memories and experiences he collects in his travels. The Khan is
the instrument of imperium, “the boundless extension of territories [he
has] conquered” (Calvino 1974, 5). Polo, instead, sails out from a unique
bounded city, a maritime empire that thrives because of trading and peo-
ple like him, the agents of emporium.
Across the chessboard of the great Khan and over his atlas, two empires
(i.e., China and Venice) exchange domestic products and foreign trea-
sures. The dual identity of Venice as imperium and emporium is clearly
manifested in Jacopo de Barbari’s woodcut, presenting an aerial view of
the city from an imaginary view point over San Giorgio Maggiore (Schultz
1978). Depicting Venice in naturalistic detail, the woodcut draws the
viewers toward the particulars of its topography. However, the artistic
composition and the mythological figures of Neptune, god of the seas,
and Mercury, god of commerce, give emphasis to the Piazza San Marco
and the Rialto. Produced at the turn of the sixteenth century, Jacopo’s
print represented what Venice had become to its visitors and inhabitants:
a remarkable urban environment, an empire of ideal government and per-
fect institutions. Between the early stages of Venice in the sand bars and
the Venetian Republic lies a protracted, anonymous, and intricate process.
As Venice’s islands coalesced, the morphological changes in the city led
to recognizable macro-structures. The pervasive centralities of the parish
squares are juxtaposed with two major centers picked up by the measure
of closeness centrality, that accounts for the shortest routes from every
Fig. 8.5 Integration values of pedestrian network in Venice. Integrated spaces

are easy to reach from every other space in a layout, constituting the spaces where
movement paths converge. In contrast, segregated spaces can be accessed through
paths that involve many changes of direction, expressing status or social difference.
space to every other space in the city, the Piazza San Marco and the Rialto,
attracting Venetians and visitors from wide orbits (Psarra 2018) (Fig. 8.5).
The Rialto was the mercantile center of Venice where bulk commodities—
iron, flour, wine, coal, oil—had to be weighted and assessed for tax (Goy
2006, 11–12). The Piazza and the Piazzetta mainly constituted the cere-
monial and administrative center of the city. They contained the Basilica of
St Marc and the highest strata of government, that is, the Doge and the
governing councils. Venice’s identity as imperial and mercantile power was
manifested not only in the urban geography, but also in the governing-
merchant class, a patrician elite that presided over the governance of the
city in the Piazza, and traded at the Rialto and their Palazzi (Romano
1987). Had the emperor and the merchant met in Venice, Polo would
have conducted his business at the Rialto. The Khan instead would have
110 S. PSARRA
presided over the room with maps and globes in the Ducal Palace at
San Marco.
Superimposing an artificial coherence onto Venice, Jacopo’s print is a
didactic work depicting the floating city shrouded in its own mythopoesis.
Known as “The Myth of Venice,” a loose collection of medieval legends
was converted into a republican ideology within historical discourse by
Venetians Humanists regarding their social and political world. Venice
became known as La Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic of 1000 years,
a realized utopia of ideal outward beauty and institutions (Muir 1981). In
the sixteenth century the Rialto, the Piazza, and St Mark’s Basin were
transformed by large-scale projects of physical reconfiguration. Significant
architectural works appeared with the emergence of architecture as liberal
art in the Renaissance. Re-imagined by Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea Palladio,
and patrician patronage, the reconfigurations of the Piazza and the aquatic
landscape of the Basin were the results of state-sponsored urban manage-
ment (Tafuri 1995). Parallel processes of centralization in administration
suppressed the social structures and rituals of the parish-islands, appropri-
ating their popular mythologies into official historiography, so that atten-
tion would turn to the political and architectural imaginaries of statecraft,
spectacularly performed in the Piazza (Muir 1981). The Venetian trans-
formation from the island settlements to a commune and an imperial state
“is a narration of the interplay between the mercantile city and the impe-
rial city, the island communities and the centralised city-republic governed
by a closed patriciate” (ibid., 305). Drawing from Venice’s rich history,
Calvino dramatizes the encounter of utopian abstract ideology with the
multiform free-wheeling practices of cities—in the paradigmatic figures of
the Great Khan and the Venetian explorer.
Projecting itself as a perfect city, Venice played a key role in the develop-
ment of Western political values, until Napoleon put an end to the
Serenissima. At the very moment of the end of this era, a second cycle of
intense influences began as the railway and other nineteenth-century mod-
ernizations brought the artists and writers of the Grand Tour to Italy, revi-
talizing interest in the ancient and Renaissance worlds. To the early
nineteenth-century Romantic travelers, Venice was not only a beautiful
city, but also a symbol of loss and labyrinthine decay, central to taste in the
picturesque (Cosgrove 1982). Transfigured into the distressed image of
decadence and decrepitude, Venice’s Myth continued exercising influence
over urban design and politics, becoming a central site for the European
imagination (Tanner 1992). Venice had re-invented itself as the
quintessential place of the artistic and popular imagination, modeling since

then an arts city, a festival city, and a tourist city far and wide (Gold and
Gold 2020).
Venice and Language

Venice provides a real-world context to understand Calvino’s work as a
resilient city adjusting its mythology to succeeding ages. The second con-
tribution Venice makes in Invisible Cities is the analogy of its own mor-
phology to that of the fiction, shifting attention from what things mean to
how they mean through the interstitial relationships among cities, language,
and other media of communication. Focusing on the question of com-
munication, the dialogues between Polo and Kublai take multiple forms.
From Polo’s hesitation to speak of Venice to the multiform exchanges
between the two characters, including their communication through
silence, and from the diamond-shaped network to the combinatorial sym-
metries of elements, the fiction is replete with Calvino’s speculations about
the constitutive and constraining medium of language. Calvino described
his investigations in Invisible Cities and literature through two different
pathways:
One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may
trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The
other path goes through a space crammed with objects and attempts to cre-
ate a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving
a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not
written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. (Calvino 2009, 75)
In Invisible Cities, these pathways are expressed by a constellation of oppo-

site signs: Kublai and Polo; imperium and emporium; the dreamed-of city
and the actual city; splendor and ruin; formed and formless; celestial and
terrestrial; solid and skeletal; the diamond shape organizing the text and
the discursive surface of the text constructing rich visual images of reality.
Each of these pairs of concepts refers to a core idea: Venice the unwritten
world with the invisible relationships of its morphology of canals, alleys,
squares, buildings, practices, products, and people; and Invisible Cities, a
written world constructing visual representations of cities in language.
Both pathways and their interstitial relationships are integral to the book
and its meaning.
112 S. PSARRA
Writing about cities and architecture, Hillier (1996) uses an analogy of

the morphological properties of urban and architectural space with the
rules of syntax and semantics in language:
In language we can distinguish ideas we think of, that is, the words and what
they represent, and ideas we think with, that is, syntactic and semantic rules
which govern how we deploy words to create meaning. The words we think
of seem to us like things, and are at the level of conscious thought. The hid-
den structures we think with have the nature of configurational rules, in that
they tell us how things are to be assembled, and work below the level of
consciousness. (Hillier 1996, 26)
Hillier explains that because buildings and cities are configurational, their
most important spatial, social, and cultural properties are non-discursive.
Venice in Invisible Cities features as an unspoken real-world context and
unwritten real-world space, corresponding to Hillier’s notion of the non-
discursive. The configurational properties of its spatial and formal ele-
ments are analogically linked with the non-discursive formal relationships
of narrative elements, which the theme of silence between Polo and the
Khan so artfully dramatizes. Venice is analogically present in the diamond-
shaped network also, through the combinatorial agency of its urban
ensembles, its macro- and micro-structures. Venice is in the interstices
between Calvino’s city-texts and dialogues, between the words, and in
“the void not filled with words” (Calvino 1974, 38), the possibilities
entailed in the combinatorial imagination.
However, considering Calvino’s view that cities need a discourse, his
understanding of cities extends beyond the non-discursive properties of
configuration to include their discursive and semantic aspects as constitu-
tive factors of their reality. Venice has both an analogical and interactive
relationship with language, emerging from Calvino’s text in three main
dimensions: an abstract Venice of spatial-formal properties; an empirical-
historical Venice of practices, artefacts, and people; and a discursive Venice
comprising the desires of its inhabitants and the myths of its foundations,
the historiographies of its Humanists and the ruins of the Romantics, the
tourists’ imaginings, the visitors’ dreams, and the immigrants’ aspirations.
Venice and the Future of Cities

If Venice provides Invisible Cities with its manifold multiplicity, what can
Venice, and cities in general, learn from Calvino’s fiction? For Calvino, the
survival of cities depends not only on their productive industries and phys-
ical environment, but also on a paradigm, a representation or image they
develop of themselves.
Each city has an implicit program that must be found every time it is forgot-
ten lest that city face extinction. The ancients represented the spirit of the
city with just that bit of vagueness and precision that the operation requires,
invoking the names of gods who had presided at its foundation. These
names correspond either to personifications of vital attitudes of human
behaviour that guarantee the real calling of the city or to personifications of
environmental elements—a water course, a land form, a type of vegeta-
tion—that guarantee the persistence of the image of the city in its successive
transformation as an aesthetic form as well as an emblem of ideal society. A
city can go through catastrophes and dark ages, see different generations
follow one another in its houses, see those houses change stone by stone,
but at the right moment and in different forms it must finds its gods once
again. (Calvino 1984, 7)
The transformations of Venice over the centuries belong to a long course

of imaginaries, reaching back to the city’s origins in the archipelago. From
an inchoate collection of medieval legends to the Most Serene Republic in
the Renaissance, and from a mythical locale of the European imagination
to the city of tourism and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries, Venice has successively adjusted its “gods” along with the irreversible
effects of time. As environmental pressures and mass tourism threaten
Venice’s survival, Venice must revise both its productive industries and its
myths. Like Andria’s astronomers, adapting and re-arranging celestial pat-
terns in response to terrestrial innovations, Venice must, once again, re-
imagine itself.
As to general lessons that cities can extract from Calvino’s book, the
multiple representations of Venice in the fiction suggest that cities have
many modes of existence. They are lived spaces of everyday life with an
innate configurational and functional order. But they also provide places
where values and meanings are created, contested, and celebrated. The
actual and the mythical, the unwritten and the pictured city, influence the
lived city and vice-versa. Through a gradual process of accretion, cities
114 S. PSARRA
become as much the world of streets and social actions from the inside, as
the perception by minds from the outside. For Henri Lefebvre (1991),
they are produced by and consist of representations, symbols, and spatial
practice. Cities are at once material and immaterial, shaped by a few as well
as many minds. They are manifold instances of activity, language, memory,
and desire. The multiplication and adaptability of their industries and dis-
courses are essential to their vibrancy and survival.
Notes
1. Calvino (1999) used this expression in response to Jorge Luis Borges’ litera-
ture, suggesting that in Borges’ work the secret watermark of the universe is
always about to appear.
2. A map produced by Fra Paolino, a Venetian monk in the island of Murano,
dating from the second half of the fourteenth century (Schultz 1970).
3. The frame refers to the dialogues between Polo and the Khan framing the
narrative of the 55 cities.
4. Ouvroir de littérature potentielle.
References
Breiner, Laurence A. 1988. Italo Calvino: The Place of the Emperor in Invisible
Cities. Modern Fiction Studies 34 (4): 559–573.
Calvino, Italo. 1974. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt
Brace and Company.
———. 1984. The Gods of a City. Harvard Architectural Review 4 (Spring): 6–7.
———. 1999. Why Read the Classics. London: Jonathan Cape.
———. 2004. On Invisible Cities. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art
40: 177–182.
———. 2009. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London:
Penguin Books.
Cosgrove, Denis. 1982. The Myth and the Stones of Venice: An Historical
Geography of a Symbolic Landscape. Journal of Historical Geography 8
(2): 145–169.
Gold, John, and Margaret Gold. 2020. Festival Cities. London: Routledge.
Goy, Ricard J. 2006. Building Renaissance Venice: Patrons, Architects and Builders,
c. 1430–1500. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Hillier, Bill. 1996. Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory for Architecture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, Deborah. 2002. The Architectural History of Venice. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald

Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Man, John. 2009. Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe’s Discovery of the East. London:
Transworld Publishers.
Markus, Thomas, and Deborah Cameron. 2002. The Words Between the Spaces.
London: Routledge.
McLaughlin, Martin. 1998. Italo Calvino. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Muir, Edward. 1981 Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Psarra, Sophia. 2018. The Venice Variations: Tracing the Architectural Imagination.
London: UCL Press.
Romano, Dennis. 1987. Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the
Venetian Renaissance State. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Schultz, Juergen. 1970. The Printed Plans and Panoramic View of Venice
(1486–1797). In Saggi e Memorie Di Storia Del’Arte. Florence: Leo
S. Olschki Editore.
———. 1978. Jacopo de Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views and
Moralised Geography Before the Year 1500. The Art Bulletin 60 (3): 425–474.
Tafuri, Manfredo. 1995. Venice and the Renaissance. Translated by Jessica Levine.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Tanner, Tony. 1992. Venice Desired. Oxford: Blackwell.
CHAPTER 9
A Tale of Two Ethnographers: Urban

Anthropologists Read Invisible Cities
Emanuela Guano and Cristina Moretti
This chapter examines the role of Calvino’s Invisible Cities in the personal
and professional formation of two diasporic urban ethnographers, Cristina
Moretti and Emanuela Guano. Both Cristina and Emanuela hail from
Italy, a country where Calvino’s work is part of the literary canon taught
in high school and college. After pursuing their graduate studies in Canada
and the United States, respectively, both Cristina and Emanuela returned
to their native country to conduct urban ethnography. Both authors drew
on Calvino’s Invisible Cities for their inspiration (Guano 2017; Moretti
2015). In what follows, Cristina and Emanuela discuss the impact of
Calvino’s work on their experiences as diasporic urban ethnographers.
Arguing for this novel’s relevance for the anthropological study of cities,
E. Guano
Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
e-mail: eguano@gsu.edu
C. Moretti (*)
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
e-mail: cristina_moretti_2@sfu.ca

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_9
118 E. GUANO AND C. MORETTI
not only do they explore some of the ways in which Invisible Cities antici-
pated the kind of debates that would transform the discipline at the end of
the twentieth century, but they also show how, 50 years after its publica-
tion, Calvino’s work continues to be relevant to urban researchers.
Calvino as Visionary Ethnographer

(Emanuela Guano)
If urban anthropologists were to read only one work of fiction, it should
be Invisible Cities. Calvino’s evocative novel captures the essence of telling
stories about cities in a way that is not just poetic, but also visionary.
Written in 1972, when most urban ethnographers were, at most, still con-
ducting neighborhood studies, Calvino’s Invisible Cities anticipated some
of the anthropological conversations that were to take place much later. As
evocative assemblages of materialities, sentiments, habits, relationships,
desires, and beliefs, Calvino’s tales about cities foreshadowed the spatial
turn of the 1990s by showing how urban space is not just intrinsic to the
human experience, but also legible on multiple levels. Invisible Cities is a
reflection on how even the most immaterial dimensions of life—emotions,
relationships, dreams—may take on a physical existence. Yet there are also
other ways in which Calvino’s novel challenged the modernist canon; it
did so, I suggest, by providing a platform for reflections that are both
disciplinary and intimate. In what follows, I discuss how Calvino’s Invisible
Cities anticipated some of the conversations of late twentieth-century
anthropology. In true postmodern fashion, I conclude this section by
examining how this book has helped me reflect upon my own trajectory as
a diasporic urban ethnographer.
For one, Calvino’s poetic cities exceed modernist political economy.
Like Sophronia, they hinge on the evocative qualities of an intensely social,
yet precarious, space. Sophronia is a town of two halves: a carnival on one
side and a city of wealth, power, and infrastructures on the other. Yet only
Sophronia’s carnival is permanent. The city’s other half, consisting “of
stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the
slaughterhouse, the school,” and even its “[m]inistry, the monument, the
docks, the petroleum refinery, the hospital” gets dismantled once a year
and transplanted to the “vacant lots of another half-city” (Calvino 1974,
63). Sophronia’s economic foundations, its institutions, and its infrastruc-
tures are fully interchangeable with those of other cities. What makes
9 A TALE OF TWO ETHNOGRAPHERS: URBAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS READ… 119
Sophronia consistent, and consistently unique, is its “shooting galleries,

and the carousels[…] the headlong roller coaster” (ibid.). In Sophronia,
the structures of power, wealth, and prestige are secondary to the softer
qualities of a festive—and ephemeral—everyday. As Calvino would reiter-
ate ten years after the publication of Invisible Cities, for him a city was,
indeed, “a place of exchange, as any textbook of economic history will tell
you—only, these exchanges are not just trade in goods, they also involve
words, desires, and memories” (1983, 41). This is why political economy,
in Sophronia, is de-centered.
The precarity of Sophronia’s material structures (and its structures of
power) challenges urban anthropologists in more than one way. If all that
is solid can so quickly melt into air, what is the value of the truth claims
put forth by modernist ethnographers? Calvino’s answer is trenchant:
“The city must never be confused with the words that describe it,” he has
Marco tell Kublai (Calvino 1974, 61). It is only with the postmodern
revolution of the 1980s that anthropologists began to denounce the fal-
lacy intrinsic to the confusion between presentation and representation—
after all, the city an urban anthropologist describes is but one interpretation
emerging through the ethnographic encounter (see Marcus 1994). “And
yet between the one and the other there is a connection,” continues Marco
(Calvino 1974, 61). Telling stories about cities, as many anthropologists
would agree, is a way of “saying something about something” (Geertz
1972, 30), thus producing a situated knowledge (Haraway 1988) that is
not definitive but rather evocative.
The issue of how—and why—this knowledge is produced, is yet another
way in which Invisible Cities articulates with the experience of the urban
anthropologist. In our discipline, ethnography as the practice of writing
about people ensues from fieldwork, and fieldwork requires the “being
there” of participant-observation and in-depth interviewing. Phrased in
modernist terms, this method supposedly guarantees the soundness of
one’s “data.” Calvino’s Marco, by contrast, may be relying mostly on
memory and nostalgia, or even imagination. Keen on expanding his
empire, Kublai is interested in gaining objective information on available
resources; at times, his patience seems to run thin.1 This is why he tells
Marco, “I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries
you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this gar-
den” (Calvino 1974, 103). Did Marco ever really travel, or are his tales
based exclusively on his imagination?
Yet Marco has physical evidence of his journeys and surprises Kublai
with mementos such as “a helmet, a seashell, a coconut, a fan” (ibid.,
121). Like a true ethnographer, he examines these items—his “find-
ings”—to draw complex conclusions: “The quantity of things that he
could read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed
Kublai,” writes Calvino (ibid., 132). After looking at a mere tree frag-
ment, for example, “Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about
rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the
windows” (ibid., 131). Kublai may not be sure whether Marco really trav-
eled; however, what matters to us ethnographers is the extent to which the
latter’s stories blend the subjective dimensions of memory and imagina-
tion with the empirical observation and the analysis of the materialities he
retrieved from his journeys. Like the fieldnotes that we ethnographers so
cherish, Marco’s helmet, seashell, and coconut demonstrate Marco’s hav-
ing been “there,” thus legitimizing his claims. They also provide him with
a foundation for competently discussing faraway peoples and places.
Marco, I suggest, is a poetic ethnographer with much to teach us.
Like much anthropological fieldwork, Marco’s travels are of the kind
that force you to become a stranger in strange lands, thus impacting you
in intimate ways even before becoming formalized as academic research.
These voyages are not just a series of forays into disparate corners of the
world; they are also, first and foremost, an inner journey. This is yet
another way in which Invisible Cities anticipated questions that we anthro-
pologists began tackling only later. Consistent with the disposition toward
self-reflection embraced by postmodern ethnographers in the 1980s,
Marco willingly admits that his travel is a quest for Venice, his hometown.
“Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice […] To
distinguish the other cities' qualities, I must speak of a first city that
remains implicit. For me it is Venice” (Calvino 1974, 86), he tells Kublai
Khan. Two decades later, at a time when ethnographic reflexivity was gain-
ing currency, anthropologist Malcolm Crick would exhort his colleagues
to ask themselves, “Why this research problem?” (1992, 142). Time and
again, while re-reading Invisible Cities, first as a young ethnographer and
later as a mature anthropologist, I found myself wondering, “Why study
cities? Why this city?” What follows is my own tale—a tale that is about
many cities and also, ultimately, about “Venice.”
I grew up in Italy, a country that has always been, and continues to be,
passionately in love with its own cities as locations of leisure, sociability,
everyday life, and cultural consumption all in one. Most Italian city centers
are theaters of passeggiata, the urban stroll whose performativity is, in

turn, also legibility. During a passeggiata, you walk among people to see
and be seen (Del Negro 2004; Guano 2017; Moretti 2015). Your clothes
and demeanor embody your ideas about your own gender, class, and eth-
nicity. As you walk, however, you also assess the performances of your
fellow passers-by. This practice allows you to informally take the pulse of
local society even as you attempt to understand your place in it (Guano
2007). Take this collectively negotiated legibility away, and Italian urban
dwellers may feel disoriented. This is what happened to me; it is also the
reason why I became an urban anthropologist.
When, in the early 1990s, I moved to a sprawling college town in the
southern United States to pursue my graduate studies, I was unprepared
for the realities of suburban living. The lack of socially viable public space
and the ghastly quality of many a US downtown confused me. Just like
Marco in Penthesilea, I would keep asking residents, “Where is the city?”
Like him, I would get vague replies and broad gestures which meant alter-
natively “‘Here,’ or else ‘Farther on,’ or ‘All around you,’ or even ‘In the
opposite direction’” (Calvino 1974, 164). When, like Marco, I insisted,
“‘I mean the city,’” I would be told, “‘We come here every morning to
work,’ or ‘We come back here at night to sleep.’” (ibid.). Devoid of a
center of social and cultural practice, this city met my attempts at relating
to it with a maze of centrifugal paths, most of which never crossed each
other. How would I get to understand my host society? How would I
negotiate my place in it? In the throes of culture shock, I was adrift in a
Penthesilea that felt like “the outskirts of itself” (ibid., 165). If Marco
longed for “Venice,” I yearned for legibility.
Eventually, my disorientation congealed in the anthropological
endeavor of understanding cities. Project after project, I pursued the kind
of flânerie that only becomes possible once you lose yourself in a crowd
(Baudelaire 1964). This was, and continues to be, my way of engaging the
kind of discernability that emerges through intensely frequented public
spaces. Seeking to understand the enchantments of neoliberal urbanism, I
first encountered this familiar legibility in Buenos Aires’ majestic avenidas
(Guano 2002). I then met it again in Genoa’s alleys, where I explored the
impact of urban aestheticization on middle-class precarity, creativity, and
cultural consumption (Guano 2017). Throughout the many journeys of
my professional and personal life, I always kept a well-worn copy of
Calvino’s novel with me. This book was not just an inspiration; it was also
a reminder of how to tell nuanced stories about cities. Unlike Calvino’s
Marco, I eventually found my Venice. Invisible Cities helped me retrace

my steps.
Invisible Cities from Milan to Vancouver

(Cristina Moretti)
As an urban anthropologist, my first encounter with Invisible Cities was
not with the book itself, but with one of its afterlives. In 2005, I attended
the presentation of a workshop in Milan, the largest city of Northern Italy,
organized by architecture students and urban activists. Starting from the
late 1970s, Milan’s factories closed, leaving in their wake “dismissed
areas”—lands and buildings that were supposedly empty, but in fact were
often inhabited or transformed by precarious residents (especially undocu-
mented migrants), artists, or alternative community centers (Moretti
2015). The workshop “Building Zenobia” (held January 6–16, 2005)
invited participants to create projects for one of the dismissed areas. The
manifesto that summarized the initiative was part invitation, part critique,
and part poetry. Drawing on Invisible Cities, the students and the activists
imagined their work as traveling to and learning from Calvino’s Zenobia,
a city built entirely on stilts, and where homes made of “bamboo and
zinc” connect in the air through suspended corridors, stairs, and “belve-
deres” (Calvino 1974: 35):
Arrived in Zenobia, hiding between the structures of abandoned factories,

we started to use steel and bamboo to construct houses, to design and plan
hallways and balconies so that we could meet, and to use stilts in order to be
always able to see, beyond us […] where the city we were coming from was
going. […] [E]very time we plan a house, we travel the stairs in the opposite
direction and we return to earth. We descend from Zenobia, to plant
another pole that would anchor to reality the dream that we are building.
We dig with bare hands and every time we find tales and memories […] we
invite all to climb and to tell us about the city that they remember and the
city that they imagine for their future, […] not only as to find a place for
everyone’s desires, but also to change ours and let them continue to live.
(CopyRiot et al. 2005, 1)2
I was puzzled: why Zenobia? How could Calvino’s fictional urban worlds
talk about “real” cities, urban change, and social inequality? More to the
point, how do we as ethnographers follow stories like these? How can we
climb and descend stilts with our interlocutors—to see, hear, and sense the
cities they find themselves in, the ones they dream about, and the ones
they show us to be unjust, forgotten, or unimaginable?
In the description above, Zenobia is an illuminating example of an eth-
nographic location: simultaneously a place, a perspective, and a methodol-
ogy. It can be a locus of radical rethinking and a crossroads of encounters.
Like Calvino’s other cities, Zenobia invites inhabitants and ethnographers
alike to begin with what is startling, follow the contradictions, and attend
to the manifold threads of things. The idea of stilts helped workshop par-
ticipants to conceptualize the precarious situations of spaces like the
Milanese “dismissed” and deindustrialized areas, poised between one era
and another, and of marginal residents, striving to be full inhabitants with
rights to the city but instead finding themselves “non-persons” (Dal Lago
1999).3 The stilts and the bamboo balconies described by Calvino also
spoke to the contradiction of the immensely valuable real estate that con-
stituted the ground for sweeping redevelopment projects (planned or at
the initial phases), but which also appeared abandoned and detached from
its territory due to speculation, opposition, and/or delay in construction.
Invisible Cities provided a guide for the workshop participants to not
just analyze these paradoxes, but also to generate new responses. One of
the projects, for example, took as a model Calvino’s city of Ersilia, where
people connect homes with threads of multiple colors to show the mani-
fold relationships they have with each other—be they based in kinship,
economic pursuits, or political roles. When Ersilia’s residents move,
because “the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass
among them” (Calvino 1974, 76), they take their homes with them, but
leave their intricate net of strings behind, resulting in a landscape inhab-
ited with the past forms of social relationships. Thinking of this social
“labyrinth” (Calvino 1974, 76) as a city in and of itself, and a defining
feature of urban life, helped workshop participants to focus on people’s
rights to the city, imagined “like threads, suspended over the ground and
passing everywhere people lived, [that] crossed each other to form an
irregular net” (Rogers et al. 2005). Taking Ersilia’s networks of strings as
an inspiration, Rogers and her collaborators argued that marginal spaces
could be redesigned and inhabited in ways that strengthen connections to
the rest of the city and build alternative urban communities. In their pro-
posal, they linked what was a “closed void” to the surrounding neighbor-
hoods. Spaces like a bicycle repair workshop, a communication hub with
access to the internet, and an open market became an “occasion for
re-appropriating the basic rights of all inhabitants such as the one to hous-
ing and to community” (Rogers et al. 2005).
As Francesca Rogers recounts,4 looking back at that project more than
15 years later shows not only how issues like migration and inequality are
still central to urban debates and conflicts, but also how Invisible Cities can
continue to illuminate urban research and activism. Calvino’s cities are
particularly useful to chart “the liveliness existing within spaces of per-
ceived ruination” (Finkelstein 2019, 5). Invisible Cities reminds us that
the way a city is built also shapes its undoing, its transformations, and what
is left behind when its inhabitants, ideas, or buildings move. Calvino shows
us that what is supposedly irrelevant or absent always inhabits and ani-
mates a city: ghosts, traces, and invisibilities matter (Guano 2017; Gordon
1997; Napolitano 2015). Furthermore, Calvino’s collection of cities reso-
nates with the idea of the archive as a practice, a methodology, and a form
of attention (Finkelstein 2019). For the students and activists of the
Milanese workshop, the stilts of Zenobia are an archive of sorts, and their
idea of climbing them up and down echoes the practices of documenting
and assembling libraries in social centers and occupied spaces (Moretti
2015; Mudu 2004). Here, the archive is a kind of knowing that is open to
different forms of knowledge (Vidali and Phillips 2020).
Invisible Cities is also helpful in my current research, while reading,
listening to, and following people who are wondering about redevelop-
ment in Metro Vancouver, Canada. In that case, growing inequality is
accompanied by what Grigoryeva and Ley call “the least affordable hous-
ing market in North America” (2019, 1168), one that is shaped, among
other factors, by a chasm between wages and accommodation costs and by
insufficient rental units (Mendez 2018). Although greater density can cre-
ate needed accommodations, constructions and redevelopment projects
to date have not improved the situation. In fact, gentrification continues
in both Vancouver and its metropolitan area (Edelson et al. 2019). In
Vancouver, many urban corridors and neighborhoods have seen single-
family houses replaced with apartment buildings, bringing Hutton and
Gurstein to describe the latter as a “building mono-culture” (2019, 15).
Their concerns include the loss of existing good housing, speculation
resulting in very high rents and house prices, and unaffordability for busi-
nesses, negatively impacting the life of neighborhoods (ibid.). A current
major development is the Cambie Corridor project, which is resulting in
new apartment buildings, the transformation of 1100 single-family homes
to townhouses, and an expected growth of 50,000 inhabitants by 2041
(City of Vancouver 2020). It is estimated that the 30,000–34,000 new

units will include 2800 social housing and 400 below-market rental
units—although only a small portion of these has been built so far, and
research will need to be conducted on how affordable they will actu-
ally be.5
While urban redevelopment is often modeled on stories of growth,
progress, development, or even sustainability (Checker 2011; Kolling and
Koster 2019), Calvino’s poetic and playful attention to the manifold sides
and stories of cities suggests that to understand these changes it is best to
see them from the vantage point of lived experiences. This enables us to
notice the contradictions, connections, and questions to which such
changes give rise. As an urban ethnographer, I appreciate Invisible Cities’
insistence on the emplaced and the sensed, and its attunement to complex
temporalities, imaginaries, and multiple perspectives. In fact, Calvino
urges us to be like the traveler who arrives at Thekla, the city in constant
construction, and encounters it not from an encompassing and disembod-
ied aerial viewpoint but from the startling, partial sight of an “eye to a
crack in a fence: cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace
other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams” (1974, 127).
It is in this way that I watch the rapid construction of apartment towers
and the demolition of houses along the Cambie Corridor. Here another
invisible city comes to mind. As Guano describes, Sophronia consists of
two very different halves, where one “is permanent, the other is tempo-
rary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle
it, and take it off” (Calvino 1974, 63). In Sophronia, Calvino invites us to
investigate how temporality, permanence, and ephemerality shape the way
cities are built, imagined, remembered, and lived. At the end of the story,
not only does the reader realize that the half-city they thought would leave
is, in fact, the half-city that stays. They might also start to ponder which
urban spaces they wish to inhabit, making this also a tale about possibilities
and utopia—after all, isn’t “the clump of trapezes hanging in the middle”
more fun than “the bank, the factories, […] the school” (Calvino
1974, 63)?
More profoundly, Sophronia shows us that we can never take for
granted what and how we know about the cities we inhabit, or what per-
manence might mean, entail, or connect to. Often, all we have left are
questions and “a crack in a fence” (Calvino 1974, 127). At the Cambie
Corridor constructions, I see massive glacial boulders and soil being
unearthed and moved; old cedars and mature fruit trees reduced to
sawdust; and fully functional, inhabitable houses being demolished, some

with roses blooming in their gardens. It is the profound sense of doubt
offered by Calvino that becomes my ethnographic starting point. In
Vancouver, moreover, as these new residences are constructed, “tempo-
rary” homeless tent cities continue to be established, setting up in a differ-
ent place once cleared (Winter 2021). Examining it from a different angle,
I ask what happens when the city that is supposed to be temporary remains,
after the permanent ones have moved over or disappeared. Which ones are
the enduring urban forms of the present, and what do they say about
inequality, displacement, and globally circulating images of world cities
and their pleasant lives?
With these questions in mind, I face a sign saying “You are here” in big
bright letters a few blocks from the Cambie Corridor constructions. It
displays a map of this part of the city, extending a few dozen blocks in all
directions. The white lines of streets delineate the gray city blocks, at times
interrupted by the green irregular patches of parks. It is a “wayfinding
map,” explains the sign. A circular line indicates the area around the view-
er’s location that is within a ten-minute walk. Just under the map the sign
says, “Welcome to Vancouver. Considered one of the most livable cities in
the world, Vancouver boasts spectacular mountain views, an amazing col-
lection of nearby beaches and parks, and a bustling urban core famous for
its diversity.” None of the ongoing constructions and transformations dis-
turb the orderly regularity of the map, making its neat patterns confusing
as they no longer reflect what I see, hear, or smell around me. As Guano
suggests above, the representation of the city has taken the place of the
city itself.
Signposts like this were placed here during the 2010 Winter Olympics,
and they have since stayed. Yet what else can be said about where we are?
What stories, commentaries, itineraries, and anecdotes can interrupt this
clear presence, if we take Calvino’s approach and look for the many cities
that always breathe and live into one? Which stories may have a different
plot or different authors? As Kamala Todd asks: “Whose stories are told?
Whose cultures are visible in the built form? Who controls it, defines it,
defends it? Who gets to shape the layout, aesthetics, and dominant norms
of how we live on this land?” (Todd 2016, 57).
Doolittle (2018) writes that it is easy to take for granted the grid and
its comforts. Its right angles can easily direct my gaze, my steps, and my
thinking: the map says I am here, so this is where I must be. Yet the rectangu-
lar boxes are only one way of knowing and representing, and in fact
Doolittle reminds us that it takes a lot of work to produce this vision, as so

many aspects have to be filtered out, simplified, or made into a linear nar-
rative. A different, animated map encompassing this area (Musqueam
Nation n.d.6) shows lands slowly transforming through the action of
waters and climate, and people inhabiting this changing territory from
thousands of years. It is only at the very end that the colonial settlement is
built on the shore and that Vancouver and its “wayfinding maps” become
part of a much longer history. If the map on the street corner simplifies the
story of Vancouver for outside visitors, the animated map breathes within
a much longer extent of time. Framed in the latter, urban redevelopment
cannot be considered apart from the dispossession of Indigenous lands;
the cities that do not figure in the grid are connected to each other in
complex ways. Doolittle (2018), Todd (2016), the animated map by the
Musqueam Nation, and Calvino, then, all ask us to pay attention to the
way we come to understand what a city tells itself to be, and to how it
shapes our senses, our movements, and our relationship to other inhabit-
ants and the land where it is built.
Conclusion
What we hope emerged from our reflections on Calvino’s Invisible Cities
is evidence of the text’s groundbreaking approach to writing stories about
cities—one that anticipated many anthropological debates—as well as its
continuing relevance for urban ethnographers. In our examples,
Penthesilea, Sophronia, Zenobia, and Ersilia offer avenues to rethink the
cities where we live as well as those we study. They also provide us with
models for taking part in local urban debates. As ethnography often dem-
onstrates, listening, sharing stories, meeting others, and paying attention
to the lived everyday experience of urban dwellers ask us to question dom-
inant and established structures, spaces, and narratives. Like in Zenobia,
these activities necessitate continuous ascending and descending stilts. In
this model, knowing is a recursive itinerary. It is an oscillation between
critical imagination on the one hand—climbing stilts to adopt different
perspectives—and the anchoring of the city to its roots and its territory on
the other hand: a listening to histories that might be at times less visible
than dominant narratives yet are essential to understanding urban life and
its inhabitants.
The stilts of imagination that ground us in reality, while allowing new
perspectives, can be the starting point for inhabitants, ethnographers, and
urban activists to work collaboratively as co-creators of perspectives and

methodologies. Through its stories and questions, and by finding its way
in the work of our interlocutors, Invisible Cities continues to inspire urban
projects, collaborations, dreams, and critiques. Moreover, for us who left
a city to live in and research very different urban spaces, Calvino has pro-
vided guidance for reflecting on our own urban journeys. As ethnogra-
phers who dwell in cities that are not our own, we study cities that are
both familiar and strange, and we continue to climb up and down
Zenobia’s stilts for a deeper understanding.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Benjamin Linder for this observation.
2. A longer excerpt of this quote can be found in my dissertation (Stories and
Landscapes, SFU 2008).
3. In fact, the workshop accompanied a campaign to support migrant families
occupying a vacant social housing building and threatened by eviction. For
squatting and migrant rights, see Mudu and Chattopadhyay (2017).
4. Personal communication, August 2021. Thank you to Francesca Rogers for
her insights on “Building Zenobia”.
5. The City of Vancouver report describes below market rental as “affordable
to singles earning $30,000–$50,000, and families earning $50,000–
$80,000” (2020, 6).
6. The map by the Musqueam Nation is accessible at https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=KIedR0hjnVU. Please note that, as described on the video
site, “This video is part of a video series that features Musqueam community
members discussing issues of importance to them. This is a resource to learn
more about the Musqueam people and culture directly from the Musqueam.
These videos belong to the Musqueam community and the teachings and
content contained within each video is the intellectual property of the
speaker. MOA is a steward of this collection and we are honoured to share
them with you for personal and educational purposes only. The community
video series was originally produced for the exhibition c̓əsnaʔəm, the city
before the city, by the Musqueam First Nation in partnership with the
Museum of Anthropology at UBC, the Museum of Vancouver and the
University of Waterloo.”
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CHAPTER 10
Fifty Years of Soul City: Lessons of a

Black Utopia
Isabel Elson
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been

demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do
not know.[…] You would think the plumbers had finished their job and
gone away before the brick layers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems,
indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion
of termites. (Calvino 1974, 49)
In May 1968, a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,
the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) gathered in Baltimore,
Maryland, to discuss the next chapter in the struggle for civil rights. The
city was still reeling from over a week of violent protests in response to Dr.
King’s death and the invasion of over 10,000 troops dispatched by the
governor to extinguish them. The meeting was called by Floyd McKissick,
the director of CORE, who had led the ideological transition of the
I. Elson (*)
The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY),
New York, NY, USA
e-mail: ielson@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_10
132 I. ELSON
organization from an integrationist civil rights group to a leading voice in

the Black Power movement. At the meeting, he addressed the state of the
nation and proposed an economic development plan for the northern
urban ghettos where poverty plagued Black communities. Urban renewal
programs focused on slum clearance addressed the symptom rather than
the cause, and McKissick argued that the only way to achieve racial equal-
ity was to establish Black economic autonomy and give African Americans
ownership of their communities. Among these programs was a particularly
radical one that would not only relieve pressure on overcrowded northern
slums, but also stem the steady stream of out-migration that had been
crippling the rural south since the early twentieth century. A native of
North Carolina but a longtime resident of Harlem, McKissick understood
the Northern urban crisis to be inextricable from the Southern rural crisis,
and he had a plan to solve both. McKissick’s idea was to build new cities
across the United States that would be governed, owned, and predomi-
nantly settled by Black people.
The timing for such a project, McKissick felt, was ideal. As part of the
1968 Fair Housing Act, Lyndon Johnson had just passed the New
Communities Act, which provided up to $50 million in Federal loan guar-
antees to new community development projects. When McKissick
approached CORE with his proposal to request federal funding for a new
city built specifically for the Black community, the more traditional mem-
bers balked at the concept of a separatist city, preferring to stick to strate-
gies of community advocacy within preexisting ones. But the more radical
members rejected the prospect of working with the Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that had since its inception
neglected and systemically disenfranchised Black Americans from access to
safe housing and homeownership. Either way, McKissick could not garner
sufficient support for his ambitious proposal and so, deciding to find
another means to achieve his vision, he resigned as head of CORE, formed
Floyd B. McKissick Enterprises Inc., and began to set the groundwork for
what would become Soul City.
In June 1972, after almost three years of negotiations, McKissick
received a bond guarantee of $14 million from HUD to build a new city
in rural North Carolina. The town was one of 13 new planned communi-
ties that received government-backed bonds as part of Richard Nixon’s
1970 Urban Grown and New Communities Development Act (also
known as Title VII), an expansion of Johnson’s earlier program.1 On
November 9, 1973, McKissick Enterprises broke ground on the city’s first
10 FIFTY YEARS OF SOUL CITY: LESSONS OF A BLACK UTOPIA 133
building, an industrial incubator facility called Soul Tech I. North Carolina

governor James Holshouser, who gave an adulatory keynote address at the
groundbreaking, declared November 9th Soul City Day. The proclamation
celebrated “this creative and innovative concept of creating a new town
for the purpose of establishing jobs, hope and opportunity and a new way
of life,” and applauded the project for its “dedication to solutions rather
than to rhetoric” (Holshouser 1973).
This story, however, like Invisible Cities, is about a city that existed only
on paper, a city imagined, planned, but never built. In June 1979, a study
ordered by HUD determined the project to be non-viable and unsalvage-
able, and the government withdrew its financial and political support for
the fledgling city, forcing it into bankruptcy (Department of Housing and
Urban Development/Avco Community Developers, Inc. 1979). For
many years afterwards, McKissick attempted to maintain the little that had
been built of Soul City and to advocate and fundraise for its continued
development. Eventually, however, construction was entirely suspended,
freezing Soul City perpetually in its utopian state.
One can tell two tales of Soul City. The first and most often told, begins
here, with what remains. This version of the city, like Italo Calvino’s city
of Armilla, is ambiguous in its half-made—or half-abandoned—state.
While Soul City was never an incorporated town, you can enter the city
name into your navigation app and you will be led directly to Green Duke
Circle. You will be greeted there by a two-story monolithic sign inscribed
with the words Soul City beneath a bronze logo of three concentric S’s,
aged to a crimson red. Just beyond the sign you will find Green Duke
House, a colonial plantation home built in 1790. But the blinds obscuring
its windows and the rotting wood breaking off the precarious front steps
will dissuade you from entering. A sign in front of the house posted by the
National Parks Service announces the upcoming construction of the
McKissick Soul City Civil Rights Center (Fig. 10.1), though upon further
research, you will find no evidence of this project’s development since its
launch in 2016. Returning down Liberation Road and taking a right on
Opportunity Road, you will soon encounter HealthCo. Inc., a health
facility built for Soul City that once serviced 50 patients a day, now aban-
doned and standing its ground against weeds bursting through its founda-
tion. You will then turn onto Soul City Boulevard and see the volunteer
fire station and the Magnolia-Ernest Recreational Complex, the latter
named for McKissick’s parents. On your right you will find a thick hedge
armed with barbed wire and Department of Justice “No Trespassing”
134 I. ELSON
Fig. 10.1 Green Duke House and NPS sign for McKissick Soul City Civil Rights
Center, Norlina, North Carolina. (Photograph by Isabel Elson, July 28, 2021)
signs. These obscure from view Soul Tech I, which today is a janitorial
products plant for Correction Enterprises. And to your left, you’ll see
where the majority of the area’s residents live: Warren Correctional Facility.
Attempts to explain the series of catastrophes that forced Soul City into
this state of incompletion dominate the literature on McKissick’s project.
Such analyses importantly reveal the persistent and insidious racism of
U.S. housing policy, the broken promises of the Nixon era, the failure of
the government to respond appropriately to the urban crisis of the 1970s,
and the impact of this history on mass incarceration today.2 But these
investigations into the multifarious contributions to the eventual dissolu-
tion of Soul City—or, in other words, the story that starts with what
remains on the site—also eclipse an analysis of this project’s radical
potential.
The second tale of Soul City begins instead with paperwork:
government- backed bonds, housing development proposals, land use
plans, water and sewage treatment maps, elevation plans, promotional

pamphlets, itemized bills, and architectural renderings. By starting here
instead, a different story emerges: not of a failed city, but of an invisi-
ble city.
Like Italo Calvino’s little Fedoras in glass globes, this chapter seeks to
retrieve “the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another,
it had not become what we see today” (Calvino 1974, 32). It is this bla-
tant utopianism, I argue, that connects the story of McKissick’s Soul City
with that of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Following Calvino, I employ the
term utopia not in its most common usage as a descriptor, connoting
impossibility or fantasy, but rather as a methodology, embracing what
Calvino identified as the constructive capacity of utopic thinking. Calvino
understood this cognitive exercise to serve two purposes. First, it exposes
political stagnation and corruption by intentionally chafing against the
norm. As Marco Polo explains to the Khan, the worst fate for a sick empire
is that it becomes “accustomed to its sores” (Calvino 1974, 59). In her
analysis of Calvino’s utopianism, Letizia Modena explains that utopia, “by
going beyond ascertainable reality, makes it possible for people to observe
their reality in a defamiliarized way,” thereby providing them enough criti-
cal distance to be able to identify sickness (Modena 2011, 64). Second,
utopic thinking poses a theoretical challenge to the status quo by visual-
izing an alternative where there did not appear to be one. Calvino once
described Invisible Cities not as a book but “a space which the reader must
enter, wander round, maybe lose his way in, and then eventually find an
exit, or perhaps even several exits, or maybe a way of breaking out on his
own” (Calvino 1983, 38). The plans and proposals for Soul City, I argue,
should be read in the same way, not as a narrative with a singular conclu-
sion, but as a space through which to wander and consider the alterna-
tive exits.
Utopia as a Not-Yet-Place
A brochure distributed by the newly formed Soul City Company in 1973
presents prospective citizens with an idyllic line drawing of a single-family
home with a chimney, a two-car garage, and a sandpit in the front yard, in
which a Black child and a White child play together (Fig. 10.2). Beneath
the illustration, the brochure asks readers to project themselves into one
of the Black or White, male or female, floating heads and “Imagine, A city
without prejudice. A city without poverty. A city without slums […]”
136 I. ELSON
Fig. 10.2 Brochure for Soul City, 1973. Floyd B. McKissick Papers #4930,
Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and the African American Resources Collection of North Carolina Central
University. Folder 1755
Modeled off the prototype of the suburban American home, the visual
and textual description of this “bold alternative” on the front of the bro-
chure is not fantastical in the suburban structure or model home that it
presents. The so-called boldness of this proposal speaks not to the radical-
ity of the image itself, but rather in its attainability for the people who
occupied what the brochure implied were cities consumed by “prejudice,”
“poverty,” and “slums,” to which Soul City offered an alternative. As
Thomas Healy writes in his book on Soul City, “McKissick wasn’t trying
to create a place that didn’t exist. The place he had in mind existed all
around him. It just didn’t exist for Black people” (Healy 2021, 13).
The press materials distributed by Soul City all similarly emphasize the
attainability of this vision and were often accompanied by press clippings
that legitimize and concretize the venture. One of these clippings, a
New York Times article from July 8, 1972 titled “A Not Impossible
Dream,” begins with a disclaimer that asserts plausibility over idealism: “A
projected new town to be called ‘Soul City’ may have the sound of still
another utopian community, but Floyd McKissick’s enterprise in black
capitalism is intended as no such thing. On the contrary, it is a sane and
practical as well as imaginative concept” (The New York Times 1972, 24).
McKissick and his team similarly avoided the term “Black utopia,” in
the association with implausibility that the word “utopia” carries. The
term that was instead embraced, “Black capitalism,” was the “sane and
practical” option that implied a concreteness and tenability that utopia
lacked. It was using this term, co-opted from the Black Power movement,
that Richard Nixon sought the Black vote during his 1968 campaign,
promising Black economic empowerment and rejecting the leftist welfare
state with a “bootstraps” dogma (Baradaran 2017, 3). Recognizing his
project’s alignment with the rhetoric of Black capitalism, McKissick prag-
matically and strategically embraced both the term and Nixon, even cam-
paigning for the president’s reelection.
The concept of Black capitalism is ultimately what distinguished Soul
City from other Black utopian plans of the past century: it emphasized the
economic potential and feasibility of the project over a social reimagining.
The issue with both the terms “Black capitalism” and “Black utopia,”
between which Soul City teetered is that, as demonstrated by the need for
the “Black” modifier, both capitalism and utopia have historically been
anti-Black ideologies, predicated on exploitation and erasure. Indeed, as
first conceptualized by Thomas More, Utopia, a fictional island discovered
in the New World, was born out of the colonial imaginary of the early
138 I. ELSON
sixteenth century, echoing the genocidal fallacy of a far-away unpeopled

land waiting to be discovered.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (2021) discusses the racist history of utopia in her
essay on another unbuilt, racially progressive architectural plan. In 1964,
the Black writer, poet, and architect June Jordan collaborated with White
architect Buckminster Fuller to propose a new housing project, Skyrise for
Harlem.3 Rhodes-Pitts argues that the term condemned projects like
Fuller and Jordan’s not because the word alone signifies impossibility, but
rather because of where and for whom the utopia would be built. Similarly,
what was utopian about the image of suburban bliss pictured in the Soul
City brochure was not the house itself, but the presence of a Black family
within it. Limited by a far narrower range of what is deemed possible,
Rhodes-Pitts argues that utopia holds a very different meaning in the
Black imaginary than it does in the White one: “At some point it became
plain that I was operating with a different working definition of utopia
than the (white) people asking me for clarification. It was not the Blazing
World of Margaret Cavendish, a place ‘so well ordered that it could not be
mended.’ I had come to think of utopia as a location of the unbuilt, the
not-yet, a place of unachieved dreams” (Rhodes-Pitts 2021).
Rhodes-Pitts’s utopia is thus temporally, rather than spatially, unattain-
able; it is not a no-place, but rather a not-yet place. The not-yet-ness of
Black utopia was one with which McKissick was intimately familiar. From
the inception of Soul City in 1968 until after its foreclosure, McKissick’s
vision was consistently delayed by its funders—HUD, Chase Manhattan
Bank, and New York Life Insurance, among others—each of them waiting
on the others to take the risk first. It is perhaps for this reason that the
town standing today appears an indeterminate place, both unfinished and
demolished, or in Rhodes-Pitts’s (2021) words, a “not-yet of the past.”
But Rhodes-Pitts’s definition reflects not only condemned plans and
thwarted dreams. Jordan’s and Fuller’s Skyrise for Harlem, while never
built, invited a radical reimagining of what urban renewal programs could
be, challenging the predominant perception that “urban renewal meant
Negro removal” (Jordan 1995, 24). Cheryl Fish, a scholar of environmen-
tal justice and literature, has described Jordan’s larger practice as both a
writer and architect as an architextual intervention. Within this frame-
work, she views Skyrise for Harlem as a “‘threshold’ or gateway into new
possibilities for Harlem,” that could in turn serve as “a scaffold on which
to build a vision of hope and embodied environments” (Fish 2007, 331).
Rhodes-Pitts’s definition of the utopian “not-yet,” and Fish’s reading of
Jordan’s architextual practice as a threshold, echo Austrian philosopher

Ernst Bloch’s theory of educated hope: “hope’s methodology (with its
pendant, memory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where
entrance, and above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeter-
minacy” (Bloch 1998, 341).4
Calvino’s utopic cities offer an interesting comparison as another archi-
textual project that similarly engages with this notion of the “not-yet” and
the indeterminate. They are fantastical in their anachronism, invisible only
because they are the product of a language vaster, and more equivocal,
than the black-and-white rhetoric of Kublai Khan’s chessboard. Like Soul
City, the cities narrated by Marco Polo are rendered descriptively utopic
not by the impossibility of their vision, but rather by the rigidity and stag-
nation of the empire in which they are imagined. Methodologically, Soul
City and Invisible Cities, in their state of the not-yet, are spaces of edu-
cated hope.
That both Calvino and McKissick were conceiving of urban utopias as
the 1960s came to a chaotic close was no coincidence. In urban centers of
Western Europe, the late 1960s and 1970s were plagued by economic
stagnation. The financial crisis precipitated a string of student and worker
protests and strikes, beginning with the May 1968 uprising in Paris and
the 1969 “hot autumn” in Northern Italy. In 1968, Calvino began to read
Charles Fourier, writing a series of three essays in the following five years
in which he considered the contemporary application of the utopianist’s
theories and plans. In the third essay, “On Fourier III: Envoi: A Utopia of
Fine Dust,” published a year after Invisible Cities, Calvino identifies uto-
pianism as “a product favored by periods in which practical action is the
loser” (Calvino 2017). In periods of unrest, the practical action of civil
obedience or rational, nonviolent discourse is abandoned for rebellions
perceived as irrational—not only in their violence and ungovernability, but
also in their idealism. Fourier, writing as the embers of the French
Revolution were extinguished and the social stasis of pragmatism and
order threatened to denature radical and liberatory thought, identified
utopianism as a tool against calcification. Calvino’s essay considers whether
the social turmoil resulting from the economic crisis of the moment might
call for a redemption of utopic thought.
It was equally as a response to social unrest that McKissick first put
forth his idea for a self-determined Black community. In July 1967, while
director of CORE, he held a press conference in which he addressed the
Detroit Rebellions, later publishing the speech in a document titled “A
140 I. ELSON
Black Manifesto—CORE: McKissick Offers Solutions and Programs.”

The manifesto recognizes the unrest not in criminal terms, as other more
moderate civil rights leaders had done by referring to the protests as riots,
but rather as “the beginning of the Black Revolution” (McKissick 1967,
3). He announces the failure of practical action by declaring that the “tac-
tics and philosophy of the civil rights era can take us no further along the
road to Total Equality,” and issues proposals for a new era that would
provide Black Americans unprecedented freedom of choice in how they
engage with White society (McKissick 1967, 3). In his “outline for prog-
ress—specifically aimed at curing our hate-ridden society,” he emphasizes
the importance of Black-owned land and commercial proprietorship that
would prevent exploitation by White landlords, allow for community
autonomy, and ensure stable employment for Black Americans. As an
example of this kind of initiative, he gives voice to demands of Black
nationalist groups like the Nation of Islam for land on which to form an
independent Black state. McKissick proposes that “with land the govern-
ment now owns, or could acquire, new cities can, in fact, be built to be
owned and controlled by Black People—with technical assistance coming
from the government and private industry to develop the resources where
these people live” (McKissick 1967, 9). This suggestion in retrospect
seems preemptive given that less than a year later, after the passage of
Johnson’s New Communities Act, McKissick would develop this idea into
his proposal for self-governing Black cities.
The utopianism of the manifesto lay not in an idealism; in fact, far from
it. McKissick’s utopianism was one of refusal, an adamant and uncompro-
mising rejection of current conditions. As a “no place,” utopia is most
threatened by its relationship to existing space. Where does one build it,
and how will it operate in regard to preexisting social structures? These
questions were at the forefront of Black utopianism of the twentieth cen-
tury in the United States. They lay at the heart of rifts between integra-
tionists and separatists who debated whether the utopian project that had
once been the United States could or would accommodate the futures of
Black people. In discussing Fourier’s tendency toward isolationism in his
theorization of utopia, Calvino (2017) writes that “Utopia feels the need
for compactness and permanence in opposing the world it rejects, a world
that presents an equally refractory front.”
Soul City was unique among the new communities funded under Title
VII, not only because it was the only project conceived by a Black devel-
oper and intended to serve a primarily Black population, but in its
geographic independence from a major city. McKissick’s site selection was

key to his enterprise: a former plantation in a remote rural region of
Warren County about 50 miles from the Raleigh-Durham area. While its
remoteness is often cited as one of the downfalls of Soul City, it was this
very aspect of the site that rendered it appropriate for McKissick’s self-
sufficient and free-standing community, allowing for a degree of isolation-
ism that utopia requires. Furthermore, in the early 1970s, the population
of Warren was 62% African American and unemployment in the region
ranged from 11% to 30% (Biles 2005, 59–60). With a potential Black work
force already in place, Warren County was ideal for McKissick’s utopic
experiment in Black capitalism. In February 1969, McKissick purchased
the land, refusing the perpetual not-yet-ness that had condemned so many
Black utopian plans before his.
Utopia from Theory to Practice

When McKissick began to conceive practically of a Black city, political and
economic pragmatism would force him to distance himself from the rhet-
oric of the Black Manifesto. While McKissick never promoted separatism
as an explicit aim of Soul City, his objective to build a city that prioritized
Black people prompted fearmongering accusations against what one
North Carolinian newspaper described as “a Camelot built on racism”
(Warrenton Record 1969, 2). The early pamphlets for Soul City, distrib-
uted before McKissick had secured funding, balance an assurance of racial
openness with a sustained focus on the cultivation of Black economic and
political power. Printed in the red, black, and green color scheme of the
Afro-American flag, the pamphlets reveal the Black nationalist roots of the
project. Inside the pamphlet, McKissick states that while open to people
of all races, “Soul City is being built so that Black people can participate in
capital ownership and control their own destinies” (Floyd B. McKissick
Enterprises, Inc. 1970). Throughout the course of Soul City’s develop-
ment however, HUD, along with state planners and project consultants,
persistently pressured McKissick to change the name of the city, concerned
that the word “soul” connoted Black separatism (Rhee 1984, 53). While
McKissick refused to abandon the name, one can observe such capitula-
tions in the promotional material. By 1973, the Black liberatory rhetoric
had given way to imagery of smiling Black and White faces living harmoni-
ously in suburbia (Fig. 10.2). The whitewashing of advertising for the city
would prove to be only one of many concessions McKissick would have to
142 I. ELSON
make throughout its development as he worked to transform a utopian

vision into an actuality.
With no architectural or planning experience, McKissick sought out a
development team whose approach to racial justice and social progress
aligned with his own. As his urban planner he hired Harvey Gantt, a young
architect from South Carolina who in 1963 had fought for admission to a
segregated Clemson University, succeeding in becoming the first African
American admitted to the school. He went on to earn his master’s degree
in urban planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), dur-
ing which he began informally consulting on the Soul City project. In his
1970 thesis, to which this chapter is largely indebted, Gantt conducts an
analysis of McKissick’s housing structure for Soul City and issues a series
of proposals for the construction of “not only economical, but also physi-
cally and socially responsive housing” (Gantt 1970, 12–13). Evidently,
Gantt’s proposal made an impression on McKissick, who hired Gantt right
out of MIT and employed his firm (Gantt/Huberman Associates) to draw
up the first set of city plans and to design Soul City’s first building,
Soul Tech I.
Gantt’s thesis identifies a successful, socially progressive housing pro-
gram as the primary determinant of Soul City’s future. His proposed
objectives establish Soul City’s housing priorities as follows: to allow for
active participation by tenants and residents in the construction of and
authority over their living environment; to reserve a minimum of one-
third of the available housing for low-income residents; and to prioritize
socio-economic integration by providing a wide range of interspersed
housing types and density classifications (Gantt 1970, 25–26). Gantt’s
proposals quite radically break with the standard suburban planning
approach of the post-war period that promoted homogeneous housing
patterns and created community subdivisions predicated on income—
closed housing policies that maintained racial segregation despite the pas-
sage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The radical openness of Gantt’s
objectives for Soul City reflects the housing section of McKissick’s pro-
posal submitted to HUD in 1970, which states, “It is expected that a
significantly larger proportion of families will come from low-income
brackets than is typical in other new towns” (Gantt 1970, 28). The HUD
proposal echoes Gantt’s insistence on community control and investment,
stating not only that “homeownership and control will be a prime goal,”
but that residents could actually be trained to build their own homes, in
turn providing marketable skills to previously unskilled workers (Gantt

1970, 29).
When three years later Gantt/Huberman Associates began drawing up
the first plans for Soul City, however, much of the utopianism of Gantt’s
thesis and McKissick’s proposal had been ceded to the traditional subur-
ban structures Gantt had rejected in his writing. Read in dialogue with
these earlier texts, Gantt/Huberman’s 1973 town plans expose a tension
between, on the one hand, a shared conviction that Soul City could serve
as a model for socially progressive planning, and on the other, the limita-
tions imposed by financial pragmatism and political palatability. This is a
lesson Calvino learned from Fourier, who was adamantly opposed to the
physical manifestation of any of his utopic plans. “He knew, or at least
foresaw,” Calvino writes, “that if his system departed from the written
page, from the argument he preached, it would lose its force as absolute
opposition to all that had ever been said and done” (Calvino 2017). With
Gantt’s series of plans, we can observe the transitional pains of a system
departing from the written word, in which the oppositional power of the
concept must be sacrificed to be accepted by the very system it sought to
disrupt.
This friction between social progressivism and the reality of local poli-
tics and economic feasibility played out most significantly in the battle
over “housing density,” a euphemistic term that implicitly denotes class
and race. The Soul City plans exhibit a diversity of interspersed housing
options in high-, medium-, and low-density formations, providing equal
access to resources for all residents of the city. McKissick’s housing pricing
plan, however, made any family making under $5,000 a year ineligible for
homeownership, limiting the housing options for low-income residents to
high-density rentals. This was in direct conflict with Gantt’s insistence on
the importance of choice and control for all residents, regardless of income
(Gantt 1970, 30).
Furthermore, the 30-year land use plan identifies no more than four
small areas of high-density housing (Fig. 10.3). The vast majority of the
residential area is zoned for low-density housing, like the single-family
home pictured on the promotional pamphlet mentioned earlier (Fig. 10.2).
These properties, though advertised as the norm in Soul City, would only
be purchasable by the wealthiest residents. The number of high-density
units in these four areas was also drastically decreased from McKissick’s
original proposal, a decision that Gantt recognized would likely heighten
144 I. ELSON
Fig. 10.3 Warren Regional Planning Corporation & Gantt/Huberman

Associates, Soul City: 30 Year Plan, Land Use Plan, May 1973. Floyd B. McKissick
Papers #4930, Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill and the African American Resources Collection of North Carolina
Central University. OP-4930/180
class divides in Soul City by pricing out low-income families who would be
forced to live on the outskirts of Soul City and commute in.
This decision was in part economically motivated: McKissick’s vision
for Soul City was predicated on the autonomous production of capital,
which meant that, at least initially, significant subsidized housing would be
financially unfeasible. But it was also largely a concession to local politics.
A letter from the chairman of the Warren County Planning Board dated
December 10, 1969, provides insight into McKissick’s original proposal
for Soul City housing while revealing the extent to which McKissick had
been forced to reduce housing density by the time he wrote the HUD
proposal in 1970. Responding to a presentation delivered by the develop-
ers of Soul City to the Planning Board, the chairman raises these concerns
several times throughout the letter:
Naturally you can understand our apprehensions when faced with the pros-
pect of a new town of 50,000 poor people, particularly when it embodies so
many new types of housing, etc. […] We continue to believe that in terms
of the health and welfare of the citizens of Warren County and the protec-
tion of existing property values, the recommendation of the State as to resi-
dential densities and street and highway design are amenable to some
modifications. […] It should be clear, however, that eighty families per acre
is out of the question. (Warren County Planning Board 1969)
The chairman closes the letter by reiterating once more the concern
regarding residential densities, warning that it could “result in consider-
able resistance to the development of the program” (Warren County
Planning Board 1969). When Gantt/Huberman Associates drew up their
plan in 1973, they had reduced the highest-density areas to no more than
30–40 units per acre, less than half of what McKissick initially proposed to
the Planning Board. These small-town patterns, to which McKissick was
forced to yield, represent a closed housing policy reflecting the anti-Black-
ness of suburban town planning, which intentionally creates a paucity of
housing under the guise of traditionalism.
In the battle over housing density, McKissick was forced to reckon with
the inextricability of both Black capitalism and Black utopia from White
America. By the end of the 1970s, Nixon’s policy of Black capitalism was
revealed for what it was: another way to neglect and disempower African
Americans and then blame their subjugation on their own failings. Black
capitalism, as Mehrsa Baradaran (2017) explains, would fail so long as the
color of capital, property, and government credit were White. There is a
146 I. ELSON
reason why Marco Polo takes us to the center of each city he visits without
describing the spaces that stretch between them: it is the ideology of the
place surrounding the no-place that condemns it (Calvino 1974, 152).
McKissick’s vision for Soul City extended far beyond Warren County; he
hoped that it could serve as a model for the construction of Black cities
around the country. But, as Calvino writes, in placing a utopia on the edge
of an existing society in the hopes that it will reform the latter by example,
“it is only a step from the radicalism of reform to the compromise of
reformism” (Calvino 2017).
What the story of Soul City makes evident is that economic power and,
in turn, spatial power are both contingent upon political power, a lesson
that many of those who worked on the city took to heart. Eva Clayton,
who as head of the Soul City Foundation had been responsible for the
planning of all the city’s social services, became chair of the Warren County
Board of Commissioners, and was later the first Black woman elected to
represent North Carolina in Congress. She served five consecutive terms
in the United States House of Representatives, where she advocated for
the rights of rural and agricultural workers and fought for racial economic
equality. Harvey Gantt, following his work at Soul City, closed his archi-
tecture firm and entered politics to be elected the first Black mayor of
Charlotte, North Carolina in 1983.5 The subsequent work of Gantt and
Clayton illustrate that while Soul City never achieved Black economic
power, it certainly produced Black political power.
Calvino argued that utopian world building, in its ability to visualize that
which once seemed impossible, is more capable of enacting change than
mere discourse which, in its abstraction, brings what is desired no closer to
realization. The cities Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan are not written
into material existence but are rendered vividly enough that they destabilize
the Khan’s stalwart reliance on his atlases that do not accommodate them.
Similarly, Soul City did not reform city planning, nor American capitalism,
but it did give concrete form to a political imaginary. As an unbuilt, not-yet
space, Soul City is always in the process of formation, and for that reason,
like Invisible Cities, this story has no determinate conclusion.
Acknowledgments I am grateful for the generous feedback of Marta Gutman

from whose course at the Graduate Center, City University of New York this essay
in its earlier form emerged. Thanks also to Flora Brandl and Evie Elson for their
diligent editing of this chapter, and to the McKissick family for their generosity in
providing permission to use these images from Floyd McKissick’s archive.
Notes
1. This overly ambitious and poorly managed program distributed $500 mil-
lion before the project was gradually defunded during the financial crisis of
the mid-1970s and cancelled in 1978, forcing most of the communities it
had supported into bankruptcy. For more on the New Communities Act,
see Biles (2005) and Gillian (2011).
2. Scholarship that discusses the many political, economic, and social contribu-
tions to Soul City’s failure includes Healy (2021), Gillian (2011), Biles
(2005), Fergus (2010), and Minchin (2005).
3. Jordan is typically described as a writer and not an architect. While neither
this project, nor any other of Jordan’s urban and architectural plans were
ever built, scholars Cheryl Fish (2007), Charles Davis (2014), Alexis Pauline
Gumbs (2012), and others emphasize the importance of describing Jordan
as an architect to emphasize the way in which she radically reimagined space
throughout her diverse practice.
4. For a contemporary application of Bloch’s theory of educated hope in criti-
cal race theory see José Esteban Muñoz (2009).
5. Notably, Gantt’s political career also included an unsuccessful 1990 cam-
paign for the North Carolina senate seat as the Democratic candidate chal-
lenging three-term incumbent Republican Jesse Helms. Helms, upon first
assuming office in 1973, had immediately established his opposition to Soul
City and is held in large part responsible for its demise.
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CHAPTER 11
Tirana Visible and Invisible
Matthew Rosen and Smoki Musaraj
More decadences, more burgeonings have followed one another in Clarice.

Populations and customs have changed several times; the name, the site, and
the objects hardest to break remain. Each new Clarice, compact as a living
body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of
the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead. (Calvino 1974, 107–108)
Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities can move scholars of real cities to
look at issues of urbanity in new and useful ways (Linder, this volume).
This was certainly true for us, two differently positioned ethnographers
who have previously approached Tirana, the Albanian capital, from our
own distinctive anthropological perspectives. As a Tirana native who has
lived abroad since 1995 (Musaraj) and a foreigner with more experience
than a casual visitor but less understanding than a local (Rosen), we situate
our analysis of the city somewhere between the skeptical resignation
expressed by many of our Tirana-based interlocutors and the fetishism of
difference often espoused by international observers. Our general argu-
ment is that Tirana’s contemporary urban landscape—from the iconic
M. Rosen (*) • S. Musaraj

Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA
e-mail: rosenm@ohio.edu; musaraj@ohio.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_11
152 M. ROSEN AND S. MUSARAJ
buildings that stand at the historic city center to the concrete-panel apart-
ment buildings and informal markets located along its periphery—can be
read as a chronotopic narrative of a city “where time and space intersect
and fuse” (Bakhtin 1981, 7). Extending Calvino’s image of a city made of
countless visible and invisible traces, our analysis in this chapter reveals an
urban landscape that is as layered with names, signs, memories, merchants,
wounds, desires, and the dead as anything Marco Polo told Kublai Khan.
Like Calvino’s city of Clarice, Tirana’s modern history has been marked by
continuous construction and destruction. A succession of different politi-
cal regimes approached the city as a tabula rasa, seeking to construct a new
world from scratch. Yet, as we reflect in the following, the various pasts of
Tirana are also still visible and palpable in the present fabric of the city.
In little more than one hundred years, Tirana has gone from a small
town under Ottoman rule to the capital of a modern secular state, a city
under Fascist occupation, the political center of a harsh Stalinist dictator-
ship, and a neoliberal urban conglomeration that one of our interlocutors
memorably described as “a place without rules” (Rosen 2019b, 4).1 Each
of Tirana’s modern transformations has been accompanied by large-scale
projects of construction and destruction. These have ranged from the
rational plans drawn up by foreign architects in the 1930s to the informal
tactics used by internal migrants in the 1990s. Whether these projects
were located at the city’s center or on its peripheries, however, they invari-
ably brought together complex networks of national and transnational
actors working for diverse and often conflicting public and private inter-
ests. Inspired by Calvino’s description of the multiple cities that make up
Venice, we argue that the visible and invisible threads of these networks
and relationships appear in Tirana today as so many “anthropological
traces” (Napolitano 2015).2 In what follows we offer four refractions of
Tirana—the Bazaar City, the Boulevard City, the Concrete City, and the
City of Cafés—to describe the sedimented layers that make up the fabric
and soul of Tirana’s “urban now” (Robinson 2013).3
The Bazaar City

Before it was the modern capital of a new nation-state, Tirana was a small
Ottoman town, and like other Ottoman towns, it had a bazaar. The Old
Bazaar was situated at the historic center of the city, marked especially by
the old Mosque of Sulejman Pasha. All of this, however, was demolished
during the communist period (1944–1991). This was done to make space
11 TIRANA VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE 153
for a reimagined city center, conceived by the Albanian authorities of the

time to represent the “force and rebirth” of Albania (Aliaj et al. 2003, 58).
Dismissing as irrelevant the city’s actual culture and history, the state
authorities constructed in their place the new Palace of Culture, National
Historical Museum, Hotel Tirana, and other monumental designs.
These buildings have all survived into the present. The Palace of
Culture, for example, now houses an upmarket bookstore, several trendy
cafés, the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet, and the National Library.
These institutions all play important roles in the broader social lives of
Tirana’s living communities, and they are accessible to anyone visiting
Tirana today. Getting a picture of what was torn down, however, is not so
easy. One option is to talk with someone whose living memory reaches
back far enough. Another option, more accessible, is to look to the
accounts preserved in old books and special library collections. For exam-
ple, in the journals of the English poet and painter Edward Lear, who
visited Tirana in 1848, we find depicted (in words and images) notewor-
thy scenes of public life around the old Sulejman Pasha Mosque.
Half a century later, the French writer and diplomat Alexandre Degrand
offered a description that also emphasized the Ottoman character of the
bazaar city, though Degrand seemed to have a greater, or at least more
diplomatic, appreciation for the town’s distinctive characteristics:
None of the towns I have visited in Albania has so much character. Founded
by a Muslim, [Tirana] has changed little in the last three or four centuries.
One does not see the transformations and changes one encounters in other
towns. It is the town in which Muslims find what they are always looking
for: water, flowers, good fruit and an agreeable climate, i.e. a place where life
is good. It has an important and curious bazaar, with wooden houses and
galleries, enormous caravanserais, and alleyways continuously cleansed by
streams of flowing water. (Degrand 1901)
Stella Cushing, the American travel writer, who visited Tirana in the
1930s, was likewise captivated by the Ottoman layout and life of the city:
“Beautifully situated with lovely mountains surrounding it—with few new,
simple buildings, many old dilapidated Turkish houses—mostly fenced in
tiny stores, bazaar, fashion mules, veiled barefooted women, turbaned
men” (Cushing 1934). Like Lear and Degrand before her, Cushing
described the bazaar as part of an oriental landscape. By the time Cushing
arrived, however, a new wave of construction had already begun to trans-
form Tirana.
For Tirana, the twentieth century consisted of multiple efforts at dis-

placing or destroying the bazaar. These efforts were most visible in a slow
and progressive dismissal, followed by the final demolition and erasure, of
the old bazaar. But these efforts did not just target one bazaar. Rather,
they targeted the concept and structure of the bazaar city itself. This cru-
sade on the bazaar city began in the 1920s and 1930s, when the new
government of the new nation-state of Albania hired the Italian architect
Armando Brasini to draft the first plan of the center of the city. The mul-
tiple ensuing urban plans, drafted by Italian and Austrian architects,
sought to materialize the vision of Tirana as a “national European capital”
(Pula 2016, 60). Such plans redirected the city away from the bazaar and
Ottoman layout onto the main boulevard and the new neoclassical gov-
ernment buildings built around it. In all these plans, the old bazaar was
either ignored or displaced (A. Hysa 2016).
The final and absolute destruction of the old bazaar, however, came in
the 1960s, when the communist regime, with Soviet funding and help,
literally erased the old bazaar to build the ostentatious Palace of Culture,
which still stands as one of the main buildings at the center of Tirana.
Communist modernity, like the Fascist modernity before it, saw the bazaar
city as a remnant of the Ottoman dark ages. Moreover, as Armanda Hysa
(2016) also pointed out, the communist regime attacked the bazaar city as
the living embodiment of private commerce. But despite the long war
against the bazaar city that was waged in the name of fascist and commu-
nist modernities, the authorities never succeeded in fully killing the
bazaar city.
Memories of the old bazaar continue to haunt the present in Tirana.
Evidence for this can be found, for example, in the expressions of Ottoman
nostalgia that came into everyday conversations about Tirana’s transfor-
mation during the communist regime (Rosen 2019a, 80–81). We have
recorded many fond recollections of the old bazaar as a central space that
organized the city’s life, not only from those who remember what Tirana
was like before the Albanian Cultural Revolution (1966–1969), but also
from their children, who have been raised on these recollections.
Furthermore, the bazaar as an urban form—consisting of the open-air
produce market, the meat and fish, the dairy vendors, the haggling form
of exchange—continued to persist in much more contained and controlled
form during the communist era and reemerged with full force in the post-
communist period.
Pazari i Ri (the new bazaar) was built in the center of the remaining
Ottoman parts of Tirana in 1928 (A. Hysa 2012; R. A. Hysa 2015). It was
built as an extension of the old bazaar and survived the demolishing of the
former. Tucked away among the red-roofed houses of the Mujo neighbor-
hood, the very name of this new bazaar carried the ghost of the old one.
Growing up in late-communist Albania, one author (Musaraj) remembers
walking to the new bazaar on Sundays to get fresh produce with her
mother, who haggled with the farmers from the surrounding village. This
was a time of centralized economy, where everything sold at state-run
stores was rationed and prices were set. While the stores around the mar-
ketplace were state-owned at the time, there were still some farmers who
sold fresh produce in the open air stands at the center of the square. By
contrast to other marketplaces, the new bazaar was bustling, messy, and
noisy. It was the only place Musaraj witnessed her mother haggling over
price and where rations were not in place. The market was still controlled
by state authorities, but it felt like a remnant of the bazaar city that existed
beyond the contours of the communist state.
With the collapse of the communist regime and the chaos of the 1990s,
open air bazaars mushroomed in different parts of the city. Local farmers
flocked to the city selling produce and meat products from temporary and
designated open-air stands. The new bazaar was the first to expand and
flourish, but others soon emerged in central and peripheral parts of town.
In response to strict regulations governing the urban core, the bazaar city
of twenty-first-century Tirana has proliferated in the peripheral and less
visible margins of the city, where the rules of the grid (i.e., the rational
European city) are less enforced.
Another wave of regulation and disciplining of the streets came in the
2000s, shutting down the unlicensed vendors that were once ubiquitous.
An urban redevelopment plan revamped the new bazaar in an effort to
modernize and Europeanize it. Vendors at the new bazaar were now
strictly licensed and had to comply with more rules. Some of the products
were either banned or forced to move indoors for hygienic purposes. The
buildings around the bazaar were painted in traditional motifs; car traffic
was banned, making this one of the few public spaces where kids could run
free while parents and grandparents sat around and chit-chatted over cof-
fee. The project sought to build a hybrid space that retained some of the
Ottoman bazaar culture, now sanitized through a more European format
of urban public space. This hybrid form remains, but the European urban
form has driven away the Ottoman-style market. As prices of the produce
were much higher than those of other street markets, the new bazaar is no
longer a destination for locals interested in buying produce and haggling.
The late capitalist variant of the new bazaar has turned into a bustling
plaza of cafés and restaurants. The small open-air produce market at its
nucleus, which is picturesque but not practical, is now a hotspot for tour-
ists, who seem more apt to snap a selfie than buy half a kilogram of olives
or cherries. For local residents, who mostly do their shopping elsewhere,
it is now a place to sit and sip their morning and evening coffees while the
children play in the open plaza.
The Boulevard City

The central boulevard of Tirana—now made up of the Martyrs of the
Nation Boulevard (formerly Stalin Boulevard, formerly Impero Boulevard),
Skanderbeg Square, Zogu I Boulevard, and the recently constructed New
Boulevard—functions as the organizing axis of the modern city. It runs
from the main building of the Polytechnic University of Tirana, through
the center (once the old bazaar), to the site of the old train station, and up
to the northern periphery, where Tirana merges with the new municipality
of Kamëz.4 Unlike most other streets in Tirana, the boulevard is wide and
spacious. It is surrounded by monumental buildings that chronicle the
modern history of the city. Thus the buildings that line up around the
boulevard, as Mëhilli (2016) also has noted, are an architectural display of
different forms of authoritarian leadership—from the neoclassical to the
brutalist. From its early conception, the boulevard was designed to host
parades and marches, a display of power and might. And indeed, the bou-
levard served this purpose, during both the fascist and communist periods.
But it always served other functions as well, such as being the main site of
the evening stroll (xhiro), an important institution of city life in Albania
and the Mediterranean region more broadly.
Conceived as the centerpiece of the new modern European capital of
Albania, the boulevard was first designed and constructed in the 1930s. It
was built against the grain of the existing city, which was organized around
the old bazaar. The boulevard city of today offers a concrete look at
Tirana’s several modernities—fascist, communist, postcommunist, and
neoliberal. While the names have changed and the reach has expanded
through a process of perpetual construction and destruction, the boule-
vard has remained the central axis of social life in Tirana throughout its
various reincarnations as the capital of various regimes. As a straight line
that opposes the squiggly, windy, meandering lines of the bazaar city, the
boulevard not only represents the search for Albanian modernity but also
the repeated authoritarian forms of state power that sought to materialize
it in different forms.
The boulevard continues to act as the central axis of the city. It embod-
ies the multiple modernities of Tirana’s twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries. It spatializes the authoritarian power structure that continues to
dominate the country’s political history. It materializes the contestations
of memory, history, and nostalgia of various pasts. It also provides a con-
tinuous open space for movement, for hanging out, for xhiro, and for
enjoying the view of the city under the light of sunset.
These alternative experiences of the boulevard city—and many more
that remain less visible—underscore the continued presence of the bazaar
city, which continues both literally and figuratively in the shadows of
Tirana’s neoliberal modernity. In the informal areas beyond the completed
portion of the New Boulevard, these forms of life and exchange are an
integral part of everyday life, as we illustrate further in the following dis-
cussion of Tirana’s cities of concrete.
The Concrete City

Beyond the boulevard, other ruins of Albania’s communist modernity
make up other cities that continue to be woven into the contemporary
fabric of Tirana. The city’s many concrete apartment blocks carry impor-
tant, sometimes conflicting associations. They give rise to images of mass
housing—with its shortcomings in infrastructure and services—together
with the comforts and virtues of community, volunteer work, cultural
activities, but also, never far behind, the distrust of the neighbor who
might be a spy.
In some ways, the apartment complexes built during the Cold War
period are so abundant that they have become almost invisible. Tirana’s
communist-era apartment blocks were constructed through a massive
effort to build a communist city directly on top of the Ottoman city. The
major Soviet-style buildings built during this time were named Shallvare,
Pallatet Agimi, and Kombinati. Perhaps most iconic were the concrete
panel apartment buildings. Placed all along Tirana’s periphery, the design
of these buildings embodied the communist ideology of efficiency, func-
tionality, and simplicity (Mëhilli 2017, 159–86; Mëhilli 2012; Musaraj
2021). Built with cheaply produced concrete panels, their construction
was modeled after similar buildings that became a staple of communist

housing across the then-socialist world from the 1960s to the 1980s
(Fehérváry 2013; Grant 2014; Molnár 2013).
When they were first built, Tirana’s communist apartment complexes
included public squares, playgrounds, local stores, cultural centers, kinder-
gartens, and other services. But throughout the massive waves of con-
structions of the 1990s and 2000s, most of the open spaces were taken
over by the post-communist high-rises, parking lots, informal extensions
of ground-floor apartments, and a new proliferation of cafés (to which we
return below). One of the more lamentable consequences of the post-
communist construction booms has been that the once-bustling play-
grounds and hangout spaces that existed within and around the
communist-era apartment complexes have now mostly disappeared. With
the resulting decline in quality of life for many in Tirana, issues of con-
struction and betonizim (concrete-ization) have become important sites of
contention, organizing diverse and seemingly unrelated aspects of public
life throughout the city (Musaraj 2020; Musaraj 2021).
The chaos and disorganization left in the wake of the first wave of post-
communist construction have only multiplied under the current neoliberal
regime. As new public-private partnerships increasingly colonize everyday
life, replacing old spaces of public life with a proliferation of new private
construction projects, talk of the destructive nature of the contemporary
construction boom has also increased. Conversations in Tirana are now
peppered with expressions such as “They’ve ruined the city” and “It’s not
a city anymore.” The following description provided by one Tirana resi-
dent is representative of many similar statements we have heard and have
experienced for ourselves in recent years: “The construction mafia is
booming like never before in the history of the city. There are buildings
popping up practically everywhere. I have two huge high-rises exactly next
to my house. We hardly slept this summer due to the noise.”5
Still, the old communist complexes continue to shape social life in the
city, not least by housing hundreds of thousands of new and old residents.
In some areas, it seems, one can still walk into a time of the past, when
multiple generations congregated on the streets in the evening hours. The
prefabricated buildings in the outer neighborhood of Porcelani-Kinostudio,
for instance, still retain much that was basic to the urban and social design
of the communist period. The concrete city can thus be read as a ghost of
the communist experiment, which continues to shape the social experience
and cultural imagination of contemporary communities in Tirana.
The City of Cafés

Despite the pejorative connotations of café ethnography, if one is to live in
Tirana, one needs to frequent cafés religiously. Indeed, hanging out in
cafés—whether for a morning coffee, during a break during work, or to
relax in the evening—is perhaps the most pervasive urban ritual in Tirana.
In Tirana, cafés are multifunctional spaces. There, friends can be together
outside of the gaze of family; relatives can meet and catch up on gossip;
colleagues can escape the monotony of workspaces; business deals can be
made and favors exchanged. Over the last 15 years of visiting the city, our
favorite Tirana cafés were sites for catching up with family, meeting old
and new friends, conducting interviews with key informants, writing up
fieldnotes, and entertaining our daughter.
The ritual of café drinking has a long history in Albania and mirrors
Ottoman, Balkan, and Mediterranean cultural practices. But the practice
has changed along with the spaces where it takes place. In Ottoman times,
Turkish coffee was consumed by men in public cafés while women mostly
made, served, and drank coffee in the privacy of their home. During the
communist regime, the Italian espresso became the standard coffee served
in the few public cafés and restaurants, now frequented by women as well
as men. Turkish coffee continued to be served at home to visitors and to
be consumed by men and women (but mostly women) at regular times
throughout the day.
After the collapse of the communist regime in 1990–1991, Tirana saw
a veritable explosion of cafés. They sprung up first in centrally located
public spaces such as Parku Rinia (Youth Park), in Blloku, the “blocked
off” neighborhood where elites lived during communism, and alongside
the Lana stream. Before long they could be found in every corner of the
city. In 2000, however, under a scheme called Rilindja e Qytetit (Urban
Renaissance), the city’s then mayor Edi Rama “ordered the demolition of
all the illegal kiosks, restaurants, and bars built in the city-center’s public
spaces after 1991” (Prato 2016, 186). This wave of urban cleansing
destroyed the cafés of Parku Rinia and Lana, but in other areas, such as
Blloku, the cafés persisted and became more elegant, stylish, and exclusive.
The living café culture in Tirana brings together rituals and traditions
of the past and the present. Cafés today are sites where certain old rituals
are still preserved. One such ritual is that of giving coffee to family and
friends following a death. Historically and in line with Muslim traditions,
after the funeral the family opens the home for visitors to come and pay
their respects. Coffee, traditionally the Turkish kind, would be offered to

the guests. In recent years, this ritual has moved to the café, where profes-
sional staff take care of serving the coffee while family members wait and
chat with the guests during designated time frames, announced through
immediate social networks, and increasingly, via social media.
Cafés have also become the sites of new, postcommunist rituals. For
many of Tirana’s youth, whether unemployed or underemployed, the café
functions as a place of time-pass and of waiting for opportunities to arise.
Hanging out at a café (as opposed to at home) keeps up the appearance
and feeling of being active in public life. Cafés are also now popular places
for making business deals, inserting some pleasure into the overriding
uncertainties and precarity of business life in contemporary Albania.
The multi-functional nature of cafés in Tirana derives in our view from
the distinct time-space they enable. To enter in a café in Tirana is to leave
behind the noise, the dust, and the aggression of the street. In contrast to
the frenetic street, cafés in Tirana are an oasis of luxury and relaxation, of
European/Mediterranean cool design. Sitting in cafés, time stops. One
enters a zone of stillness and grounded presence. It is this stillness, per-
haps, that makes room for the various pasts and presents to be called on
and to be performed and relived.
Conclusion: The Palimpsest of Tirana

We opened this chapter with a reference to the fictional city of Clarice to
indicate one of the many ways in which reading Invisible Cities can forge
productive connections to important issues in urban studies. Calvino’s
Clarice was a city that refashioned and recycled its elements in strange and
unexpected ways throughout its history, making the contemporary city
simultaneously “the same as” and “different from” the city that came
before. This description seems apt as we reflect on the central themes of
this chapter—of transformation and continuity, and the sedimentation of
history in the urban landscape. Both the language of the novel and the
voices we recorded through ethnographic operations in Tirana speak to
these and related themes of construction and destruction and of repeating
old patterns of violence in the name of progress.
As we have seen, visions of a modern Tirana have been part of multiple
governments and urban plans over the past one hundred years, reaching
from the post-Ottoman to the post-communist era. These visions of mod-
ern urbanity are part of official and vernacular discourses. They are
articulated in memories, urban plans, media reports, and everyday conver-

sations. But local residents have become increasingly critical of such mod-
ernizing campaigns. Instead, they have engaged in ongoing protests to
conserve and protect iconic buildings and public spaces. In so doing, they
seek to preserve and give space to the memory of the different layers of
the city.
Our exploration of the multiple memories and visions of Tirana sought
to make visible the many, co-existing, and overlapping cities that make up
the palimpsest of the contemporary city. Our findings suggest that unlike
other major Albanian cities, such as Shkodër in the north and Gjirokastër
in the south, which have modernized without losing the Ottoman charac-
ter at their core, the multiple modernities visible on Tirana’s urban land-
scape—including the Italian neoclassical modernity of the inter-war
period, the communist modernity of the Cold War period, and the neolib-
eral modernity of the post-communist period—also conjure absences and
other forms of invisibility. Despite concerted efforts of erasure, eviction,
overwriting, and renaming, however, the concrete signs and symbols of
the city’s historical memory have continued to circulate—both in visible
forms such as maps and documents as well as in the invisible oral residue
of everyday talk and ephemeral social action.
Notes
1. Interview with Ataol Kaso, conducted in Tirana, June 20, 2016.
2. We use the term “anthropological traces” in Valentina Napolitano’s (2015)
dual sense of “a form in space as well as the process through which histories
and reminders of different worlds imprint and condense on a given space”
(Napolitano 2015, 57). Drawing on her research in Rome, Napolitano
argues that ethnographic details become anthropological traces “when par-
ticular lingering histories of attachments and marginalities have a material
form, but cannot be conveyed by existing structures of meaning”
(ibid., 47–48).
3. We refer to “the urban now” in the sense Jennifer Robinson (2013) gave
that term when, repurposing elements of Walter Benjamin’s (1999) analysis
of urban modernity for a more global urban studies, she proposed “an ana-
lytics of the urban” that would draw attention to the multiplicity of specific
forms and surfaces that accumulate and preserve traces of the past in the
present (Robinson 2013, 674).
4. Kamëz is a recently formed city built and populated by people who came to
the capital to start new lives after the fall of communism in 1990–1991.
5. Ataol Kaso 2021, pers. comm., February 7.
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CHAPTER 12
The Lost City: The Pathos of Arab Jerusalem
Arpan Roy and Carlos Diz
The Lost City is not one of Calvino’s invisible cities. Calvino’s cities disap-
pear, go underground, reveal themselves to be illusions, become unrecog-
nizable over time, but they are, strictly speaking, never lost. By “losing” a
city we mean two things: first, a city that lives on in the world but to which
one cannot return for reasons of exile or banishment. This is the condition
of exiles, refugees, political dissidents, émigrés, a condition which Edward
Said (2000, 173) remarked as “strangely compelling to think about but
terrible to experience.” For this group of people, the city is gradually
enveloped by a pathos of impossibility. Even if the city were to go on exist-
ing as always, fantastic as this may be, the distance between the self and
this city can never be recovered. The second kind of lost city is one that
has recently been conceptualized by the social theorist Ashis Nandy
(2018). This is a city in which its past is still materially present, like the
A. Roy (*)
Program in Islamic Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
C. Diz
Department of Sociology and Communication Sciences, University of A Coruña,
A Coruña, Spain
e-mail: carlos.diz@udc.es

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_12
166 A. ROY AND C. DIZ
Vienna of its fin de siècle coffee houses or the Tangier of its opium dens,
but where the vitality of such spaces has become lost forever, rendering
the city hollow of a certain jouissance and—simply put—lost. The “natural
habitat” of these lost cities, Nandy says, is in “grandparents’ tales, dated
travelogues, local superstitions, and retired caretakers of old bungalows,
abandoned palaces, and cemeteries.” It is, of course, more than this, but
the theoretical parameters of this chapter, like two gates of an invisible city,
are between these two modes of losing.
Jerusalem, for Palestinians, is a city that encompasses both of these
conditions. That Jerusalem is a lost city for its diaspora of Palestinian refu-
gees and exiles, spanning the entire globe since Israel’s conquests in 1948
and 1967, notably having included Said himself, is not a very contentious
argument. Exile, as Gil Anidjar (2006, 227) has noted, produces a new
place through an “ontological transformation,” in which the old place,
“though perhaps still there,” is recast as a new place. This new place is the
lost place, the fantastical place, the place of the mind for those who have
been barred from the old place. This, again, is not very contentious.
However, the second kind of lost city, in which the character of Jerusalem
itself has been dramatically and perhaps irrecoverably altered in the past 70
years irrespective of the subjective position of the exile or émigré, perhaps
requires some discussion.
Let us begin with the historical fact that Jerusalem has been an Arab
city for over a millennia, since Sophronius, the Byzantine Patriarch of the
city, surrendered to the Arab army of Omar in 637 CE. The city, particu-
larly its walled medina, is a palimpsest of Islamic civilizations—Umayyad,
Mameluke, Ottoman. One finds traces of the Crusader interruptions and
of dialogues with Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria (and, later, Paris,
London, Moscow) in the construction of churches. All of this is contained
in the “Arabness” of the city. Arabness, as it has been argued, is a generic
universalist condition, unbound by religious and ethnic difference that is
expressed through Arabic language. Jerusalem’s walled medina, held by
the Orientalist historian K.A.C. Creswell to be the most perfectly pre-
served example of a medieval Arab city (in Schleifer 1997, 21), still shows
traces of this Arab universalism in its still existing enclaves of Armenians,
various Christian denominations, black Africans, Indians, Maghrebis,
Uzbeks, Aleppines, and Romani people. These are the Palestinians.
Jerusalem grew rapidly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
beyond its walled medina. Often assumed to be spurred by the zeal of
European Jewish settlement in Palestine, the growth of Jerusalem in this
12 THE LOST CITY: THE PATHOS OF ARAB JERUSALEM 167
period was, in reality, due to a complex nexus of factors that included the
burgeoning of Palestinian modernity, a considerable rural-to-urban migra-
tion, European interest in the Holy Land, British governance after World
War I, and, yes, Zionism. Prior to this, Jerusalem had always been a mysti-
cal mountain city, a difficult to reach pilgrimage destination that is acutely
captured by the name of its holiest mosque—al-aqsa, “the furthest.” It
was the city that the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh (2008, 105–106)
calls “the last outpost of human civilization” before the wilderness that is
known in Arabic as al-barriyah and by the Israelis as the Judean Desert.
This city at the end of the profane world became a modern urban center
for the first time during this period. This was the beginning of Jerusalem
as a lost city.
Another Jerusalem emerged in the early twentieth century: a complex
of elegant stone mansions and new European institutions invested in the
rediscovery of the bible as history (e.g., hospitals, schools, research insti-
tutes, etc.). Expanding around the gates of the walled city, the new city
creeped into the surrounding hills. The construction of an airport in 1924
(today a military checkpoint and bus depot) connected Jerusalem to
Cairo, Amman, Aden, and Kuwait by air. The rupture came in 1948, when
most of the modern city became part of the newly established Israeli state,
its Palestinian residents expelled, and Jerusalem became lost further. Only
the walled medina and the areas immediately adjacent to its north were
retained by Palestinians. Severed of its modern districts, Arab Jerusalem,
thus, retreated to its medieval ideal, into the walled medina as the proto-
type of its own authenticity.
A City of Signs
Everything we have written up until now describes Jerusalem as the his-
torical city. But there was always another Jerusalem, the mythical Jerusalem
that Nandy (2018) calls the “utopic anchor,” the “life-affirming idea of a
city for the Jewish diaspora.” For Nandy, Jerusalem has always been a lost
city, but one which has only recently shifted in its being lost from one
imaginary of loss to another. We do not contest the obvious reality of
Jewish attachment to Jerusalem, evident in centuries of prayer, ritual,
poetry, and more. We do, however, wish to draw a distinction between
this object of attachment—the Iron Age city of Jewish settlements, rich
with mythological and theological investment, and of great contemporary
archaeological interest—and the historical Arab Jerusalem that is a living
city, if increasingly a lost one. This does not make one city more real than
the other, but it underscores the subtle but important distinction between
“invisible” and “lost” cities. If Calvino’s cities possibly never existed, that
they were mere dreamy fabrications of Marco Polo’s genius, then this is
what we propose separates the invisible city from the lost city: the lost city
once existed in the world, whereas the invisible city may never have existed.
It is not without reason that the Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is
emblematically prefaced with l’shana haba’ah (“next year in…”), a condi-
tional future tense that transcends the materiality of a really existing city.
This is Jerusalem, the invisible city.
Arab Jerusalem was lost again in 1967, when Israel conquered the
remainder of the city. Ironically, Israeli rule also greatly expanded the city’s
limits by incorporating several Palestinian villages into the municipality
(Fig. 12.1). This “East Jerusalem” of political discourse, strictly speaking,
is distinguished by Jerusalemites through linguistic shibboleths that betray
peasant dialects of Arabic. These cannot be mistaken even after 50 years of
these villages’ annexation into the city. It was a consolation, of sorts, for
Fig. 12.1 The village of Silwan, now a part of Jerusalem. (Photograph by

Arpan Roy)
the idea of an ever-shrinking Arab Jerusalem, after Palestinians lost the

elegant modern districts in 1948, like Baqa’a, Qatamon, Musrara,
Talbiya—the “real” Jerusalem; its once affluent residents scattered
throughout the world’s Palestinian diaspora. For Israel, it was a land grab,
a swift expansion of sovereignty over the Palestinian hinterland. Now even
this “East Jerusalem” is being lost as Israeli settlements encircle these
localities, its Palestinian residents evicted, and its street names changed to
commemorate Jewish mystics. Nevertheless, the idea of Arab Jerusalem
reverts to its historical symbols—the walled medina, and the exquisite reli-
gious and historical sites that it houses, especially the Dome of the Rock
and the al-Aqsa Mosque. Ostensibly Islamic symbols, these two mosques
are now metonyms of Arab Jerusalem itself, of what remains of a city
plagued by loss. They appear ubiquitously in Palestinian cultural imaginar-
ies and artistic production and in recent years have become the de facto
sites of working-class youth protesting against Israeli rule. This brings to
mind Calvino’s Zirma, the city that exists only by its repetition of signs;
that is, a redundant city, which repeats itself in order to become etched in
the mind.
Night and Cats

At night, Arab Jerusalem is the dead city. Shops are shuttered closed a
little after sunset, Israeli soldiers patrol the ancient alleys of the walled
medina, a few hotel bars stay open as a meeting place for straggling foreign
diplomats, and cats roam the city in place of people. These cats, it has been
noted by the literary scholar Basem Ra’ad (2010, 160), “mirror the old
city’s insular nature, its current predicament, and the people’s life in that
situation.” Often tortured by children, the cats become an externalized
ego for Palestinians, Ra’ad writes, a projection of a colonizer/colonized
trauma that is “feral, forced and unnatural” (ibid., 166). Israeli Jerusalem,
meanwhile, is a bustling urban center into the nocturnal hours, mixing a
motley society of secular Israelis, ultraorthodox Jews, American Jewish
students, armed nationalists from the West Bank settlements, tourists, and
more. They huddle into bars, nightclubs, ice cream parlors, and restau-
rants, as Arab Jerusalem sleeps. The two Jerusalems interlock geographi-
cally like a jigsaw puzzle; they are the same Jerusalem in the world but are
separated only in meaning. The Israeli city acts as the white city to the
Arab black city, the living city to the dying city, the free city to the shackled
city. It is the city that shrouds the Arab city with its colonizing halo. In
this, the Israeli city is the “unjust city” of luxury that surrounds the “just
city,” like Calvino’s Berenice, where justice is articulated in its fragility and
where its inhabitants move through tight and compressed spaces. But this
just city is fragmented, an archipelagic city-within-a-city, an undercity, like
Calvino’s Beersheba and Eusapia, where a second city exists underground
as the dwelling place of the forgotten and the dead.
The Names of Jerusalem

Al-Quds (“the holy”), the Arabic name for Jerusalem, is an abridged form
of beit al-maqdis (“house of the holy”), itself a translation of the Hebrew
beit hamikdash, the name for the two Jewish temples of antiquity. By its
very name, Arab Jerusalem is already a palimpsest of a lost Jerusalem, a lost
city that evokes an invisible city (Fig. 12.2). Curiously, in Arabic poetry
about Jerusalem, the city is commonly referred to by its ancient names—
Yabus (the Canaanite name for the city), the Latin Aelia, and the Hebrew
Urshalim. Jerusalem in the Palestinian imaginary, thus, draws a continuity
from antiquity to the present, whereas Israeli Jerusalem is the narration of
Fig. 12.2 Palimpsest of Jerusalem’s walls. (Photograph by Jaime Gutiérrez Moreno)

a singular and mythic Jewish past, albeit with excess historical matter that
is extraneous to this past. It is because of this that Israeli Jerusalem does
not fundamentally pose a historiographic threat to the city. Its eventual
loss, surely to come someday, will be the loss of a very reduced and paro-
chial Jerusalem. By contrast, the loss of Arab Jerusalem is, in a sense, the
loss of any and all Jerusalems.
But all hope, we say at risk of sounding hackneyed, is not lost. Nandy
(2018) reminds us that “the city of the mind is a form of resistance to the
city on the ground.” The more Jerusalem is lost, ironically, the clearer its
memory becomes in the Palestinian imaginary. It is telling that Yasser
Arafat, the late leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO),
after secretly negotiating with Israel and the United States in the early
1990s to secede significant territory to Israel in exchange for a curtailed
Palestinian state with “East Jerusalem” as its capital, had privately resigned
to the probability that this deal would end in failure. It is because of this
pessimism that the Palestinian parliament building was quietly built in Abu
Dis, a village near Jerusalem in the West Bank, but a site that offered an
unobstructed view of the Dome of the Rock. The public Arafat was stead-
fast on the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem, but the secret construction of
this now abandoned parliament for a nonexistent state suggests that Arafat
had privately resigned to the fate of a lost Jerusalem. He, like Moses on
Mount Nebo, could only hope to set his sights on the holy city from a
distant summit. Arafat had lost Jerusalem, but he had preserved the fan-
tasy of Jerusalem. Lost here comes to mean “displaced,” not “defeated.”
Abu Dis is now separated from Jerusalem by the Israel/West Bank sep-
aration barrier, a 708-kilometer-long wall that snakes through the ancient
terraces, valleys, and villages of Palestine, essentially encircling Jerusalem
from multiple sides. Just as the walls of Jerusalem’s medina have shifted
over the centuries, each sultan or emperor expanding or retracting the
city’s fortifications, today a new city barrier has been built, greatly expand-
ing the limits of the city, dividing the city from its Palestinian hinterland,
but also dividing families, lovers, agricultural land, politics, and dreams.
Regardless of where the walls have been moved, Arab Jerusalem has
remained a stable concept throughout the centuries, but the demarcations
of where it begins and ends have always been defined by whoever ruled it.
Jerusalem is a lost city, at times an invisible city, but it is also a walled city.
None of these, of course, are mutually exclusive. One needs only to think
here of Calvino’s Venice—the city that is described by all other cities.
Narrating the Lost City

Fifty years after the publication of Invisible Cities, walls have spread not
only in Jerusalem but all over the world. In their erections, new worlds are
delineated, cities become ghettoes, and worlds are lost. The twenty-first
century is one in which more and more people feel as if they are losing
their cities. Arab Jerusalem is only one pathetic, but by no means the only,
instance. This is also the century of Aleppo, Raqqa, and Kabul. With
Invisible Cities, Calvino wanted to write “a last love poem addressed to the
city” (Calvino 1983, 40), knowing that the city was already then entering
into a new era. The book “is like a dream born out of the heart of the
unlivable cities we know” (ibid., 40–41).
As anthropologists conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork in
cities—in their bus terminals and taxi stands, cafés and bars, public squares
and markets, historical sites—jostling with their inhabitants, pleading with
their police, and more, we often ask ourselves not only what the city means
to us today, but also what kind of epistemological relationships are possi-
ble with what is at once a material but also living entity. Researching
Romani people in Jerusalem and the effects of neoliberal restructuring in
European cities, respectively, we are sensitive, despite our disparate con-
texts, to Calvino’s project. From him we have found solace in ways of
looking at the city beyond the limitations of the empirical, inviting instead
the preeminence of the senses—looking, touching, experiencing from the
heart, wandering and getting lost, encountering the other—in a way in
which nostalgia and romance eclipse reason.
But narration, as such, is also insidiously political. Calvino, writing in
the 1970s, already had the intuition that the early stages of neoliberal glo-
balization would shape the world into a homogenous place, in which the
particularities of each city would blur together like the aesthetically indis-
tinguishable airports of the modern world, like in Jacques Tati’s Playtime,
in which a group of tourists travel through European capitals and discover
in each city reprisals of the same (same street lamps, same roads, etc.).
Calvino’s intuition was a premonition. In our new world of cities both lost
and invisible, the art of description and narration, that which is embodied
by the figure of Marco Polo, would soon become obsolete. In the same
way that Nandy’s cities of the mind pose a resistance to the cities on the
ground, Calvino’s mode of narrating invisible cities constitutes a reposi-
tory of resistance.
As such, the loss of a city can be mitigated by its preservation in the art
of narration. Lost cities may persist in the realm of fantasy—the absent
place—where the perils of the world leave the memory untouched. As
such, we hope to have narrated Arab Jerusalem at this moment in time,
preserving something of it in the text and in the mind, as it, at least for the
moment, disappears from the world.
References
Anidjar, Gil. 2006. Futures of al-Andalus. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 7
(3): 225–239.
Calvino, Italo. 1983. Italo Calvino on ‘Invisible Cities. Columbia: A Journal of
Literature and Art 8: 37–42.
Nandy, Ashis. 2018. Cities of the Mind: Lost Cities and Their Inhabitants.
Columbia University World Leaders Forum. Lecture. https://worldlead-
ers.columbia.edu/content/ashis-nandy-indian-political-psychologist-social-
theorist-and-critic-honorary-fellow-and.
Ra’ad, Basem. 2010. Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean.
London: Pluto Press.
Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Schleifer, Abdallah. 1997. Jerusalem as Archetype of the Harmonious Islamic
Urban Environment. Journal of Islamic Jerusalem Studies 1 (1): 21–38.
Shehadeh, Raja. 2008. Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
CHAPTER 13
“Submerging the City in Its Own Past”:

Tracing Glasgow’s Architectures
of Inhabitation
Ursula Lang
Calvino’s city of Leonia is a continuous city, produced anew each day.

Waste generated by this everyday production—and its removal—comes to
define the city itself, materially and geographically. This “fortress of inde-
structible leftovers” is continually pushed outward and piled higher, fusing
into new landscapes (Calvino 1974, 115). Teetering piles of pianos, por-
celain, and boilers—normally heavy and permanent items—threaten col-
lapse at the edges of the crater surrounding the city. With each new
delivery of discarded items, from empty toothpaste tubes to encyclope-
dias, the waste looms ever higher, not only over the city’s geographic
bounds, but also over its possible futures. In this chapter, I draw on Leonia
as an analytic to consider contemporary Glasgow’s architectures of inhabi-
tation, and what these make possible, from deindustrialization to green
infrastructure.
U. Lang (*)
Minnesota Design Center, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_13
176 U. LANG
Calvino’s portrait of Leonia highlights the displacement of matter,

mainly its topographical implications. But the landscapes continuously
altered by Leonia’s inhabitation also stand in for more intangible affects,
including the everyday labors of this displacement and the relentless
rhythm of possibility with the dawning of each new day. What would it
mean to inhabitants to be constantly producing their own surroundings?
How would it feel living with the everyday rhythms of removal, disposal,
rebuilding, and eventual destruction? In addition to all the material dis-
placements, what might that do to, or for, inhabitants? At its heart, Leonia
evokes for storyteller Marco Polo and listener Kublai Khan deep consider-
ation of what is made possible (and present) by the absence of another (in
the past and future). Kublai Khan says, “We have proved that if we were
here, we would not be.” To this, Marco Polo replies, “And here, in fact,
we are” (Calvino 1974, 118). Thus, the story of Leonia distills the genera-
tive and destructive natures of “a metropolis in constant eruption”
(Calvino 1974, 115).
Such shifting phenomenal urban ecologies can be seen in contempo-
rary Glasgow, a city shaped by Empire’s expansion, intensified industry,
deindustrialization, poverty, and urban regeneration. Glasgow is emblem-
atic of many UK cities. It is tasked with adapting Victorian-era housing
stock to meet changing housing needs, as well as maintaining or rebuild-
ing aging infrastructure in a time of increasing surface flooding and
extreme weather. Glasgow is renowned for having the highest percentage
of green space per capita of any major European center. It also makes
claims to being the rainiest of European cities. Even with its history of
progressive housing provisioning, activism around tenants’ rights, land
reforms, and resistance to gentrification, some of the city’s neighborhoods
have the poorest recorded health outcomes and highest multifactor rates
of deprivation in the UK (Mason and Kearns 2017).
If Glasgow offers aspects of architectural particularity,1 its challenges
are shared with cities worldwide. From tenement flats to modernist tow-
ers, these everyday architectures of inhabitation are the meeting of water,
stone, and soil. Such forms shape how people live with and within what
Calvino wrote of Leonia: “the residue of yesterday’s existence” (Calvino
1974, 114). In Glasgow’s historically disinvested East End, urban regen-
eration is now reshaping homes and neighborhoods in the image of green
urbanism. As the city adopts solutions for the movement and storage of
urban water, these material infrastructures are always already socially,
politically, and culturally constituted. How does the continuous grey city
13 “SUBMERGING THE CITY IN ITS OWN PAST”: TRACING GLASGOW’S… 177
exist alongside the emerging green city? This chapter examines how traces
of Glasgow’s past continuously define its present and future.
Annie’s Loo
On February 10, 1972, for the first time in Annie Gibbons’ life, her
Glasgow dwelling, built in the 1800s, had a private indoor toilet. The
building of this single private bathroom would subsequently shape
community-based housing policy across Scotland. Into the 1970s, thou-
sands of Scottish families still lacked indoor private plumbing in the ubiq-
uitous and now iconic tenement flats. This distinctive Scottish housing
type, built from the mid-1800s until the start of World War I, housed
immigrants coming to Glasgow to work in the shipyards. The buildings
were generally 4 stories high, composed of 12 apartments (each of one or
two rooms). The first toilets were privies outdoors in the backcourt. Later,
unheated shared toilets were attached to the common stair, or close. By
the late 1800s, tenements of this form were considered a vast improve-
ment in housing, which had been miserably overcrowded previously. In
addition to these material upgrades, Glasgow is known for its radical com-
mitment to provisioning social housing, from the earliest regulations on
behalf of renters beginning in the late 1800s (Young 2013; Clark and
Carnegie 2003; Glasgow City Archive n.d.-a).
Glasgow is also famous for building things and knocking them down,
following every architectural and planning trend from the nineteenth into
the twenty-first century. As shipbuilding and related industries contracted,
working-class families and neighborhoods were left in desperate condi-
tions. The response from city planning agencies was to tear down old
tenement flats in bad shape in the name of urban regeneration. They
developed peripheral estates away from the city center with a variety of
housing styles—notably, the “tall flats” or modernist high-rise apartment
towers (Young 2013; Glasgow City Archive n.d.-b). In the midst of these
upheavals, by the late 1960s, some community groups had begun to orga-
nize to try to save their neighborhoods. One such group was The New
Govan Society based on Glasgow’s southside in the shadow of the ship-
yards. This small group of residents was determined to respond to the
growing relocation of residents and the demolition of tenement homes
with more care and local input. These residents of Govan worked with
Raymond Young, an architecture student doing his thesis, to develop an
affordable, workable solution to the lack of indoor plumbing in a given
178 U. LANG
tenement building. Flats originally made up of one or two rooms were

combined to make larger homes. Sleeping alcoves in kitchens proved to be
just right for creating a private bathroom in each flat, stacked to enable
indoor private plumbing for the whole building. Annie Gibbons’ toilet—
“Annie’s Loo”—was the first demonstration that this could work (at a cost
of less than 200 pounds), showing it was possible to update multi-owner
tenement buildings without the damaging effects of total relocation and
demolition. In Leonia, Calvino renders this kind of demolition and
removal as just another daily activity. In Govan, these residents interrupted
the destruction long enough to find creative possibilities embedded within
the architecture. Architect Raymond Young (2013) writes that, before
housing associations, the local authority used a “butcher cleaver’s”
approach to rehabilitations, when what was needed was a surgical knife.
The changes based on these private toilets resulted directly in the devel-
opment and widespread adoption of an innovative model of housing own-
ership and management: the community-based housing association. Now
ubiquitous across Scotland, these associations ushered in a new era. They
proved crucial to the broader improvement of the poorest areas of inner-
city Glasgow in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, housing associations provide
and manage the majority of social housing, of all types, and function as
important community organizations which interact with broader gover-
nance and social services at several scales (Young 2013). Their humble
origins with Annie’s Loo are almost entirely obscured. There are many
more stories to tell about Annie’s Loo, but here I highlight it as an exam-
ple of the ongoing co-production between inhabitants, designers, and the
material limits and possibilities of particular architectures. Annie’s Loo
relied on people’s local knowledges of the material concerns of their every-
day environments. This story of one bathroom shows that community
organizing, based in everyday expertise combined with technical exper-
tise, can become something really significant—in this case, a whole new
approach to community-based adaptations to uncertain and deindustrial-
izing futures. Making the city over and over involves not just formal
experts, but the everyday practices of urban inhabitants. Calvino’s (1974)
Leonia shows us a glimpse into the accelerated rhythms of relentless repro-
duction. Glasgow provides a longer look into the possibilities of
community-led changes in forms of housing, expertise, infrastructure, and
everyday practice.
Guddling About
Where did relocated residents in neighborhoods like Govan go, and where
are they now? Some moved to peripheral social housing estates such as
Easterhouse, now undergoing major regeneration in the image of green
urbanism. All such developments are required to have sustainable urban
drainage systems (SUDS), part of incorporating green infrastructure into
these redeveloping areas. On many days in Glasgow, it rains. Water moves,
sluicing over the city’s surfaces. Off roof tiles. Down gutters and down-
spouts. Across pavement. As surface water, the rainfall settles and puddles
up in accidental and awkward places. But at the grassy edge of a new gath-
ering basin, it begins to slow. Captured by tangled green shoots, the water
seeps into root systems beneath. The new layer of green urban infrastruc-
ture begins its work. With more rain forecasted for tomorrow, rainwater
will start to well up, forming an ephemeral pond, an SUD.
While Leonia seems to have no discernable weather, or seasons, it is not
hard to imagine the complexities of rain flooding its mountains of refuse,
destabilizing ground, and creating new channels of motion and matter. By
contrast, in Glasgow, rain as it comes and goes hovers in people’s conver-
sations and seeps into collective moods. In cities across the world, there is
renewed interest in the movement and storage of urban water—tactics for
managing its volume, direction, and flow. How does the re-placing of
water shape the ongoing life of the city? How are resident communities to
make sense out of these new geographies and phenomenal urban ecologies?
Historically and conventionally, cities have relied on grey infrastructure
technologies for urban water management, directing the flow of storm
water and sewage across city landscapes horizontally, using pipe networks
running considerable distances to reach treatment complexes. As city
planners grapple with aging sewer systems, worry about intensifying
weather events, and build a fuller appreciation of environmental futures,
the apparatus for urban storm water management has become a signature
feature in the transition from grey to green infrastructure. Rather than
horizontal flow, green infrastructure favors storage and absorption in situ,
using rain gardens, permeable paving, and ponds designed to absorb rain-
water where it falls, thereby improving water quality, recharging ground-
water, and reducing strain on water treatment systems. Green infrastructure
describes networks of greenspaces across urban and peri-urban landscapes,
intended to integrate ecological, economic, and social functions. These
emergent multi-functional landscapes are seen as an essential component
180 U. LANG
of designing and planning more sustainable urban environments. Recent

research demonstrates significant benefits to human health and well-being,
as well as economic returns in increased property values (Mell 2016;
Dover 2015). Nonetheless, green infrastructure initiatives have high-
lighted the disconnect between expert design knowledge and everyday
experience and a failure to recognize uneven landscapes and impacts of
urban regeneration. In response, there is a clear need to acknowledge the
longer-term challenges of living with shared resources.
Because of Glasgow’s geographic location and rainy climate—as well as
its built form with a variety of industrial and natural waterways—the intro-
duction of SUDS into neighborhood landscapes highlights multiple
understandings of water in its relation to housing. These often become
contested around concerns about the dangers of open water (risk of
drowning and liability) or concerns about aesthetics of water features and
vegetation (related to maintenance, weather, and partial understandings
about the function and value of SUDS). Because of these concerns, some
city planners, water managers, and engineers are very interested in resi-
dents’ understandings of water, particularly in relation to SUDS located in
close proximity to new and redeveloped housing. In 2016–2017, the City
of Glasgow funded two Glasgow-based artists, Minty Donald and Nick
Millar, to find out more about perceptions of water, building on their
environmental performance arts practice, Guddling About (Donald n.d.,
Donald 2018). To “guddle about” is a Scots phrase meaning, roughly,
mucking about, especially in relation to water. It also connotes a kind of
wasting time, playing, doing nothing particularly useful. I collaborated
with them on this project, and we put together simple materials and activi-
ties with water to do with residents of areas undergoing intensive redevel-
opment. We also included a range of “water experts”—environmental
planners, designers, managers, along with housing developers and com-
munity organizers—in the project as well. We wanted to understand the
possibilities and limitations of guddling about for informing or affecting
engagements with water, along the spectrum of people involved in making
and living with SUDS.
We walked with residents along culverted burns, cutting across car
parks and busy roads and grassy patches, noticing where the water goes.
We used a modified caravan hand pump to borrow water from storm
drains, puddles, gutters. It was a collaborative performance, a moving
focus group, a meandering conversation. We talked with participants
about their experiences and memories of water in place. We worked with
maps, pumps, bottles, labels. We borrowed water on our walks, stopping

door to door. Indoors, we set out the water on a giant map on the floor,
retracing our route, to see where the water goes. Participants from the
neighborhood came to add their borrowed water, and they talked about
the drainage and the damp. With simple materials indoors, we invited
participants from the neighborhood (as well as outside water experts) to
play with water through sensory engagements—moving water through
soil, building containment with clay and found materials, flowing water
through varying lengths of gutter, hose, and buckets. Even without
Leonia’s ample waste at hand, we managed to gather found materials from
immediate surroundings. Materials immediately sparked conversation,
water in motion.
In the doing of these embodied and sensory experiences, knowledge
emerging from inhabitation rose to the surface. From residents’ perspec-
tives, this knowledge centered on stories of failing systems for drainage,
with analyses based on firsthand experience of corners cut in construction.
There was also the recognition that people have varying capacities to
engage with plans and formal visions of the future as presented in planning
meetings.2 Residents also easily linked SUDS features to their knowledge
and memories of other waterways in the city, but sometimes struggled to
understand how such features function. Based on the varied and deep
expertise about water in daily landscapes, which emerged even from fairly
brief encounters, residents can make significant contributions to shaping
urban water futures in shared residential landscapes. The activities with
water enabled deeper interaction and highlighted learning across special-
ties, especially with water managers and urban designers. The interest in
co-production through experimentation, across and between “expert”
and “non-expert” categories, reveals the potential of simply guddling
about while designing and communicating about green infrastructure.3
What’s very often left out of the metrics and plans for regeneration of
areas like Easterhouse are such local experiences. Guddling about gets at
some of these experiences, through emphases on inhabitation and co-
production. Experiences with urban environments are themselves co-
productions of place-making from above (urban planning) and
place-making from below (everyday micro and neighborhood practices).
To recognize the making and remaking of our lived continuous cities is to
demand attention to these multiple scales at which such actions take shape.
182 U. LANG
Conclusions
Leonia provokes in a flash: imagery of the daily repetition of excess waste,
removal, and remaking. It raises questions about a landscape of teetering
craters, encircling the whole city, and limiting future possibility in this
constant present. Leonia’s futures are limited by the precarious topogra-
phies of consumption and the relentless pace of production. Leonia invites
the imagination to consider ongoing extreme urban consumption and
production, through Calvino’s focus on the topographies these create. For
a continuous city like Glasgow, the actual pace and matter of urban change
is slow and iterative. Unlike Leonia, whose labors of consumption and
production remain obscured, a city such as Glasgow is fundamentally
shaped by geographies of socioeconomic inequity and deprivation. I have
brought these cities together in this chapter in order to better understand
how what is discarded and marginalized is constitutive of the cities we
inhabit. This is not only the material of daily life, but also how, and by
whom, these architectures of inhabitation are configured and used
over time.
In the case of Glasgow’s privies, material constraints of tenement build-
ings became opportunities for new forms of ownership, community
design, and continuing inhabitation to emerge. This happened not only
through the material natures of neighborhoods, but even more impor-
tantly, through those who were involved—such as community members
and local experts. From Annie’s Loo, architectural expertise and commu-
nity organizing meant new practices and structures emerged to provide
more secure and socially intact housing. In the case of emerging green
visions for Glasgow’s stormwater and surface flooding management, it
remains to be seen how new flows for water through neighborhood land-
scapes will be inhabited. From current efforts at incorporating green infra-
structure into new and redeveloping neighborhoods, there is clearly ever
more room for community-led design and input, to better inform
regeneration.
Leonia is a continuous city of production over and over. Who engages
in such ongoing production, and what do the processes of design and
implementation make possible? Glasgow past and present provides exam-
ples of how inhabiting urban environments can be a central part of the
co-productions of place-making from above (urban planning) and place-
making from below (everyday neighborhood practices). Throughout, this
involves the matter of the city itself, continually made and remade.
Notes
1. Much existing housing stock in the iconic forms of tenement flats was built
before 1915 from Scottish sandstone and financed through global trade in
goods such as tobacco, cotton, steam engine technology, and steel. Such
financing was rooted firmly in the Atlantic trade and enslavement of peo-
ple—a critical piece in considering the history of Empire in Glasgow. For
detailed discussion, see Mullen (2022).
2. The president of a housing association in Easterhouse and a long-time resi-
dent of the area, a woman in her 60s, explained that even despite her own
commitment to engaging in planning discussions for new housing projects,
“You never think about what’s underground, when you see the plans. You
only think about what it looks like, the finishes, not how it works. And how
it works is how you live with it, after its built. Like, is your garden flooding?
What’s actually underground?”
3. For more detailed discussion about our methods, findings, and future direc-
tions for SUDS and green infrastructure development in Glasgow, see
Donald (2018).
References
Clark, Helen, and Elizabeth Carnegie. 2003. She Was Aye Workin’: Memories of
Tenement Women in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Dorchester: White Cockade
Publishing.
Donald, Minty. 2018. Living, Working, Playing with Water: Exploring Perceptions
of Water in the Urban Environment Through Creative Practice. Accessed
September 17, 2021. https://guddlingabout.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/
lwpww-final-report-21feb18.pdf
———. n.d. Guddling About: An Ecological Performance Practice with Water and
other Nonhuman Collaborators. Accessed September 17, 2021. https://gud-
dlingabout.com/portfolio/guddling-about-essay/
Dover, John. 2015. Green Infrastructure: Incorporating Plants and Enhancing
Biodiversity in Buildings and Urban Environments. New York: Routledge.
Glasgow City Archive. n.d.-a. Housing in 19th Century Glasgow: Documents
1880–1914. Mitchell Library Glasgow Collection.
———. n.d.-b. Housing in 20th Century Glasgow: Documents 1914–1990s. Mitchell
Library Glasgow Collection.
Mason, Phil, and Ade Kearns. 2017. Health and the Wider Determinants of
Health Over Time in Glasgow’s Deprived Communities: Findings from the
184 U. LANG
GoWell Household Survey. Accessed September 17, 2021. https://www.gow-

ellonline.com/assets/0000/3939/GoWell_health_over_time.pdf.
Mell, Ian. 2016. Global Green Infrastructure: Lessons for Successful Policy-making,
Investment and Management. New York: Routledge.
Mullen, Stephen. 2022. Glasgow, Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: An Audit of
Historic Connections and Modern Legacies. Glasgow: Glasgow City Council.
Young, Raymond. 2013. Annie’s Loo: The Govan Origins of Scotland’s Community
Based Housing Associations. Argyll: Argyll Publishing.
CHAPTER 14
Poetics of the Invisible, Poetics of Rubble
Irene Brunotti
On Christmas morning 2020, I woke up very late. I’d had a beautiful eve
with my kids, eating, playing, and watching movies, forgetting, at least for
a moment, that this year we could not join my mum in Italy. I drank coffee
while reading the news on my mobile. As I have become accustomed to
doing over the last several years, I checked my social networks for informa-
tion I would never read on mainstream media. To my astonishment,
Twitter was exploding with posts about Zanzibar: Beit-al-Ajaib/Jumba la
Maajabu, known in English as the House of Wonders, had just fallen,
under the eyes—and cameras—of the world.
This chapter is derived in part from the article published as Irene Brunotti
(2021), “Kifusi: Towards an Ethnography of Rubble,” Stichproben: Vienna
Journal of African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 41: 63–82. https://doi.org/10.25365/
phaidra.310_04, available online: https://stichproben.univie.ac.at/en/all-
issues/stichproben-no-412021/ (last visited May 30, 2022).
I. Brunotti (*)
University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
e-mail: irene.brunotti@uni-leipzig.de

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_14
186 I. BRUNOTTI
I could feel the sense of loss, the mourning, not only for the palace
itself, but for the cultural and historical grandeur attached to it, the pride
of Zanzibar and Zanzibaris since its construction in the 1880s. Wonders,
indeed, were the many “modernities” Sultan Seyyid Barghash brought
into that House, Zanzibar, the city, and his own reign.1 The islands were
a wealthy nation then. Barghash—sometimes deemed frivolous, easily
attracted by beautiful objects and innovations, and deeply in love with the
world’s material cultures (Meier 2016)—was not stingy in imagining and
realizing an oeuvre destined to (in)scribe the history of the East African
Coast through urban design. The House of Wonders, his most impressive
work, was situated “at the intersection of multiple ways of marking terri-
tory and claiming place,” enacting “a vision of Zanzibar’s profound cen-
trality in the world” (Meier 2016, 138). Sited on the waterfront, the
palace’s very architecture embodied the many claims to space exerted by
the various powers which ruled from within its walls and atop its verandas
(Myers 2003; De Boeck and Baloji 2016).
I entered the House of Wonders just once, in 1996, before it was
declared unstable and closed to the public. It was chilly inside, too ample
and rich to grasp at once. The humble mtepe (sewn sailing boat) in the
entrance hall was stunning. It did not belong to Barghash’s vision, nor to
the British colonial project, but rather to the individual experience of the
urban as understood by Prof. Abdul Sheriff, who, under President Salmin
Amour, was tasked with transforming the rarefied House into the Museum
of Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast, accessible to all. I remember the stairs,
and the lift, the rooms with their breath-taking views, the furniture, oil
paintings of the sultans who had reigned on the islands, and kangas on the
walls. I regret not noticing the floor, which I now know was constructed
of marble from Carrara, where my own life began, a detail I continue
to ponder.
Through these wonders—that matter—I think with Calvino’s invisible
cities, through Marco’s narrations, his dialogues with the emperor, and
the imagination of the Great Khan, for these too are anchored in a vivid
materiality: corners, grilles, barrels, animals, weavers, sacks, a truthful
matter, Marco says, which contains cities’ pasts and futures. I look at the
House’s rubble, not just as a terrain of action, but rather an actor in
material-discursive practices (Barad 2007). Here, rubble displays itself as
active, present matter, political and poetic at once. Its poetics, that is to
say, the plurality of individual experiences of the inside(s) of words, things,
and space(times)—of matter—can translate the plurality of the invisible
14 POETICS OF THE INVISIBLE, POETICS OF RUBBLE 187
urbans, an onto-epistemological practice, inseparable from ethical ques-

tions concerning material changes in the world (Barad 2014).
Narratives of Loss, Shame, Matter

Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through
the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle
it could escape the termites’ gnawing. (Calvino 1974, 5)
The Old Town of Zanzibar, and Beit-el-Ajaib within it as one of its most
emblematic buildings, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in
2000. Pictures and videos of the collapse went viral among global digital
publics. There, Beit-al-Ajaib is invoked as a symbol of modernity, prog-
ress, and civilization. It is the undeniable (land)mark of past glory and
power, the emblem of Zanzibar and Zanzibaris, an indelible witness to the
passing of time, and the changing sentiments which accompanied and
molded the house (Tarpino 2008).
The event is recounted as a tragedy, a disaster, an irreparable bereave-
ment for which eulogies are delivered all over the Internet. Zanzibaris are
mourning for a house like a loved one for whom all the living have is
prayer. Grief, regret, and anger for an avoidable accident, foreseen in
2017, when the Sultanate of Oman funded its renovation with five million
USD. And yet, the edifice was left to lose its charm and personality (Hilal
20202). As people desperately try to understand what happened, the gov-
ernment attributes the collapse to “budget mismanagement.” Sheriff
(2020) laments a “dependency” mind-set, an over-reliance on outside
funding. But a counternarrative holds responsible the people associated
with the Sultanate and Omani domination for the maintenance of the
House and the whole of Old Town. Here, the government’s neglect is
intentional and strategic, committed to letting the city collapse, in order
to allow wenyeji (Zanzibaris themselves, citizens, locals, owners), as the
government conceives them, to re-build, erasing the distasteful history of
foreign domination once and for all (Ghassani 2020b).
I’m struck by a rising cacophony: as emerging coverage offers a precise
narrative of that House, of harmonious cultural fusions, of Indian Ocean
and world cultures,3 of relations and translocalities (Declich 2018; Verne
2012; Bang 2003), of global flows and consumerism (Prestholdt 2008).
What I see is the kifusi, or rubble: the pile of debris at the forefront of
every image, the building literally stripped of its charm, partially revealing
188 I. BRUNOTTI
its intimate interior, after so many years of abuse (Bissell 2005; Myers
2003). In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the vivid materiality through which
Marco’s dream stories unwind allows the emperor, and us, the readers, to
sense and make sense of the countless cities scattered throughout his
empire: walls, towers, termites, corners, grilles, barrels, weavers, and sacks,
all implicated in the moving, growing, glowing, crumbling, vanishing,
blossoming, and flowing. In the novel, every single city unfolds from small
or large objects, from the most peculiar architectural element to the small-
est incrustation, the product of encounters between nature, things, and
humans over time. Truthful matter, so dear to Marco, is visible and mate-
rializes our everyday experiences. Marco weaves the empire’s cities with a
narrative that goes from matter to dream and back. Within the “temporal
succession of different cities, alternatively just and unjust […] all the future
Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other,
confined, crammed, inextricable” (Calvino 1974, 163), says Marco,
recounting the hidden city, its triglyphs, abaci, and meat-grinding
machines; its men assigned to polishing; the atria, stairways, odalisques,
and porticos; the shadowy rooms behind the shops and beneath the stairs;
its wires, pipes, and pistons; the perfumed pools of the baths; and its foods,
rice, boiled beans, and squashed flowers. Berenice is the city where every-
thing is as predictable as it is deceptive, while, in the seeds of the city, bit-
terness and rivalry ferment (ibid.).
Feeling hopeless, I send condolences to friends and family and receive
a video link, an interview with Zanzibari historian Abdul Sheriff, hosted
by poet and journalist Mohamed Khelef Ghassani and published on his
private YouTube channel, Gumzo la Ghassani (A Chat with Ghassani). A
widely acknowledged expert on urban Zanzibar, Prof. Sheriff shares his
shock in learning about the collapse, from his home, just a few lanes away
from where the House of Wonders had ruled, superb, until that moment.
He looks sad and draws my attention back to the very matter with which
Beit-al-Ajaib was built: not only stones, but also cables, mangrove poles,
steel, and woodwork of all kinds, now part of the rubble amassed before
what remains of the House. Speaking of the government’s apparently
urgent need to clear it away, he reflects on that kifusi and its significance
for all Zanzibaris, the histories told through the House and the ones
stamped into its materiality. Between 2012 and 2014, Beit-al-Ajaib had
already experienced two partial collapses, for which it was often nicknamed
Beit-al-Aib—the palace of shame (Sheriff 2021). But kifusi, says Sheriff, is
not shameful; rather, it is the result of an accident and much more. These
feelings of majesty and grandeur embedded in the House of Wonders,

transformed into shame through the visible debris, must be understood
within the socio-political and historical context of urban Zanzibar. One
could make a parallel with the clearing away of the remnants—the every-
day things—of the 2011 sit-ins in Cairo by police; getting rid of the traces
of the Egyptian bodies “was a necessary manifestation for the state clear-
ing out matter out of place” (Malmsröm 2018, 115), tearing up an
uncomfortable historical and political page. The remains, which Malmsröm
(ibid.) calls “thinking-matter,” last only in photos through which the
author confronts the centrality of matter, in its presence and absence.
Sheriff then points to a treasure which could not have come to light
without the collapse: huge, very old timber planks carved with religious
calligraphy, painted in gold and green,4 placed by Sultan Barghash on the
front side of the verandas. After Barghash’s death in 1888, the British
claimed the power to decide who would become sultan, depriving
Barghash’s son, Sayyid Khalid bin Barghash, of the throne. When Sayyid
Hamed bin Thuwain died five years after his installment by the British,
Sayyid Khalid moved into the palace to claim the place denied him. He
held until the British army, initiating the shortest war in the world, bombed
the house for 45 minutes, killing between 400 and 500 people. Sayyid
Khalid fled the country. The British took over the House, rebuilding the
palace and adding a clock-tower, which required poles for support. In
need of wood, they took the very planks from the veranda which had
made the building famous. The planks, turned so as to make their carvings
invisible, literally disappeared from sight and, forcibly, from the memories
of Zanzibaris. Today, however, history could be recovered, re-membered:
this accident offered the chance to save that wood and to return it to the
city. And yet, the government wants to get rid of that kifusi—ashamed for
not having intervened in the valuable materiality of the House, “cruel
with history” for not knowing (or not caring) about the carved beams in
it (Sheriff 2020), (un)consciously and violently perpetrating political
power on it. It is how we relate to matter that makes matter political.
Is the government trying to get rid, once again, of shame, of the mem-
ory of an uncomfortable past (Bissell and Fouéré 2018) and present? Is it
yet another act of cleansing the multiple identities of Zanzibar, relegating
some of them to the trash heap (Malmsröm 2018)? After all, “objects,
sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no
longer is” (Cole 2015). They are “reservoirs of specific personal
190 I. BRUNOTTI
experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life. They have been
touched, or worn through use. They have frayed, or been placed just so”
(ibid.).
Noisy and silent at the same time, kifusi calls for attention: What would
become of the pasts contained in the rubble when it is swept away? What
is to be cleared out? Shame, matter, shame-matter? When Marco attempts
to describe Zaira, he speaks of mattering details: “the height of a lamppost
and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the
line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that
decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that
railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt
of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same win-
dow; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond
the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering […]” (Calvino 1974,
11). And yet, descriptions do not say anything of the city, he says, because
“the city […] does not tell its past, it contains it like the lines of a hand,
written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the ban-
isters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags,
every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (ibid.).
Hence, for Calvino, things and material-discursive practices, not just
words, can translate the city’s heterogeneity.
The House and its kifusi held memories of hundreds, thousands of
people, those who lived and worked there and those who had labored on
its building; those who chanted its grandeur, and those who envied it from
the outside; and those who passed by, entering or leaving it behind, pro-
ceeding on their own path. Calvino, anchoring us to matter, showing us
how matter reveals the “relationships between the measurements of its
space and the events of its past” (Calvino 1974, 11), is there as I listen to
Ghassani and Sheriff. Matter pushes us to listen to the plurality of voices
relating to and becoming with it, without necessarily creating fixed bina-
ries or categories, insofar as “the listener retains only the words he is
expecting. […] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”
(ibid., 135).
Turning to the kifusi, then, provides for a more complex reading of
Zanzibar urban variations, otherwise invisible, and the identities which its
architecture has embodied. While people give meaning to objects and
therefore affect the perception of a place, the objects, too, produce new
concepts and significations in their places (Appadurai 1986). So, while the
very first project of the House of Wonders was to realize a precise desire of
its maker, the House is impregnated with the materials, the knowledge,
the touch, and the memories of its designers and laborers. And the will,
desires, and powers of all who related to it afterwards, acting upon it and
changing its significance, as much as they have been affected by its
magnificence.
From Metaphor to Matter

Before the interview with Sheriff, Ghassani gives a public eulogy to the
House of Wonders (Ta’azia kwa Jumba la Maajabu la Zanzibar). His
verses narrate a House multiple in its significances and substances. He
addresses it directly, viewing age not as weakness but as wisdom and
knowledge, power and strength. “Built in stone, clay and lime, with a
majestic skin; Barghash made it strong, in purpose and integrity.”5
Through personification, Ghassani is invoking the House, arousing our
attention from the vital metaphor forcefully to the matter—from the sym-
bol, the sign, the voice, and the vision, as well as the memory of Zanzibaris,
to the speaking (land)mark. Ghassani denounces, “You told us: we were
the ones who stood up, while others were sleeping. You told us: we were
a respected sovereign nation, under God’s favour. You told us: we are the
chosen ones, and not just anybody.”6 Beit-el-Ajaib was the remarkable
“symbol of the country of Mwana wa Mwana, the nation of Mwinyi
Mkuu, the land of Mkamandume, the dynasty of al-Busaidi, and the
homeland of all the Zanzibaris of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”7
Beit-al-Ajaib’s kifusi, provoking this powerful eulogy, offers an oppor-
tunity to publicly retell the history of Zanzibar, and of all Zanzibaris, in a
way that reminds me of Calvino’s city of Zora, which remains in the mem-
ory “point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets,
and of doors and windows in the houses […]” (Calvino 1974, 15). Zora
is a city which does not fade, whose secret lies in the way the individual
gaze reads it as a musical score that is always the same, in which you can-
not move the notes. This city, Marco says, “is like an armature, a honey-
comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember:
names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifica-
tions, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech” (ibid.). Created dif-
ferently in the memory of thousands of travelers, Zora itself stays put and
is “always the same” in the effort to be remembered, but it eventually
languishes, disappears, gets forgotten by the Earth. Does this mean that
once the narratives of the House of Wonders multiply, its matter will
192 I. BRUNOTTI
disappear? Or is the space’s multivocality made possible by the matter

itself? That is, is the House made with its histories? If so, what becomes of
these histories when that matter is cleared out?
When Ghassani addresses the House’s collapse, he speaks not just of
the space where the House of Wonders once stood, but of its space-time,
its historical, social, and cultural role (nafasi). At first listen, this seems to
be a question of representation, but he is thinking of the stones, the lime,
and the clay of which the House is built, the materiality “in place,” which
has affected the city with its presence and now with its half-absence. In a
WhatsApp message to me, Ghassani writes, “People are saddened and
made crying by the built environment as they are by their own people.
The houses and the cities to us (and at our homes) have a soul, they
breathe.”8 His words strike me deeply. I sense the strong, deep relation-
ship between the city’s houses and the body. I sense the centrality of mat-
ter, in Ghassani’s as in Calvino’s words, Marco whispering to Kublai Khan
about sentient cities: “Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears,
even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their
perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. […] Cities
also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the
one nor other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a
city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in answer it gives to a question of
yours” (Calvino 1974, 44).
While literary studies often treat metaphors as meant to free the author
from a supposedly binding concreteness, opening the senses to dreams
and phantasies, neither Mohammed nor Italo free themselves from the
matter that pushes them to write. Mohamed does not ignore it, supersede
it, leave it behind, for it is that matter co-constituting his words: a “mate-
rial metaphor of fluidity,” what Philippopoulus-Mihalopoulos calls a mat-
terphor, “one that slides between the linguistic and the material, while
nodding to things that can never be fully expressed” (Philippopoulus-
Mihalopoulos 2021, 270). Mohammed’s matterphor—the houses and the
cities to us (and at our homes) have a soul, they breathe—opens to a variety
of understandings, embodiments, and intra-actions (Barad 2007). It does
not fix its objects nor their function (ibid.): it allows us “to responds, to
be responsible and take responsibility for that which we inherit from the
past and from the future” (Barad 2019; Haraway 2016).
Thus, I sense the breathing, I feel the sorrow. Thus, the world relates
to the collapse, to the eulogy, to the words and the images, to the House
of Wonders itself, and to its rubble. Words as matter—word/matter—are
in/finite, an unlimited eruption and irruption of histories and interac-

tions, which threaten categorizations by refusing the violence of represen-
tation and ontological determinacy (Barad 2019). Rather, as Ghassani
powerfully insists, “it has a soul, it breathes.”
In addressing the question of the moral and economic responsibility for
the maintenance of the House (and of the whole Old Town) with Prof.
Sheriff, Ghassani refers to the very strong argument, held by some
Zanzibaris, which holds that the Old Town was established two centuries
ago, under foreign rule, and therefore the buildings represent but do not
speak for the wenyeji wa Zanzibar (the rightful citizens of Zanzibar). The
so-called patriots, he says, believe it is better to let the buildings fall down
and to build a new city in their place.
In the interview, Sheriff seems discouraged. The very thought that the
old town belongs to foreigners, Sheriff says, is “like that of a horse with
blinders on: if they are removed and he can see everything around him, he
will be afraid, therefore his eyes are covered. And we do the same!” In a
context where socio-cultural differences, the result of encounters that
have been occurring for centuries, were racialized during colonial domina-
tion—a racialization that was consciously and precisely translated into an
architectural project—Sheriff argues strongly against racial discrimination,
seeing it as unable to address reality. Clinging to such a perspective blinds
Zanzibaris to the reality around them, Sheriff says. He insists that “every-
one here is Zanzibari and this is our culture” even though it is partly the
fruit of foreign domination. The House is homeland to all Zanzibaris.
But it is also a clear example of how categories of belonging are repro-
duced through and projected onto a place’s architecture and its matter.
“The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things:
pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern; hal-
berds, the barracks; scales, the grocer’s. Statues and shields depict lions,
dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something—who knows what?—has as
its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star” (Calvino 1974, 13).
Poetics of the Invisible, Poetics of Rubble

Even though Old Town was never a homogenous agglomerate of coral
stone houses only, this is how it has been constructed, not only with the
invention of the single-matter polis, but also through the association of
that matter with specific political, economic, and racial identities. This
racially constructed matter is what the patriots refer to, when they claim to
194 I. BRUNOTTI
want to build their own new city; this is also the imagery from which nos-
talgia draws to criticize the present (Bissell 2005). And yet, its materiality
does not end with the stone: “materiality is always something more than
‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that ren-
ders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (Coole and
Frost 2010, 9).
The House of Wonder’s rubble breathes and unveils centuries of repre-
sentation, agency, intention, and articulation, in and of itself as matter.
Each person and entity, then, relates to it in a different, personal, and yet
meaningful way, co-constituting its being and becoming. Rubble, unlike
governments and people who have deployed partial, identity-based narra-
tives to establish claims to the city, does not exclusively see the sultan, the
porter, the Arab, or the Indian, the fisherman or the seafarer. Rubble sees
them all, in its “ongoing historicity” (Barad 2003, 821). However, with-
out judgment, without becoming stuck in merely discursive practice, it
participates in the process of materialization (ibid.). It defies categories,
and the resultant jumbling—uncategorization—is to be prevented by the
government because it is not easily controlled and, by definition, produces
disorder and shame. The government requires cleansing to restore order
and, with it, the purity of a single identity, removing the other histories of
domination which co-constituted that building. Rubble materially speaks
of the plurality of the identities and agencies which form the Zanzibari
polity and restores belonging to all Zanzibaris, the House ultimately serv-
ing as a homeland to them all.
This pile of rubble is present in Zanzibar; it is from and of Zanzibar. Its
stark, if temporary, presence inscribes that sociohistorical plurality into the
present, acknowledging the city’s cosmopolitanism without its dense local
identity being dissolved. Rubble restores agency to those humans and
things who are constantly and regularly silenced by being rendered fixed
and unchangeable. Turning to the rubble allows heterogeneity, multiplic-
ity, and complexity to be eventually visible. In other words, taking rubble
as an actor in material-discursive practices, which co-produce meaning,
and not just the terrain of action, enables us to disclose dynamics and
complexities which are otherwise simplified, obscured, or nullified, while
reifying and reproducing dangerous dichotomies and categorizations
(Barad 2003). Calvino wishes his readers to experience, together with
Marco, the moment, not too far into the story, when words fail Marco, so
that he has to rely on objects, gestures, and glances to sense his own
accounts and help the Great Khan to make sense of his cities (Calvino
1974, 38–39). At this point, Calvino’s concern with matter emerges as

visible and powerful: “as the vocabulary of things was renewed with new
samples of merchandise, the repertory of mute comment tended to
become closed, stable. The pleasure of falling back on it also diminished in
both; in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and
immobile” (ibid., 39).
The rubble of the House of Wonders provokes rethinking. It is power-
ful everywhere, glorious and humble, a material intentionally produced in
the various projects of urban planning and re-planning in which lots of
other things are made to collapse or vanish. For instance, take the road
which extends from Zanzibar town to the East of Unguja island, in
Ng’ambo, between Mwanakwerekwe and Fuoni. This very busy thorough-
fare is one of the most important on the island. Yet it could be any urban
context in Tanzania. A building stands on the road, red arrows painted on
its road-side wall. Rubble on the ground. From a little further away, we see
that a slice of the houses has been cut, the rest remains standing. A long
procession of rubble that is probably not mattering to the government,
yet violently political in its presence. Hundreds of trees, shops, and houses,
labeled as abusive by the government, have been torn down to widen the
road. Since I had lived in a neighborhood which borders that road, I have
experienced the material ramifications of this project on my family mem-
bers and their bodies: the dust, the noises, the coughing, the dry throats,
the itching eyes, the disruption of the usual housework, and the bitterness.
Paying attention to the poetics of rubble reveals other layers of urban
complexity. This poetics, refusing the divide between matter and meaning,
displays the lines of possession and dispossession that make certain urbans
invisible and gift us better modes to “sense” those invisibilities and to
translate them. It might help us understand why certain rubble, in particu-
lar locales across Zanzibar, would not be talked about by the government.
Only some rubble goes viral on the Internet, and yet it all materially and
affectively impacts the daily lives of Zanzibaris. When does rubble matter?
When does it bear shame or become trash? Does rubble always matter?
How rubble is political? What else does the rubble allow to see and trans-
late in approaching the urban?
196 I. BRUNOTTI
Postscriptum
On September 13, 2021, I wrote an email to Prof. Sheriff, inquiring on
the fate of that kifusi. He said it was dumped in the creek near the old
Bwawani Hotel and that nothing has been done to sift through it, to res-
cue the beams with Arabic inscription. He wrote about the mtepe too, but,
in his words, “inertia has set in.”9 I can sense him looking at the first rains:
“Already we have begun to receive rain in early mornings, and soon we
may begin to get Vuli rains, and the termites will begin to do their work”
(ibid.).
Notes
1. The “wonders” included electricity, the lift, marble, and materials imported
and local. British colonial reports described the results as a jumble of styles
revealing the sultan’s lack of taste. Yet Meier (2016) also refers to the embel-
lishments Barghash added to every room, especially the ceremonial room
where he welcomed ambassadors, heads of state, merchants, religious lead-
ers, and so on (Meier 2016; Al Busaidi 2020).
2. Originally in Swahili, all translations are of the author, unless indicated
otherwise.
3. UNESCO (2020).
4. The Islamic imagery was displayed in various ways and materials, a relational
practice throughout the Indian Ocean world, not always about ethnic nego-
tiations but rather about visual and corporeal pleasure. Imagery could com-
municate strong territorial claims, as shown by the examples of the mosques
in Mombasa and Lamu, or enact a political re-centering of the peripheries of
the Ocean world, as Barghash wanted his own architectural design to do
(Meier 2016).
5. First stanza
6. Last stanza.
7. Last stanza.
8. Message to the author, March 9, 2021.
9. Message to the author.
References
Al Busaidi, Riadh. 2020. Sheikh Riadh na Beit Al Ajaib na majengo mengine ya
Mji Mkongwe. Interview by Mohamed Ghassani, Gumzo la Ghassani, YouTube,
December 28. Accessed June 14, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CaU6QGnQE4g.
Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective. New York Cambirdge University Press.
Bang, Anne Katrine. 2003. Sufis and Scholars of the Sea: Family Networks in East
Africa, 1860–1925. London: Routledge.
Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society
28 (3): 801–831.
———. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, London: Duke University Press.
———. 2014. Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax 20
(3): 168–187.
———. 2019. After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms,
Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice. Theory & Event 22
(3): 524–550.
Bissell, William Cunningham. 2005. Engaging Colonial Nostalgia. Cultural
Anthropology 20 (2): 215–248.
Bissell, William Cunningham, and Marie-Aude Fouéré, eds. 2018. Social Memory,
Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle. Remembering the Revolution in Zanzibar.
Oxford: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers.
Cole, Teju. 2015. Object Lesson. New York Times, March 17. Accessed December
21, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/magazine/object-
lesson.html.
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and
Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
De Boeck, Filip, and Sammy Baloji. 2016. Suturing the City. Living Together in
Congo’s Urban Worlds. London: Autograph ABP.
Declich, Francesca. 2018. Translocal connections across the Indian Ocean. Swahili
speaking networks on the move. Leiden: Brill.
Ghassani, Mohamed Khelef. 2020a. Kijiweni: Profesa Abdul Sheriff na Kuporomoka
Beit al Ajaib. Published on Gumzo la Ghassani, YouTube, December 27.
Accessed June 14, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw5immtooZM.
———. 2020b. Ta’azia kwa Jumba la Maajabu la Zanzibar. Published on Gumzo
la Ghassani, YouTube, December 27. Accessed June 14, 2021. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Nw5immtooZM.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with Trouble. Making Kin in the
Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hilal, Hilmi (@HilmiHilal88). 2020. Twitter, December 25. Accessed March 1,
2021. https://twitter.com/hilmihilal88?lang=de.
Malmsröm, Frederika Maria. 2018. The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective
Fragments in Sisi’s Egypt. Oakland: University of California Press.
198 I. BRUNOTTI
Meier, Prita. 2016. Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Myers, Garth Andrew. 2003. Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban
Africa. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Philippopoulus-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2021. Performing Metaphors. Theory &
Event 24 (1): 268–293.
Prestholdt, Jeremy. 2008. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the
Genealogies of Globalization. Berkley: University of California Press.
Sheriff, Abdul. 2020. Kuporomoka Beit al Ajaib. Interview by Mohamed Ghassani,
Gumzo la Ghassani, YouTube, December 27. Accessed June 14, 2021. https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw5immtooZM.
———. 2021. Partial Collapse of the House of Wonders, Public Discourse on its
Future Recovery as a World Heritage Site, and National Reconciliation in
Zanzibar. Paper Presented at the Second Webinar: Cultural Heritage and
People in the Post-Trauma Process: Building Resilience through Integrated
Reconstruction and Recovery of Heritage, organized by ARC-WH. YouTube,
March 14. Accessed June 14, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=sD4W7ek-F2U.
Tarpino, Antonella. 2008. Geografie della Memoria: Case, Rovine, Oggetti
Quotidiani. Torino: Einaudi.
UNESCO. 2020. Early Notification of Collapse of House of Wonders in Zanzibar.
December 25. Accessed June 14, 2021. https://whc.unesco.org/en/
news/2233.
Verne, Julia. 2012. Living Translocality. Space, Culture and Economy in
Contemporary Swahili Trade. Stuttgart: Steiner.
CHAPTER 15
Encountering Urban Mutualities

and Indeterminacy with a Dar es Salaam Taxi
Driver
James Ellison
It’s June 2018, and Steven Marandu is stuck in traffic in Ubungo district
in Dar es Salaam (often called “Dar”).1 His unmarked taxi, a 16-year-old
Toyota that he rents, yields to expensive new SUVs and to construction
vehicles that roar and belch diesel exhaust. Pedestrians pass us, as do walk-
ing venders selling flashlights, soccer balls, and washcloths commonly
used for wiping sweat from one’s brow. Dust and noise surround the car,
emanating from construction that has consumed Ubungo and much of
Dar for several years, as buildings were razed, homes and businesses
demolished, and roads torn up for a new multilane overpass, a bus rapid
transit (BRT) system, and highways. This destructive construction, a fea-
ture of then-president John Magufuli’s populist rule, is intended to
increase the flow of cars, buses, and particularly trucks throughout the city
and between Tanzania’s Indian Ocean ports, its interior regions, and
J. Ellison (*)
Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, USA
e-mail: ellisonj@dickinson.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_15
200 J. ELLISON
neighboring countries. The disruption cost Steven passengers and fares,

he said, as did Magufuli’s anticorruption campaigns, which targeted every-
one from government ministers to quasi-legal drivers like Steven. Even so,
Steven was attracted to Magufuli’s zeal and audacious infrastructure proj-
ects, despite the uncertainty they brought to his livelihood and possible
futures.
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974) unlocks this ethnography of Dar,
an examination of the city’s infrastructures and political subjectivities.
Calvino’s Marco Polo, like Steven, is a keen observer, a “visionary travel-
ler” (Calvino 1983, 39). Conversing with the emperor Kublai Khan,
Marco describes cities continuously remade and expanding in ways that
are stubbornly indeterminate. From Tamara (Calvino 1974, 14), which
one leaves without ever discovering what it really is or what it conceals, to
Andria (ibid., 151), where each change implies other changes, and the city
like the sky never remains the same, indeterminacy is ubiquitous. Marco
likewise conjures people shaped by cities that they also create, frustrating
Kublai’s desires to impose definition. This mutuality is captured in his
description of a bridge, “stone by stone” (ibid., 82), where no single stone
supports the bridge, but together they form the arch that is the bridge,
which thus depends on the stones. Invisible Cities has inspired many inter-
pretations. My interests concern the novel’s relentless attention to urban
indeterminacy and to the city as co-constituted with its elements, includ-
ing those who live in and traverse it. Steven brings these lessons from
Calvino to life in Tanzania’s largest, ever-changing city, where, from his
arrival to his current dilemmas about populism and urban growth, he and
the city have co-developed in ways that exceed delineation.
Steven left rural life at the start of the new millennium, in his early 20s,
to seek a future in this burgeoning eastern African metropolis, where two
decades of neoliberal reforms were remaking Tanzania’s socialist founda-
tions. He found work in a carwash, whose proprietor offered to fund his
driving lessons and licensing. Seizing this opportunity, Steven married and
built a house in a neighborhood that soon became a bustling residential
and commercial hub. Steven’s life and the city’s elements were already
enmeshed, like the stones forming an arch that makes a bridge. In 2015,
like many in Tanzania and elsewhere (Ogola 2019), Steven was drawn to
Magufuli’s penchant for demolishing obstacles to achieve his goals.
Eventually, though, the city felt crowded and chaotic, like Marco’s report
of Ersilia, where “the strings become so numerous that you can no longer
pass among them” (Calvino 1974, 76). Steven and his wife sought life in
15 ENCOUNTERING URBAN MUTUALITIES AND INDETERMINACY… 201
the city’s fringes. His plans deferred by the COVID-19 pandemic and the
populist president’s death in 2021, Steven reflects on life with the city,
wondering whether he might always “pass from one limbo to another,
never managing to leave it” (Calvino 1974, 158).
During his daily travels, Steven absorbs and shares information about a
city that is never the same from week to week. Like Marco, he is atten-
tive—to things, to space, to people’s stories and actions, to language, to
ruins and constructions, to topography and hydrology, to transportation
and trade, to planning, to the city’s fabled cosmological meanings, and to
how the city manifests its past and future. Reflecting on Marco’s dialogues
with the Khan, one could imagine Steven conveying to Magufuli the
effects of his edicts and what remains unseen: “While, at a sign from you,
sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls,” he might say, “I am
collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room
for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered” (Calvino 1974, 60).
Dar, purportedly being remade by design, is nevertheless discontinuous,
disjointed, and intimate to Steven’s life.
Invisible Cities is, throughout, a meditation on urban indeterminacy
and how the city and the things and people in it are co-constituting
agents.2 Like an ethnographer, Marco warns against confusing the city
with the words used to describe it (Calvino 1974, 61). When the emperor
tries to “deduce” cities, Marco counters that they are made of “excep-
tions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions” and that forcing models
produces a city “too probable to be real” (ibid., 69). Later, when Kublai
seeks his empire’s order in chess, he instead sees “the empire’s multiform
treasures” as “illusory envelopes,” “reduced to a square of planed wood”
(ibid., 131). In the two woods of a chessboard, ebony and maple, Marco
tells of trees, climate, forest parasites, logging, woodworking, and people
in windows. These intimate, nonlinear relationships among the game’s
panels and their pasts, things and people, cities and other agents under-
score the book’s central themes of mutuality and indeterminacy.
A city, Calvino (1983) writes elsewhere, is not fixed. It is not defined by
particular crises or by buildings of some type or configuration. Rather, it is
“a combination of many things” including memory, desires, language, and
goods, all being exchanged (ibid., 41). Marco explains that he could
describe Zaira using certain measures—a street’s length, “the degree of
the arcade’s curve,” roofing materials—but this would be like saying
“nothing” (Calvino 1974, 10). Rather, the city comprises “relationships”
of people and things: not just a lamppost, but also “a hanged usurper’s
202 J. ELLISON
swaying feet”; “the course of the queen’s nuptial procession”; “the leap of
the adulterer” over a railing.3 These relationships implicate the city’s past
in its present spaces, things, and infrastructures.
Indeterminacy and Mutuality in the City

The unequal relationship between Marco and the Khan—emphasized
when Kublai challenges Marco’s interpretations—recalls questions eth-
nographers ask about relations between “the people” and populist leaders
like Magufuli. Why do Steven and others support the destructive con-
struction that might also oust (kutumbua) them? Political anthropologists
shift such rationalizing, cost-benefit questions from a presumed paradox
about “the people” based on liberal assumptions, to experiences that form
subjects in particular milieus. This approach points to the comingling of
the ruler and the ruled, of the city and those in it. It reframes agency, not
as a property of already-formed subjects, but as generated in the interac-
tions among various actors, including people, technologies, infrastruc-
tures, and the city at large. It calls for embracing the indeterminacy that is
integral to urban life, rather than assuming a static city existing indepen-
dent of its milieu.
City life is made in part by infrastructural networks such as roads, which
are distributional systems of relationality that serve as agents in processes
of mutuality. Attention to these mutualities challenges a prevalent
Aristotelian supposition that matter is inert until humans give it form, “as
if [infrastructure] were some ontologically fixed thing” (Chu 2014, 365
n6). In Tokyo, for example, the overcrowded commuter train network
represents more than “instruments of human will” (Fisch 2018, 217); it
participates in everyday habits of capitalism, gender, autonomy, and col-
lective life that shape urban vitality. In Dar, the road construction Steven
navigates may appear to be a technical solution to urban or political prob-
lems, but it is already involved in imagining those problems, and it is
already active in life as Steven and others think it and live it.
These contingent interactions involve what mid-century philosopher
Gilbert Simondon (2017) terms the “margin of indeterminacy.” Margins
of indeterminacy are the unforeseen aspects of a system’s actual practice.
Simondon contends that technologies and their elements constantly
respond to “information” (2017, 152), new scenarios that emerge when
machines and infrastructures interact with diverse agents. Roads, for
example, are engineered and constructed with locally varying elements,
and their uses in specific environments exceed planning (Harvey and Knox
2015). Likewise, mobile phone systems are not simply replicated place
after place but must be open to unanticipated practices in new contexts
(Odumosu 2017). The areas where these relationships develop, their
“associated milieus” (Simondon 2017, 59–60), are shaped by and in turn
contribute to these relationships. Indeterminacy thus facilitates the anima-
tion of individuals, collectives, and systems, which remain “open to ‘infor-
mation’ and subsequently to further transformative interactions with a
milieu” (Fisch 2018, 15).
Steven’s relationship with the city vivifies the dynamic milieu, even
though his story emphasizes his personal agency. After migrating from a
small town in the north, as a young man “looking for life” (kutafuta mai-
sha), he was hired at a car wash, an enterprise emerging with liberalizing
vehicle markets. He became interested in driving after talking with
mechanics at the car wash and meeting other northerners already making
a living with taxis. His employer, a new capitalist seeing potential profits,
also urged him to take a driving course and get a license, and he paid for
it. The many times Steven has told me about his driver education course,
he is always proud of the outcome, although he faced challenges that, with
hindsight, he finds humorous. Laughing about it in 2018, he said he ini-
tially failed the course because his rural background left him ill-prepared
for studying and test taking. His heart was set on driving, though, and he
retook the course with new enthusiasm and succeeded the second time.
Steven’s journeys took shape amid a florescence of vehicles on Dar’s
roads. During Tanzania’s socialist years, in the 1960s and 1970s, automo-
bile ownership was restricted and rare. Contemporary photographs show
clean city streets with painted curbs and little traffic. In the 1980s and
1990s, in efforts to support political and economic liberalization, parlia-
ment eased restrictions and even subsidized vehicle ownership among
government employees. By the time Steven arrived in Dar, new financing
and credit possibilities existed for purchasing vehicles and further legisla-
tion made vehicle ownership easier. The numbers of vehicles grew along
with commercial possibilities for using them and that in turn accelerated
demand, summoning interest in new import possibilities. In 2000, there
were around 200,000 vehicles in Tanzania. By 2011 the number rose to
more than 650,000 (Rizzo 2017, 37), and it exceeded 1.4 million by
2014 (CEIC n.d.; WHO n.d.). Roads became expanding networks of
opportunity, networks that were increasingly crowded and exciting.
204 J. ELLISON
Today, that florescence of vehicles exists in “infrastructures over-

whelmed” (Melly 2017, 11), roads congested with the rising population
and accelerating construction. The vehicles traveling Dar’s infrastructures
also tell a unique story. Unlike in the Global North, where vehicle manu-
facturing annually adds new makes and models that alter the milieu, all
vehicles in Tanzania during this time were imported, and most were used.
On Northern roads, new cars and trucks actively shape urban residents’
infrastructural lives—including automobility’s intimate bonds with the
automotive industry and socioeconomic disparities. In Dar since Steven
arrived, vehicle makes and models have been elements in post-socialist
liberalization and global market shifts. While Tanzania’s economy liberal-
ized, Japan’s automobile industry made quality improvements that altered
safety and environmental regulations, which channeled increasing num-
bers of used vehicles into eastern African markets (Rizzo 2017, 37–38).
Vehicle prices in Tanzania declined while commercial uses proliferated. To
accommodate this growth, Tanzania developed a new license plate num-
bering system with numbers permanently associated with individual vehi-
cles. Used vehicles on Dar’s roads, like the 16-year-old Toyota of Steven’s
quasi-legal taxi work, mark infrastructural changes that are active in the
milieu with Steven’s aspirations.
Steven’s migration, pursuit of driving, and current livelihood show his
agency while they have also been part of the city’s need for drivers.
Although Steven works throughout Dar, he mostly drives in Ubungo, one
of the city’s busiest districts. The multi-country-funded multilane over-
pass, BRT system, and highway construction Steven negotiated daily with
thousands of other drivers—by 2013, more than 35,000 vehicles passed
Ubungo each day (African Development Bank 2013, 33)—were designed
to increase traffic flows. Ubungo’s roads connect shopping centers, the
state university and off-campus residences, offices of the water and irriga-
tion ministry and the national electricity agency, and BRT stations. They
distribute cars, trucks, and buses to city and cross-country bus terminals,
ports, and the international airport. They are the gateways to Tanzania’s
interior and to countries in eastern, central, and southern Africa, bringing
Steven into unexpected mutualities with China’s Belt and Road Initiative
flows through Africa, the Indian Ocean, and beyond.
All the Future Dars

With greater traffic, Steven sees ever-more amateur drivers flout rules and
cause accidents. He identifies these troubles with bodaboda (relatively
inexpensive motorcycles from China, often ferrying passengers) and bajaj
(three-wheeled taxis), both recent arrivals. Bajaj and bodaboda drivers, he
says, operate without licenses, despite legal requirements. “You see,” he
interrupts a downtime colloquy with other taxi drivers, pointing to a bajaj
cutting across traffic in a roundabout without signaling. As we head down-
town one afternoon, he similarly exclaims about a bodaboda zipping
between stopped cars and trucks and through a red light with no hint of
decelerating. In 2017, when a bodaboda sheared off Steven’s side mirror
while he was stuck in a sea of traffic, police were unhelpful, telling him to
take it up with his insurance agent or just fix the mirror himself. Steven
accepts bodaboda and bajaj among the burgeoning city’s “functional
chaos” (Rizzo 2017, 2); he also seems anxious about their relation to his
aspirations.
Destructive construction, the tumult of urban growth, and escalating
costs lead many residents to consider resettling in Dar’s ever-expanding
edges. Steven and his wife worry that their neighborhood feels increas-
ingly precarious, tucked behind a busy road and a new light rail line. Their
children play in a neighboring field whose other border, a polluted stream,
has brought destructive floods in recent years after abnormally heavy rains.
Across the stream, block walls topped with broken glass and barbed wire
enclose constantly growing stacks of shipping containers. Deciding it’s
time to move, a few years ago Steven bought land 30 kilometers to the
west, in a former village being stitched into the city, near where the cross-
country highway narrows from four lanes to two, for now. “I want my
children to go farther than I did,” he reasons. “They need education, but
it’s hard to pay for it. Moving [there] will help.” He and his wife plan to
raise chickens, goats, and cattle; he’ll also “continue to fight with work
[pambana na kazi] in the city,” he says, using a popular idiom that felt like
a metonym for life during Magufuli’s presidency.
Steven’s future is bound up with Dar’s. The pandemic and Magufuli’s
death paused his work on the new house. When he completes it, it will
change with Dar’s “outpouring of networks without beginning or end”
(Calvino 1974, 139), including nearby railway and road expansions and a
500-hectare dry port project. Will his children go farther than he did? Will
their new home be swallowed by the city’s seemingly relentless growth?
206 J. ELLISON
Could an evolving transportation landscape or further anticorruption

campaigns affect his opportunities? Time will tell. What Steven knows,
and what motivates him, is that he and the city will develop, somehow,
together. Perhaps, as Marco explains, “all the future [Dars] are already
present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed,
inextricable” (Calvino 1974, 163), constantly generating possibilities
through emerging mutualities and relentless indeterminacy.
Notes
1. Steven Marandu is a pseudonym. For more than a decade, I have hung out
with Steven when in Dar and kept in touch when away.
2. Calvino’s indeterminacy meshes with AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2019) “impro-
vised lives” in “uninhabitable cities,” comprising people’s efforts to shape
lives in ensembles defying definition. It also resonates with urban ethnogra-
phies of “improvisation” (Degani 2018; Mains 2019; Simone 2019, 59–65).
Other commenters on Invisible Cities (e.g., Panigrahi 2017; Ryan 2016)
highlight indeterminacy using different terms.
3. For Robert Ryan (2016, 228), these examples indicate “movement.”
References
African Development Bank. 2013. Tanzania Transport Sector Review. Dar es
Salaam: African Development Bank Group Transport & ICT Department.
———. 1983. Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities. Columbia: A Journal of Literature
and Art 8 (Spring/Summer): 37–42.
CEIC. n.d. Tanzania Motor Vehicle Registered. Accessed October 16, 2018.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/tanzania/motor-vehicle-registered.
Chu, Julie. 2014. When Infrastructures Attack: The Workings of Disrepair in
China. American Ethnologist 41 (2): 351–367.
Degani, Michael. 2018. Shock Humor: Zaniness and the Freedom of Permanent
Improvisation in Urban Tanzania. Cultural Anthropology 33 (3): 473–498.
Fisch, Michael. 2018. An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train
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CHAPTER 16
Reconstructing Memory and Desire

in Bhaktapur, Nepal
Vanicka Arora
Introduction
A visitor to the city of Bhaktapur, Nepal, will be greeted at one of its sev-
eral entry points with a small blue sign welcoming them to a “heritage
city,” a “traditional city,” and a “medieval city.” These phrases are embla-
zoned on entry tickets, guide-maps, brochures, and signage along the
popular tourist routes. Bhaktapur’s municipality website describes it as the
“cultural capital of Nepal” (Bhaktapur Municipality 2019), and most
licensed tourist guides will introduce the city to tourist groups with at least
one of these phrases, possibly all. A mere 13 kilometers from Nepal’s capi-
tal city, Bhaktapur is often described as a different universe by tourists and
locals alike, ancient and unchanging, firmly resisting the march of moder-
nity and globalization that has infiltrated the rest of the Kathmandu Valley
(Grieve 2006). Standing in Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square, which is a
V. Arora (*)
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University,
Parramatta, NSW, Australia
e-mail: v.arora@westernsydney.edu.au

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_16
210 V. ARORA
designated UNESCO World Heritage Site (UNESCO WHC 1979), sur-

rounded by temples, palatial courtyards, and rest-houses, these descrip-
tions seem plausible, even inevitable. Every day, sometimes twice in one
day, the municipality's waste-collecting van drivers play a pre-recorded
song in Nepali as they negotiate the narrow streets in the city's interiors.
The song describes the many virtues of Bhaktapur as “the legacy of the
Newar,” the indigenous majority inhabitants of the city, and reminds resi-
dents that they are part of a World Heritage City that is rich in tradition
and culture.
Several years after the Gorkha Earthquake devastated Nepal in April
2015, large sections of this heritage city have undergone reconstruction,
including many of its most iconic sites. The post-disaster landscape of
Nepal is slowly undergoing transformation, though progress remains frag-
mentary. In addition to ongoing political instabilities and changing gov-
ernment regimes, bureaucracies of funding mechanisms and the complex
geography and ecology of the Himalayas present ongoing challenges
(Gautam 2017), to say nothing of the COVID-19 pandemic (Shneiderman
et al. 2020). Nevertheless, Bhaktapur’s historic skyline has steadily been
reassembled. Historic temples, palaces, and rest-houses, which had col-
lapsed, are built again; the decaying remains of old homes are replaced.
Despite claims of an unchanging city, post-disaster reconstruction as well
as the ongoing influences of tourism and urbanization are continually
reshaping Bhaktapur and in turn are shaped by the city’s collective memo-
ries and desires.
In this chapter, I examine how memories and desires—the two central
themes of Invisible Cities, according to Calvino (1983)—configure the
trajectories of ongoing reconstruction of built heritage in Bhaktapur. On
the one hand, reconstruction of heritage has been driven by a desire for a
pre-earthquake “normal” and a reconfirmation of Bhaktapur’s history and
collective memory. On the other hand, reconstruction has offered an
opportunity to curate the past, selectively rewriting the city’s narrative and
valorizing specific versions of its history. Bhaktapur’s physical fabric
encompasses over seven centuries of reassembly and reconstitution follow-
ing at least four catastrophic earthquakes, in addition to multiple political
upheavals and cycles of gradual decay and resurgence. Thus, the urban
fabric of Bhaktapur contains a bricolage of multiple layers of history that
co-exist with the present (Crang and Travlou 2001), where chronologies
are continually absorbed and diffused, much like Marco Polo’s Clarice,
the city of ebbs and flow, decays, and resurgences (Calvino 1974). Both
16 RECONSTRUCTING MEMORY AND DESIRE IN BHAKTAPUR, NEPAL 211
the disaster and the reconstruction that has followed transform not only
Bhaktapur’s post-disaster landscape, but also its identity, through selective
memorialization and forgetting, reconfiguring narratives of the city
(Saul 2018).
Reconstruction in Bhaktapur constantly negotiates between individual
and collective desires, history, and memory. The desires of the municipal-
ity and tourism industry are driven simultaneously by the heritage econ-
omy operating in the city (Grieve 2006) and the need to present the city’s
past as a prominent capital of the Malla Era (twelfth to eighteenth cen-
tury), a historical period that is central to the city’s physical organization,
built aesthetic, and identity (Whelpton 2005; Shrestha 2016). Reassembling
Bhaktapur’s Newar architecture, characterized by monumental tiered and
shikhara (spire) temples and palatial complexes, innumerable community
spaces known locally as patis, sattals, and phalchas, where people gather,
celebrate, or simply rest, as well as historic ponds and fountains, is there-
fore of the highest priority. By selecting which places—and, consequently,
which pasts—to reconstruct and which aesthetics to present through (re)
construction, Bhaktapur’s identity as a majoritarian Newar city that draws
from its Malla lineage is continually reinforced, skimming over more
recent regimes and periods of political decay. Through reconstruction, the
municipality can, like Calvino’s often unreliable narrator Marco Polo,
present a nostalgic narrative of a city that has never truly existed.
But what of the desires of the 80,000 residents of the city? They inhabit
not only the public and tourist spaces of Bhaktapur, which they share with
visitors, but also its homes and neighborhoods. The city is not merely a
“living museum” for tourists, nor is it an aging relic somehow frozen in
time, like the postcards of Maurilia (Calvino 1974, 30). Rather, it is a space
to live, work, pray, and play, a series of relationships between places and
inhabitants. Each home that is built and rebuilt represents the individual
desire and agency of its inhabitants, but each simultaneously reflects the
municipality’s control and the prevailing heritage-driven economy (Arora
2022). Visitor expectations for Bhaktapur are not limited to the monu-
mental ensembles of the Durbar Square and its individual landmarks, but
also include lively streets that connect these points on the tourist itinerary
and showcase a traditional Newar lifestyle. This means that in addition to
reconstructing its listed monuments, both residents and the municipality
must consider the tourist’s desire to get lost in the city streets, to be
ensconced by centuries of tradition, reflected in the brick walls, timber
carvings, and jhingati (clay tile) roofs of Newar houses. The distinction
212 V. ARORA
between the reality of Bhaktapur and its carefully crafted narrative remain
impossible for a tourist to untangle, much like Diomira and Irene, which
continually challenge the visitor to separate the stable from the transforma-
tive (Cavallaro 2010). In Marco Polo’s telling, the visitor to Diomira
encounters both the expected and familiar version of a city, but also a spe-
cific moment in its transformation that is then embedded as a unique, indi-
vidual memory. Similarly, Bhaktapur reinforces the idea of continuity and
tradition to its visitors, even as they currently experience a city in a state of
rapid transformation, each day’s skyline different from the next day’s.
I explored the many hidden layers of Bhaktapur as relayed to me by its
residents over seven months of fieldwork. Their stories, shaped simultane-
ously by memory and desire, both individual and collective, are also shaped
by religion, caste, gender, and ethnicity, as well as by their literal place in
the city. Through the narratives of my participants as well as my own lived
experience of the city, I examine the ways in which Invisible Cities can be
used to inform emplaced ethnographic methods. My own narrative and
memories of a pre-earthquake Bhaktapur and the extensive archives I ref-
erenced are interspersed with stories of inhabitants and the continually
shifting contours of a post-disaster landscape. Calvino continually breaks
binary distinctions between insider and outsider, visitor and inhabitant
through various literary devices and the shifting of narrative power
(Cavallaro 2010). Expanding on the thematic lenses that Calvino deployed,
I inhabit multiple positions myself: as researcher I present my own version
and memory of the city, while I simultaneously attempt to foreground
hierarchies and marginalities operating within the urban to present lesser-
known narratives of Bhaktapur. Here, rather than a simple layering of the
past, there is continuous mixing of temporalities brought forth through
memory and history. Bhaktapur remains inserted in multiple moments
between the past and the present (Crang and Travlou 2001). Drozdzewski
et al. (2016) argue that memory is inherently spatialized, whether it be
through physical interventions or narratives and discourse. Memories can
be purposefully positioned, strategically reinforcing specific versions of the
past and shaping identities in the present. Places are made and remade
through reconstruction, as new interpretations and narratives are imposed
upon the city and new meanings are presented (De Nardi 2019). By exam-
ining the stories that residents shared with me about the ongoing pro-
cesses of reconstruction in Bhaktapur, I contrast individual memory and
desire with other dominant imaginaries authorized and valorized by the
city, the state, and the international community.
“It Will Be Same as Before”: Remembering

and Forgetting Through Reconstruction
January 2020. At the eastern edge of Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square, there is

a flurry of activity at the foot of a massive series of stepped brick platforms
that form the plinth of the Silu Mahadev Temple, which collapsed in 2015.
The height of the platforms hint at the presence of an impressive landmark
in the city. Currently, this is one of many ongoing heritage reconstruction
projects within Bhaktapur (Fig. 16.1). Three men carefully offload newly
carved stone columns from a small truck, which will be installed in pairs
along each of the four sides of the temple. This is the second time this
temple is being reconstructed following an earthquake, since it was first
built in the seventeenth century. The platform has survived multiple earth-
quakes, changing political regimes and the annual onslaught of vegetation
that grows after each monsoon and pushes its way between the brickwork.
The guardian animals have survived, mostly intact, their stone joints filled
in over decades with cement and silicone sealants.
In its first iteration, the Silu Mahadev temple would have been the tall-
est shikhara temple, and the second tallest structure within Bhaktapur,
towering over the city’s skyline. The temple first collapsed in the 1934
Bihar-Nepal Earthquake (Fig. 16.2). Subsequently, a squat and unadorned
brick temple with a dome, plastered in lime stucco, was built in its place.
The domed temple came to be known colloquially as Faasi Dega, which in
Nepal Bhasa translates to “pumpkin temple,” a humorous reference to the
dome. This version was a distinct departure in size, form, and materials,
adopting the prevailing Rana style introduced in the early twentieth cen-
tury, more functional as an austere shelter for the surviving Shiva deity,
than as a religious landmark of a Newar kingdom. Following the 2015
Gorkha Earthquake, it is the first iteration that currently serves as the tem-
plate for ongoing reconstruction (Fig. 16.3). Though little physical evi-
dence remains from that time, an old painting and nineteenth-century
photographs serve as broad guidelines. Other brick shikara temples within
the Durbar Square are also used to guide proportions and individual tem-
ple elements (e.g., the stone columns, timber door-frames), while new
construction details have been designed by local structural engineers to
strengthen the structure of the temple. “Is this punarnirman (reconstruc-
tion)?” I ask contractor Sanu Suwal, commissioned to execute the work.
Surely, what is being reconstructed is not the earlier temple but something
else entirely. There are precious few photographs and paintings of the
214 V. ARORA
Fig. 16.1 Ongoing reconstruction of the Faasi Dega in January 2020.

(Photograph by Vanicka Arora)
iteration preceding Faasi Dega, certainly not enough to dictate the carving
on the stone columns or the decorative door frame. This leaves everything
up for conjecture and imagination, rather than living memory, I assert. He
reassures me that it will be the same as “before.” The previous “pumpkin”
version was not right. This will be better, he adds confidently.
Fig. 16.2 The various iterations of the Silu Mahadev Temple before and after the
Bihar-Nepal Earthquake of 1934, drawn from various photographic references
circulating among residents. (Figures by Vanicka Arora)
Fig. 16.3 The various iterations of the Silu Mahadev Temple before and after the
Gorkha Earthquake of 2015, drawn from various photographic references circulat-
ing among residents. (Figures by Vanicka Arora)
Other residents that I interviewed in general echoed Suwal’s senti-

ments. While local priest Binod Ram Sharma thought the temple was
undergoing a substantial degree of change, another local contractor
opined that the temple was being reinstated to its “original” state.
Punyeshwari Lage, hired to clean bricks for Faasi Dega and assist with the
ongoing reconstruction, was convinced that the temple would not only
look like the pre-1934 version, but that it would also be stronger in the
face of the next earthquake. Representatives from the Heritage Section of
the municipality clarified that the evidence for reconstruction was deemed
“insufficient” only if one were to consider Western frameworks such as the
216 V. ARORA
UNESCO World Heritage Convention (UNESCO WHC 2019) and vari-

ous international heritage conservation charters and policies and that such
frameworks failed to account for the local knowledge that went into build-
ing and rebuilding practices. They argued that the pre-1934 temple
counted as “original,” so it was befitting to return to it. To assure me that
the new structure followed the original template, several residents showed
me early twentieth-century photographs of the temple that were circulat-
ing on social media. A local carpenter explained that the collapsed Faasi
Dega was an opportunity to rectify mistakes that had been made in the last
iteration. The newly reconstructed temple would complete the space, and
the deities would be happy to be housed in a proper home again.
The decision to switch forms and aesthetics for the Faasi Dega (among
several other buildings that have been previously reconstructed) has been
critiqued extensively by various representatives of UNESCO and the
International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), who have
repeatedly brought up concerns of historic and material authenticity,
integrity, and heritage value in context of Bhaktapur’s ongoing recon-
struction. Within the authorized heritage discourse (Smith 2006), recon-
struction is one of the most contested practices, deemed acceptable only
in “exceptional circumstances” (UNESCO WHC 2019), such as the after-
math of disaster or conflict. Though this framing has seen increasing cri-
tique and interrogation in recent years, particularly as Asian perspectives
on heritage and its management have gained prominence (see, e.g.,
ICOMOS 1994; Silva and Chapagain 2013; Byrne 2014; Byrne 2019;
Rico 2014), debates on reconstruction are, for the most part, still unre-
solved. In Nepal, centuries of catastrophic earthquakes have meant that
the concept of cyclic renewal is embedded within the building culture of
the country (Chapagain 2008; Tiwari 2017). This is informed by historic
Vaastu texts and knowledge systems, popular in both rural and urban con-
texts, through formalized patronage as well as quotidian practices of care.
The Great Bihar-Nepal Earthquake of 1934, the shifting contours of
Nepal’s political regimes, and the subsequent opening up of national bor-
ders to tourism and international institutions have meant a paradigm shift
in reconstruction practices for built heritage (Amatya 2007; Chapagain
2008). The institutionalization of heritage—through the Department of
Archaeology, established under the national government in 1952, as well
as through international institutions like UNESCO—has created multiple
points of disjuncture between so-called traditional and modern recon-

struction practices. In Bhaktapur, this institutionalization has been rein-
forced over several decades by the Bhaktapur Development Project, an
urban regeneration intervention funded by the Federal Government of
Germany that was planned and executed from 1972 to 1982. Thus, recon-
struction following the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake has been a constant
negotiation between pre-existing (re)building practices and those that
have been introduced more recently through internationally funded inter-
ventions (Arora 2022).
The question of whether Faasi Dega should have been reconstructed at
all was answered in affirmative, even if what constituted the “original”
temple remained ambiguous. Most residents I spoke with remembered
the “pumpkin” dome, the animal guardians, and the large platforms. Yet,
the temple is no longer part of the vast pantheon of city-level religious
places. Almost nobody could recall who the current assigned priest care-
taker of the temple was, nor recall the last major ritual or ceremony held
there. Why, then, was the collective desire of locals to return the temple’s
“original” form so resolute? Even though most locals had no living mem-
ory of the Silu Mahadev Temple prior to 1934, a collective commemora-
tion of the temple’s aesthetic persists, reinforced by the photographs that
continue to circulate on social media platforms. This produces a hybridity
between memory, imagination, and desire. The desire of the majoritarian
Newar community in Bhaktapur is driven partly by a need to erase the
Rana aesthetic that was popularized in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies and write over it, reclaiming a historical narrative. This particular
period of history remains fraught in the Newar imagination, since it repre-
sents the systematic subjugation of their language, culture, and traditional
practices by the Rana-Shah regime. Reinstating the pre-1934 form is thus
a political forgetting and remembering. During many of our conversa-
tions, residents brought up the notion of reconstruction as an opportunity
for “correction.” Here, a past could be written over and its relationship
with Bhaktapur’s identity could be reconfigured. A different past could be
constructed into the present and carried forth into the future. Nevertheless,
like Zaira, Bhaktapur is a city of “relationships between the measurements
of its space and the events of its past” (Calvino 1974, 10). Faasi Dega and
its relationship with Bhaktapur’s spaces and peoples, even after multiple
reconstructions, contains a complex and layered past. This becomes evi-
dent if one knows where to look. Its name references the pumpkin form,
even as the form itself is built over and its plinth and guardian animals
218 V. ARORA
contain the physical signs of several centuries of decay and care. While
each of these relationships and their associated memories are soaked up
“like a sponge” (ibid., 10) in the city, the past can also be created and
repurposed for the present through reconstruction.
“Everything Has Changed”: Neo-Newar Homes

in Bhaktapur
April 2019. Toward the west of Bhaktapur’s Durbar Square is Khauma

Tole, one of many neighborhoods that make up the city (Fig. 16.4). It is
a two-minute walk away from the main tourist entrance to the square and
the starting point for most visitor itineraries. For several months, I lived as
a temporary resident of Khauma Tole, renting a four-story home con-
structed in 2006, a curious mix of traditional Newar domesticity and mod-
ern streamlined living. The kitchen and dining space were on the top floor
Fig. 16.4 A house in Khauma Tole damaged during the 2015 Earthquake.
(Photograph by Vanicka Arora, 2019)
with a living space below that and sleeping spaces below that. The ground
floor was used mostly for receiving outsiders. This vertical division is typi-
cal in most traditional Newar homes. In stark contrast to earlier house
types, however, each floor has an independent bathroom, heated water,
and excellent plumbing, all fed from an underground tank filled every few
weeks, a privilege that meant I never had to stand in line for the municipal
water tankers. A washing machine and a dishwasher were luxuries few resi-
dents could afford. The house, a reinforced concrete structure, was clad in
glazed brick tiles. The main door was machine carved, and Buddhist flags
adorned the terrace. Inside, instead of the unfinished mud floors typical of
a traditional Newar home, there was ceramic tile, cement flooring, and
rough carpeting.
From my window, I could almost reach out to the house across the
street, an older masonry building showing decades of wear and tear, miss-
ing window-panels, and a corrugated sheet roof. From my terrace, I could
peer into a shared courtyard enclosed by two homes that appeared to be
well over a century old. Supports made of bamboo, metal, and timber held
up portions of bulging walls. At first glance, one of the homes was bus-
tling with activity, but the other building did not seem inhabited: large
sections of walls were missing, and weeds had overtaken the roof and
upper story. Over the next few weeks, I realized that what I had assumed
was a ruin, possibly crumbling since the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, was
still somebody’s home, precarious though it seemed. Human and animal
inhabitants would dart in and out from the two lower stories, navigating
their way through the still livable spaces in the building. Six months later,
when I returned to the neighborhood, the house had disappeared into a
pile of rubble. Behind this scene of decay, at least four new homes were
being built again, some like the one I was inhabiting, while others were
more austere versions. Various shades of terracotta brick tiles, machine-
carved timber windows, and flat concrete terraces with water-tanks dot the
landscape. The family had moved to a smaller home in the vicinity. Because
their building had technically not fallen directly after the earthquake, the
family was not eligible to receive reconstruction funds. A neighbor rue-
fully told me that the Khauma Tole of her childhood was disappearing
amidst all these new dhalan (reinforced concrete frame) houses.
Architects and urbanists studying Bhaktapur refer to the dhalan house
as a “Neo-Newar” or “Pseudo-Newar” house type. Occasionally, the style
is derogatorily referred to as the “Disney” house type, referring to the
globalized commercialization of heritage that is solely for fulfilling tourist
220 V. ARORA
desires. However, I found that the dhalan home is the outcome of com-
plex interactions between individual and collective aspirations and a need
to memorialize certain aspects of Bhaktapur’s urban aesthetic. On the one
hand, new homes constructed or reconstructed within Bhaktapur’s heri-
tage zones need to adhere to a complex set of municipal guidelines and
those set by the Department of Archaeology to qualify for approval and
potential financial incentives. On the other hand, these homes represent
individual aesthetic tastes, functional aspirations, the availability of land,
budgetary considerations, and the location of the house. The palette of
dacchi appa (glazed bricks) that were used historically in Bhaktapur by
affluent and dominant caste families are now ubiquitously translated into
a range of terracotta shades, sizes, and depths, depending on vendors and
costs. Some of the new constructions use high-quality bricks of propor-
tions and materials similar to their antecedents, but a wide array of brick
tiles or machine-cut bricks are also in circulation. The famed Peacock
Window in the Dattatreya Square of Bhaktapur, an elaborately carved tim-
ber masterpiece, is imitated countless times in smaller and less ornate ver-
sions, carved in wood or pre-cast in cement and installed as a skylight or
above a doorway. The jhingati (clay tile) roof has been almost universally
replaced by a flat terrace, but here too different concessions to the munici-
pality’s code are evident. Some of the terraces have concrete projections
mimicking parts of a slope and tile profiles in cement concealing tanks or
solar panels behind them. The convenience of having an accessible terrace,
which requires none of the annual maintenance that the jhingati need,
seemed to be desired universally in Bhaktapur. The Newar configuration
has also been superseded, with several homes serving as guesthouses and
residences, or as cafes and shops, serving the thriving tourist industry of
the city.
Furthermore, the widespread popularity of the Nepal Workers and
Peasants Party (NMKP) that has continuously governed the municipality
for over three decades, along with the introduction of newer tourism-
based professions in the city, have resulted in a shifting of caste and class
lines, allowing new modes of mobility and access. While inequalities based
on caste, ethnicity, gender, and religion are still widespread, signs of
change are evident. The upward class mobility of some of Bhaktapur’s
residents is reflected in the Newar house types themselves. Historically,
marginalized castes were not allowed within specific neighborhoods in the
more privileged sections of the city (Levy 1990; Gutschow and Kölver
1975). They had to inhabit homes that were modest in both scale and
materials: thatched roofs instead of tiles, austere exteriors instead of elabo-

rate wood carvings. These versions of the Newar house have almost disap-
peared now (Parajuli 1986; Gutschow 2011), either modified and
upgraded over several years or replaced entirely with the dhalan house,
bringing about a greater sense of uniformity in the overall built fabric of
the city. Following the Gorkha Earthquake, the National Reconstruction
Authority (2016) has emphasized the need to strengthen houses being
reconstructed, which has resulted in a greater emphasis on reinforcing the
concrete frame, with more steel being added to beams and columns.
Before the earthquake, and certainly after it, the underlying fabric of
Bhaktapur has changed. The emergent aesthetic recalls a sense of nostalgia
for the traditional Newar lifestyle, but it is firmly rooted in the present,
responding to the inevitability of change brought about simultaneously by
modernity and disaster.
Nevertheless, the collective memory of the Newar home persists in
Bhaktapur. Much like Marco Polo’s description of Maurilia, the city which
is frozen in time as a postcard (Calvino 1974, 30), nostalgia and longing
are recurring themes in the recollections of my participants when they
described Bhaktapur’s changing homes and neighborhoods. Sri Prasad
Prajapati, a 70-year-old potter and farmer, described at length his child-
hood home: the thicknesses of masonry walls, the mud flooring that kept
the interiors cool in summer, and the low ceilings and small windows that
trapped in heat during winters. Suyog Prajapati, a young art historian,
rued what he felt was the irretrievable loss of Bhaktapur’s wooden craft
that was displayed in architectural details of the old homes. The home was
a central site for memory, drawing together residents and creating a col-
lective, spatially constituted identity (Crang and Travlou 2001; De Nardi
2019). The site of the home, however, was now also confronted by the
changing landscape of the city. Smith and Campbell (2017) argue that the
notion of heritage is inextricably linked with nostalgia and the fetishiza-
tion of specific aesthetics, values, and histories. Both aspects of the Newar
house—as an aesthetic as well as a representative symbol of a specific life-
style—were simultaneously venerated in the narratives of many (though
not all) of my participants. Some of my participants were quick to point
out the myriad issues of the “old” houses, which needed continual, expen-
sive maintenance and upgradation to be inhabitable. These people also
stressed that newer forms of construction were cheaper and faster. Rita
Suwal, a local guide, told me that while she took tourists to see the older
houses and neighborhoods to offer a sense of how people lived
222 V. ARORA
“traditionally,” those places presented daily challenges for those who actu-
ally lived there. The “postcard” Bhaktapur and post-disaster Bhaktapur,
like Maurilia, inhabit the same place, though not the same timeline. The
postcard version of memory is tinged with nostalgia, (almost) always supe-
rior to the present, which is diminished not only by the earthquake, but
also by the tectonic forces of modernity.
Conclusion
Bhaktapur presents to the world a pervasive sense of permanence, high-
lighting the continuity of some of the central spaces of the city and their
most significant buildings. This permanence has little to do with form or
material, given the degree of change that the city has seen, both as a post-
disaster landscape and as a city coming to terms with the forces of global-
ization. For residents, there is a duality between continuity and change.
From public and communal heritage spaces to individual homes, the city
of Bhaktapur must straddle multiple, conflicting ideas about past and pres-
ent, tradition and modernity, heritage and transformation.
When asked specifically about their desires for reconstructing Bhaktapur’s
official sites of heritage, most participants were confident that reconstruc-
tion should be the “same as before.” However, “same” and “before” are
both loaded terms. They mean different things to different participants. It
is possible, then, that “same as before” has considerable elasticity as a
description. Unlike conservation terms like material authenticity or visual
integrity, which refer to an exacting standard and level of expertise, “same as
before” is filled with myriad possibilities. “Same” is more of an approxima-
tion. It refers not to a painstaking identification of the “original” material,
form, or even craftsmanship. “Before” can refer to any number of histories
and memories.
In Bhaktapur, tourists are drawn in by the highly curated, crafted ver-
sions of a past that is continually recreated in the present. Bhaktapur is a
city that is presented as “medieval” even though significant portions of its
built fabric have been reconstructed in the last 50 years. It is presented as
an ideal of Newar tradition and life, even though no singular version of
this exists. What version of Bhaktapur is presented to tourists and what
imaginaries do they observe and carry back with them in the form of
memories? What versions are residents commemorating and imagining,
and how are multiple desires negotiated in the post-disaster landscape of
the city? Bhaktapur’s narrative, much like the narrative of Invisible Cities,
straddles multiple temporalities and resists linearity. The past shifts in the
present through the transformation of memories. This settling and unset-
tling of both time and space influence the traveler’s ability to discern the
real from the illusory. Much like Calvino’s position, rooted in instabilities
and uncertainties (Cavallaro 2010), Bhaktapur is a city of specificity and
multiplicity in both memory and desire.
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the World Heritage Sites of Kathmandu Valley. Kathmandu: Vajra Publications
and Eco Himal.
Arora, Vanicka. 2022. Reconstruction of Heritage in Bhaktapur, Nepal: Examining
Tensions and Negotiations Between the Local and the Global. Disaster
Prevention and Management 31 (1): 41–50. https://doi.org/10.1108/
DPM-03-2021-0093.
Bhaktapur Municipality. 2019. “Reports and Publications.” Accessed June 10,
2021. https://bhaktapurmun.gov.np/en.
Byrne, Denis. 2014. Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation
in Asia. New York: Routledge.
———. 2019. Prospects for a Postsecular Heritage Practice: Convergences
between Posthumanism and Popular Religious Practice in Asia. Religions 10
(7): 436. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10070436.
Cavallaro, Dani. 2010. The Mind of Italo Calvino: A Critical Exploration of His
Thought and Writings. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.
Chapagain, Neel Kamal. 2008. Heritage Conservation in Nepal: Policies,
Stakeholders and Challenges. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://digitalre-
pository.unm.edu/nsc_research/26.
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CHAPTER 17
The Weight of the City: The Burden

and Opportunities of Urban Villages
Irna Nurlina Masron and Emily Soh
The pursuit of relentless growth and the uneven development of cities

have resulted in overburdened urban agglomerations and overwhelmed
populations. The burdens may seem obvious, but not so the antidotes. Far
less obvious are the ways in which people can and do make things work in
the face of formidable odds. This reflective piece explores how Italo
Calvino’s (1974) Invisible Cities relates to “real” city life. The discussion
that follows synthesizes insights from existing works on real cities to rei-
magine urban issues and recast responses to them. Calvino’s cities defy
definition or recognition. Through the character of Marco Polo, Venice is
portrayed as seemingly distinct cities (Calvino 1974, 86). These abstrac-
tions offer ways to (re)frame contemporary real-world cities—to see and
I. N. Masron (*)
Department of Geography, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
e-mail: ibinte01@student.bbk.ac.uk
E. Soh
Department of Geography, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
e-mail: emily.soh@mail.huji.ac.il

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_17
226 I. N. MASRON AND E. SOH
understand their development and evolution beyond the obvious—and to

translate them across space and time. Conversely, real cities can contextu-
alize these abstractions, enriching Calvino’s cities and materializing the
common threads running across different cities to explore pathways for
contemporary urban problems. These include the increasingly contested
presence of urban villages, often labeled as informal settlements or slums.
Urban villages typically predate rapid urbanization in these cities and
evolve in their roles as providers of housing for the masses and labor for
the city (Wang 2016; Cairns and Friedrich 2014).
In particular, but not exclusively, we glean strands from three imaginary
cities in the book: Leonia, Berenice, and Andria. These cities express the
burden of the burgeoning city through images and notions of urban
expansion, resolute progression, density, overcrowding, and the infernal
city. They serve to uncover the overt and obscured narratives of real cities
through often evocative imagery and layered descriptions of the imaginary
cities. Calvino’s abstractions upend our expectations and insert a sense of
unfamiliarity, strangeness, and discordance, resetting our minds to look at
the subject anew.
Through these lenses, we probe the existing narratives of urban develop-
ment in Jakarta and Shenzhen, two metropolises in Asia where the urban
village as an important socio-spatial phenomenon is often rendered invisi-
ble. Our aim is not direct comparison or contrast of these two cities; rather,
to show through each case how the overlay of Calvino’s cities can interro-
gate common narratives, elicit less familiar ones, and assemble previously
unseen connections. Overt narratives, for instance, often portray the urban
village as the burden of the city. With its untamable informal settlements,
such sites appear as hindrances to modernization, and as dead weight on
scarce land. Obscured narratives may comprise those that reveal urban vil-
lages as housing the city’s unwanted, whose creative efforts to maintain vital
socioeconomic spaces in the city are understated.
Through the three Calvino cities, we explore mainstream and alterna-
tive narratives of Jakarta’s and Shenzhen’s urban villages on three broad
scales. The scalar lens is derived from the subject matter of each fictional
city. The macro narratives of the burgeoning city, both at global and city
levels, are explored through Leonia. Berenice unveils the narratives of the
just and unjust spaces intertwined at the meso level—that of the urban
village. Finally, Andria invites attention to the micro narratives of village
inhabitants and their efforts to sustain the city and their lives. In addition
to the scalar lens, we identified three thematic lenses from the Calvino cit-
ies: (1) centrality and peripherality, (2) expulsions, and (3) valorization.
17 THE WEIGHT OF THE CITY: THE BURDEN AND OPPORTUNITIES… 227
These thematic lenses offer entry points for reflection on the place, role,
and meaning of urban villages in Jakarta and Shenzhen.
Jakarta’s Urban Villages

The narratives of urban villages in Indonesia, and in particular Jakarta, are
usually negative, much like the periphery of Leonia, whose land and dwell-
ers disproportionately bear the weight of urban growth, environmental
degradation, and the collective moral failings of inequity, precarity, and
misrecognition. This may be a consequence of how a city “refashions itself
every day” (Calvino 1974, 114), where the insatiable appetite for novelty
and a continual supply of consumer goods and entertainment result in
abundant and quality waste. This process of consumption and waste is not
unique to Leonia but affects and is replicated in other cities near and far,
creating a vicious cycle where “the boundaries between the alien, hostile
cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other,
overlap, mingle” (ibid., 115). Real cities like Jakarta also face such cur-
rents of consumption and urban change, with the metropolis personified
to be “always dressed in new clothes” (Calvino 1974, 116). Real cities are
confronted with the pressure of urban competition and global urban
trends as they pursue the smart city, the livable city, the sustainable city,
and other labels or criteria by which cities are ranked (Acuto et al. 2021).
Calvino observes the expansionist hubris of cities, where “in the nearby
cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to
push into the new territory, expand” (ibid., 116).
In Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, urban change—propelled by
globalization and the ambitions of city authorities and developers—hap-
pens rapidly (Shin and Lopez-Morales 2018; Widyaningsih and Van den
Broeck 2021, 3). This constant transformation renders major parts of the
city increasingly unrecognizable, often with detrimental effects on the
environment and its residents. The amount of waste produced by the met-
ropolitan area of over 30 million people amounted to over 14,000 tons
per day, going to landfills which are fast becoming overloaded (Andapita
and Atika 2020). Workers keep the pile growing higher as there are few
other alternatives. It is not only waste that gets expelled from these cities
in their unrelenting quest for development: people, settlements, and tradi-
tional ways of organizing a city are forced out too. Evictions of urban vil-
lages have been the modus operandi of city authorities since independence
in 1945 to make way for new urban megaprojects and environmental risk
mitigation measures (Widyaningsih and Van den Broeck 2021).
In Jakarta during the Dutch colonial period, urban villages (kampungs)
were segregated based on inhabitants’ ethnicity, religion, and occupation
(Kusumaningrum et al. 2020). Urban villages were mostly built on agri-
cultural lands before the city took over (Irawaty 2018; McCarthy 2013).
Over time, urban kampungs became important housing, social, and eco-
nomic areas for migrants to the capital and for a majority of the growing
city population (Akbar and Edelenbos 2020, 3). These settlements are
typically low-income housing which are commonly labeled as informal,
though with varying degrees of informality. Such ambiguities originate
from the complex dual land system in Indonesia, whereby the large infor-
mal market consists of mostly unregistered or locally registered kampung
lands, while the formal market comprises nationally registered lands
(Kusno 2012). Today, these urban villages continue to differ in their legal
status, density, and settlement characteristics (Akbar and Edelenbos 2020,
6). Some kampungs now accommodate more middle-class migrants and
residents (Kusumaningrum et al. 2020), which may increase social mixing
and gentrification-led displacement risks at the same time. As in Calvino’s
Leonia, the question of what the future holds for a precarious and bur-
dened city and its inhabitants looms large in Jakarta.
In Calvino’s city of Berenice, where the just and unjust coexist within
each other, justice appears to be an elusive presence susceptible to misin-
terpretation and a lofty aspiration whose realization is vulnerable to cor-
ruption. The hope of Berenice is said to be found in the distinctive speech,
habits, and culture of its dwellers. Calvino further ventures that distin-
guishing the just requires carefully looking and knowing where to look:
the just “recognize one another by their way of speaking […] from their
habits which remain austere and innocent […] from their sober but tasty
cuisine” (Calvino 1974, 161). If one extrapolates this as a critique of
knowing the city, this could be a call to examine cities at the human level.
Technical innovations and solutions of urban renewal and environmental
management are often incomplete approaches. In comparison, social
innovations and endeavors addressing spatial justice and environmental
issues, while attending to cultural and historical concerns, are often under-
estimated (Widyaningsih and Van den Broeck 2021).
In the interplay between information and truth, Calvino suggests that
one can get closer to the true picture of the city by mining the data of
human experiences: “From these data it is possible to deduce an image of
the future Berenice, which will bring you closer to knowing the truth than
other information about the city as it is seen today” (Calvino 1974, 162).
Yet he also cautions on human tendencies (pride, in particular) and the
delicate and challenging nature of ensuring justice: “in the seed of the city
of the just, a malignant seed is hidden” (Calvino 1974, 162). Well-
intended plans and actions cannot escape susceptibility to corruption and
injustice. Closely related to this is time as a recurring theme throughout
the book, emphasizing the potentiality of the present to shape the future—
“all the future Berenices are already present in this instant” (Calvino 1974,
163)—and how every effort toward a more just society also needs to con-
sider latent injustices. Unraveling the concept of time as a single-
dimensional measure of linear progress in which urban development is
narrowly measured and analyzed, we find that social life is more complex.
Communities may have their own conceptions of time and organize their
efforts accordingly (Tilley 2017).
Tracing the current heritage-making efforts of urban villages in Jakarta,
inhabitants secure their future in the city by drawing on cultural assets and
memories. This entails a set of values distinct from the market-oriented
approaches of state and private sector-led historical conservation
(Widyaningsih and Van den Broeck 2021, 14). Recent examples include
Kampung Tongkol and Kampung Luar Batang in North Jakarta. These
urban villages choose to focus on local cultural discourses and everyday
living heritage to engage residents. This is in contrast to the official dis-
courses of tourist attractions and heritage commodification that narrowly
focus on colonial heritage, often at the expense of local needs and aspira-
tions. For Kampung Tongkol, which lies along the Ciliwung riverbank and
is prone to flooding and eviction threats, heritage-making was initiated by
the local community (Elyda 2016). They faced the challenge of convinc-
ing the authorities to allow them to remain and redevelop according to
their own plans (Widyaningsih and Van den Broeck 2021). Combining
self-upgrading with heritage-making, they have been successful thus far in
staying in place under improved conditions, instead of being evicted or
displaced. Meanwhile, Kampung Luar Batang was identified by the gov-
ernment in the early 1990s as one of the important historical kampungs
that should be rehabilitated and preserved. Nevertheless, its existence was
at risk as a deteriorating neighborhood without much government sup-
port and sited on prime land slated for redevelopment (Subroto 2006).
However, community organizations in collaboration with academics and
activists in the last few years mounted a challenge to city authorities’ plans
for flood mitigation and new tourist sites, which would displace the resi-
dents (Gabriel 2016). Kampung Luar Batang today is being revitalized in
better alignment to residents’ aspirations that incorporate historical, cul-
tural, and socioeconomic contexts (Sembiring 2021).
These two examples portray the existential issue facing urban villages:
the struggle to sustain themselves in the city amidst power differentials,
resource asymmetries, and the danger of gentrification once the heritage
label is applied. In their attempt to confront the negative effects of neolib-
eral urbanism and resist expulsions, cultural movements driven by urban
village communities in Jakarta consist of both working against and within
neoliberal capitalism to “create culturally sustainable environment as an
alternative model for the Global South” (Budianta 2019, 241).
Communities work to reclaim and sustain their commons in the city
against commodification and state- or market-driven land enclosures
(ibid., 244). These are also attempts to lift the status of the kampung by
making it an exemplar of national heritage, in order to overcome its cur-
rent ambivalent state. As Kusno (2019) describes: “The kampung is cen-
tral and yet peripheral at the same time. It is simultaneously in and out of
place. It is geographically in the ‘middle’ of the city, yet it is seen and
unseen at the same time” (ibid., 961).
Calvino’s city of Andria unveils a microcosm of innovation, community,
and ground-up movements which strive to make urban villages visible
again. Outsiders perceive the seemingly obvious lives of Andria’s citizens—
“painstakingly regimented” and apparently “not subject to human caprice”
(Calvino 1974, 150). Yet this view belies the innovations and transforma-
tions that the citizens effect, for which they find retroactive justification in
the celestial realm. Andria, therefore, calls for consideration of the per-
spectives and lived experiences of inhabitants before making judgments of
what is valuable. It calls for looking underneath the surface for the
obscured. This can open a way for citizens to carry out a holistic assess-
ment of the potential changes that their innovations might mean for
“themselves and for the city and for all worlds” (Calvino 1974, 151). It
guides us in the search for change and innovation that remains cognizant
of local challenges and needs—probing not only the macroeconomic and
societal structures that shape human behavior, but also the micro, ground-
up movements that strive for harmony between their pursuits and others
affected by them.
Against the backdrop of uneven development in Jakarta, urban villagers
face heterogeneous challenges in ensuring the continued existence of their
neighborhoods. Despite insufficient government support and the added

pressures of preserving their ways of life amidst rapid urban change and
environmental disasters, urban villagers have conducted participatory
approaches to make meaningful progress for their community. Syahid
et al. (2020), for example, show how an ethnically diverse kampung com-
munity collaborated to preserve the heritage mosques in their area while
ensuring that spatial needs for other community activities were met. Under
the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many physical heritage-making prac-
tices have had to be reduced or halted. Thus, urban villagers have used
digital technologies to continue their heritage-making activities, especially
by getting academics and practitioners to talk about various aspects of
their sociocultural and religious life to a wider audience beyond the locals.
Identity affirmation—the recognition of the community’s existence and
value amidst evictions, environmental risks, disrupted livelihoods, and
health concerns—continues to be an important component of citizenship
and cities. As Calvino reminds us, such affirmations of community require
a street-level perspective rather than the abstract, bird’s-eye view of plan-
ners and officials.
Shenzhen’s Urban Villages

Urban villages arguably form an integral part of Shenzhen’s transforma-
tion into “China’s instant city” (Du 2020) over the past 40 years. The
growth of urban villages supported the growth of the city. Without them,
there perhaps would not be the wealthy, advanced, and well-planned part
of the city. At the very least, Shenzhen would be a completely different city
if bereft of its distinctive socio-urban core of urban villages, home to sev-
eral million dwellers. Urban villages tell—or, in fact, are—the story of
Shenzhen’s urbanization. They arose from swathes of agricultural land
appropriated for urban uses. Instead of cultivating fields, landowners built
apartment blocks and became landlords offering low-cost apartments to
inland migrants flooding the city in search of opportunities. Shenzhen’s
urban villages—or chengzhongcun in local vernacular—have been variously
called “a scar on the city” (Yan 2008, 57), “hotbed of disorder and social
anomaly” (Zhang 2011, 481), built of “decrepit material infrastructure”
(Li et al. 2021, 4). In a more positive light, they have been characterized
as an urban phenomenon of “extraordinary social vitality and typological
diversity in spatial configuration” (Yan 2008, 59).
The narratives of Leonia can find their resonance in many real-world

cities burgeoning with the weight of growth, grappling with the meaning
of urban renewal, and undergoing processes of expulsions. In relation to
Shenzhen’s urban villages, we interrogate these macro narratives, attend-
ing to the themes of urban renewal and expulsions.
First, at the global level, Leonia reflects the phenomenon of Shenzhen’s
urban villages vis-à-vis other informal settlements around the world.
Scholarly works on Shenzhen’s urban villages often identify broad similari-
ties with global examples of inner-city or peri-urban residences, squatter
settlements, shanty towns, and informal housing of various manifestations
(e.g., Indonesia’s desakota or Brazil’s favelas). These broad patterns pres-
ent narratives on the socioeconomic role and meaning of these informal
settlements; their urban form, structure, and function as part of the larger
city; and the daily realities and livelihoods of their inhabitants. However,
an overdependence on global narratives may glide over the distinctive fea-
tures of Shenzhen’s urban villages. Wang (2016, 6), for instance, resists
the idea that Shenzhen’s urban villages are slums, suggesting that there is
“mild orientalism” at work when a singular concept gets imposed onto the
broad diversity of Asia and Latin America. Wang argues that Shenzhen’s
urban villages are distinct in their rural-to-urban transformation and their
present-day urban characteristics; they are not squatter settlements but
are built on land owned by the original urban villagers. As such, they are
not collapsible alongside the desakotas of Indonesia or barrios of Latin
America. This calls for more differentiated narratives on themes of precar-
ity (e.g., land tenure, livelihoods of inhabitants), urban poverty, crime,
and urban blight. An examination of Shenzhen’s urban villages can recast
these ideas.
Moving the lens of misrecognition from a global perspective to that of
a city, a stark duality of urban spaces is brought into question: the rich,
gleaming, and modernist Shenzhen contrasted with the city’s urban vil-
lages. How does the former view the latter? Do narratives at the city level
reveal a better understanding of urban villages, or does misrecognition
persist? With its core of ultramodern buildings and an increasingly well-
heeled population, Shenzhen is becoming one of China’s wealthiest cities.
Consequently, the city’s urban villages, many of them located in close
proximity, come into an increasingly striking contrast. Does the new
expanding Shenzhen, like Leonia, begin to expel whatever does not con-
form to its image and ways of life? Today, Shenzhen’s urban villages, given
their prime locations, are being demolished in large-scale urban renewal
projects to make way for planned, often luxurious, developments. Like

Leonia’s expansion that pushes its boundaries, the imagined peripheral-
ity—metaphorical rather than spatial, in this case—of Shenzhen’s urban
villages is increasingly swallowed up by the center.
At the meso-level narratives focusing on the urban villages themselves,
we evoke Calvino’s city of Berenice depicting the duality of its just and
unjust cities, which, in their co-dependence and struggle, engender a new
future city. As with Berenice, Shenzhen’s celebrated places hide the dual
natures of the city, and under those dual natures lays the very falsification
of duality. As the two natures are inextricable from each other, together
they engender the future city. Like its fictional counterpart, Shenzhen’s
celebrated places tell only a partial, or even superficial, part of its story.
The “austere and innocent” speech and the “sober but tasty cuisine” of
Berenices may parallel the perceived unpolished language and culture of
the urban villagers. Instead of the binaries of rural-urban, informal-formal,
poor-wealthy divides, and instead of being parasitic weight upon the city
evoked by images of informal settlements around the world, Shenzhen’s
urban villages are the mechanisms of urbanization, assimilation, media-
tion, and adaptation (Bolchover 2018) that soften the dualities for its
dwellers. Shenzhen’s wealthy core and its urban villages are symbiotic and
co-dependent. As Bach (2010, 423–425) notes, “villages appear simulta-
neously as the city’s condition of existence and perceived obstacle to prog-
ress, its recognized heritage and its hidden past, its location for menace or
entrepreneurial exuberance […] The coevolution of city and village occurs
precisely because both city and village use the ambiguous space that
Shenzhen created between the urban and the rural to take advantage of
each other.” As such, the urban villages play the role of fostering and
enabling the evolution of the city and its citizenry. The urban villages have
been a constant witness and contributor of the city’s historical and con-
temporary development, as well as a key cultural identifier of Shenzhen as
its heartland of authenticity and vibrant cultural concoction represented in
food, urban life, and neighborliness. Such are seeds and momentum of
urban evolution held latent in urban villages, and together with its gleam-
ing and forward-looking counterpart of the modernist city, they are bound
up in their co-evolution and coproduction of future urbanity.
Focusing on the micro-level of the urban village, Calvino’s Andria may
be a fitting metaphor for the creation of the urban villagers in Shenzhen’s
wider scheme of planned socio-spatial developments writ large. Yet, rather
than having the citizens’ creations reflected in the cosmos like in Andria,
Shenzhen’s urban villagers’ daily practices reflect the authenticity of their

life circumstances, as their city-making is grounded in societal knowledge
and action. Kochan (2015) finds that the liminal qualities of public spaces
in the urban villages afford an ambiguity and dynamism that can give rise
to creative and diversified use of communal spaces. These spaces reshape
identity, engender the use of local knowledge, and foster social interac-
tion. Such alternative communal areas include street corners where ped-
dlers and hawkers gather, communal water taps where residents wash
laundry and dishes, and more. This kind of urbanity—with the semblance
of spontaneous village life—is increasingly antithetical to the planned,
managed, purpose-built public spaces in Shenzhen. Such liminal spaces
give rise to its dwellers taking agency. Backholm (2019) observes how,
arising from precarity of livelihood, urban villagers appropriate liminal
spaces to engage in social and small business activities, using a kind of
“tactical urbanism” (de Certeau 1984) to set up shop in the absence of (or
in defiance of) regulations. This is usually accomplished through simple
material interventions like setting up display tables for goods and make-
shift signboards. At a neighborhood scale, the collective agency of the
urban village entrepreneurs contributes to much of the vibrancy and life
that make up the urban village.
As with Andria, which portrays citizens’ actions in daily life and in city-
making, in Shenzhen (and Jakarta), we put forth that the recognition of
the work and practices of urban villagers valorizes their creative industry,
identity, and citizenship.
Resonant Strands
Taking the narratives of Calvino’s fictional cities as departure points, this
chapter has probed the prevailing narratives about urban villages in Jakarta
and Shenzhen. In some instances, this entailed undermining and reimag-
ining them, recasting them in a different light. Much like Leonia and its
ever-mounting periphery, urban villages in both Jakarta and Shenzhen
straddle the ambiguity between centrality and peripherality at the geo-
graphical, metaphorical, and functional levels. The urban villages and the
cities in which they are found are engaged in contests of narratives and
meanings. This is not only true at the community level, but also at the
urban and global levels. Some of these narratives cast blame and doubt on
the continuing relevance of urban villages, often to justify their erosion
and erasure. Like the just and unjust Berenice, the apparent polar
opposites that seek to outdo the other to ensure its own perpetuation,
urban villages run a trajectory of urban development that often goes
against the grain of the “official” ones. This often results in the expulsion
of urban villages as their respective cities embark on ambitious redevelop-
ment projects. In such cases, urban villages are frequently represented as
exhausted relics of yesteryear, dissonant with the gleaming futures often
imagined by city officials and developers. Resisting these obliterating nar-
ratives and forces, urban villagers often reclaim their place in the evolving
urban life by valorizing place and identity and by highlighting the eco-
nomic and sociocultural role played by such spaces and their inhabitants.
Finally, like Andria’s inhabitants who put their knowledge, speech, and
actions to meaningful and significant creations, urban villagers use theirs
to present alternatives for more locally driven, just ways of urban renewal
and sustenance.
Acknowledgments We thank our friend Dominic Cooray for his helpful feedback
on our drafts.
References
Acuto, Michele, Daniel Pejic, and Jessie Briggs. 2021. Taking City Rankings
Seriously: Engaging with Benchmarking Practices in Global Urbanism.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (2): 363–377.
Akbar, Poeti Nazura Gulfira, and Jurian Edelenbos. 2020. Social Impacts of Place-
Making in Urban Informal Settlements: A Case Study of Indonesian Kampungs.
Social Sciences 9 (6): 104.
Andapita, Vela and Sausan Atika. 2020. “Skyscraper of waste: Greater Jakarta drown-
ing in mountains of trash.” The Jakarta Post, May 20, 2020. Accessed December
12, 2021. https://www.thejakartapost.com/longform/2020/05/20/
skyscraper-of-waste-greater-jakarta-drowning-in-mountains-of-trash.html.
Bach, Jonathan. 2010. ‘They come in peasants but leave citizens’: Urban villages
and the making of Shenzhen, China. Cultural Anthropology 25 (3): 421–458.
Backholm, Johan. 2019. “Urban Redevelopment in Shenzhen, China Neoliberal
Urbanism, Gentrification, and Everyday Life in Baishizhou Urban Village.”
Master’s thesis. School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Bolchover, Joshua. 2018. “Palimpsest Urbanism.” Accessed November 17, 2021.
h t t p s : / / w w w. e -f l u x . c o m / a r c h i t e c t u r e / u r b a n -v i l l a g e / 1 6 9 8 0 1 /
palimpsest-urbanism/.
Budianta, Melani. 2019. Smart Kampung: Doing Cultural Studies in the Global
South. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16 (3): 241–256.
Cairns, Stephen, and Eva Friedrich. 2014. “Kampung City: Fragile Obduracy, or
the Urban ‘Ship of Theseus Paradox’.” Future Cities Laboratory Magazine:
44-53. Accessed December 21, 2021. https://www.researchgate.net/
publication/317258706_Kampung_city_Fragile_obduracy_or_the_
urban_%27ship_of_Theseus_paradox%27.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven
F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Du, Juan. 2020. The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Elyda, Corry. 2016. “Kampung Tongkol residents propose to guard heritage,
river.” The Jakarta Post, May 24, 2016. https://www.thejakartapost.com/
ne ws /2016/0 5 / 2 4 / k a m pu n g-t o n g k o l -r esi de nts-p r opose -g ua r d-
heritage-river.html
Gabriel, Renaldo. 2016. “Inside Luar Batang, a Slum at the Center of the
Anti-Ahok Movement.” Vice, November 22, 2016. https://www.vice.
com/en/ar ticle/bm85mz/inside-l uar-b atang-a -s lum-a t-t he-c enter-
of-the-anti-ahok-movement.
Irawaty, Dian Tri. 2018. “Jakarta’s Kampungs: Their History and Contested
Future.” Master’s thesis. University of California Los Angeles. Accessed
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———. 2019. Middling Urbanism: The Megacity and the Kampung. Urban
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CHAPTER 18
Don’t Nuisance the Relented City:

Community Barriers and Urban “Keepers”
in Haedo, Buenos Aires
María Florencia Blanco Esmoris
People from Haedo stay in Haedo. That people who move in two blocks away
from their homes, happens so often. I don’t know people from other neighbor-
hoods who don’t want to leave. Most of them want to go somewhere else […]
Except in Haedo. Those who have left, left because they had no other choice.
—Extract from the Facebook group “Republic of Haedo”1
Tranquility, silence, decelerated rhythm, stillness, peacefulness, calm, and

serenity are some of the adjectives used by the inhabitants of Haedo
(Municipality of Morón, Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina) to describe the
town where they live. Their routine and clustered habitat express a distinc-
tiveness in the middle of an amplified urban space located only 40 minutes
away from the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (from now on “the
M. F. B. Esmoris (*)
Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS-CONICET/IDES),
Buenos Aires, Argentina
e-mail: mblancoesmoris@unsam.edu.ar

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_18
240 M. F. B. ESMORIS
city”). The urban experience (Segura 2015) of Haedo seems to mark a dif-
ferent beat, alien and strange for those not living there. Haedo is not a
gated community, but there are borders and socio-urban barriers percep-
tible to any passerby. A copious foliage of its lime trees, low-lying build-
ings, and a leisurely tempo—linked to intermittent commercial activity
that stops during siesta time—mark some of its decelerations, producing a
particular experience of tranquility. In this domain, a sense of community
built on a long-standing sociability includes a precise knowledge of local
families, landmarks, trades, sites, and milestones as part of a socially shared
heritage experience. In this scenario, Haedo inhabitants seek to maintain
the town in its slowness, charm, and tranquility. They do so as a way of
resisting dramatic socio-spatial transformations linked, for example, to
broader real estate markets and as a way of safeguarding “what one has” in
a context of major structural uncertainty.2 In effect, this phenomenon
exposes moral values in an unequal city, a city for which some inhabitants
claim to be urban “keepers” (guardianes).
Calvino’s (1974) Invisible Cities contains all manner of fantastical urban
scenes, but not all of them are enchanted. Many also offer elegiac depic-
tions of cities undergoing homogenization, relentless sprawl, uncontrolled
growth, and existential threats. Thekla is a city always under construction
(ibid., 127). In Procopia, Marco Polo watches unchecked overpopulation
gradually makes the city less livable (ibid., 147). The cities of Cecilia (ibid.,
152–153) and Penthesilea (ibid., 156–158) both speak to the rising threat
of rampant growth and peri-urban sprawl. In the face of such urban prob-
lems, Calvino challenges us to think of new ways to inhabit our cities. The
residents of Haedo are engaged in just such a project. Haedo residents
actively and consciously seek to decelerate and distinguish themselves
from the chaos, noise, and speed of Buenos Aires. In so doing, they both
imagine alternative urban futures while reinscribing particular modes of
exclusion.
In this chapter, I reflect on some families’ withdrawal from the expan-
sive urban experience to neighborhoods that enable another way of life, an
escape from superficial and immediate urban relations. As I will present,
this decision is articulated with family experiences in the area and social
expectations created through a socialization established over decades, a
sociability embedded in the daily life and socio-economic conditions that
make this feasible. This analysis is the result of an ethnography carried out
from 2015 to 2019, when I conducted a fieldwork with four family houses
in Haedo and its surroundings.
18 DON’T NUISANCE THE RELENTED CITY: COMMUNITY BARRIERS… 241
Care and Tranquility in the “Republic of Haedo”

In Haedo, the oldest houses usually have two stores, front gardens,
exposed bricks, and large terracotta roofs. Smaller ones are distinguished
by their gable roofs, smooth concrete walls with a certain touch of color,
and solid wooden doors. Most recent constructions have smoothed con-
crete walls in pastel tones, black galvanized sheet roofs without tiles—an
important difference with respect to the older chalets—and garages with
gray metallic gates. Among some of these styles are the buildings of the
families I studied with, who dedicate work and effort to “their houses”:
caring, nurturing, maintaining, cleaning, and securing them. But between
these families,3 it is not only about taking care of the house, it is about
taking care of their local ties, their neighborhood, and Haedo itself.
The inhabitants of Haedo protect its existence as the town’s “keepers,”
even if this entails various economic and social efforts to shield the locality
from a booming urban development that they see as “dangerous” and
“invasive.” Residents fear that such transformations potentially could “make
Haedo lose the charm of a town.” These moralities scale in a city that is
experienced as a placid place where time feels different and linden trees
appear to shape it as a fortress. Haedo is a town that was born with the rail-
way at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the area functioned
as a summer retreat for wealthy families of “the city” of Buenos Aires (Saez
2010), a place with large and spacious country houses. At the beginning of
the century, together with the city of Ramos Mejía (Municipality of La
Matanza), it was a place of escape from “the city,” but such rest and leisure
was only available to a minority of people. Later, in the twentieth century,
Haedo was associated with a booming industrial process. Its consolidation
as a neuralgic point of communication between the districts of the interior
of the province generated the installation of several factories and industrial
plants fundamentally because of the railway development.
Over the decades, Haedo attracted many manufacturing facilities pro-
ducing ceramics. With the factories came workers who could not find a
place in “the city” due to overpopulation and high living costs. The prolif-
eration of mutual organizations and workers’ associations was vital in a town
that was torn between workers and affluent people. The industrial boom in
Haedo, and also in Morón, led to a population increase, with a growing
number of workers beginning to settle permanently in the area. Although
some working-class neighborhoods were generated around the station,
especially on its northern side, Haedo’s urban physiognomy—particularly
its southern side—remained largely unchanged, with its wide streets and tall
trees. After the mid-twentieth century, the size of Haedo’s population
stayed constant.4 Likewise with its urbanization and architecture, Haedo has
maintained larger plots of land, houses with big front gardens, and facades
resembling those of a countryside-style building. Today, Haedo stands as a
desirable area in which to live for the middle classes (Kamitz 2015).
If residential neighborhoods and their dwellings became expressions of
desire for various social sectors, especially in recent decades for the (new)
middle classes, so did the social and moral communities associated with
them. It is worth noting that alluding to the term community in urban
worlds has its complexities. People in Haedo refer to this term both in a
practical and a symbolic sense (Anderson 1993). Anthropologists studying
dynamics related to cities and rural-urban migration have looked closely at
the discontinuity produced by the passage from a supposedly traditional
life in the place of origin to a more “modern” one in the urban world
(e.g., Banton 1957; Little 1965).5 In the case of Haedo, however, an
opposite movement is taking place, one promoting a life of calm in what
is supposed to be a quieter suburban town. In this scenario, the notion of
community appears as a key to understanding a particular relationship
with “the city.” This relationship is expressed as Haedo residents mobilize
different values to distinguish themselves from the big city of Buenos Aires.
Face-to-Face Neighborliness: Social Classification

as Barriers
Some time ago, Gloria, a Haedo inhabitant, pointed out to me that she
“couldn’t live anywhere else.” Haedo implied access to a certain calmness,
a sheltered place where “she knows people.” For many inhabitants, Haedo
represents a form of self-enunciation and affirmation of who they are, but
also of who they are not. Gloria and her husband Ariel have most of their
family residing in and around Haedo. Among the families I work with,
Haedo constitutes a “desirable” horizon of urban life. Gloria feels safe
because she knows and is known. She shops in local stores and takes part
in different activities in the locality—for example, going to the Sagrada
Familia Catholic church, attending a sport group in southern Haedo, and
even keeping most of her and her family’s doctors in the vicinity of the
city. These are vital subsistence activities that create a shared social fabric.
For Luisa, a dentist living to the south in Morón, and Rosa, an entre-
preneur of aesthetic products, Haedo also appears as a horizon of fulfill-
ment. This is especially true for Rosa, who continues to affirm herself as
part of “Haedo Norte” despite living, in administrative terms, in El
Palomar. Somehow, the city surpasses its topographical outline by grasp-
ing peoples envisioning and narratives. Rosa sells products at the gym,
located in northern Haedo. So, Haedo’s material reproducibility can be
associated with a locality offering other opportunities and publics to her
ongoing business. On the other hand, Luisa refers to Haedo as an upward
lifestyle, as a desired town where you can look at people’s eyes and “rec-
ognizes them.” It also evokes a sense of tranquility. Likewise, a newcomer
woman in Haedo named Isabella takes advantage of the town’s commer-
cial circuits and the “security” related to the size of the town and its social
ties. Desire and narrative. Imaginary and experience. Communal ties and
face-to-face contacts. Such expressions delineate what inhabitants want
and what they don’t want, as a moral prefiguration of the search for a
reposeful urban life, where noise and bodies appear as sensorial modes of
perceiving the other.
Gloria circulates between Haedo and neighboring localities like Ramos
Mejía, El Palomar, and Morón. Gloria and her family go almost exclusively
to the city to see her sister, who lives in the Villa Crespo neighborhood of
Buenos Aires. For Gloria, the city suffocates her. By contrast, Haedo
implies access to a certain tranquility that is not achieved in the “big city.”
Her prescriptions regarding noise and “the unwanted” are articulated
with other practices and geographical displacements carried out by
the family.
Gloria’s circulation is linked to her sensorial modes of perceiving space
and opposing the less desirable modes of life in the city. Gloria often told
me she finds annoying that everything in Buenos Aires is a “bardo.”6 By
bardo in the city, she means that things are lying in the street, that there
are no bins, no traffic lights, no street signs, no wells. There is a lack of
“tidying up,” which indicates to her that the neighbors are not clean and
do not care about their city. Gloria even “avoids” other cities like Morón
due to this. But recently, she has noticed characteristics of this kind in
Haedo because of its real estate renovation and new urban developments.
As a result, she started to take part in neighborhood WhatsApp and
Facebook groups about Haedo. These groups commemorate the town’s
past while at the same time seeking to secure the current Haedo. Rosa
shares some of Gloria’s prejudices related to strangeness, although she
does enjoy certain “untidy” city activities, like carnivals held in February.
Middle-class perceptions seem to actualize modes of belonging and desire
through performative acts, all while constructing social differentiations
(Douglas 2007) that are materially and racially anchored.
Little by little, based on the dialogues, I wove together a set of catego-
rizations that were constituted from inhabitants’ stories and practices:
bardo and chaos (“the city”) versus tranquilidad and neat spaces (Haedo);
safe and clean (Haedo) versus dirty (Morón city). Negative judgments,
alluding to that which is undesirable and inappropriate, highlight particu-
lar canons of appreciation. These classifications are often linked to “nega-
tive” experiences associated with noise, pollution, dirt, traffic, and fear in
“the city” and other localities. Thus, such oppositions were overlaid with
different criteria that ranked localities and municipalities according to
these characteristics, whether desirable or undesirable, resulting in a life-
style withdrawal to preserve urban community in Haedo.
Haedo is referred to as a separate space, a town where a better life is led.
This sort of separation, attributed to the city and claimed by its inhabit-
ants, has its roots in various historical, urban, and social processes.
Inhabitants seek to enhance and safeguard a variety of characteristics
deemed positive: green space, class proximity, neighborliness, and face-to-
face ties. For example, Gloria ensures that her children participate in vari-
ous activities related to their schooling and sports. She also maintains an
agenda of social and family events. This was experienced differently by
Luisa, who had always felt a kind of stigmatization due to the area where
she lives in Morón Sur, a factory and workers’ area. In Haedo, there was a
geographic translation of what she understood as social progress. For this
reason, she expressed her aspiration to move away from Morón and build
other experiences that could reconnect her with other parts of herself and
her class-oriented projects. This, perhaps, is the inevitable flipside to sub-
urban fantasy, the constitutive exclusion upon which its tranquility and
closeness depends. Nevertheless, the experience of Haedo residence them-
selves tends to prize a slower, more sociable place in contradistinction to a
variety of other urban spaces.
Conclusion
Haedo shapes a community that gives meaning, urban arrangements, and
tranquility to its practitioners. Its inhabitants protect their existence as
“keepers” of the town, even if this entails various economic and social
efforts to shield the locality from a booming urban development that they
see as “dangerous” and “invasive,” a boom that potentially threatens to
“make them lose the charm of a town.” Part of the morality is inscribed in
their residents’ long-standing trajectory in the town and its surroundings.
In a global framework that tends to think of cities as seats of openness
supported by futuristic ideas, innovation, rapid change, technology, indus-
trial development, and digital mediations, Haedo gives precisely the oppo-
site impression: an enclosed and relented city. In a way, the communalist
logic in Haedo, based on its particular urban history, reveals different
senses of otherness and values imputed to that which is perceived as
strange. Its inhabitants are wary of outsiders’ permanence and try to pre-
serve their urban environment by favoring commercial ties between
acquaintances and by privileging transactions based on face-to-face rela-
tionships. Newcomers, as Isabella, quickly perceive themselves as part of a
sociability that alternately excludes and values them.
According to Haedo’s people, strangeness can be connected to unfa-
miliar types of mobility within the city. The strange is tied to (im)moral
descriptors such as dirty, noisy, and chaotic. Such descriptors paint the city
as a “bardo” full of “unknown” faces and bodies. Haedo, by contrast,
seeks to recreate a kind of avoiding mechanism as a form of care, under-
stood in terms that are both exclusive and excluding. In Haedo, move-
ment through the city brings into play a set of distinctions that mobilize
evaluative classifications about the built space and the circulating bodies.
It remains for us to be attentive to why and how people produce a deceler-
ated experience of life in and around the city. This is exactly the sort of
attention called for by Invisible Cities itself. It is through such experiments
that alternative urban visions take shape and also where the policing of
moral boundaries organizes new invisible walls.
Notes
1. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.
2. In this municipality and in others in the province of Buenos Aires (Argentina),
from 2015 to 2019, people saw their living conditions eroded and degraded.
At the end of 2015, Mauricio Macri, leader of the political force Cambiemos,
became President of Argentina. During his term of office, various measures
were implemented that led to disruptions and setbacks in issues of social and
political rights (Simonetta 2019).
3. These families perceive themselves as middle class by socio-demographic

criteria (e.g., income, privatized education and health services, professional
development, and homeownership).
4. Even with small fluctuations, Haedo has generally maintained a stable num-
ber of inhabitants: 41,475 in 1991, 37,906 in 2001, 37,745 in 2010
(Síntesis Histórica del Partido de Morón 2014), and 41,509 in 2014
(Informe Acumar 2014).
5. For more on the notion of community and moral communities in anthro-
pology, see Robert Redfield (1941, 1955), Julian Pitt-Rivers (1971 [1954]),
and Anthony Cohen (1985). Somehow those who live in Haedo do so
because of its size, its sociability, or because they feel, according to one
Haedo inhabitant, that they lead “a village life in the city.”
6. “Bardo” is a simplification by apocope of the Lunfardo word balurdo, which
means mess, trouble, or problems.
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1993. Comunidades imaginadas. Reflexiones sobre el origen y
la difusión del nacionalismo. Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Banton, Michael. 1957. West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown.
Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute.
Cohen, Anthony. 1985. The Symbolic Construction of Community. London:
Tavistock Publications.
Douglas, Mary. 2007. Pureza y peligro: un análisis de los conceptos de contami-
nación y tabú. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Nueva visión.
Informe Acumar. 2014. Informe Sociodemográfico y de Salud del Partido de Morón.
Observatorio Unidad Sanitaria Ambiental de Morón. Dirección General de
Salud Ambiental.
Kamitz, Romina. 2015. Condominios Urbanos. Análisis sobre el polo residencial de
Ramos Mejía, Haedo y Villa Sarmiento. Alternativa para la revalorización de
enclaves urbanos en áreas potenciales para el desarrollo inmobiliario. [Tesis de
Maestría, Universidad de Belgrano]. Repositorio de tesis Universidad
de Belgrano.
Little, Kenneth. 1965. West African Urbanization: A Study of Voluntary
Associations in Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pitt-Rivers, Julian. 1971 [1954]. The People of the Sierra. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Redfield, Robert. 1941. The Folk Culture of Yucatan. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
———. 1955. The Little Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Saez, Graciela. 2010. Morón, de los orígenes al bicentenario. Municipalidad de Morón.

Simonetta, Juan Cruz. 2019. La exaltación del populismo penal. Análisis de la
política se seguridad del gobierno del presidente Mauricio Macri durante los años
2015-2019, tesina de grado en Ciencias Políticas. Argentina: UNR.
Segura, Ramiro. 2015. Vivir afuera. Antropología de la experiencia urbana.
UNSAM Edita.
PART III
Cities & Practice

CHAPTER 19
The Architect and Invisible Cities
Nicola Fucigna
Why do architects gravitate to Italo Calvino’s (1974) Invisible Cities? At first

blush, it might seem that Calvino’s fantastical imagery is what pulls an archi-
tect into the text. But it is his conversations with reality—in all its psychologi-
cal, social, historical, and changing complexity—that lend his work its lasting
impact. This meditation explores why Calvino’s work fascinates and inspires
architects in particular. Reading Invisible Cities in relationship to architec-
tural texts—that is, buildings and writings by architects—provides new
insights into both. Four case studies from architecture—Il Teatro del Mondo
(Venice), De Schalm Community Centre (Deventer), The Guggenheim
(New York City), and The Shed (New York City)—are used to hold a mirror
to Calvino’s Invisible Cities and reveal overlapping captivations.
Imagination and Reality

In 1979, Aldo Rossi designed Il Teatro del Mondo, a modern version of
the sixteenth-century floating pavilions of the same name that temporarily
dotted Venice’s waterways during the annual water festival. Rossi’s
N. Fucigna (*)
Rowell Brokaw Architects, Eugene, OR, USA

Switzerland AG 2022
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252 N. FUCIGNA
floating theater stood 82 feet above its steel raft. The Teatro was com-
posed of multiple geometric forms: a cuboid, flanked by rectangular vol-
umes, which supported an octagon, which, in turn, supported a turreted
metal roof. Square windows and rectangular doors punctuated these vol-
umes. Above the roof, a finial of a steel flag rose from a metal sphere. The
Teatro was clad in bright yellow wood. The raft, the doors, and the tops
of the volumes were all painted sky-blue. Constructed in the Fusina ship-
yards, the Teatro was towed into Venice by tugboat and moored off the
Punta della Dogana. After many theatrical performances (the theater
could seat up to 250 people) during the 1979–1980 Venice Biennale, the
theater traveled across the Adriatic to Dubrovnik where, after more per-
formances, it was disassembled.
Many of the ideas that inform Rossi’s Teatro and the effects produced
by Rossi’s Teatro resonate with the architecture Calvino created in Invisible
Cities. Both use imagery to tap into collective and personal memory. In
the Teatro, Rossi’s forms evoke not only the typology of Venice—for
example, the triangular pediments and strong verticals of Palladio’s
churches, the towers and domes of the Salute, the golden ball of the
Dogana—but also, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the typology of Maine
with its stark lighthouses. Similarly, Calvino’s imagery evokes Venice and
beyond. In the first section alone, Calvino describes cities with domes,
statues, canals, bastions, ports, wells, and towers. He intentionally disrupts
these old, historical, Venetian elements by also introducing skyscrapers
and camels (the desert) along with defamiliarized materials: lead for
streets, a crystal theater, and seashells on spiral stairs. These disruptions
help to transform the particular city, Venice, into all cities.
Calvino invents versions of what Rossi (1982) called “the analogous
city.” Rossi developed this concept by examining a painting by Canaletto,
in which Canaletto places three projects by Palladio into a townscape of
Venice—he does this in an extremely realistic manner, even though two of
the projects, the Basilica and the Palazzo Chiericati, are located in Vicenza
and one of the projects, the Ponte di Rialto, was never built. Rossi asserts
that this “fantasy view of Venice, [this] capriccio … nevertheless
constitute[s] an analogous Venice” that “we recognize” (Rossi 1982,
166). Although Rossi ultimately used the concept of the analogous city to
inform his neorationalist design method, this concept also applies to indi-
viduals’ experiences of the city.
In Invisible Cities, Calvino offers analogous versions of Venice—dis-
torted by imagination, myth, personal experience, collective history, the
19 THE ARCHITECT AND INVISIBLE CITIES 253
unconscious, and even other cities, but Venice all the same. Rossi writes of
his theater: “The tower of my Venetian theater might be a lighthouse or a
clock; the campanile might be a minaret or one of the towers of the
Kremlin: the analogies are limitless, seen, as they are, against the back-
ground of this preeminently analogous city” (Rossi 1981, 67). Similarly,
Calvino writes in the opening city, Diorama: “All these beauties will
already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities”
(Calvino 1974, 7). Calvino, like Rossi, generates imagery that leverages a
paradoxical sense of geographic fluidity and singularity.
The titles of the works, The Theater of the World and Invisible Cities,
speak to the intention on the part of both artists of using the analogous to
evoke the psychic and universal. In both works, architecture goes beyond
set and backdrop to partake in the symbolic and unconscious. Rossi inten-
tionally docked the theater by the Dogana, “a place where architecture
ended and the world of the imagination or even the irrational began”
(Rossi 1981, 66). In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo also evokes an imaginary,
unconscious realm that might appear irrational but has its own logic:
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of
their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful,
and everything conceals something else” (Calvino 1974, 44). Ultimately,
both Calvino and Rossi create a tension between the built object and its
psychic resonance.
Even as Calvino’s cities become more fantastical and symbolic, the
rigor of the author’s imagination is part of an architect’s fascination with
the cities. How would you detail Zenobia’s hanging sidewalks? Can a city
be built on stilts? Many cities and buildings are mirrored in water, but
could one create a true mirror city? Calvino famously wrote: “[F]antasy is
a place where it rains” (Calvino 1993, 81). In another passage from his
lectures collected in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino asserts
that his apparent flights of fancy are grounded in the rational:
Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like

Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dreams or into the
irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from
a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cog-
nition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade
away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future.
(Calvino 1993, 7)
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Although it is tempting to equate Calvino’s use of “lightness” with imagi-

nation and “heaviness” with reality, he complicates this simplistic reading,
for “lightness” also involves “logic” and “verification.” A large part of the
lasting power of Calvino’s imaginative work is in its conversations with
reality.
Because Rossi’s Teatro is a built structure rather than an imagined/lit-
erary one, in some ways, it creates the inverse of Calvino’s cities: its lasting
power results from its conversations with imagination. Rossi subverts our
basic understanding of a building as a stationary, fixed object that will
outlast us. The building itself is quantifiable, with its precise measure-
ments and materiality, but its effect feels unquantifiable. Rossi writes that,
in the theater, “the architecture serves as a possible background, a setting,
a building that can be calculated and transformed into the measurements
and concrete materials of an often elusive feeling” (Rossi 1981, 33).
Rossi’s Teatro vividly embodies his concept of “exalted rationalism,” a
logical-rational design process with an emotional, subjective core. As with
his concept of the analogous city, the concept of exalted rationalism can
also be applied to individuals’ experiences of the built environment: real,
measurable buildings can appear uncanny, half-remembered, and even
anthropomorphic. The Teatro can be interpreted as an analogy for an
individual’s experience of life—temporarily moored “at the start and end
of every voyage” (Rossi 1981, 66)—refracting all who we encounter—
traveling through life only to be dismantled at journey’s end.
Tonally, Calvino and Rossi’s works feel similar. Even as Calvino explores
darker themes, such as death and environmental destruction, there is a
buoyancy and resiliency inherent within the inventiveness of the descrip-
tions. A childlike wonder combines with the world-weary traveler’s per-
ceptions to create a sensation of memory and invention. Calvino and
Rossi’s works are haunted by birth and death, wonder and melancholy,
reverie and rigor.
Structure and Possibility

In Invisible Cities, the overarching structure—the book’s megastructure,
if you will—can be classified as a spine with a fixed sequence of cities
arranged according to category, so that in all but the first and last sections
there is a repeated descending order of themed cities: 5–4–3–2–1, where
each number corresponds to the introduction (first appearance) and rep-
etition (second appearance, third appearance, etc.) of a city theme. After
the fifth recurrence of a theme, that theme disappears from the book and
gives way to other themes or categories. In all sections, these sequences
are bookended by the commentaries between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
Within this megastructure, there exist substructures that also knit the
book together: the naming of each city with a female name; the subtle
repetition of phrases at the beginning of cities to suggest the sense of arriv-
ing and departing places, of constant traveling (“from there,” “after three
days,” “the traveler,” etc.); the use of lists. Many of these substructures
can be attributed to the viewpoint of these cities; we experience them fil-
tered through Marco Polo’s perspective and narrative.
What are the effects of this intricate structure? Thematically, the megas-
tructure enacts the rise and fall of cities—simultaneously, for as a city theme/
category ascends in number and exposure, it also nears elimination from the
pattern. This structure also speaks to the overall complexity of each city,
which often through its idiosyncrasies fights against its own categorization
and creates its own hidden connections with other cities. A reader remem-
bers Leonia or even just the image of a mountain range of indestructible
leftovers surrounding a city and forgets that this image and its city are part
of the Continuous Cities category. Meanwhile, Leonia becomes linked to
the other cities whose built environment foregrounds waste.
If each city is also thought of as a substructure that links back to the
megastructure, then there is, at times, a friction between the two. Still,
despite each city’s singularity, Invisible Cities does hold together as a sin-
gle, cohesive work. Practically, the structure becomes, as Calvino explains
in an interview, “the plot of a book that had no plot” (Calvino 1992). It
becomes a way to hold everything—all the multiplicities—together.
An architectural equivalent to the structure of Invisible Cities is Dutch
architect Herman Hertzberger’s concept of “structure as a generative
spine” that “reconciles the diversity of individual forms of expression”
(Hertzberger 1991, 108). Hertzberger uses a metaphor to further explain
the concept:
Let us take the image of a fabric such as that constituted by warp and weft.
You could say that the warp establishes the basic ordering of the fabric, and
in doing so creates the opportunity to achieve the greatest possible variety
and colourfulness with the weft…. It is the weft that gives colour, pattern
and texture to the fabric, depending on the imagination of the weaver. Warp
and weft make up an indivisible whole, the one cannot exist without the
other, they give each other their purpose. (Hertzberger 1991, 108)
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In the case of Invisible Cities, the warp is the megastructure—the fixed

sequence of cities bookended by commentaries—while the weft is the sub-
structure—Marco Polo’s unique phrasings and perspective alongside the
striking attributes of the individual cities.
Of all the examples that Hertzberger chooses to illustrate his concept,
the De Schalm project for a neighborhood center, which lasted from 1972
to 1974, offers a launching point to further explore the structure of Invisible
Cities. In Hertzberger’s project, a “spinal street” (Hertzberger 1991, 112)
accommodates temporary structures, for special events, and more perma-
nent structures, such as prefabricated buildings that can be easily assembled
and disassembled according to the inhabitants’ needs; the street adapts to
different “accretions” (Hertzberger 1991, 112) (Fig. 19.1).
When applying this illustration to Invisible Cities, one realizes that the
commentaries between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan play an interesting
role in the overall structure. They are not static. They do not appear like
service areas—think bathrooms and drinking fountains—equally spaced
along the spinal street between the different textures and sizes of the cities
within their categories. Instead, they act more like streetlights and ground
lights; they influence the reader’s interpretations of the cities and the
actual cities themselves. They twist like the phosphate backbone of a strand
of DNA, with the cities stretched between, only becoming explicit at the
beginning and end of each chapter, where they cross when Polo and Khan
engage in conversation (Fig. 19.2).
This layering occurs throughout the text. When we learn in the com-
mentary that Khan dreams of “light” cities in response to the “wealth and
Fig. 19.1 Copy of Hertzberger’s diagram of the De Schalm project’s evolution

over time. (Diagram by Nicola Fucigna, based on Hertzberger [1991, 113])
Fig. 19.2 Diagram of the structure of Invisible Cities. (Diagram by Nicola

Fucigna)
traffic” of his empire (Calvino 1974, 73), we discover in the sequences

that follow cities with spiderwebs, threads, and stilts. After Khan squab-
bles with Polo that he never describes Venice, the next city in the sequence,
Esmeralda, most closely resembles Venice outwardly but is full of subver-
sive images, such as differing routes for those with “secret and adventur-
ous lives” and swallows whose paths cannot be fixed on the map (Calvino
1974, 89). While the commentaries seem to affect the cities, the cities,
conversely, affect and intrude on the commentaries, such as when Khan
tries to describe cities or find others in his atlas.
A differentiation of the two perspectives could be broken into the fol-
lowing dichotomies (with Polo as the first pole and Khan as the second):
cities as mutable versus fixed, impermanent versus lasting, heterogenous
versus homogenous, uncontrollable versus controllable, based on trade
versus conquest. And yet both Polo and Khan are deeply concerned with
meaning, preservation, and ultimately structure, though with some funda-
mental differences. Polo’s call to make room at the end can be read in two
simultaneous ways—as space and form, that is, form that adapts to the
pressures of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Khan’s vision for a “final city”
(Calvino 1974, 60) only makes form, with no possibility of change.
These disparities on the nature of form also manifest in their exchange
about the nature of a bridge. When Khan says, “Why do you speak to me
of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me,” Polo answers,
“Without stones there is no arch” (Calvino 1974, 82). Khan’s fixation on
the arch reveals his desire for one all-encompassing form, while Polo’s insis-
tence on the stones reveals his desire to not lose the individual forms that
make up a larger form. In terms of the De Schalm project, Khan would
have us focus on only the spinal street, whereas Polo would have us explore
the various, changing accretions. These different emphases evoke larger
discussions in architecture about the role of the client and user within the
258 N. FUCIGNA
creation of the design. Hertzberger ultimately decided that De Schalm was

a failed project. Inhabitants did not have enough design skills to create
distinct additions; instead, they erected generic, prefabricated ones that
rendered the weft uninteresting. According to Herzberger, they were given
“too much freedom” to create their own environment and the “‘light-
street’[…] developed into a shapeless mass” (Hertzberger 1991, 113).
Though architects and city planners can have reputations of being like
Khan, of wanting to achieve their singular and sweeping vision, many
strive to be more like Polo—that is, to be attentive to actual inhabitants,
in all their mutable ways.
Citizens and Users

In 1959, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened to the public in
New York City. A continuous spiraling ramp extends from ground level to
just under the ceiling skylight, rising six stories high to the oculus 90 feet
above, running about a third of a mile long (at a 3% grade), and expanding
from 100 feet in diameter at the bottom to 128 feet at the top. In Frank
Lloyd Wright’s design, visitors ride the elevator to the top and then slowly
proceed down the ramp while enjoying the artwork and the views across
the rotunda. People, like the artwork, can be viewed on various levels
simultaneously.
Although the organic form of The Guggenheim corresponds with the
fractal, continuous, or even infinite nature of many of Calvino’s images—
in particular, Isidora with its “spiral staircases encrusted with spiral sea-
shells” (Calvino 1974, 8)—the way actual users interact with the space and
each other is illuminating. The open rotunda—with its views above and
below, of past (just viewed) and future (soon to be viewed) artwork, of
other people viewing and being viewed—vividly evokes the constant
changing of perspective that Calvino’s cities exact. Polo relentlessly reveals
the misinterpretations and multiple valid interpretations of a city not only
by us readers/listeners/fellow travelers but also by the cities’ inhabitants
themselves.
The Guggenheim’s rotunda helps highlight the theatrical nature of
Calvino’s cities. The rotunda, which can accommodate up to 1500 visitors
at once, produces a staged space, a theater-in-the-round that places the
audience onstage. Although Calvino overtly likens the citizens in Melania
to actors who switch “roles” (Calvino 1974, 80) from “act to act” (Calvino
1974, 81), he more covertly creates this sense of roles through the lack of
personal names for people in the text and through the scrutiny given to
human dramas and relationships. Polo often finds himself on stage, whether
in conversations with Kublai or in the actual cities, such as Adelma, where
he finds himself absorbed into the “kaleidoscope” of dead people strug-
gling to recognize each other (Calvino 1974, 95). The constant changing
of cities, full of new actors and enactments, heightens a paradoxical sense of
temporality and endlessness. In some ways, the cities are like the contem-
porary artist installations in The Guggenheim. The featured artist trans-
forms the void at the center of the rotunda into a new, temporary space.
Several of these transformations resonate with Calvino’s text.
Jenny Holzer’s 1989 retrospective installation presented a series of aph-
orisms blinking in red, green, and yellow type that move across LED dis-
play boards along the inner concrete wall of the spiral ramp. These read like
modern versions of Calvino’s commentaries. Some of Holzer’s messages
have traces of Khan: WITH PERSEVERENCE YOU CAN DISCOVER
ANY TRUTH; RESTRAIN THE SENSES; and SCORN HOPE. Others
have traces of Polo: YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE
BY; ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE; and SCORN
CONSTANCY.
In Daniel Buren’s Around the Corner (2000–2005), the artist inserts
two sides of an implied glass cube (composed of square mirrors) that
bisect the entire rotunda. He inserts green strips, precisely spaced around
the upper part of the concrete balustrade, and covers every other pane of
the oculus—the building’s vast, 58-foot-wide skylight—with magenta fil-
ters. The glass creates a mirror (exact, reverse) image that fragments and
extends the architecture (with its new colors) and the people within.
Buren’s installation evokes Calvino’s fascination with reflected cities. The
glass has a water-like quality reminiscent of Calvino’s Valdrada, the city
built above a lake (Calvino 1974, 53–54). Much like the “Cities and Eyes”
series, the exhibit also heightens the self-consciousness of viewing, as peo-
ple see themselves and others reflected in the mirrors. The overall dizzy-
ing, labyrinthine effect of Around the Corner vividly dramatizes the
multiple perspectives throughout Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
In the 2011–2012 exhibit Maurizio Cattelan: All, the artist hung all
128 of his works from cables attached to an aluminum truss that hovered
above the rotunda. Taxidermied horses, donkeys, mice, and dogs dangled
beside photographs, life-size wax effigies, and paintings—objects that rep-
resented the artists’ feelings of failure (Smith 2011) were juxtaposed with
images of historic, often disturbing associations, such as an elephant
260 N. FUCIGNA
behind a cut-out white sheet suggesting the Ku Klux Klan’s robes. The
exhibition mirrors Calvino’s Octavia, hanging over the void, which, like
many of Calvino’s cities, also creates an unsettling combination of per-
sonal, shared, and fantastical memories.
The variety of these site-specific installations reinforce the notion that
The Guggenheim’s central void is a space no one artist—not even Frank
Lloyd Wright—can fully possess. In addition to this overarching subver-
siveness, these site-specific installations also establish a subversive relation-
ship with the viewer, who is asked to interpret, react to, and, in many
cases, participate in the work, whether by reading slogans, viewing and
helping to populate mirror images, or circulating around floating personal
and historically charged objects.
Although museumgoers, like the citizens in Calvino’s text, have some
autonomy as individuals, they are often treated as part of a collective or, at
least, heavily aware of their place within an overall collective. Calvino’s
doublings, triplings, and exponential, seemingly infinite multiplications in
such cities as Laudomia and Procopia often create a sense of a partisan col-
lective with different factions and beliefs. The effect is to increase the
weight and presence of others. Cities, after all, are diverse, heterogeneous
places. This becomes most apparent toward the end of Invisible Cities,
where cities start to suffer from overpopulation. Although the last line of
Calvino’s text, in which Polo calls for giving space, resonates with this
sometimes claustrophobic and agoraphobic tension, it also speaks to mak-
ing space for other, new voices.
The Guggenheim’s central void, in effect, makes room for multiplicity,
for each artist’s new “city,” which, in turn, must make room to engage
others (i.e., the viewers) in meaningful and often uncomfortable ways.
Then, the space gets subsequently reinvented yet again, literally making
room for the next exhibit/city and its new others to engage with—and the
cycle continues.
Designing the Future

In 2019, The Shed’s Bloomberg Building, a cultural center in New York
City, opened by holding multiple events at once—a series of music perfor-
mances, talks with curator Alex Poots, and a new Gerhard Richter exhibi-
tion. Inspired by Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun Palace (1961), The Shed was
designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with the Rockwell
Group. The design creates an infrastructure that can be endlessly reconfig-

ured by artists. Although the building contains multiple venues with vari-
ous audience and display capacities, its most striking feature is its
kinetic space.
The building quite literally can change its footprint. A 115-foot-high,
movable outer shell—made of lightweight, luminescent ETFE panels—
detaches from the 200,000-square-foot base building to cover the adjoining
plaza and make a 17,200-square-foot light-, sound-, and temperature-con-
trolled hall. The 1200 seats—or 2700 standing room—of the hall can be
expanded via the adjoining space in the base building to accommodate up
to 3000 people. Large operable doors can also be opened to connect to the
remaining outdoor public areas. The eight-million-pound outer shell struc-
ture moves on four single-axle and two double-axle bogie wheels, each six
feet in diameter. The deployment of the shell takes approximately five
minutes.
Like Calvino’s Berenice, “the unjust city” that is inextricably linked to
a reoccurring and simultaneous “just city” (1974, 161), The Shed has
been touted as the one bright spot of the controversial Hudson Yards
development. After the city rezoned Hudson Yards in 2009, developers
Related Companies and Oxford Properties Group were able to buy—for
one billion dollars—the “air rights” over a 28-acre section of the rail yard
for 99 years. The joint venture built a platform above both the eastern and
western portions of the yard on which to construct, according to their
master plan, 16 skyscrapers in two phases. Construction began in 2012
and is anticipated to be completed in 2024. The development has been
severely criticized as gentrification at its worst—giving amenities to the
ultrawealthy while uprooting and marginalizing the poor.
The Shed is positioned on the southern edge of the Hudson Yards
development. Although it occupies land that was set aside by the city for
cultural use, it is heavily associated with the private development. The
Shed has had to prove that it is not just servicing the rich; that it is not just
architecture preserving the status quo. Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio
+ Renfro believes strongly in “protect[ing] the public space” in a “rapidly
privatized world” (Diller 2018). Inequity and social barriers are evident in
many of Calvino’s cities (e.g., Anastasia and Hypatia). A subversive cur-
rent of secret passageways and human patina can be seen throughout the
text in response to oppressive social forces. The surprises within each city
become assertions of freedom. In a similar way, The Shed, as a nonprofit,
262 N. FUCIGNA
has sought to win over naysayers through its eclectic, cross-disciplinary,

and diverse programming (as well as discounted tickets). Each new artist,
like each of Calvino’s cities, is tasked with innovating a constantly chang-
ing world.
As a design, The Shed is striking in its radical, kinetic flexibility. On its
own scale, it is exactly the opposite of Calvino’s Zora, a city “forced to
remain motionless” (Calvino 1974, 16). As with the Guggenheim, it gives
shape to the space while still creating room for other creative work to
occur. Artists’ inspiration derives, in part, from a response to the particular
space, which, despite all its flexibility, is not neutral in its design. Elizabeth
Diller explains, “Often, flexible buildings are generic in form. We wanted
to make a flexible building that can have a strong architectural character.
Our goal was to create a building that would be so flexible, it would adapt
to a future it does not now know. It would be so flexible, it could even
change its footprint” (Mafi 2019). Although the sheer size and mobility of
The Shed—its changing footprint—obviously differentiate it from The
Guggenheim, The Shed also is different in its forward-projected uncer-
tainty, its advanced future-proofing that self-consciously strives to include
unknown future art forms and uses.
Another aspect of this future-proofing involves the environment. A
densely populated metropolis like New York City has many of the prob-
lems—particularly overpopulation, non-biodegradable waste, and envi-
ronmental destruction—that plague many of Calvino’s cities (e.g.,
Procopia, Leonia, Cecilia, and Theodora). In response, the architects
designed The Shed to incorporate many sustainable/green features. A
minimal amount of energy is used to power the outer shell: the rack-and-
pinion system requires 180 horsepower, less than the horsepower for a
Toyota Prius. The outer shell is constructed from the eco-friendly material
ETFE (Ethylene Tetra Fluoro Ethylene), a plastic polymer related to
Teflon that is 100% recyclable. Because of its lightness (approximately 1%
of the weight of glass), the shell can be easily transported and installed.
Another way the building saves energy is through its unprogrammed
space. As Diller observes, “When you don’t need it, you don’t need to
heat and cool it. But when you need it, everything is there” (Diller 2018).
And when the shell is nested over the building, the public can enjoy much-
needed open space.
Conclusion
At the end of Invisible Cities, it is tempting to concede that Khan’s pessi-
mistic vision of “the last landing place” for our increasingly polluted, over-
populated, unjust, unhealthy, and unhappy cities “can only be the infernal
city” (Calvino 1974, 165), destined to collapse from global warming, ter-
rorist attacks, epidemics, or other calamities. It is tempting to believe by
extension that architects, no matter how beautiful or ingenuous their
buildings, ultimately recapitulate the inherent ills in cities because they
often seek to build monuments to oppressive social structures. The work
of architects often raises the question: Whose city is it?
Cities frequently become the battleground of ideals in which different
visionaries imagine a future free of conflict. The future is often framed in
binary terms: harmony or conflagration. But for Polo, there is no future
event that is not already embedded in the present: “The inferno of the
living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already
here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together”
(Calvino 1974, 165). Polo’s call at the end of Invisible Cities “to seek and
learn who and what, in the midst of inferno, is not inferno” (Calvino
1974, 165) underscores the complexity of cities. Urban spaces, by their
nature, are full of irreconcilable conflicts and perpetual struggle—a het-
erogeny of parts and voices combining and recombining, one that never
reaches stasis and will always serve as a repository of our hopes, desires,
and fears.
Though Calvino worries about the problems of modern cities, this is
not the main focus of Invisible Cities. In a lecture delivered at Columbia
University, Calvino explained his intentions:
I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the
city, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live there. It
looks, indeed, as if we are approaching a period of crisis in urban life; and
Invisible Cities is like a dream born out of the heart of the unlivable cities we
know. […] The desire of my Marco Polo is to find the hidden reasons which
bring men to live in cities: reasons which remain valid over and above any
crisis. (Calvino 1983, 40)
Although one might point to many hidden reasons throughout the text—
many moments amorous or otherwise of shared humanism—to continue
to live in cities, architects will always be drawn to cities as the locations
264 N. FUCIGNA
where their dreams struggle off the canvas and come alive in three-
dimensional space. Here their buildings converse with other buildings and
with the people who inhabit them.
Of course, the architectural imagination has many missteps and backfir-
ings—it must account for misperceptions, contradictions, and unintended
consequences. Architects return again and again to Calvino’s text to expe-
rience the sheer inventiveness and vitality of his cities, all of which are
forged within the crucible of inferno.
References
———. 1983. Italo Calvino on ‘Invisible Cities’. Columbia: A Journal of Literature
and Art 8: 37–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41806854.
———. 1992. Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130. Interview by William
Weaver and Damien Pettigrew. The Paris Review #124 (Fall 1992). https://www.
theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino.
———. 1993. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Patrick Creagh.
New York: Vintage International.
Diller, Elizabeth. 2018. Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist. DLD Conference
2018: Space On Demand—Designing The Shed, May 1, 2018. Accessed
December 12, 2021. https://dsrny.com/press-release/elizabeth-diller-in-
conversation-w ith-h ans-u lrich-o brist-a t-d ld-c onference-2 018-s pace-o n-
demand-designing-the-shed.
Hertzberger, Herman. 1991. Lessons for Students of Architecture. 4th ed. Compiled
by Laila Ghaït and Marieke van Vlijmen. Translated by Ina Rike. Rotterdam:
010 Publishers.
Mafi, Nick. 2019. These 13 Buildings Redefined Architecture in the Past 5 Years.
Architectural Digest, August 6, 2019. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/
story/buildings-redefined-architecture-past-5-years.
Rossi, Aldo. 1981. A Scientific Autobiography. Translated by Lawrence Venuti.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
———. 1982. Preface to the Second Italian Edition. In The Architecture of the
City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Smith, Roberta. 2011. A Suspension of Willful Disbelief. Review of Maurizio
Cattelan: All. New York Times, November 3, 2011. Accessed December
12, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/arts/design/maurizio-
cattelan-at-the-guggenheim-review.html.
CHAPTER 20
Visible Cities: Calvino in Performance
Kyle Gillette
Leaving Rome and proceeding for an hour toward the northeast, you
reach Fara Sabina, a city with medieval walls, an alleyway of cats, a stairway
to nowhere. Down implausibly labyrinthine staircases and alleyways, you
behold the main church on the piazza, built over a temple to an obsolete
god. Across the piazza is a museum devoted to Sabine archaeology that
precedes the empire of Rome by centuries. Beyond the bell tower on the
belvedere and the bakery at its base—on a clear day—you can see all the
way to St. Peter’s.
As Calvino writes of Diomira, “these beauties will already be familiar to
the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities” (Calvino 1974, 7). But
in Fara Sabina, this sacred sense of recognition grew more uncanny for the
travelers who arrived on a warm evening in July 2016. Hundreds of spec-
tators from across the world—from Dubai to Rio de Janeiro—gathered in
This chapter includes brief rewritten selections from my book The Invisible City:
Travel, Attention and Performance (Routledge, 2020).
K. Gillette (*)
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA
e-mail: kgillett@trinity.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_20
266 K. GILLETTE
front of a stone wall near a small café. Here at the top of one of the highest
of the Sabine hills, just below the gates to the medieval village of Fara
Sabina, an international group of performers assembled, artists from
Tokyo to Tehran. A woman in a half mask and top hat incanted into a
microphone. She spoke words she has uttered in dozens of cities and lan-
guages around the world, but tonight in Italian: “Spectators, follow us;
this voyage will take you to the invisible cities hidden by the walls of houses
and the weight of boredom.” She invited us to “follow the path of sounds,
walk alongside the images,” to “see the apparitions of the seers and the
splendor of the blessed, the market of passions and the suburb of the
nomads.” Her words interpellated spectators as mobile travelers, not pas-
sive audience members. We were here to explore the city’s suggestive
appearances, its mysteries and nuances, its affective economies, its contra-
dictions and ghosts.
Two monasteries have called this village home for centuries: one an
order who vowed silence, the other whose members passed messages from
their silent sisters to the city beyond. One convent continues to function,
even though it must rent out its rooms during the summer. The other has
become a theater. Teatro Potlach, cofounded by Pino Di Buduo and
Daniela Regnoli in 1976, rebuilt the monastery’s structure to create a
space devoted to intercultural performance as anthropological research
after working under the director Eugenio Barba (founder of Odin Teatret
and the International School of Theatre Anthropology). On that July
night in 2016, Teatro Potlach celebrated its fortieth birthday and staged
the twenty-fifth anniversary performance of its ongoing Invisible Cities
project in the city where it all began. Since 1992, under the direction of
Di Buduo, the group had staged this project in dozens of cities interna-
tionally, mostly in Europe and the Americas. Each production responds to
the particular history, mythology, and geography of the specific city whose
streets and buildings it haunts. The only constant is the structure of the
fixed route: scenes change with the pace of the spectators’ steps, the direc-
tion of their attention.
In Fara Sabina, a long fabric tunnel made the nooks in the walls appear
in a new light, as accordion and clarinet players lingered beyond crum-
bling stones and an opera aria haunted the distance. The pathway passed
the only restaurant in the village. The fabric parted like theater curtains
onto the large window and diners within. The waiters and diners were not
part of the show. But of course, they could not help but appear framed as
exemplary of themselves. Their movements of serving, pouring, cutting,
20 VISIBLE CITIES: CALVINO IN PERFORMANCE 267
and eating presented a compelling, if improvised, choreography. This was

no longer just a particular group of people eating a meal but a vivid res-
taurant scene juxtaposed against scenes of the city surrounding it, every-
day architecture that had grown saturated with scenic meaning. Everything
was inevitably drawn into the aesthetic journey, even the dog barking in
the distance, accompanying a slow Kamigata-mai dance in a secret garden.
The course covered much of the little city’s historic center. Cellars
transformed into installations that mixed found objects with makeshift
altars. Woodwork and pottery-making unfolded in dozens of tiny passage-
ways. The products of this work accumulated in piles, transforming the
scenography of the city through gradual sedimentation. Giant video pro-
jections of abstract patterns, stitched together from several projectors,
made the imposing monastery’s architecture seem to breathe and shape-
shift. Near the medieval gates of the monastery, at the top of the steepest
part of the hill, an acrobat in angel wings repelled off the side of the mon-
astery’s stone wall, dancing in the air in slow motion. Across from her a
Baul performer sang a sacred Bengali song—not to the spectators but to
the villages twinkling in the valley below.
Along the pathway, spectators discovered standalone texts from the
source of Teatro Potlach’s inspiration for the project. You step around a
corner and see one of Calvino’s (1974, 44) most recognizable quotes,
projected in vast letters across a wall: “Cities, like dreams, are made of
desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules
are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals some-
thing else.”
* * *
Artists who create site-specific performance have taken particular inspira-

tion from the formal and symbolic journeys of Italo Calvino’s Invisible
Cities. The 59 Productions staged an adaptation for the Manchester
International Festival in 2019.1 Taking over the Mayfield building (a der-
elict railway station), the directors Lysander Ashton and Leo Warner,
along with the dance group Rambert choreographed by Sidi Larbi
Cherkaoui, created a “spellbinding mix of theatre, choreography, music,
architectural design and projection mapping” that “imagines a succession
of alternative worlds—and reimagines what is possible in live perfor-
mance” (https://59productions.co.uk/project/invisible-cities/). A
review in the Guardian emphasized the mutable scenography: “In a feat
268 K. GILLETTE
of production design, the stage—around which the audience, like compass

points, is divided into four distinct phalanxes—morphs from throne room
to temple, encampment to shopping mall, and even to a Venetian canal,
complete with water, gondola and bridge” (Roy 2019).
In preparation for a live performance in 2021 at the New Visions Arts
Festival, 59 Productions teamed up with Jeffrey Shaw and the University
of Hong Kong to create an immersive motion-capture 360-degree VR
journey called Stones of Venice, based on the previous hybrid multimedia/
dance Invisible Cities. Audiences are “transported directly inside Khan’s
head to experience together his mind-blowing, life-changing epiphany.”
Here, “in a flash of understanding, Khan is able to see beneath the surface
of every city. There, he finds they are all defined by the unifying principles
of architecture, geometry, and physics” (https://59productions.co.uk/
project/stones-of-venice/). The production posited stories as the struc-
ture of the world.
In 2013, The Industry commissioned and performed Christopher
Cerrone’s Invisible Cities, an opera for headphones, in Los Angeles’ Union
Station. The director Yuval Sharon prompted spectators to move through
rooms around the station as they listened to the live performance on the
headphones. According to the Los Angeles Times review of the opera,
“Sharon’s production is meant to stimulate discovery. Sooner or later you
look up and find the text projected on a wall. You discover that the angry-
looking fellow in a wheelchair—no, not that one but the other one—is
Kublai Khan.” Among the travelers, everyday commuters, and homeless
people, “choreographer Danielle Agami installs the eight dancers” from
the Los Angeles Dance Project “into a wide variety of scenic elements.
They rush through the station like hurried balletic commuters. They
brawl. They become statuary in outdoor spaces. They seductively take
over the ticket booths” (Swed 2013). The venue and music both empha-
sized the ongoing revisions and revisitations that make up each spectator’s
experience. Cerrone notes that as “the work progresses, you might find
yourself wandering back to the same place in Union Station again and
again, to find new things happening there each time. In the same way, the
same few musical ideas of Invisible Cities are revisited again and again, but
from vastly different perspectives” (https://christophercerrone.com/
music/invisible-cities/).
Since 1992, Teatro Potlach’s itinerant site-specific piece inspired by the
structure of Calvino’s novel has “excavated” over seventy cities—from
Mazatlán to Palermo to Tehran—with vast cloths, video projections, and
performances embedded in alcoves and hanging off stone precipices,

sometimes including hundreds of collaborators from various social threads
of the host city. Potlach emphasizes the ways ghostly memories structure
the performative experience of the city. Our old journeys haunt today’s
streets not because they are nightmarish intrusions but precisely because
they are inscribed into our very enactment of city life. The movement of
the spectator makes the invisible city appear.
Calvino’s poetic and enigmatic novel appears to do what texts can do
better than any other medium. The meta-narrative form of Invisible Cities
and the texture of each city depend on the text as symbolically mediated
by memory and fantasy. Why should Calvino’s distinctively literary prac-
tice inspire those interested in creating performance?
The performing artist’s most obvious interest begins in the enigmatic
performance Polo creates for the emperor. Polo evokes patterns of traffic
and memory, exotic marketplaces, parades and caravans, demolitions and
constructions, each city’s resemblances to other cities. But he does so
through an act that transcends the text that represents it. The first few
meetings between the traveler and emperor involve communication
through souvenirs and leaps, cries and gestures, bridging the language gap
with spontaneous acts that become symbolic descriptions. Kahn fills in the
negative space described by Polo’s gestures and souvenirs, his cries and
songs. Between Polo’s memory and Kahn’s imagination, between the
traveler’s performance and the emperor’s perception, arises a virtual city
where the spectator is free to roam, to project private desires and
understandings.
The Great Khan, listening in the fragrant evening breeze of a garden,
imagines his own contours into the space between Polo’s words and ges-
tures. The miniature worlds constructed through fragments, objects, and
anecdotes animate invisible cities, remembered cities, impossible cities.
There are remembered cities that the traveler performs and imagined cities
that the emperor sees as he embarks on interior journeys, interpreting with
an eye to the mythic and prophetic. Then there are the cities the reader
imagines by interpreting Calvino’s allusive, illusive prose. The act of read-
ing this novel involves readers’ memories of the city streets they have tra-
versed or imagined before, including through other novels, travel shows,
and films. Since the arrangement of the book rewards non-linear excur-
sions between short vignettes that depict separate cities, the act of reading
resembles the very act of travel that underlies Marco Polo’s source mate-
rial. Memories and choices scaffold virtual travel, structuring both the
270 K. GILLETTE
familiar city and its opposite: the fantastical, utopian (or dystopian) city
that stretches known urban experiences into exemplary visions. By imagin-
ing urban spaces, these fellow travelers—explorer, emperor, reader,
writer—unspool the kinds of riddles cities ask of travelers, “like Thebes
through the mouth of the Sphinx” (Calvino 1974, 44). They explore
enigmas about themselves, dwelling and travel, empire and myth, and
what it means to become in and between urban spaces.
Many writers who have thought seriously about the aesthetic nature of
urban life depict cities textually, through metaphors of reading or writing,
as palimpsests or collections of stories. But performances precede and
actualize the city’s texts; performance as such underlies cities’ myths, polit-
ical geographies, and daily rhythms. Performance is text’s “precursor, the
long-disavowed engine of much of the city’s cultural power” (Solga et al.
2009, 3). To travel through cities like a spectator is to attend to an essen-
tial theatrical dynamic. It is not merely that certain theatrical acts, like
Marco Polo’s, can unveil, express, or interact with invisible urban forces.
The important point is that certain dynamics at the heart of cities—
between the visible and invisible, the everyday and extraordinary, self and
world, past and present, nature and culture, public and private, traveler
and performer—are, at heart, theatrical: live, haunted by repetition, medi-
ated by scenography, structured by texts, contexts, and performances.
The structure of Calvino’s book and the texture of the cities described
depend on theatricality at a fundamental level, on the ways imagination
both incorporates and transcends local material conditions. Many of
Calvino’s cities are impossibly utopian or dystopian, mental worlds beyond
the current coordinates of reality. Or they indicate the blurry interpenetra-
tion of backstage and onstage space, the ways social relations constitute a
fleeting yet blindly self-reproducing horizon of possibility. Some cities
stage the ways meanings overlay streets in a collaborative performance of
projection and signification. To travel the city is to read it and to perform
that reading actively. Much as signs and associations overlay architecture
and objects for sale, these cities invite imaginative stories interpolated into
the lives of others, casting people with their own existences into private
fantasies. Sometimes a city is different depending on the direction of
arrival: one city if by sea, another if by desert. Or one for the traveler who
looks up to the eaves; another who walks head down, observing only gut-
ters and refuse and so on. Each city performs an aspect of every city: the
way cities construct themselves or distribute social relations or burn
through history.
Without the strange Venetian explorer, Calvino’s Kublai Khan knows

his cities only the way imperial power does: through military strategy,
brute force, political maps—in other words, panoptic distance. He does
not know them through intimate, vulnerable encounters at the street level
or through empathetic interest in the citizen’s particular experiences. He
does not know them through the memory of the body which develops and
becomes itself through walking, eating, relating to others. In contrast,
Polo knows these cities as a traveler, which is another way of saying as an
actor and spectator: one who sees and carries the city through poetic
impressions, one who shares anecdotes that can only be performed, sou-
venirs that might only be valuable as symbols insofar as they activate mem-
ories and utopian visions in the context of a particular encounter. Polo
conveys the city’s personal revelations for the traveler: “Arriving at each
new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had:
the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait
for you in foreign, unpossessed places” (Calvino 1974, 28–29).
Polo draws from his embodied ethnographic research to perform these
cities for Khan, to activate their hidden meanings. Cities contain their own
pasts, but obscurely, “like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the
streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the anten-
nae of the lightning rods” (Calvino 1974, 11). These remnants bear wit-
ness to memories that remain unseen to most long-time residents, never
mind foreigners. Cities’ memories may require the traveler to draw out
their memories, which can only happen through performance: reading
and reimagining the journey with another. The subtle explorer pays atten-
tion to small traces of public memory usually neglected, divining their
patterns through suggestive descriptions. But the sensory reality of these
cities arises somewhere liminal, between performer and spectator.
* * *
This collaborative act of making the invisible city visible was fundamental
to Teatro Potlach’s Invisible Cities from the beginning, before the group
ever considered performing it in other cities. More than the content of
Calvino’s cities, Di Buduo was inspired by the form of their unfolding, the
way the reader could linger or jump ahead, the way each city offered its
own miniature world, the way symbolic relations between the scenes
depended on the imagination of a subject making her own connections.
Like Calvino’s reader, Di Buduo wanted the spectators to join their per-
spective to that of the traveler, the explorer, Marco Polo.
272 K. GILLETTE
At its beginning, Potlach’s Invisible Cities was a way of meeting and

incorporating the citizens of its hometown, Fara Sabina. It was not just a
festival but a journey, not only a spectacle but a city-wide encounter:
between travelers and residents, between the theater and the city, between
art and life. Choirs, orchestras, acrobats, craftswomen and craftsmen,
architectural experts, historians, anthropologists, people who owned inter-
esting houses, residents who made wine or olive oil from trees that grew in
the surrounding hills and valleys—these groups and individuals opened
their homes and their work to a course through town. More, they shared
stories, revealed secrets, raised specters of the dead. Each performance
became a city unto itself, where spectator-travelers could linger for as long
as they wished before strolling along the path toward other cities. They
added up to a kind of exposure to the hidden world of work and life in Fara
Sabina. The project, as the projection artist and scholar Vincenzo Sansone
notes, has “as its primary objective to uncover the memory, culture and
identity of places” (Sansone 2017, 543). “All these interventions bring out
from the place a city never seen before, invisible to the eyes of its inhabit-
ants, but present and buried in the meanderings of their memory”
(ibid., 536).
Over the past three decades, each iteration of this performance has
unfolded distinctively, drawing from the particular anthropology, geogra-
phy, and history of the city where it was created. When Teatro Potlach
created the second Invisible Cities in Klagenfurt, Austria, in 1993, geo-
graphic differences gave birth to differences in approach to theatrical
research. Teatro Potlach was not on home turf. Instead, it played the role
of a caravan of travelers removed from local customs and therefore was
capable of seeing dynamics invisible to everyday inhabitants of the host
city. Klagenfurt was laid out quite differently than Fara Sabina’s narrow
medieval alleyways, steep stairways, and closely huddled old buildings.
The space was dominated rather by a lake, a wide canal, and a castle. Di
Buduo learned from locals about a myth of a city sunk into this lake.
Engineers helped Teatro Potlach build a platform that hydraulically lifted
from beneath the surface of the water. The canal, an artificial and relatively
recent addition to the town, was covered over with cloths. These giant
scenic elements, along with the content of the performances, derived from
the history and geography of Klagenfurt’s particular dynamics.
And so it would be elsewhere, according to Di Buduo: “Each location
is unique, the medieval village of Fara Sabina suggests a different exchange
from the lake at Klagenfurt, or the abandoned dock where the Liverpool
event is to take place” (Watson 2002, 166). In Rovereto, Italy, Teatro

Potlach projected paintings by the native son and futurist artist Fortunato
Depero onto columns. In Tehran, Iran, the group reanimated an old polit-
ical prison through projections and performances within, including by its
former inmates. In Londrina, Brazil, Di Buduo incorporated the thick
jungle and muddy trails to stage a broken-down Jeep at the beginning of
the journey. Over time certain images and motifs began to repeat, although
in different forms (e.g., tightropes, repelling harnesses, vast muslin cloths,
angel wings, video projections of particular patterns). These recurrent
motifs connected cities by association, layering a kind of unconscious
migration into the work, visible to any spectator or participant who fol-
lowed from city to city. When in 2016, Potlach performed Invisible Cities
again in Fara Sabina for the first time in twenty-five years, the performance
carried home the afterimages of its journeys across the world, to Klagenfurt,
Rovereto, Lecce Braga, Fontenais-sous-Bois, Holstebro, Liverpool,
Londrina, Mazatlán, San Antonio, Tehran, and so many other cities.
* * *
Kublai Khan eventually asks Marco Polo why he never mentions his native
Venice. Polo replies, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something
about Venice” (Calvino 1974, 86). In a similar way, it is tempting to say
that every time Teatro Potlach creates Invisible Cities it is saying some-
thing about Fara Sabina. I have asked each of the company members if this
was the case for them. They all said no. Each had their own personal
Venices, for they each came from different backgrounds, different cities:
Rome, Palermo, Geneva, Budapest, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires. They
regularly collaborate with guest artists formed by radically different cities:
Ahmedabad, Denpasar, Tokyo. For the members of the company, Fara
Sabina became a village laboratory, wherein they could explore urban con-
tours as such and rehearse what a city might be. As they traveled together,
they interwove their experiences moving between cities—scaffolded by
memories, desires, and fears—into the work. In this sense, their embodied
experiences of creating these performance installations in so many cities
have become inscribed into the group’s very notion of the city.
Teatro Potlach, like 59 Productions and The Industry, takes inspiration
from Calvino’s novel as a structure of urban experience. The city, far from
a neutral space through which travelers move, is composed precisely of
those travelers’ motions. As Michel de Certeau writes, the act of walking
274 K. GILLETTE
is a spatial practice that performs a city that is otherwise merely potential;

it is “a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic
acting-out of language)” (de Certeau 1984, 97–98). Like a language, the
city would not exist in any concrete sense without the practice of its sub-
jects. Also like a language, the city hides its rules from those who actualize
it. As Alfie Bown notes, writing about urban daily life psychoanalytically,
the city is “equally inescapable and unreadable, constructing us but refus-
ing to confess how” (Bown 2016, 84). The subject comes to be within the
city’s secret syntax. The fact that the city’s rules are relegated largely to an
unconscious register helps facilitate control by bureaucratic forces, corpo-
rations, and governments, never mind the anarchic demands of the mar-
ket. Once citizens grow myopic, committed to fixed routes between
home, work, shops, school, and so on, they grow increasingly blind to the
invisible offstage that structures their experience, never mind to other pos-
sible ways of being in the city.
Beginning in the 1950s, revolutionary poets and intellectuals of the
Situationist International, led by Guy Debord, took to the streets of Paris
for an influential but subversive Situationist practice: the dérive (“drift”),
wherein “one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations,
their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for move-
ment and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the ter-
rain and the encounters they find there.” Cities have “psychogeographical”
contours, with “constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly
discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” (Debord 2006 [1958],
62). As Bown puts it, the dérive is “about showing the subject how the city
has an unconscious that organizes and controls its inhabitants” (Bown
2016, 80). As much as this organization takes on a collective urban charac-
ter, more and more the experience of the urban traveler is one of isolation
and alienation. The Situationist practice, like the performances of Teatro
Potlach, The Industry, and 59 Productions, actualizes community. At the
same time, it reveals an invisible city, a possible city, lurking in the singular
potential of performance, in the chance encounters on the street or metro.
The practice of (re-)creating, subverting, or revolutionizing urban
space by traveling connects performance, and theater more specifically, to
the insights mapped by Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The substance of cities is
the experience of travel, of performance, composed by interwoven threads
of memory and desire.
* * *
After covered fabric tunnels through crowded corridors (alleyways stuffed

with musicians, comedians, installations), Potlach’s Invisible Cities perfor-
mance the following summer began with the same pathway as the one in
2016. But then it opened onto Fara Sabina’s main piazza at the top of the
hill, where aerial acrobats repelled from a palace built by Orsini wealth.
The bell tower across the piazza drew travelers’ eyes upward. Winged,
outrageously high up, the angels opened the stage’s height, sharply con-
trasting the claustrophobic tunnels and alleyways from before. The mise
en scène suddenly included the towers and steeples, the pigeons nested in
holes in the bricks, the sky above. Video images from a projector with
enough intensity to blind a person were mapped onto the old church’s
architectural outlines, filling them in with bold primary colors alternating
with images of Roman columns, obsolete gods, the church’s pagan ori-
gins. Families saw their shadows projected onto the old wall. Then, around
the corner, spectators even saw the moon drawn into the scenography. An
actress teetered beyond the monastery’s castle-like precipice; she leaned,
as if Juliet, forward at the edge of a rock wall, jutting into our line of sight
at the end of a taught rope. Her attention and gestures appropriated the
bright moon through her presence in that evening vista. The moon
appeared to float just beyond the grasp of her extended hand.
The journey ended at the beginning of a pedestrian road next to a pizza
bar downhill, connecting back to the café where the journey began. But in
a sense the pathway never ended; rather, it spilled back into the life of the
city. I stepped beyond the path of the performance, back into the flow of
citizens enjoying the weekend. They drank beer and ate pizza, strolling,
sitting on benches, their children riding bicycles, their friends listening to
a rock band playing at the bar. The life of the city, seemingly oblivious to
the journey spectators just took above, continued that journey, connecting
the end to the beginning, creating a circle—but also connecting seamlessly
to the aesthetic intensity woven through town by Teatro Potlach’s project.
Here we were—travelers, residents, artists—mingling and blending into
the fabric of the nightlife. Here we were, paying attention to the strangers
that we passed with fresh eyes, ready to take them all in. Here, still alert
from the aftereffects of Invisible Cities, we recognized life, a world too
often obscured by urban pressures but capable of emerging like a flower
growing obstinately through a crack in the brick road.
* * *
276 K. GILLETTE
At the end of Invisible Cities, Calvino writes that Kublai Khan’s atlas con-
tains not only cities within the empire but also possible cities and future
cities. Marco Polo catches glimpses of these potential cities at times. The
traveler sees through his travels—in the liminal states between cities and
between scenes—a composite utopia he would perform into being: “I will
put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed
with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out,
not knowing who receives them” (Calvino 1974, 164). Within the fabric
of the imperfect, even infernal cities he has known, he has seen glimpses of
the invisible city. This city—like Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s City of God,
or the post-capitalist worker’s city of communism—does not exist except
as a notion, a rumor, a glimmer, a performance of hope, necessarily dis-
persed among real urban encounters. Its existence only comes into being
through the search for it, and it is a city whose geography is never fixed.
As Polo says: “If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is
discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed,
you must not believe the search for it can stop” (ibid.).
This is the work of Invisible Cities, of Calvino and Teatro Potlach, of
The Industry and
59 Productions. It is the work of any traveler or artist who wants to
protect who and what are not inferno. This work is not connected to pro-
duction, accomplishment, or displays of power. It demands attention to
what in the visible is not visible, to latent possibilities. It involves giving
yourself up to the task of attending to the world. It involves performing
the dreamed of city through the streets of the mortal city.
Note
1. This production later appeared at the Brisbane Festival as well.
References
Bown, Alfie. 2016. How Did the Everyday Manage to Become So Interesting? In
The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City, ed. Jeremy Tambling,
75–87. New York: Palgrave.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven
F. Randal. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Debord, Guy. 2006 [1958]. Theory of the Derive. In Situationist International

Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, 50–54. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.
Roy, Sanjoy. 2019. Fantasy, Folly and Fancy Footwork: Cosmic Dance Comes to
Manchester. The Guardian, July 7, 2019. Accessed December 12, 2021.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jul/07/invisible-c ities-
alphabus-manchester-international-festival-review.
Sansone, Vincenzo. 2017. Citta Invisibili of Teatro Potlach: A Journey to
Rediscover Our Cultural Heritage. In Handbook of Research on Emerging
Technologies for Digital Preservation and Information Modeling, ed. Alfonso
Ippolito and Michela Cigola, 536–563. Hershey: IGI Global.
Solga, Kim, Shelly Orr, and D.J. Hopkins, eds. 2009. Performance and the City.
New York: Palgrave.
Swed, Mark. 2013. Review: An Inward Tour through ‘Invisible Cities’. Los Angeles
Times, October 21, 2013. Accessed December 21, 2021. https://www.lat-
imes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-e t-c m-i nvisible-c ities-r eview-
20131022-story.html.
Watson, Ian. 2002. Invisible Cities: An Interview with Pino Di Buduo. In
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Watson and Colleagues. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
CHAPTER 21
The Pedagogy of Storytelling in Invisible

Cities
Scott Palmer
In a moment of pique, Kublai Khan poses a pointed question to Marco

Polo as he struggles to grasp Polo’s narrative approach to his role as impe-
rial ambassador: “What is the use, then of all your traveling?” (Calvino
1974, 27). Khan’s question is both practical (What kind of data do your
accounts contain?) and conceptual (What do your stories signify?). It is illus-
trative of the complex relationship between the two men and the informa-
tion that passes between them. Khan’s impossible goal, we are told in the
opening pages, is “knowing and understanding” (ibid., 5) the extent of his
vast territories, which he can only access via the accounts of his many emis-
saries whose “foreign eyes and ears” make his “empire manifest” (ibid.,
21). In other words, Khan’s problem is primarily educational, that is, he
must learn how to absorb, classify, and interpret information presented to
him from a highly heterogeneous set of sources. On the other hand, with
his many travels and his accounts of the cities he encounters, Polo employs
a strategy of experiential learning that places a premium on observation
S. Palmer (*)
New York University Florence, Florence, Italy
e-mail: snp1@nyu.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_21
280 S. PALMER
and interaction in the field. This piece will examine the question of peda-
gogy and learning in Calvino’s novel in two separate contexts. This begins
with the dialogue between Khan and Polo, which forms the central narra-
tive dynamic of the text. Following this, the chapter turns to how the
study and discussion of this relationship serves to underpin the course on
travel writing and digital storytelling that I teach at New York University
Florence.
What Invisible Cities Teaches

The dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan serves as the locus for
the flow of information about Khan’s empire. Notwithstanding his youth
and status as an outsider, Polo quickly becomes Khan’s privileged inter-
locutor, even if the steady stream of information that he supplies remains,
at least initially, “incomprehensible” (Calvino 1974, 21) to Khan because
it arrives at court in a myriad of unknown languages without context or
apparent connection. In Khan’s mind, each piece of information is identi-
fiable, discrete, and seemingly unrelated. Polo proposes a novel solution
through a language of gestures and signs “that the sovereign had to inter-
pret” and “from which there appeared, for each city and province, the
figures evoked by the Venetian’s logogriphs” (Calvino 1974, 21–22).
Thus, Polo offers to teach Khan about his empire by inviting him to solve
an intricate series of puzzles, in which sequence and form are as significant
as content.
This approach mirrors the structure of the novel itself, which unfolds
through a dense, chiastic structure of interlocking elements. Each city
appears both as a poetic image and as a constituent element of Khan’s
dominion. In this respect, the book also functions as a manual or primer
that is at once the story of its characters’ (mis)education and a lesson for
the reader, for whom the text’s particular formal structure and narrative
logic must be parsed in order to be learned and understood.1 Laurence
Breiner persuasively argues that “we must treat both characters, not just
Khan, as readers” (Breiner 1988, 569). I would extend this idea to the
form and manner of education these characters receive as a consequence
of their divergent reading practices.
This education, as Fausto Guido Bonifacio argues, is also an “aesthetic”
one, in which invisible cities become visible through a “salto eidetico”
(Bonifacio 2008, 87), an “eidetic leap.” This concept draws from Marshall
21 THE PEDAGOGY OF STORYTELLING IN INVISIBLE CITIES 281
McLuhan’s concept of the “City as Classroom,” which shares many paral-

lels with Kolb’s model of “experiential learning.” As Bonifacio writes,
Teaching the imagination, within the field of the imaginary, thus expresses
the need to reawaken the capacity and willingness to restore a sense and a
dimension of aesthetic awareness to our daily visible experiences in order to
build a common set of possible realities, negotiated in relation to or anchored
within a history, in a “place.” (Bonifacio 2008, 87 [my translation])
Here Bonifacio uses McLuhan’s invitation for students to explore every-

day environments as a rich educational field of opportunity—a rather
novel and relatively radical position when the City as Classroom was pub-
lished in 1977. He applies the idea to Calvino’s literary approach in
Invisible Cities. We are reminded that Invisible Cities is a rich meditation
on how information is presented, taught, interpreted, and remembered
through narrative. Polo’s reports require active engagement in order to be
understood, and it is through this complex process that Khan and Polo
(and the reader) grapple with the implications and limitations of interpret-
ing information.
Polo, too, initially struggles in his role as emissary, first resorting to
pantomimes to communicate and then further embellishing these gestures
by “drawing objects from his baggage […] and pointing to them with
gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror” (ibid., 38). Khan follows
Polo’s performances with interest and puzzlement, trying to grasp the
relationship between the elements Polo brings before him. In one respect,
this “void not filled with words” has one residual advantage: “you could
wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool
air, or run off” (ibid., 38). In some limited fashion, Khan can explore his
empire through a combination of objects—produced in and by that
world—and also through Polo’s theatrical reanimation of their function
and significance. Thus, as an “inarticulate informer” (Calvino 1974, 38),
Polo models to Khan a way of observing and learning through urban
exploration even as he simultaneously exposes the limitations of such
knowledge.
However, as Polo and Khan’s modes of communication become richer
and more varied, their utility diminishes. Polo eventually learns Khan’s
language, but before long even that, too, proves inadequate (Calvino
1974, 38–39). Polo understands that his value is not simply an imperial
accountant. An inventory of Khan’s empire is not sufficient to allow him
282 S. PALMER
to decide how and why to use those resources. This is what Polo’s hybrid
approach promises: a simulation of travel that places Khan in multiple
imperial contexts at once. However, as Khan discovers the limits of these
forms of communication and what they produce—or fail to produce—in
his imagination, the two men fall into a “silent and immobile” (Calvino
1974, 39) stalemate. Not only is Khan’s visibility limited in Polo’s repre-
sentation of empire; he has no actual agency within it.
Shifting these objects and conversations to the chessboard later in the
novel, Calvino further underscores the futility of Khan’s reasoning. “If
each city is like a game of chess,” Khan muses, “the day when I have
learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never
succeed in knowing all the cities it contains” (Calvino 1974, 121). By
substituting the ambiguity of Polo’s travel accounts with the order and
certainty of chess matches, Khan is further distanced from the knowledge
that he seeks. Through the abstraction of chess, he has now removed his
emissary and, by extension, himself from the cities of his empire. Khan has
created a false equivalency between the “rules” governing games/simula-
tions and those governing the physical world. He has conflated imagining
cities with living in, or indeed ruling, cities. “What were the real stakes?”
he asks himself toward the end of the novel (ibid., 131), as he comes to
the realization that his education remains maddeningly narrow and
confined.
Cartography is Khan’s last, desperate gambit to fully understand and
therefore possess his empire. At least initially, this does suggest a move
toward a model of knowledge more closely related to the material world,
although cartography implies but does not require fieldwork.2 Khan’s atlas
not only depicts the territories of his empire as I have noted earlier, but
also the “terrestrial globe all at once” (Calvino 1974, 136) and “cities
which neither Marco nor the geographers know exist or where they are,
though they cannot be missing among the forms of possible cities” (ibid.,
137). Taken together they represent an encyclopedic accumulation of
knowledge, a text from which to learn and to study, but whose authorship
is unknown. Yet after having perused multiple cities—Kamalu, Urbino,
and Cuzco—and having quizzed Polo on its contents, Khan declares his
preference for the seemingly authoritative semiotic logic of cartography.
As he snaps the volume shut, he remarks, “I think you recognize cities
better on the atlas than when you visit them in person” (ibid., 137). This
affirmation echoes Khan’s earlier comments: “My gaze is that of a man
meditating, lost in thought—I admit it. But yours? You cross
archipelagoes, tundras, mountain ranges. You would do as well never

moving from here” (ibid., 27).
Khan’s criticisms of Polo—“What is the use, then, of all your travel-
ing?”—mirror the reservations many theorists have registered with an
experience-based learning model.3 The fundamental difference is that
“For Marco reading is exchange rather than accumulation” (Breiner 1988,
569). The question is not whether to prefer experiential learning to tradi-
tional scholarly research but rather to carefully synthesize the two while
remaining sensitive to the way in which subjective experience shapes
understanding.
We might pause here to register that Khan has yet again expressed a
preference for a model of learning that privileges a particularly ordered
and abstracted method of acquisition. The atlas takes this dynamic to its
most extreme, such that Polo’s accounts have been substituted with an
anonymous and unverifiable authority of which there is no pretense of
“ocular evidence” (as Columbus was said to have employed in his letters
to Ferdinand and Isabella). By this point it is clear that Calvino’s Khan is
a flawed reader who cannot fully appreciate the utility of Polo’s itinerant,
subjective, and seemingly entropic approach.
One of Polo’s defenses against Khan’s criticisms is to affirm the subjec-
tive, experimental nature of travel and knowledge:
[…] the more that one is lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the
more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there, and he
retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from
which he set sail, and familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of
home, and a little square in Venice where he gamboled as a child.
(Calvino 1974, 28)
This is the first moment in the text in which Polo explicitly refers to Venice,
his implicit city from which all subsequent descriptions of other cities
derive. La Serenissima serves as both a point of departure and of return for
Polo. It is both template and palimpsest, visible and invisible, to echo the
dynamic potential of the “field of the imaginary” (Bonifacio 2008, 87).
This productive ambiguity between and across cities and the memories
of their comingling is what Polo refers to when he answers the Khan’s
preference for stories, simulations, and maps over experience: “Traveling,
you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cit-
ies[…] Your atlas preserves the differences intact” (Calvino 1974, 137).
284 S. PALMER
But these incongruities are precisely what Polo values: they offer him the
ability to simultaneously be a child playing on the streets of his youth and
a man contemplating the “stages of his journeys” (ibid., 28). Understanding
the connection between past and present allows Polo a vision of what is at
stake in the future, the very question that eludes the Khan as he surveys
the chessboard.
As Invisible Cities concludes, the cities become increasingly dystopian—
Perinthia (city of monsters), Procopia (overpopulation), Raissa (city of
sadness), Theodora (animal infestations), Berenice (injustice). Polo’s
observation that the “empire is sick” becomes more apparent. His solu-
tion is an act of recovery and preservation, to discern the “traces of happi-
ness still to be glimpsed” in the encroaching darkness (Calvino 1974, 59).
In the final exchange between the two men, Polo returns to this theme
through his famous meditation on the inferno. Throughout the novel,
Polo has demonstrated that the “vigilance and apprehension” (ibid.,
165)—here it is worth underscoring that Calvino uses the word apprendi-
mento in the original Italian, understood in this sense as comprehension or
learning—necessary to identify the “not inferno” comes from exchange:
from living and traveling in the world in search of spaces (urban and oth-
erwise) from which one can learn and in turn cultivate for future travelers.
Teaching Abroad
NYU’s Florence campus is located on an estate just outside of the city of
Florence with five villas, formal gardens, and agricultural fields. NYU
Florence offers a broad range of courses but maintains a strong focus on
the humanities and social sciences from antiquity to the present day. As is
the case with many study abroad centers located in major cities, courses
frequently use the city itself as a pedagogical resource, from visits to sites
of historical and cultural significance to fieldwork projects and internships.
Over the course of an academic semester, it is not uncommon to catch
my students—and often myself—gazing out the window of our classroom
onto the olive groves situated in the center of campus. There are many
vestiges within Villa Ulivi, the academic center within the Villa La Pietra
estate, that betray its more genteel past: weathered floors, vaulted ceilings,
and the like. However, these traces are more easily concealed by the build-
ing’s current use as a teaching facility for an institution of higher learning.
Nevertheless, it is situated within the enchanting rolling hills, historic
villas, and the limpid air for which Tuscany is so famous, and it is those
views from classroom windows that capture students’ attention.
This is quite natural. My students have come to see and to study Italy,
and the institutional spaces we share, however pleasant, do not satisfy their
image of the Bel Paese in quite the same manner as this splendid vista just
outside of the boundaries of our classroom. To be certain, managing this
tension between the classroom and the “real world” (perceived or other-
wise) is one of the great pedagogical challenges that confront teachers and
students in all educational settings, and this dynamic is magnified in the
context of study abroad. On the one hand, student-travelers are more
aware than usual of their unfamiliar surroundings, which often leads to an
increased intellectual openness to new and familiar subjects alike. On the
other hand, academic duties compete with a natural desire to explore this
foreign space, an impulse that necessarily creates a distance, both physi-
cally and mentally, from the classroom environment.
The specific form that this dynamic assumes in academic study abroad
is at once its greatest opportunity and its most complex challenge. Students
choose to study abroad for many reasons, but all of them expect to experi-
ence something different (but perhaps not too different—more on this
later) than what they would otherwise encounter on their home campus.
In this respect, modern study abroad programs retain much of the intel-
lectual and cultural logic of the Grand Tour, in which young men (and
eventually young women) traveled Europe seeking an intellectual, politi-
cal, moral, and aesthetic education away from home, which also carried
the additional benefit of escaping the constraints of many of the domestic
mores (e.g., drinking, sex, religion, etc.) in their home countries.
As intellectual projects, travel and education both demonstrate an
awareness of and an attraction to the foreign and the unknown. Just as a
traveler explores the fascination of a foreign land and its peoples by pack-
ing her bags and boarding a plane, so does a student enroll in a subject
about which he knows very little but remains nonetheless (or perhaps con-
sequently) curious. Whatever is “out there,” assumes the traveler/student,
it is worth knowing about. However, while leisure travel (i.e., tourism)
and academic study appear to share an initial openness toward the
unknown, they often differ widely with respect to how such new horizons
will be approached, experienced, and consumed.
Which elements will be worthy of notice, which will be marked for
further examination and study? What, if any, methodology will be
employed during this process? Clearly, academic field study requires a
286 S. PALMER
scholar to anticipate, organize, and articulate a coherent intellectual

approach to a given context that a tourist may selectively consider or
ignore altogether. And so, the student abroad finds herself constantly con-
fronted with this paradox—is she, at any given moment, a carefree tourist
or a diligent scholar? Is it possible to be both, and if so, how? What is valu-
able, surprising, or illuminating about undertaking a course of academic
study in an unfamiliar space, perhaps framed by an entirely foreign cultural
and linguistic context?
Typically, the curricular offerings at a study abroad site are rich in sub-
jects that have a clear connection to the host culture. One could thus
reasonably conclude that subjects for which site visits and tours may be
easily organized lend themselves to more meaningful educational oppor-
tunities—surely, teaching students about Renaissance art is enriched by a
class trip to the Galleria degli Uffizi. However, this conclusion assumes
that students, no matter where they find themselves, are prepared to
absorb and critically analyze material taken from the “field” within the
time and space allotted to them. Invisible Cities illustrates this challenge in
the diverse reading (and travel) practices of Khan and Polo and the con-
clusions that they draw from them.
Effective teaching in study abroad settings must consider a range of
factors that inevitably alter students’ receptivity not only to familiar study
methods but also to approaches more specifically targeted to particular
educational opportunities. A more explicitly situationist approach facili-
tates the recovery of this foreign context, not simply as a landscape dotted
with exemplary sites to be used as connecting points to coursework, but as
open laboratories central (rather than subordinate) to the educational
methods and objectives of the traditional classroom environment.
The increasing amount of research focused on social and cultural analy-
sis in study abroad environments, especially as it applies to experiential
learning, testifies to both their current applicability and relative popular-
ity.4 These studies are typically rich in detail about how a particular pro-
gram or class has employed ethnographic fieldwork or has prompted
students to become more aware of the complexities of the cultural immer-
sion experience. At the same time, this literature spends relatively little
energy engaging with the complexities inherent in asking students to
adapt to an information-gathering analytical paradigm with which they are
unlikely to be familiar. Setting aside for the moment the reasonable asser-
tion that immersion in the host culture is itself the “classroom,” the
question of just how effectively students will identify, extract, and analyze
what they see in this newly defined space remains open.
One might begin by examining certain pedagogical assumptions, first
and foremost the expectation that students enter the university with the
ability to efficiently observe, record, and transfer what they observe in the
“field.” Before students abroad are ready to perform as effective and
enthusiastic field researchers, capable of producing what Clifford Geertz
(1973) famously called “thick description,” they not only need to be ori-
ented, quite literally, within the culture that they will be studying but also
with respect to the intellectual approach that they will use to gather
information.
What else, then, is taken for granted? What are the roles of “student”
and “professor,” and how are they performed according to a series of
learned behaviors closely tied to and framed by the institutional context?
This educational mise-en-scene is disrupted in the study abroad space, even
if institutions and their agents (i.e., administrators and professors) typi-
cally (and often unconsciously) attempt to reconstruct, in some form or
another, the distant central institution. However, as I have illustrated
above, this process is subject to a constantly disruptive slippage: first of the
institutional reconstruction of the dislocated academic space and even
more insistently by the “foreign” world surrounding it. Is it possible that
the reconstructed familiarity of the classroom functions as a barrier
between the student and the subject matter itself? And if so, would this
not threaten to negate the very reason for traveling, as the Khan prefers his
atlas to visiting the cities of his empire? If the pedagogical objective is for
students to be contaminated by their studies abroad rather than to be
insulated behind the walls of an elaborate reconstruction of what they
have left behind, then it is essential that the academic site, especially those
spaces and practices explicitly dedicated to instructional activity, be thor-
oughly permeated by the ordinary rhythms and, wherever possible, the
extraordinary events taking place in the host culture.
To resolve this problem, one might begin by recognizing and articulat-
ing our own social, cultural, economic, and religious positions within a
community of scholars, in order to use the sense of estrangement felt by
the traveling scholar as an intellectual opportunity to unlearn and relearn
certain skills. Experiential learning, then, reconciles the gap between cur-
ricular and extracurricular experience abroad, making available a much
wider array of experiences and observations for use in coursework. When
linked to an explicit set of information-gathering practices, common tools
288 S. PALMER
used in study abroad settings such as travel journals or diaries are much
more likely to acquire Geertz’s elusive “thickness.” Such practices may be
explicitly structured within established scientific models of observation
from any number of disciplines—anthropology, biology, architecture,
physics, and so on—especially when students are adequately prepared to
use or have already demonstrated proficiency with them.
Teaching Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities is among Calvino’s most taught texts. It appears regularly
in syllabi for literature, writing, film theory, urban design, and architecture
courses as academic communities seek to apply the solutions proposed by
the novel to a wide variety of disciplines.5 Each Spring I teach a course
called Italian Sketchbook: Travel Writing and Digital Storytelling, which
invites students to experiment with narrative technique as they study travel
writing in Italy and Europe and interrogate their own travel practices. The
course references a wide range of forms—the essay, the journal, the sketch-
book, the map, the photograph, the human voice—through which an
author represents the thoughts and sensations of mobility. In parallel to
these formal categories, the course also explores many different authorial
subject positions such as cartographer, pilgrim, explorer, exile, and tourist,
each of which can be productively tied to Invisible Cities.
The mechanics of the course focus on two primary impulses: observa-
tion and creation. During the semester, faculty and students trace how
traveling subjects observed and recorded the world as expressions of artis-
tic representation, scientific discovery, and comparative sociocultural anal-
ysis. We also focus on the strategies and techniques employed by authors
and artists—particularly the interchange between word and image—as a
baseline for translating these familiar approaches into new digital forms.
Italy, and in particular Florence, serves as the most immediate conceptual
and physical context for investigation so that textual and visual material
studied in the classroom can be considered together with the world
beyond the boundaries of Villa La Pietra.
At the beginning of each semester, I ask my students some framing
questions to initiate this process: Why do we travel? Where do we go, and
how do we get there? How do we document and remember the places
we’ve been? The storytelling practices we explore in class are tightly bound
not only with recognizable forms of collective expression (e.g., nationality
and class) but also with more private conceptions of individual identity.
Students are thus situated in an intellectual space within which they are
encouraged to articulate and represent their own affinities with (or dis-
tance from) the artists, styles, and historical contexts being studied, with
an emphasis on intentionality and decision-making rather than technique.
As students investigate these dimensions of individual and collective
expression through their own storytelling practices, they potentially
develop a more nuanced and detailed understanding of the mechanisms
and distinct features of how mobility is represented in artistic consump-
tion and production.
Invisible Cities is introduced in the second session of the semester,
which is dedicated to techniques of observation and documentation.
Polo’s early struggles to provide evidence of his travels in Khan’s empire
are thus initially framed in the context of conducting fieldwork. Following
this session, students complete an assignment: they are asked to gather
various artifacts of their movements in Florence in their first weeks and
place them in an envelope. These envelopes are then redistributed to other
classmates, who must then produce a short creative narrative making use
of their envelope’s contents.
The following session introduces the first traveling subject of the semes-
ter: the stranger. Here students are asked to consider Marco Polo’s posi-
tion as an outsider alongside other traveling strangers, beginning with
Odysseus, in particular his return to Ithaca disguised as a beggar in Book
XVII of the Odyssey. In a follow-up assignment, students create short
audio narratives that explore, among other things, the concept of xenia
(“guest-friendship,” including hospitality to strangers) in the Odyssey; in
Polo’s arrivals and departures in the first three sections of Invisible Cities;
and in popular music, beginning with Elmore James’s song “Stranger Blues”.
Subsequently, the class takes up the question of exploring cities from
different subject positions. Dean Swinford, who writes of his own use of
Invisible Cities in his teaching, contrasts Khan’s cartographic and “panop-
tic” approach with Marco Polo, who “occupies the space of the flaneur”
and consequently “disrupts this illusion of order” (Swinford 2013, 125).
Building on this tension, I ask students to consider the ways in which race
and gender further complicate exploring the city—in particular the poli-
tics of visibility—in the work of Garnette Cadogan (2016) and Lauren
Elkin (2017). This unit is typically paired with an overnight trip to the city
of Naples, a particularly dense and “layered” city both in terms of its phys-
ical layout (our itinerary moves from the underground aqueduct built by
the ancient Greeks to the hills of Vomero overlooking the Bay of Naples)
290 S. PALMER
and its deep history (Naples is one of the oldest continuously inhabited
cities in the world, having been first settled during the Neolithic period).
In this manner, as Swinford puts it, my students “consider the influence of
the city on artistic production” (Swinford 2013, 131) through their expe-
riences in Florence and Naples in relation to the “implicit cities” that they
carry with them from memory.
Each semester, we take a collective leap through our urban experiences
with Calvino, Polo, and Khan as guides and as sources of inspiration. And
while the colors, characters, and contexts change with each class, the fun-
damental impulse to explore and to narrate the urban remains a reassuring
constant, a cycle of storytelling that, like Invisible Cities itself, begins again
even as its final pages are read.
Notes
1. There are several perceptive studies on the connection between the reader
and Khan. In her study of the visual dimensions of reading the novel, Esrock
explores the “the problematic relations between image, order and word”
(Esrock 1993, 116). Carolyn Springer has suggested that Invisible Cities
functions as a “reader’s Bildungsroman” (Springer 1985, 293) in which the
“only form of knowledge implied by Calvino is the relative knowledge
gained by mastering the process of reading itself” (Springer 1985, 293).
Springer further argues that Khan’s control over his empire is correlated to
the reader’s mastery of the symbols and structures that underpin Calvino’s
text. Kirk and Buckingham apply a similar dynamic to the “utopian” poten-
tial of museums in order to better gauge what “constitutes adequate knowl-
edge” in spaces in which visitors learn and are taught (Kirk and Buckingham
2013, 18).
2. Calvino was well aware that neither Marco Polo nor Kublai Khan were
known to have produced or commissioned maps of their voyages nor of the
Mongol Empire. Like Il Milione, any maps linked to them were produced
from cartographic sources based on accounts of their lives.
3. See James March, The Ambiguities of Experience (2010).
4. Jane Jackson (2015) is a leading voice in this area of study: her scholarship
covers many aspects of international education, in particular the complexi-
ties of teaching foreign languages, and more generally, the administration of
study abroad programs. Jackson argues for an “ethnographic pedagogy”
that questions many of the assumptions surrounding student learning in
international environments.
5. See Approaches to the Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino (Ricci 2013) for an
overview of general approaches to teaching Calvino’s work. See Jacob
(1998), Kirk and Buckingham (2013), and Bonifacio (2008) for discussions
concerned with the disciplines of graphic design, museum studies, and
childhood education, respectively.
References
Bonifacio, Fausto Guido. 2008. Dalle Città Invisibili ai ‘Luoghi’ dell’immaginario:
il gioco, l’arte e la trasfigurazione pedagogica della quotidianità. Encyclopaideia
XII (24): 73–92.
Breiner, Laurence. 1988. Italic Calvino: The Place of the Emperor in ‘Invisible
Cities’. Modern Fiction Studies 34 (4): 559–573.
Cadogan, Garnette. 2016. Black and Blue. In The Fire This Time: A New Generation
Speaks About Race, ed. Jesmyn Ward, 94–104. New York: Scribner.
Elkin, Lauren. 2017. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo,
Venice and London. London: Chatto & Windus.
Esrock, Ellen J. 1993. A Proposal for Integrating Readerly Visuality into Literary
Studies: Reflections on Italo Calvino. Word & Image 9 (2): 114–121.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Jackson, Jane. 2015. Becoming Interculturally Competent: Theory to Practice in
International Education. International Journal of Intercultural Relations
48: 91–107.
Jacob, Johanna. 1998. Calvino’s Reality: Designer’s Utopia. Utopian Studies 9
(1): 103–119.
Kirk, Elee S., and Will Buckingham. 2013. Invisible Museums and Multiple
Utopias. Museological Review 18: 16–25.
March, James. 2010. The Ambiguities of Experience. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1977. City as Classroom: Understanding Language and
Media. Agincourt: The Book Society of Canada.
Ricci, Franco. 2013. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino. New York:
Modern Language Association of America.
Springer, Carolyn. 1985. Textual Geography: The Role of the Reader in ‘Invisible
Cities’. Modern Language Studies 15 (4): 289–299.
Swinford, Dean. 2013. The Invisible Monster: Calvino and the Contemporary
City. In Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino, ed. Franco Ricci,
125–133. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
CHAPTER 22
Invisible Smart Cities
Regev Nathansohn
This chapter offers a reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974) as a

potential inspiration and warning for smart city stakeholders who, in the
last 10–15 years, have promoted computational models of urbanism
through the integration of digitization and artificial intelligence in cities
around the globe.1 The desire to gain absolute knowledge about every-
thing that happens in the city—from its infrastructure to its residents’
behavior—is what drives the development of smart city systems, with the
stated goal of improving efficiency, governance, sustainability, and conve-
nience. Through the characters of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, Calvino
presents a similar desire for absolute knowledge about material and social
life in cities. Like smart city enthusiasts, who aspire to create a fully smart
city,2 the Great Khan sent Polo to explore the cities under his rule in order
to fulfill his desire for knowledge, to better predict future scenarios, and to
improve his governing of his empire.
To follow the Great Khan’s order, Polo describes his explorations based
on imaginative and surrealist datafication of urban infrastructures and
everyday interactions between residents of the cities he had visited. By
R. Nathansohn (*)
Sapir College, Ashkelon, Israel
e-mail: regevn@mail.sapir.ac.il

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_22
294 R. NATHANSOHN
contrast, smart city systems rely on visible and quantifiable information,

collected from networked sensors and digital procedures for harvesting
human practices and converting them into computational artifacts, which
are then fed into digital algorithms.3 Of course, the data gathered are
always partial and selective, and the algorithms cannot (and may never)
fully mimic or predict human behavior. Some smart city systems include a
dashboard to display the outcomes of such algorithms. These dashboards,
however, conceal as much as they reveal (Mattern 2021, 41).4 The infor-
mation shared by Polo, on the other hand, shows the invisible, underlying
logics of social life in cities, their surprising mechanisms, and their unin-
tended consequences.
In his meetings with the Great Khan, Polo is switching between several
typecasts of smart city stakeholders. In some of his city descriptions, he
plays the urban techno-utopianist, who believes that it is possible to
decode the logic of cities and use it for better predictability. In descriptions
of other cities, he takes on the role of a meticulous and frustrated analyst
who struggles to harvest relevant data that represent the true nature of the
cities he was sent to explore. When describing yet other cities, he plays the
critical observer who wishes to warn against the misleading nature of such
representations and therefore the inability to predict altogether the future
based on such data.
The synthesis of Polo’s observations could inspire whoever wishes to
critically explore “actually existing smart cities” (Shelton et al., 2015) or
warn whoever desires to build such cities from scratch. In fact, Polo’s
observations reveal that each city is already an invisible smart city. By this,
I mean that each has its own unique cultural algorithm—an implicit for-
mula that maintains its residents’ collective practices and the changes they
undergo. Polo shows how such a cultural algorithm cannot be reduced to
the logic of practice of each individual resident alone, and he also reveals
the limits of mirroring it by devices of artificial intelligence.
* * *
In his description of both Dorothea and Octavia, Polo seems almost like
those high-tech company salesmen, imagining cities as organized and pre-
dictable social configurations. Dorothea, he explains, is a city where once
you learn the basic numbers (of towers, gates, canals, quarters, houses,
and chimneys) and routines (of marriage and exchange of goods), “you
can then work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about
22 INVISIBLE SMART CITIES 295
the city in the past, present, and future” (Calvino 1974, 9). The same,
according to Polo, is true for Octavia, the spider-web city hung between
two steep mountains, where everything is dependent on a web of ropes,
chains, and catwalks, and all the rest is void (ibid., 75). Smart cities are
similarly dependent on supporting webs of LED street lights with their 5G
data communication and the data collected by their digital sensors and
other devices from the interconnected chains of the Internet of Things, as
if all the rest is void.
Polo’s descriptions of Valdrada and Eusapia concern the dialectics
between representation and the represented. These ideas are crucial for
developers and users of “digital twins,” the datafication and visualization
systems that are designed to present everything that happens in the city
and serve as its replica in order to ease processes of decision-making. In
Valdrada, Polo argues, the inhabitants “know that each of their actions is,
at once, that action and its mirror-image, which possesses the special dig-
nity of images, and this awareness prevents them from succumbing for a
single moment to chance and forgetfulness” (Calvino 1974, 53). At the
same time, data in Valdrada is one thing, but the value attributed to it is
another. Users of digital twins should be minded that “at times the mirror
increases a thing’s value, at times denies it. Not everything that seems
valuable above the mirror maintains its force when mirrored” (ibid.).
Residents of cities that use digital twin systems must contend with the
mechanisms through which “representational logics structure the agency
and subjectivity of the dashboard’s users, whether city administrators or law
enforcement officers or members of the public” (Mattern 2021, 42–43;
italics in original). Here, Calvino’s city of Eusapia has much to teach. In
Eusapia, the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city
underground. Those who translate the information from above the
ground to its representation underground are the hooded brothers. Only
they have access to the underground representation, and “everything
known about it has been learned from them” (Calvino 1974, 110).
Reporting on what happens in the underground reflection, these agents of
datafication reveal that in Lower Eusapia, innovations are constantly being
made, and from one year to the next Lower Eusapia becomes unrecogniz-
able (ibid.). Following reports on their underground reflections, and to
keep up with them, Eusapia’s residents want to do everything that the
hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of their underground reflec-
tion in order to be a genuine copy of their reflections. Polo shares the
assumption that in these twin cities there is no way to know which city is
296 R. NATHANSOHN
which, and it may be the case that the underground reflection—or the
data presented on the dashboards of the digital twins—becomes the origin
of its supposed source (ibid.).
Polo’s descriptions reveal that the cities’ own cultural algorithms may
even resist the possibility of an external algorithm or artificial intelligence
to decode the city’s urban life. Eutropia’s cultural algorithm, for example,
is quite simple in how it processes constant and unpredictable changes.
According to Polo, when Eutropians are tired of their routine—their jobs,
relatives, houses, relationships—they move to the next city, where “each
will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on open-
ing his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends,
gossip” (Calvino 1974, 64). At the same time, in Melania,
When one changes role or abandons the square forever or makes his first
entrance into it, there is a series of changes, until all the roles have been reas-
signed […] As time passes the roles, too, are no longer exactly the same as
before; certainly the action they carry forward through intrigues and sur-
prises leads toward some final denouement, which it continues to approach
even when the plot seems to thicken more and more and the obstacles
increase. (Calvino 1974, 80–81)
The ongoing renewal and reconfigurations of residents’ relations and

practices in Melania and Eutropia show that these cities already operate
according to an algorithm that resides in their cultural cloud, an algorithm
that is fed by unpredictable data and is not designed to achieve any specific
functional goal, an algorithm that cannot be mirrored by any known
machines of artificial intelligence and thus cannot be reduced to any desire
to make the urban life more predictable, more manageable, or more
efficient.
Polo knows that the desire to possess all knowledge about the cultural
algorithm of cities, to be able to predict and plan, is shared by many who
are aware of the “infinite deformities and discords” of cities, from astrono-
mers and smart city entrepreneurs to Kublai Khan, who wishes to master
his empire by discovering “the invisible order that sustains cities, […] the
rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting them-
selves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall in ruins” (Calvino
1974, 122). However, when Polo describes the cities of Moriana, Tamara,
and Raissa, he seems more skeptical regarding the data that could be
extracted to decode their cultural algorithms. These cities taught Polo
about the difficulty of relying on the visible signs that a city shows in order
to learn its true nature. In Moriana, a first look will never reveal the city’s
full face. Only once you walk in a semicircle, “you will come into view of
Moriana’s hidden face” (ibid., 105). At the same time, beneath Tamara’s
“thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave
Tamara without having discovered it” (ibid., 14). Similarly, extracting use-
ful data from the city of Raissa, a city of sadness, is also a futile task. Data’s
sociality—characterized by “real-time transformation in ways that cut
across notions of nature and culture” (Boellstorff and Maurer 2015,
3–4)—is revealed in Raissa’s “invisible thread that binds one living being
to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between
moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second
the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence”
(Calvino 1974, 149). The reality in Raissa is so unpredictable and fluid
that no piece of data can be fully isolated and fixed in time.
Other cities pose additional obstacles for those who seek to harvest
urban data and make it useful. According to Polo, in some cities, the
abundance of data created by the residents’ routines becomes a burden, so
they shift elsewhere and leave their data behind. Such, for example, is the
case of Ersilia, where “the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of
the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether
they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the
strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the
inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their
supports remain” (Calvino 1974, 76). Ersilia’s cultural algorithm shows
that any attempt to translate social interactions into data objects5 may end
up creating a web of empty signifiers.
Toward the end of Invisible Cities, Polo shares the aftermath of an
attempt to build an ideal, predictable city. This is Perinthia, which was
designed by astronomers according to celestial laws. They guaranteed that
Perinthia “would reflect the harmony of the firmament; nature’s reason
and the gods’ benevolence would shape the inhabitants’ destinies”
(Calvino 1974, 144). Of course, the result was quite different: a city of
horror and deformity. According to Polo, “Perinthia’s astronomers are
faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calcula-
tions were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or
else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the
city of monsters” (ibid., 145). Not so different from such astronomers are
urban planners and hi-tech entrepreneurs who attempt to build smart
298 R. NATHANSOHN
cities “from the internet up,”6 only to realize that their ideas of futuristic
cities meet with sharp criticism over privacy, democracy, and their misper-
ceptions on how people actually use public spaces in their cities.7
* * *
No matter what typecast we can imagine Polo playing—the smart city

entrepreneur, the frustrated analyst, or the critical observer—he always
remains in a disadvantaged position. He has only limited ability of repre-
senting for Kublai the cities of the Great Khan’s empire because of linguis-
tic, biographical, and experiential differences between them. Similarly,
smart city platforms are also limited in their ability to represent the urban
social reality. They always produce gaps between, on the one hand, the
reality they were designed to harvest, process, and represent and, on the
other hand, the actual presentation of the processed data for their end
users. In Polo’s description, “an hourglass could mean time passing, or
time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made” (Calvino 1974,
38), and in a smart CCTV system, a sudden gathering of people in a pub-
lic park could mean a potential threat, the aftermath of an event, or an
attempt to mislead the CCTV’s AI algorithm. While Calvino tells us that
the Great Khan appreciates these gaps in meaning and interpretation
(ibid.), similar gaps in smart city systems could be counterproductive and
lead to an increase in the social and financial costs of their
implementation.
Moreover, when Polo admits that the city of Venice is his reference
point in all of his descriptions (Calvino 1974, 85), and when he recognizes
that regardless of his own communication skills, the Great Khan listens
only to what he is expecting to hear (ibid., 135), his reflexivity and sensi-
tivity highlight the need for algorithmic transparency and accountability.8
As smart city systems enter the third decade of their implementation in
existing and new cities around the globe,9 their technology keeps develop-
ing and thus expanding the possibilities of integrating ever more predic-
tive algorithms into the everyday life of residents and decision-makers in
cities. Consequently, when algorithmic “black boxes” may conceal biased,
discriminatory, partial, and erroneous processes, it becomes ever more
crucial to openly reveal data’s preconceptions, as well as the protocols of
data collection, processing, presentation, dissemination, interpretation,
and operation.
Like Polo’s multiple perspectives, so should smart city stakeholders—

developers, decision-makers, residents, researchers—be mindful of the
gaps between what is visible, quantifiable, and representable and what is
not. They should shift their gaze and look at data in context, “at the life
cycle of urban information, distributed within a varied ecology of urban
sites and subjects that interact with it in multiple ways” (Mattern 2021,
64). They should be mindful of the various ways data can be interpreted
by various stakeholders in various moments. They should acknowledge
the inspiration behind each new application that is presented as objective
and universal, as if it has no genealogy. Finally, they should acknowledge
that invisible smart cities have always been and will always be here.
Notes
1. For example, see Das (2019), Joss et al. (2019), Söderström et al. (2014),
and Willis and Aurigi (2017). For a short video that illustrates the concept
of smart cities, watch “How will artificial intelligence change the cities we
live in?” from BBC Ideas: https://youtu.be/UXxyCBimRyM (uploaded:
July 1, 2021).
2. Such as Songdo (South Korea) or Masdar (United Arab Emirates), which
were designed “from the ground up with information-processing capabili-
ties embedded in the objects, surfaces, spaces and interactions that between
them comprise everyday life” (Greenfield 2013, 9).
3. See Timcke (2021).
4. According to Mattern, “what’s left out are those urban subjects and dynam-
ics that simply don’t lend themselves to representation in the form of dials
and counters, that resist algorithmicization and widgetization” (2021, 16).
5. See Schwarz (2021) on the translation of interaction into digital data
objects, which distinguishes digital societies from their predecessors.
6. See Daniel Doctoroff’s description of Sidewalk Labs, a Google company
that wished to establish a new neighborhood in Toronto (Canada) based on
the view that “a combination of digital technologies—ubiquitous connectiv-
ity, social networks, sensing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and
new design and fabrication technologies—would help bring about a revolu-
tion in urban life. Their impact will be as profound as the steam engine, the
electric grid, and the automobile, the three previous technological revolu-
tions that have largely defined the modern city” (Daniel L. Doctoroff,
“Reimagining cities from the Internet up,” published in Sidewalk Talk,
November 30, 2016, https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/reimagining-
cities-from-the-internet-up-5923d6be63ba). The project was abandoned in
May 2020 for economic, civic, and political reasons (see Leyland Cecco’s
300 R. NATHANSOHN
“Google affiliate Sidewalk Labs abruptly abandons Toronto smart city proj-
ect”, The Guardian, May 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/tech-
nology/2020/may/07/google-s idewalk-l abs-t oronto-s mar t-c ity-
abandoned).
7. See Leyland Cecco’s “Toronto Swaps Google-Backed, Not-So-Smart City
Plans for People-Centred Vision”, The Guardian, March 12, 2021, https://
www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/12/toronto-canada-quayside-
urban-centre.
8. See, for example, Brauneis and Goodman (2018) and O’Neil (2016) on the
need for algorithmic transparency in smart city technologies and in big data
analytics.
9. See, for example, billionaire Mark Lore’s recent plan to build a new smart
city in the USA, following corporations such as Cisco, Google, Siemens,
IBM, Amazon, and Toyota’s similar attempts in previous years: https://
www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/telosa-d esert-s mart-c ity-m arc-l ore/
606854/.
References
Boellstorff, Tom, and Bill Maurer. 2015. Introduction. In Data: Now Bigger and
Better! ed. Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer, 1–6. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press.
Brauneis, Robert, and Ellen P. Goodman. 2018. Algorithmic Transparency for the
Smart City. Yale Journal of Law & Technology 20 (1): 103–176.
Das, Diganta. 2019. Smart City. In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and
Regional Studies, ed. Anthony Orum, 1–7. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. https://
doi.org/10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0294.
Greenfield, Adam. 2013. Against the Smart City. New York: Do Projects.
Mattern, Shannon. 2021. A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
O’Neil, Cathy. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases
Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Crown.
Schwarz, Ori. 2021. Sociological Theory for Digital Society: The Codes that Bind Us
Together. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Shelton, Taylor, Matthew Zook, and Alan Wiig. 2015. The ‘Actually Existing
Smart City’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8 (1): 13–25.
Simon, Joss, Frans Sengers, Daan Schraven, Federico Caprotti, and Youri Dayot.
2019. The Smart City as Global Discourse: Storylines and Critical Junctures
across 27 Cities. Journal of Urban Technology 26 (1): 3–34.
Söderström, Ola, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser. 2014. Smart Cities as
Corporate Storytelling. City 18 (3): 307–320.
Timcke, Scott. 2021. Algorithms and the End of Politics: How Technology Shapes
21st-Century American Life. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
Willis, Katharine, and Alessandro Aurigi. 2017. Digital and Smart Cities. London:
Routledge.
CHAPTER 23
Peripheral Visions of Empire: Zagreb,

Belgrade, Sarajevo (Homage to Calvino)
Jeremy F. Walton
Introduction: The Peripheral Vision

of Invisible Cities
Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast
can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. (Calvino
1974, 15–16)
Even in their aftermath, empires exert a centripetal force on representa-

tions. Dominant images of empire privilege the architectural pomp and
circumstance of imperial palace complexes, sites that materialize and
encapsulate the might of empires past. The Forbidden City, Topkapı
Sarayı, the Hofburg, the Winter Palace, Buckingham Palace: names that
roll easily off of the historically inclined tongue. Monuments and monu-
mental architecture play a comparable synoptic role—can one think of the
Roman Empire without envisioning the Colosseum, Ancient Egypt
without the Giza Pyramids and the Sphinx, or, more provocatively,
J. F. Walton (*)
University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_23
304 J. F. WALTON
American Empire without the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore,

and the Statue of Liberty? Such icons are fodder for tourist brochures and
mass-produced postcards, objects of vacationers’ desire. They are fetishes
of empire, both testifying to and obscuring the mechanisms of imperial
power. Frequently located in former imperial capitals, they bind collective
memories of empires in the present.
By contrast, recent scholarly interrogations of empire are resolutely
anti-monumental in their critiques. The imperative to view empires from
an “off center” perspective (Jovanović and Carabelli 2020) has entailed
new methods, foci, and founts of inspiration. Temporally, such an approach
attends to the ongoing effects that empires of the past continue to have in
the present. As postcolonial and decolonial critics have argued, imperial
power persists in myriad ways long after the polities known as empires are
no more—concomitantly, scholarship must pursue the durability of “impe-
rial duress,” in Ann Laura Stoler’s (2016) evocative phrase. Spatially, cur-
rent research on empires insists on the indispensability of peripheries,
frontiers, and “shatterzones” (Bartov and Weitz 2013). The edges of
empires are crucibles of “inter-imperial” exchanges that productively dis-
orient the hegemonic gaze from the imperial center. As Laura Doyle
(2020) contends, “inter-imperiality” is not merely a description of the
mutual influence that empires have had on one another—more strongly, it
unsettles the self-justifying narratives of empires, which privilege the per-
formances of autonomy and monumental grandeur that proliferate in
imperial centers. In sum, to examine imperiality from an off center, inter-
imperial perspective is to adopt peripheral visions on and of empires.1
***
Well before the heyday of this revisionist scholarship, Invisible Cities

(1974) offered a primer on peripheral visions of empires and cities. The
lessons and lure of peripheral visions suffuse Calvino’s opus and form a
thematic thread throughout Marco Polo’s peregrination. Calvino’s medi-
tations on urban paradoxes and, especially, the repartees between Marco
Polo and Kublai Khan presciently anticipate the preoccupations of con-
temporary studies of empire. Kublai Khan inhabits and constitutes the
center of his vast empire, yet this center is a figure of alterity: “The emperor
is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through foreign
eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to Kublai” (ibid., 21).
Marco Polo, the exotic itinerant who roams the distant cities of the Khan’s
23 PERIPHERAL VISIONS OF EMPIRE: ZAGREB, BELGRADE, SARAJEVO… 305
realm, supplies these foreign eyes and ears. The mode of communication
that befits the empire is eccentric, oblique. Due to his ignorance of the
Tartar language, Marco Polo initially relies on gesticulation and mimicry
to describe his ports of call: “The ingenious foreigner improvised panto-
mimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the
leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city
by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its
teeth green with mold” (ibid., 21–22). The Khan’s comprehension of his
empire emerges from a compilation of visions from the periphery, related
by a stranger in a gestural pidgin. To know one’s own empire is a venture
of unknowing: “In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows
pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and
the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought
of knowing and understanding them” (ibid., 5).
The peripheral cities that Marco Polo describes destabilize the spatial
and temporal coordinates of empire, the will to centralized durability and
entrenched continuity. Haunting, melancholy, and uncanniness abound.
In Maurilia, longing for the past, what Svetlana Boym (2001) calls “reflec-
tive nostalgia,” is a foil for progress in the present:
The traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine
some old post cards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square
with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the
overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions
factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must
praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one […]. (Calvino 1974, 30)
Eusapia is beholden to its dead, who occupy a subterranean replica of the

city—the caretakers of the necropolis report that “every time they go
below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make
innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection,
not passing whims” (ibid., 110). Leonia appears to be a model imperial
city, expanding ceaselessly outward, but the material of this expansion is
the rubbish that the city produces each day, which eventually “submerge[es]
the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with
the past of the neighboring cities” (ibid., 116).
Maurilia, Eusapia, Leonia, and the other cities that Marco Polo depicts
for the Khan bear crucial lessons for post-imperial cities today. Like
Calvino’s invisible cities, post-imperial cities are frequently loci of
306 J. F. WALTON
ruination, decay, disorder, and paradox, where “the jam of past, present,
future” (ibid., 99) is ubiquitous. This heterochronic “jam” of past, pres-
ent, and future is especially sharp in cities that once occupied the backwa-
ters and frontiers of empires, where peripheral visions of imperiality
flourish.
Over the remainder of this essay, I adapt the model of Invisible Cities in
order to pursue an interpretive experiment with three post-imperial cities
in southeast Europe: Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. Each of these cities
took shape over centuries on the Balkan frontier between the Ottoman
and Habsburg Empires. Subsequently, they were united for most of the
twentieth century in the various incarnations of Yugoslavia before parting
ways as a result of the violent wars of the 1990s. Today, they each anchor
nation-states—Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina—as capital cities.
Each of them has figured in my recent research, but in this context, I only
touch passingly on their distinctive histories, spaces, and communities.2
Rather, with Invisible Cities as a precedent and guide, I write about each
of them in the manner that Calvino might. In each section, I ventriloquize
Marco Polo before offering a more standard “historical” addendum for
the sake of the reader. Taking inspiration from the quotation that serves as
an epigraph for this essay, I seek points in which “an affinity or a contrast
can be established” (ibid., 15) among these cities, which might bolster
dissonant collective memories of their intertwined, inter-imperial pasts.3
Cities and the Dead (Zagreb)

On fine afternoons the living population pays a visit to the dead and they
decipher their names on their stone slabs: like the city of the living, this
other city communicates a history of toil, anger, illusions, emotions; only
here all has become necessary, divorced from chance, categorized, set in
order. (Calvino 1974, 140)
Arriving in Zagreb, a settlement tucked comfortably in the joint between a

mountain and a plain, the visitor is astounded: Is this a city without dead?
On the outskirts, the minaret of a mosque pierces cerulean skies, but no kabris-
tan is to be found. A network of churches permeates the city, anchoring neigh-
borhoods and districts, but these places of worship lack accompanying
graveyards. Even the towering cathedral, the city’s apex, reserves no space for
the dead, save one: a sarcophagus of glass entombs the remains of an
archbishop, an object of reverence and controversy. Where do the multitudes of

the past find repose in the present?
Then one learns the secret: In Zagreb, the dead reside above the living. On
the muted, sylvan slopes of the mountain that rises to the north, a second city
mirrors the first darkly. A sheer wall of unadorned brick and mortar, orna-
mented only by copper-paneled domes that, from afar, resemble defensive bas-
tions, separates Mirogoj, sprawling city of the dead, from the Zagreb of the
living. Behind wrought iron gates, a semi-circular courtyard forms an ante-
chamber for the necropolis. The austere facade of a chapel rises opposite; to left
and right, ivy clings to the delicate arches and cupolas of mortuary arcades,
where lightless cavities in walls entomb luminaries of bygone decades and
centuries.
Mirogoj hosts not one, but two species of the dead: the remembered and the
forgotten. A sizeable complement of candles encircles a gargantuan black mar-
ble slab, the crypt of the heroic founder of the nation. Candles flicker throughout
the regimented columns and rows of the cemetery, testaments to the obligation
that Zagreb’s living feel toward its dead. Floral offerings remain fresh, fra-
grant. An elderly couple passes with a cheap plastic brush and dustpan, the
accoutrements necessary to keep a loved one’s grave clean. Elsewhere, tell-tale
signs of dilapidation prevail. A granite mausoleum is choked by overgrowth.
Beneath the foliage, the names of the dead are etched in Cyrillic rather than
Latin script. A series of rectangular marble grave markers, close to the ground,
are nearly illegible due to grime and abrasions. The Star of David is visible on
those that have not succumbed entirely to time’s oblivion; they were members of
a now-forgotten regiment who fell fighting a poorly remembered war.
Zagreb and Mirogoj maintain their distance from each other, but those
who return to the city of the living after visiting the city of the dead retain
something intangible: an aura, a trace that is difficult to pinpoint. Only
after a long sojourn in the city does the visitor realize in a flash that the city
has played a morbid joke on its residents. Do they consider the fact that its
name, Zagreb, suggests that life here is ultimately “for the grave” (za grob)?
That for Zagrebians (zagrebčani), the everyday is “otherworldly” (zagrobni)?
***
Mirogoj opened in 1876, on a plot of land previously owned by Ljudevit

Gaj, the polymathic intellectual and leading light of the Illyrian Movement,
which pursued cultural recognition and political self-determination for the
South Slavs—Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes—of the Habsburg Empire. The
308 J. F. WALTON
Fig. 23.1 The dilapidation of Mirogoj. (Photograph by Jeremy F. Walton)
cemetery represented a moment of modernizing centralization: the hap-

hazard graveyards of the city’s parish churches were disinterred and their
dead relocated. All further burials in Zagreb were to take place in Mirogoj,
as they still do today (Fig. 23.1). However, only certain areas within the
cemetery continue to be active sites of entombment and commemoration.
Mirogoj’s Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim graves suffer from deteriora-
tion. Catholic Croat graves, by contrast, are generally well preserved.
Some dead remain tethered to life more than others.
The interlacing of care and neglect that defines Mirogoj is an imperial
legacy. Nineteenth-century Zagreb was in many ways a typical Habsburg
provincial seat, in which a plurality of languages, religions, and ethnicities
composed a complex social fabric. Mirogoj’s graves register this plurality.
On the other hand, the cemetery’s more recent burials and memorials
materialize Zagreb’s homogenization and Croatian preeminence in the
city. This is especially true of the monumental tomb of Franjo Tudman, ̵
the first president of independent Croatia, and the large section of the
cemetery devoted to military dead from the Homeland War (Domovinski
Rat) of the 1990s. Mirogoj is both a record of an imperial city that is no
more and a monument to a national city that only recently came to be
(Walton 2020).
Continuous Cities (Belgrade)

The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where
the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle. (Calvino 1974, 115)
A disoriented visitor poses a question to a passing pedestrian: “Where am I?

What is the name of this city?” “Zemun.” “But I thought that I was in
Belgrade.” “So you are.” “Well—is this Belgrade or Zemun?” “It is both.”
And this is the peculiar magic that resides at the confluence of two wide, lan-
guid rivers: one can be in multiple cities simultaneously, without taking a step.
At the junction of the Danube and the Sava, waters that once divided
empires now unite a city. Cities once opposed are now continuous with each
other, and bridges span waterways that once formed borders and boundaries.
Yet reminders and remains of erstwhile separation are legion. A popular
riverside restaurant on the banks of the Danube resides in a former customs
house, and still bears its name. Nearby, the campus of Zemun’s municipal
hospital was originally an eighteenth-century lazaret, where travelers arriv-
ing from Ottoman realms in the south passed idle days in quarantine before
proceeding into Habsburg domains. Beneath the eddies and currents,
shrouded in the gloom and mire of the riverbed, relics of the empires persist:
the wrecks of kayaks and dinghies that once navigated the aquatic imperial
border. Deeper still, abandoned tunnels, the lagums, honeycomb the damp
loess earth. Some circumvent the rivers from below.
Zemun takes pride in its multiplicity, its status as a city within a city. To
be in two cities simultaneously incites the pleasures of compressed space and
traversed time. But this is not so unusual. In every city there are places that
occupy other times, spaces that are continuous with disparate pasts. In Zemun,
one is necessarily in two cities simultaneously—why not more? Every city is an
archive and a compilation of the countless cities that preceded it: the city of
yesterday and the city of centuries past.
In Belgrade, this is known. For some, the weight of many pasts is too much
to shoulder. On the right bank of the Sava opposite Zemun, a recent redevelop-
ment scheme, the Belgrade Waterfront project, has evicted both the poor and
the past from the neighborhood of Savamala. High-rise luxury apartment
towers have replaced the district’s squats and taverns. Walking along the new
promenade beside the river, a visitor might be forgiven for thinking that they
are in another city: any other city. To be in one city is often to be in two, or
more; to be in any city is to be in no city at all.
***
310 J. F. WALTON
In 1716, the Habsburg army under the command of Prince Eugene of

Savoy defeated Silahdar Damat Ali Pasha4 and the Ottomans at the Battle
of Petrovaradin (Peterwardein), near present-day Novi Sad. Soon thereaf-
ter, the Habsburgs took Belgrade itself, where they remained in power
until the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739, in which they were
allied with the Romanovs. The Ottomans were victorious in this cam-
paign, and the consequent Treaty of Belgrade fixed the border between
the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires along the Sava and Danube Rivers
(Fig. 23.2). Belgrade returned to the Ottomans, while Zemun became a
border outpost for the Habsburgs. Over the following century, Zemun
and Belgrade developed substantially different urban cultures. They
remained distinct, if well connected, throughout the nineteenth century,
even as the Kingdom of Serbia achieved increasing autonomy within, and
eventual independence from, the Ottoman Empire. Zemun was part of
the Habsburg Empire until the end of World War I—some of the first
shots of the war were fired across the Sava toward Belgrade by the
Habsburg forces in Zemun. Belgrade and Zemun were united in the
Fig. 23.2 Waterways that once divided Belgrade now unite it. (Photograph by
Jeremy F. Walton)
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia)

following the war, but infrastructural integration of the two cities was only
fully achieved in socialist Yugoslavia, after World War II, with the con-
struction of New Belgrade to the south of Zemun, on the west bank of
the Sava.
Today, Zemun both is and is not part of Belgrade. Travel between
them, once a voyage between empires, is a matter of half an hour on a
municipal bus.5 Yet residents on both sides of the Sava frequently attest
that a more tenacious difference, one of mindset, continues to separate the
two banks. This ambivalent, persisting difference is, like the urban texture
of Belgrade generally, an inter-imperial legacy. Such legacies are increas-
ingly under threat, as deterritorialized capital investment—in the case of
the Belgrade Waterfront project, funds from Abu Dhabi—remakes the city
as a globalized everywhere, which is to say nowhere.6
Cities and Signs (Sarajevo)

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things:
pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds,
the barracks; scales, the grocer’s. (Calvino 1974, 13)
Each day in Sarajevo, an argument erupts in the farmers’ market between

two groups of vendors, the onion sellers and the hawkers of squash. The squab-
ble is always the same: both cadres of merchants insist that the city resembles
their chosen vegetable. For the onion purveyors, Sarajevo consists of countless
layers, each of them integral to the whole. For the squash peddlers, Sarajevo’s
essence is an inimitable feeling, a flavor that is contained in the redolent
center of the city. Gradually, their vituperative exchange becomes a food fight.
Rotten produce squirreled away at the bottom of sacks and crates flies through
the air. Soon, vendors and customers alike are covered in a slime of decayed
root vegetables and gourds.
Both factions have a point. Like the layers of an onion, Sarajevo’s districts
enfold one another, and multiple strata of the city’s past intersect. Socialist-
era ministries give way to art nouveau confections; these, in turn, cede the
cityscape to the minarets and domes of mosques and madrassas. The former
Holiday Inn still suggests the rococo postmodernism of the late socialist era,
but scars of the siege of the 1990s are no longer visible on its reconstructed
exterior. Closer to the center, a plaque on the corner of a building recalls his-
tory’s most devastating assassination, though the nearby bridge across the
312 J. F. WALTON
Miljacka River no longer commemorates the assassin as it once did (Kenjar

2020). The principal pedestrian thoroughfare, Ferhadija, witnesses a dra-
matic transition from orderly, colorful Habsburg-era façades to the low
recessed courtyards, overhanging stucco roofs, and monochromatic masonry of
the Ottoman old town. The street plan changes, as the Austro-Hungarian
grid yields to the skein of cobblestone alleyways that form Bašc ̌aršija, the
Ottoman-era marketplace. Residents of different neighborhoods in Sarajevo
live in the remnants of different times; these layered times, and their inter-
relations, constitute Sarajevo as a whole. So claim the partisans of the onion.
The squash sellers espouse a different view. For them, the essence of Sarajevo
is not a matter of layers and their contrasts, but a certain mood, a sensibility
best captured by the term merak. Merak is pleasure and taste, but it is also far
more than this. Its bundle of connotations includes a sense of tranquility, an
absence of or indifference to pressing responsibilities, a slowness and deep
appreciation of the textures and tastes of the city itself.7 The ideal place to
indulge in merak is Sarajevo’s historic center, the square at the heart of
Bašc ̌aršija. The outdoor tables of adjoining cafés ring the square. To sit at one
of them while sipping a small cup of strong Bosnian coffee, accompanied by
rose-flavored lokum (Turkish delight), arranged neatly on a decorative plat-
ter that was forged nearby in the ateliers of Bašc ̌aršija’s bronze- and copper-
smiths, to humor the play of shadow and light from the plane trees above, to
watch passersby: this is merak.
At the center of the square, an ornate wooden fountain, Sebilj, keeps benev-
olent watch over the votaries of merak at their tables. Sebilj is the preeminent
symbol of Sarajevo—on this, both onion vendors and squash sellers can agree.
Its delicate latticework screen, geometric decorative motifs, and dome all sig-
nal the aesthetic world of the Ottomans. But this gesture is deceitful. How
many Sarajevans realize that this icon of the city and compass for merak was
a work of Orientalist fantasy, designed by an architect from Graz?8
Frequently, the signs that identify a city, that lend it identity and atmosphere,
play subtle tricks with memory.
This is no surprise. History provides the raw ingredients for meaning—the
onions and the squash—but memories are the result of recipes that unite these
ingredients in unexpected, enticing combinations. Sarajevo teaches this, too.
While onion and squash may oppose each other in the marketplace, they are
both necessary components in one of the city’s signature dishes, bosanski lonac,
the Bosnian hotpot. Of course, the degree to which different ingredients—dif-
ferent signs of the city—achieve harmonization and find their full flavor nec-
essarily varies according to the cook.9
***
Sarajevo was one of the Ottoman Empire’s marquee cities in the Balkans
for over 400 years, from 1461 to 1878. Though it was politically subordi-
nate to the provincial capital in nearby Travnik for much of the Ottoman
era, Sarajevo predominated in matters of economy and culture. In 1878,
another Russian-Ottoman conflict concluded with the Treaty of Berlin,
which established new hegemonies and spheres of influence in southeast
Europe. Bosnia, with Sarajevo at its heart, was now under Habsburg occu-
pation, although it officially remained part of the Ottoman Empire until
its annexation by Vienna 30 years later. The seeds of the Great War were
sown during this period; they sprang to life violently with the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the revolu-
tionary movement Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), on 28 June 1914 in
Sarajevo. Like Belgrade and Zagreb, Sarajevo was incorporated into
Yugoslavia for much of the twentieth century, from 1918 to 1991. Unlike
its sister cities, it suffered immeasurably during the war in the 1990s that
constituted the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia. Though now the capital of
Bosnia-Hercegovina, it remains partitioned between two political orders—
large swaths of Sarajevo’s periphery and suburbs constitute “East Sarajevo”
(Istoc ̌no Sarajevo) and lie within the semi-autonomous entity known as
Republika Srpska.
The cityscape of Sarajevo remains a dramatic record of the many eras
that constitute its dense history. Sarajevo’s streets and structures docu-
ment a city’s capacity to encompass multiple pasts simultaneously
(Fig. 23.3). Simultaneously, merak, pleasure of and in the city, testifies to
Sarajevans’ perseverance through violent times. However, writing about
cities and their pasts in such a romantic register warrants caution, espe-
cially in contexts of recent and ongoing strife. Like Sebilj and other urban
symbols, the narratives that summarize and authenticate a city are often
not what they initially seem.
Conclusion: Peripheral Visions and Metrosophy

on Imperial Margins
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a
hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the
banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the
flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
(Calvino 1974, 11)
314 J. F. WALTON
Fig. 23.3 A provocatively deceitful urban symbol. (Photograph by Jeremy

F. Walton)
In cities on the erstwhile margins of empires, relations between the dead

and the living are dense and protean, as they are in Zagreb and its necrop-
olis, Mirogoj. Such cities are temporally and spatially multiple, in the man-
ner of Zemun and Belgrade. To reside in them today is often a matter of
navigating and integrating several cities simultaneously. Like Sarajevo,
these cities encase innumerable pasts in intersecting layers, even as the

moods and motivations that saturate them, such as merak, exceed these
disparate strata. Finally, the images and objects that symbolize post-
imperial cities often embed political ironies and temporal paradoxes, like
Sarajevo’s Sebilj.
Cities such as these are vantage points for peripheral visions of the
empires they once inhabited. They invite forms of writing that pioneer
dissonant perspectives on the past and its persistence in the present and for
the future. The parched disinterest of traditional historiography fails to
capture their tensions, textures, and temporalities, while the blithe plati-
tudes of inflight magazines and travel guides endeavor to erase them
entirely. As a balm to such silencing (Trouillot 1995) and whitewashing
(Jovanović 2019), these cities demand what I have elsewhere called
metrosophy, an esotericism of the urban everyday (Walton 2019c; see also
Walton 2021).
Invisible Cities offers an unprecedented and unmatched model for this
mode of “metrosophical” writing. Like Maurilia, Eusapia, Leonia, and
Calvino’s other invisible metropolises, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Sarajevo are
cities where memory and desire both bolster and destabilize signs and
names, where time is both continuous and hidden, labile and calcified.
Nor are they alone. Innumerable post-imperial cities await the peripheral
visions that Invisible Cities inspires.
***
Kublai Khan’s distraction waxed as Marco Polo spoke. His brittle fingernails
tattooed a topographical map, fashioned from tanned horsehide, which cov-
ered the entirety of the long, low table at which they sat. Finally, he inter-
rupted the merchant. “These cities that you describe—they are not part of my
empire.”
“No, my Khan,” replied Marco Polo, “they are not. They once belonged to
other empires, in a time yet to come. But recall: The cities of your empire are
no more your own than they are.”
The Khan slipped into silence. The Venetian reveled in paradoxes; this he
knew. How might a city in the future preterite, that once belonged to a future
empire, appear? He broke his silence: “These empires, these cities… when will
they come to be?”
“They exist already, my Khan, in my memory.”
“The future can be a memory?”
316 J. F. WALTON
“All empires are already memories, even those yet to rise. Just as all hopes
are directed toward the past.”
Acknowledgments My thanks to Annika Kirbis and Robert Walton for kindly

offering comments on earlier versions of this essay. Kevin Kenjar and Jelena
Radovanović graciously offered me their expertise and insights on Sarajevo and
Belgrade, respectively. Their guidance was indispensable.
Notes
1. For a distinct yet overlapping invocation of the concept-metaphor “periph-
eral vision,” see Lisa Wedeen’s Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and
Performance in Yemen (2008).
2. See Walton (2019a, b).
3. This endeavor resonates with what I elsewhere have called the method of
textured historicity: “a mode of scholarship and knowledge [that] empha-
sizes the distinctive, embodied encounter between the subject in the present
and the objects that convey the past in the present” (Walton 2019b, 357).
4. Silahdar Damat Ali Pasha’s mausoleum (türbe) has pride of place within
Kalemegdan, Belgrade’s massive citadel overlooking the confluence of the
Danube and the Sava. It was recently restored with financial assistance
from Turkey.
5. As the artist, writer, and humorist Momo Kapor quips, “Belgrade is the best
place in the world where to catch a bus for Zemun” (Kapor 2008, 49).
6. For a trenchant critique of the redevelopment of the Savamala neighbor-
hood, see the documentary film Waterfront: A post-Ottoman, post-socialist
story (KURS and Jovanović 2018).
7. The term merak made its way to Bosnian from Turkish, but its connotations
are different in Turkish: rather than pleasure, it means curiosity or concern.
Merak is also closely related to another term derived from Turkish, c ̌ejf
(Turkish: keyif), which means pleasure or enjoyment in both languages.
Engin Işın (2010) offers a provocative reading of keyif as a distinctive
“affect” of Istanbul, one that contrasts with Orhan Pamuk’s (2003) famous
invocation of the constitutive hüzün, or collective melancholy, of the former
Ottoman capital.
8. As Maximilian Hartmuth pointedly writes, “Thereby, paradoxically,
Sarajevo’s oriental quality was expressed with a structure that was not built
under Ottoman but Habsburg rule!” (2015, 174).
9. I am indebted to Kevin Kenjar for suggesting the extension of the onions-
and-squash metaphor with a reference to bosanski lonac.
References
Bartov, Omer, and Eric D. Weitz, eds. 2013. Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence
and Violence in German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Doyle, Laura. 2020. Inter-Imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the
Literary Arts of Alliance. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hartmuth, Maximilian. 2015. K.(u.)k. Colonial? Contextualizing Architecture
and Urbanism in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1878–1918. In WechselWirkungen:
Austria-Hungary, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Western Balkans, 1878–1918,
ed. Clemens Ruthner, Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Ursula Reber, and Raymond
Detrez, 155–184. New York: Peter Lang.
Işın, Engin. 2010. The Soul of a City: Hüzün, Keyif, Longing. In Orienting
Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? ed. Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal, and
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Ipek Türeli, 35–47. New York: Routledge.
Jovanović, Miloš. 2019. Whitewashed Empire: Historical Narrative and Place
Marketing in Vienna. History & Anthropology 30 (4): 460–476.
Jovanović, Miloš, and Giulia Carabelli. 2020. Introduction: Empire Off-Center.
History of the Present 10 (1): 5–8.
Kapor, Momo. 2008. The Magic of Belgrade. Translated by Ljiljiana Bajić. Belgrade:
Knjiga-komerc.
Kenjar, Kevin. 2020. Linguistic Landscapes and Ideological Horizons: Language
and Ideology in Post-Yugoslav Space. PhD dissertation. Berkeley: University of
California, Berkeley.
KURS and Miloš Jovanović. 2018. Waterfront: A Post-Ottoman, Post-socialist
Story. Film. Götttingen Germany and Belgrade: MPI-MMG and KURS.
̇
Pamuk, Orhan. 2003. Istanbul: ̇
Hatıralar ve Şehir. Istanbul: ̇
Iletiş
im Yayınları.
Stoler, Laura Ann. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of
History. Boston: Beacon Press.
Walton, Jeremy F. (ed.). 2019a. Ambivalent Legacies: Political Cultures of
Memory and Amnesia in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Lands. A Special
Issue of History and Anthropology, Vol. 30, Issue 4.
———. 2019b. Introduction: Textured Historicity and the Ambivalence of
Imperial Legacies. History and Anthropology 30 (4): 353–365.
———. 2019c. Metrosophy: Rereading Walter Benjamin in Light of Religion After
Religion. In All Religion is Inter-Religion. Engaging the Work of Steven
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M. Wasserstrom, ed. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri and Paul Robertson, 57–64.

New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
———. 2020. Already Dead? Of Tombstones, Empire, and Photography. In
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———. 2021. Graphic Designs: On Constellational Writing, or a Benjaminian
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Wedeen, Lisa. 2008. Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
CHAPTER 24
Imagining São Paulo with Invisible Cities
Derek Pardue
…Although I have willingly returned to report to you, sire, so many voyagers

out there in your kingdoms are hardly in control of their travels. In hard fact,
I feel out of sorts and I may err in my description of the next city. The wander-
ing and wondering, reporting and making rapport, pleasures and duties, I
embrace them as I look forward to these opportunities. And, so it is with
Peri Peri.
One elderly inhabitant of Peri Peri, a region with little presence in the
empire and few accounts in our records, shared a secret with me. He first
arrived in Peri Peri by mistake. Unfamiliar with the terrain and illiterate
in the language, Phulano had memorized his friend’s instructions. He was
told to wait for the third stop and then step off the train. Unfortunately, the
train made an unexpected stop in Valdrada, the mirror city reflected in the
shores of its lake. Valdrada exerted a magnificent gravitational force. For its
part, by contrast, Baucis was a lofty place whose inhabitants were fascinated
by their own mundane absence.
The force brought the train to a halt and accommodations were made.
Indeed, Valdrada is, as it turns out, a common hindrance, so banal as not to
D. Pardue (*)
Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
e-mail: dpardue@cas.au.dk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_24
320 D. PARDUE
be considered. Unaware of such trivialities, Phulano counted the stop as one

of his three. Phulano proceeded to exit the train, his destination altered
forever…1
* * *
I scribbled this story starter as part of my “notes” over 25 years ago when
I first read Italo Calvino’s (1974) Invisible Cities and coincidentally had
just perused an archive of late nineteenth-century European immigration
to Brazil. It was filled with stories of desperate Spaniards, who hoped to
find opportunity in Argentina, and who had miscalculated or were misin-
formed and ended up in the Brazilian port city of Santos, a mere 100 kilo-
meters from the emerging speculative monster called São Paulo. At the
time, I had just begun what has become an extensive engagement with
migrant experiences and the improvised city of São Paulo, Brazil, espe-
cially located in the heterogeneous, never-ending peripheral outskirts (per-
iferia or “Peri Peri”).
This essay develops that story starter to explore and develop the quali-
ties of ethnographic fiction as a form of urban theory. After an initial
reflection on existential crises and their links to Calvino’s text, I pick up
those narrative pieces of Peri Peri, rearrange them, and offer an extended
story of São Paulo. Not unlike the lambe-lambe (“lick-lick” stick-up, roll-
on) Brazilian street art, I make an intervention by producing another layer
of text that literally constitutes the city. Like an event poster, a misspelled
flyer for English classes, or a Banksy-inspired collage showing Pelé kissing
Chairman Mao, it is to be picked up, thrown away, recycled, and stuck up
again on any surface for passersby to contemplate. And, so it goes.
Urban policy analysis as well as urban ethnography struggle to capture
the emotional contours that constitute the city. Fiction’s great potential
power is affect. The scaffolding of tension and vulnerability is both an
aesthetic and theoretical resource, if one is willing to entertain the premise
that theory, in particular, is both explanatory and imaginative.
* * *
After all this time, urbanists, geographers, anthropologists, politicians,

writers, and others continue to struggle with the basic question: what is a
city? We impose models and metrics, templates and timetables to move
projects through processes of recognition, funding, material construction,
24 IMAGINING SÃO PAULO WITH INVISIBLE CITIES 321
and ideological posturing in the name of urban development and design

or knowledge production or, even more dangerously, “progress.” In the
end, it’s a shell game, a game of cards, as the reader gleans from Italo
Calvino’s development of the relationship between Marco Polo, the imag-
inative fieldworker, scribe-cum-urban theorist, and Kublai Khan, a mighty
but aging leader and pragmatic conqueror, who worries about the future.
The clever and somewhat dubious visionary encounters the nervous and
literal cartographer. The reader is reminded that maps are narratives, too.
It is this “invisibility” of Invisible Cities that hangs in the air as a rhetori-
cal opening worth exploration. The cities are “invisible” in the sense that
they appear to be fabrications. Marco Polo has invented these cities (Zora,
Maurilia, Olivia, Esmeraldo, and so on) and has, in fact, not traveled any-
where. He has been in Venice the whole time imagining other cities and
their peculiarities, as an opportunity, perhaps, to comment on the various
dimensions of one city. For Marco Polo, there is a consistent pole of refer-
ence: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.
[…] To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city
that remains implicit. For me it is Venice” (Calvino 1974, 86). And, so it
is. For me, it is São Paulo.
Stark experiences up against an impossible city. São Paulo. A memora-
ble journey on a midnight bus with suspicious noir characters, uneven
metal growths that pass as seating, glass panes forever stuck in rubber
grooves that are never open enough to provide relief from the oppressive
afternoon heat of January nor closed enough to protect passengers from
the crosswinds of a midnight frost whipping through the bus interior.
Mental health is a public policy issue, and laughter is contagious. Poverty
works like quicksand, while wealth, often astounding in its display, lifts a
few continuously above the fray. Unique beauty of bodies, hair and fash-
ion, a language of signs and sounds, spread out over the city. The jackham-
mer roars and the smell of deep-fried breads, rotting tropical fruit, and
cooked black beans penetrate the body. Smack upside the head. The physi-
cality of the subway car, aptly nicknamed a sardine can; the jack knife
maneuvers to enter into the ubiquitous elevator. There is no denying the
tactile sensoria of the city.
The city is an impossibility to explain, for it exemplifies intensely the
dialectic of materiality and ideation, one of the oldest relationships humans
have pondered. Coupled with the dialectic of local (Venice or São Paulo)
and global (Kublai Khan’s kingdom or the “Global South”), the city is in
continuous tension. The city is tension.
322 D. PARDUE
And, while all of this constitutes the city, urban policy reports contain
nothing of the sort. It is a genre problem. The city is impossible; the city
is erased. Only to be rebuilt and retold. We look to Marco Polo’s reports
with different eyes.
The “invisibility” of cities for Calvino is an invitation to fill in the spaces
of empirical doubt with an informed imagination in order to see the future
and steer Khan’s empire away from inferno. The accumulation of Marco
Polo’s reports to Kublai Khan suggests a weight not of universal truth or
a single shining beacon of modernity (i.e., “the city”), but rather a diverse,
wide-ranging realm of qualities and relationships. I read each report as a
rumination on a vantage point, an encounter, an aspect of the city in both
time and space, memory and shape. There is both a human attraction to
the city (e.g., Isidora) and repulsion from the city (e.g., Cecilia). The city
is everywhere and nowhere.
Marco Polo’s descriptions of Zaira are apropos. After detailing a few
quantitative observations, he counters, “The city does not consist of this,
but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events
of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a
hanged usurper’s swaying feet; […] The city, however, does not tell of its
past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of its
streets” (Calvino 1974, 10–11).
As it is in Khan’s kingdom, so it is in Peri Peri. Phulano confesses: The
numbers in these parts can confuse even the highest-ranking official. Many a
scholar, wise young men, really, have looked at these streets with pleading eyes
hoping for an answer about the whereabouts of places of interest to fall from
the sky. There are reports to be filed, people of interest to be interrogated, per-
sonal correspondence to be delivered. After all, the city must be mapped and
organized. These visitors to Peri Peri often become impatient. Actually, the
confusion is quite simply understood. There is no solution, but I will tell
you anyway.
Phulano leaned over to me, as if the next utterances were a deep secret of
the empire. Peri Peri is not organized around numbers or addresses. Indeed,
numerical signs are employed. They are all around us, but their order is not
sequential; it is symbolic. Phulano gestured, do you see over there? The young
brute with rose-colored shorts, wearing no shirt, and decorated in chains. He
renamed streets in accordance with his childhood idols—Jesus Christ,
Napoleon, Mussolini, Zumbi,2 Scarface, and George Washington. He pro-
nounced his house as 45 not for any reason of sequence or relation to adjacent
structures. No, he idolized a past emperor, a certain Fernan Henri Cardô,
who was highly educated and mesmerized the people with interminable tales
of Sorbonne and the Seine. Cardô called his followers “those of 45, the end of
darkness.” The young strongman considered himself to be a “doctor” and
expected due respect afforded to the “enlightened.”3
And, so is this mysterious relationship between the concrete and hope,
the elevated gate and despair.
* * *
Phulano attempted to leave Peri Peri several times. It appeared to be simple

enough. Modes of transportation were abundant, at every corner. And, yet, as
he approached this platform or that vehicle or that one, a wave of resistance
pushed against Phulano. A gale wind, a mountainous ocean wave. Pushing
him back into his place, a place that he had never intended to be.
And, in truth, one might say that part of Phulano’s troubles have to do
with his name. As your majesty can attest, names carry weight. Titles, affili-
ations, lineage, and even the sound of the name itself can part the sea or
persuade a multitude. Names can also condemn, give the mark of a witch, a
backwards oaf, or a dirty outsider. Peri Peri contains few people with any such
elite distinction and stigma, which are passed around like the flu or like elec-
tricity. Unfortunate and derogatory names ball up on a street post. They call
it “making a cat.”
Phulano itself is an interchangeable name; it is without individuality.
Literally, it could be anybody. And, yet, there are sparks of knowledge and
ingenuity there, to be sure, sire, in Peri Peri. Your majesty surely is aware.
Your wisdom is so great and your teachings have influenced me as I grapple
with this issue of names. Indeed, they seem to cut both ways. Lineage and
power; false fixation and potential erasure of what is true and real. I, myself,
sire, feel susceptible to the problem of names and, with it, the problem of lan-
guage. It is the risk of memory, that is, to realize an incompleteness of what
was so clear. And, perhaps this is the greatest lesson of Peri Peri, sire, and,
indeed, of Phulano, the man with no distinct name: that my reports are par-
tial, always partial. I admit this failure and beg your forgiveness. Humility
may be the greatest resource in Peri Peri.
But, I have been remiss, really. I think it apt to file an adjacent report. A
report from Ordin Ário,4 Phulano’s stepson. I suppose that is the designation.
Ordin came from the countryside. He stuffed his pants with a cucumber or a
carrot or some other innocuous vegetable that he hopes would make an impres-
sion. He tended to drift from neighborhood to neighborhood. Ordin caused a
324 D. PARDUE
splash, even though, apart from a bit of odd behavior, there was nothing at all
distinguishing about him. He was of average height, weight, intelligence,
and, honestly, endowment. It is unclear why he stuffed his trousers. Men and
women were moderately attracted to him. This was not his problem. In addi-
tion, Ordin could hit a cross, especially with his left foot, in a pinch on the
pitch. He was serviceable in many ubiquitous situations.
As I accompanied Mr. Ário during his daily tasks, a series of odd jobs, it
became apparent that his way of understanding and navigating the city—
and, by extension, I suppose, your High Kingdom—was unusual and, frankly,
confusing. Forgive me, sire, let me get straight to the point. On the royal map,
there is a neighborhood, a district really, called Tiradentes City.5 Indeed, it is
the size of a separate city. Named after a folk hero or conniving conspirator,
depending on your view of history, Tiradentes has been the official designa-
tion, recorded in the books and on all the circulated regional maps. Yet,
Ordin continually referred to the place as “Senzala” and then later as
“Márcia” and, still later, as “Negreiro.” These words rose up out of seemingly
thin air like the steam after a torrential summer afternoon rain storm.
Ordin emphasized them, as he described local living as comparable to concen-
tration camps, but then would pivot to refer to the area as one beautiful
woman. “A little piece of my heart is left behind after each visit,” Ordin
swooned. At other times, he opted for a racist epithet, to be honest. A slave ship,
to be blunt about it. Not unlike the figure of Tiradentes himself, “negreiro”
could be also a sign of resistance and, indeed, we identified several small
establishments with the name displayed. A brand, perhaps? My confusion con-
tinued, however, as it seemed that he was talking about all together four dif-
ferent locales.
After seeing my repeated frowns and consternation, Odrin Ário stopped
his pace and took hold of my arm. He grinned as he adjusted his pants and
rocked back and forth on his average-sized feet. Shoes the color of sand. His
feet disappeared several times during our encounter. He turned and said,
“for those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for
those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive
for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return.
Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Tiradentes
under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Tiradentes.”6
* * *
I worry, sire, that my reports are not what you seek. That you desire statistics
and graphs and measurements. That these reports are like Minotaur’s laby-
rinth, an enraging tale of futility that demands patience. That I am pre-
sumptuous, an aspiring Daedelus, who builds with words rather than fortified
wood and metal alloys. But, before you decide, rashly I might add, to banish
me to FEBEM or even beyond the realm to Ilha Grande or Mandabala,7 I
implore you, sire, that imperial maps must include the signs, the names, the
desires, memories, and overall stealth of the realm’s inhabitants. Their lives
must appear. But, how? This remains the ongoing challenge.
Your Highness will observe that during our conversation, we have played
several rounds of truco.8 We have played dominos. I have allowed you to win
occasionally as not to cause suspicion, to keep you minimally interested, some-
what occupied so that you, sire, might allow me to continue with my reports
from the far reaches of the empire. You have listened, albeit with demon-
strated frustration, and are to be commended for that. It proves you to be an
emperor of superior quality.
And, here we are, faced with what you once posed as the crucial question:
how might the empire avoid decay? How can we assure ourselves that we will
not veer off into an inferno? The answer is not solely related to focusing on
borders and military cartography. The beginning of an answer comes from
your subjects, sire, a select few who mix art with politics, sound with word.
They talk not of circumventing inferno but surviving an ongoing one.
Again, sire, my counsel is to listen to the artists, those who take risks to show
the beauty of survival inside the inferno. The venerable Mano Brown, his
council, and their followers preach this very notion: “I have an old Bible, an
automatic pistol, and a feeling of rebellion inside me. I am trying to survive
in hell/inferno.”9
* * *
And, we return to the driving question: what is the city? I would reply: a
contested imagined environment. The city is a struggle over belief. Indeed,
credence and suspicion appear on the first page of Invisible Cities and
increasingly qualify Marco Polo’s “reports” to Kublai Khan. Yet, the
reader takes note and waits, savoring in expectation of another entry.
Despite their inherent contradictions, dialectics tend to be generative,
not stifling. Calvino creates via Marco Polo. Lefebvre, Davis, Jacobs,
Rolnik, de Certeau, Bonduki, Maricato, Harvey—they all create as they
interpret. In a complementary manner, Cole, Ondjaki, Auster, Smith,
326 D. PARDUE
Melo—they all interpret the city as they create compelling, poetic narra-
tives.10 An approximation is needed.
In dialogue with geographer Pushpa Arabindoo, my objective here has
been to “write the city (creatively) back into the (critical) urban”
(Arabindoo and Delory 2020, 407). I use fiction as a method toward
(implied) critical analysis. Fiction both opens up potential inquiry through
imagination and affect, as well as through a (re)construction of the object,
the city. Or, perhaps better conceived, writing empowers the city to be a
subject, i.e., a series of protagonists involved in its own realization.
Notes
1. Phulano is a play on the Portuguese word “fulano,” which translates as
“so-and-so,” a nameless, stand-in-for-all type of person. A version of this
opening was published in Pardue (2008).
2. A reference to the legendary warrior who fought against Portuguese and
other European colonizers to protect the Quilombo of Palmares, a maroon,
Afro-indigenous community, one of hundreds during the colonial period
of Brazil. His death, which occurred during battle on November 20, 1695,
is commemorated as the true day of Black Liberation in Brazil.
3. Reference to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, president of Brazil from
1995–2003. He was trained in São Paulo as a sociologist and at one time
was considered a cosmopolitan elite intellectual. He has been a leader of
the PSDB, a center-right political party in Brazil.
4. The name is a crass separation of the Portuguese word “ordinário” (Ordin
Ário), which literally means ordinary but carries derogatory connotations
in Portuguese as someone who is stupid, backwards, an idiot.
5. A reference to Cidade Tiradentes, the massive neighborhood located in the
extreme far east side of São Paulo. The name Tiradentes is a homage to
Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, one of the leaders of a conspiracy
(Inconfidência Mineira, “The Distrustful Group from the State of Minas
Gerais”) against the Portuguese monarchy. The nickname Tiradentes or
“pull teeth” was given to Xavier based on his experience as a dentist earlier
in life. Members of the revolutionary movement were arrested; however,
the colonial forces selected Tiradentes to make an example due to his rela-
tively low class standing. The others came from families of reputation and
property. Tiradentes became the scapegoat and ultimately a martyr for
what would be Brazil’s First Republic (1889–1930) and not Brazil’s
Independence, declared in 1808, due to its maintenance of the monarchi-
cal system of governance.
6. This quote comes from Invisible Cities (Calvino 1974, 125). I simply sub-
stituted Tiradentes for Irene.
7. FEBEM (State Foundation for the Well-Being of Minors) is an acronym
referring to a system of youth correctional facilities in São Paulo. The city
administration changed the name to Fundação Casa (House Foundation)
in 2010. The attempt to clean up the institution’s violent past through
euphemisms has had its limitations. Linguistically, most residents still refer
to the place as FEBEM. Ilha Grande is an island in the Atlantic Ocean off
the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro and has been a tourist destination
since the late 1990s. However, during most of the twentieth century, it
served as the site of the Penal Institution Cândido Mendes. Mandabala,
literally “shoot the bullet,” is a nickname of Alta Mira, one of the most
violent cities in Brazil located in the state of Pará on the edge of the
Amazon rainforest.
8. Truco is a card game, supposedly invented by the Moors in Iberia, what
would become Portugal and Spain. Migrants brought the game in the late
nineteenth century to Brazil’s Southeastern states, including São Paulo.
9. Lyrics from rapper Mano Brown and the group Racionais MCs on the
track “Genesis” from the 1997 album Sobrevivendo no Inferno.
10. The list includes canonical figures of urban theory and public policy (Henri
LeFebvre, Mike Davis, Michel De Certeau, Jane Jacobs, and David
Harvey) with a targeted inclusion of Brazilian scholars (Raquel Rolnik,
Ermínia Maricato, Nabil Bonduki). I purposefully juxtapose these scholars
with contemporary fiction writers, who foreground the city as not only
setting but social actor. To be clear, the list includes: Teju Cole (Nigerian-
American), Ondjaki (Angolan), Paul Auster (author known for his New
York Trilogy), Zadie Smith (English), and the famed Brazilian urban crime
novelist Patrícia Melo.
References
Arabindoo, Pushpa, and Christophe Delory. 2020. Photography as Urban
Narrative. City 24 (1–2): 407–422.
Pardue, Derek. 2008. Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip-Hop.
New York: Palgrave.
CHAPTER 25
Desires and Fears in the Invisible Eternal City

An Ethnography of All Urban Ethnographies
Ana Ivasiuc
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but

even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its
reverse, a fear. (Calvino 1974, 44)
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities fell into my hands again as I was writing up
my ethnography of Rome.1 I first read it in my late teens, way before I had
any idea about anthropology, never mind about urban ethnography. Back
then, I found it enticing and poetic, I remember, but I could not connect
it to anything that I had thought about nor to any city I had known
before. After ethnography that changed: myriad connections appeared at
almost every paragraph, as if Rome was the one and only invisible city that
Calvino was writing about. I recognized the city in all its metaphors, but
that is not all: I recognized the book as an ethnography of all urban
ethnographies.
A. Ivasiuc (*)
Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland
e-mail: ana.ivasiuc@mu.ie

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_25
330 A. IVASIUC
My essay, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted intermit-

tently between 2014 and 2017 on formal and informal policing of the
Roma in the Roman peripheries, is a reflection on the connecting threads,
inner rules, and deceitful perspectives of desires and fears in the eternal
city, inspired by Italo Calvino’s prose. Step by step and following the
book’s symphonic rhythm of themes, I uncover the ways in which the
ethnographic presence allows for the city to delight the urban researcher
beyond the visible and evident.
Rome and Memory

The parts of Rome that let your mind easily wander are known from post-
cards. Cobblestones, fountains, sunset-colored buildings. Stairs, squares, stat-
ues. Alleys, curbs, ascents. Descents, too. The tourist areas become familiar,
expected, repetitive. Static, museum-like, mummified. Too safe, perhaps, or
too desired. That city contains the desires of every pilgrim that has ever set foot
on its streets, of every traveler enticed by memories of grandeur. And those
more intimate with the city, who deplore its magnificent past while looking in
the mirror of its decayed present, still hold dear the memories of an empire out
on a civilizing mission.
But what are the city’s absurd rules? How are the perspectives of this city
deceitful?
Rome and Desires (Fears, too)

What is the secret thread that links desires and fears in the parts of the eternal
city where no pilgrims and no travelers set foot?
Rome’s peripheries, contrasting the postcard visions of the eternal city, con-
ceal, alongside their own desires, the reverse, too: fears. Yes, everything imag-
inable can be dreamed: idyllic visions of suburban well-being amidst nearly
untamed nature, and with it a sense of belonging, an identity that seems at
first unthreatened. But when urban blight in the peripheries vexes the inhab-
itants’ sense of middle-classness and with it, the certainty of their status, fears
arise and multiply.
25 DESIRES AND FEARS IN THE INVISIBLE ETERNAL CITY 331
Rome and Signs

In Tor Sapienza, the walls welcome signs of death. Posters announcing the
passing of its oldest torsapientini2 appear overnight on the walls of houses,
shops, and pillars. Their colors fade in time, bar for the black stripe in the
upper right corner—a sign of death within a sign of death. Giannina, Iacopo,
Marcello become the signs of the passing of time. But they are also, and stub-
bornly so, signs of relationships—like in Ersilia, the strings stretched from
house corner to house corner, dense weavings showing connections. Giannina
is more than a name. Iacopo is more than the photograph of a round-faced,
jolly-looking old man. And Marcello, well, everyone knew the butcher. When
the Roma celebrate Ederlezi3 in the Spring, he used to order lambs, especially
for them. In Tor Sapienza, the strings between people and the puzzles of posters
on the walls fill the space that fears inhabit elsewhere.
The Thin City

Like in the neighboring Ponte di Nona. Is it perhaps because of its still rela-
tive newness that Nuova Ponte di Nona is a thin space, with no strings
between house corners? Or is it that strings can never be stretched between
blocks of flats? People call it a dormitory: “on the outskirts where men and
women land every evening like lines of sleepwalkers” (Calvino 1974, 61–62).
Here, no posters signal deaths. Giannina? No one would know her anyway.
Marcello who? There is no butcher wearing a bloodstained apron here and
bonhomously greeting Roma and pontenonini4 alike. Only an impersonal,
albeit glittering and sparkling-clean shopping mall in the margin. Rumor
has it that Roma Est, one of the biggest malls in Rome, was built only to boost
the disappointing apartment sales in the neighborhood.
The sidewalks of Ponte di Nona are ghostly, too. If you walk in the neigh-
borhood at night, something invisible compels you to look beyond your shoulder,
every now and then, pulling at fears you did not even realize you harbored.
Trading Rome
Rome’s obverse lies in its peripheries. Like in Calvino’s Moriana, its alabaster
facades conceal a hidden city where an expanse of scrap metal, ripped pieces
of cloth, old furniture, dolls missing limbs, construction debris, broken house
appliances, and everything in between amasses around camps “of nomads.”
332 A. IVASIUC
Nowadays, the pilgrim’s Rome and its obverse cannot be separated from
one another, nor look each other in the face, although there was a time when
the city welcomed in its heart and its hidden arteries—under bridges, on the
river shore, in the old slaughterhouse—those who sought refuge from wars and
poverty. Some of the migrant Roma still carve out places for themselves in the
city’s interstices, but the lawmen periodically descend upon their settlements,
dismantling with fury their makeshift shacks and chasing them away. And
while they cannot stand to see Rome’s obverse grow in its midst, the lawmen,
and those commanding them, are precisely the ones who created it. Campi
nomadi, where the sovereign powers hosted the Roma, whom they supposed to
be nomadic, were moved and removed farther and farther away from the
city’s inhabited places. Chased away from their makeshift cities-within-the-
city, the Roma, like Ersilia’s people, move the remains of the lawmen’s fury
elsewhere, rebuilding what they lost, again and again. Deprived of the strings
they had spanned between their shacks and the house corners of the Romans,
with whom they spin gainful relationships, they seek other ways of making
a living.
One of these livelihoods makes them resemble the street cleaners of Leonia,
were it not for the contempt that others manifest towards them. And yet those
others need them, secretly. They call them and trade their cumbersome refuse
and a coin or two against their time and peace of mind. Some of the Roma
trade in objects rescued from dumpsters, polished, repaired, laid on cloth on
the ground of makeshift markets, where all manner of rich and poor Romans
seeks hidden treasure.
Rome and Eyes

To compensate for the lack of strings, the thin city grew eyes. Pairs of men’s eyes
that scrutinize the night looking for thieves. When they don’t find any, they
create them: anyone walking on the sidewalk looks like a thief in this ghostly,
post-pedestrian city. The voice behind the pairs of eyes promptly asks them to
leave the neighborhood. The neighborhood patrol became the eyes that, in the
act of looking, produce those thought to not belong.
Rome and Names

Nuova Ponte di Nona (bit of a boring name, really) was built on lands that
were used by a shepherd. Settled sometime in the 1990s on the slow slope
between what became Nuova Ponte di Nona and what became Colle degli
Abeti, the shepherd and its sheep were swallowed by the city. Nobody knew to
whom the land belonged. The papers were gone, and so were the people. So the
shepherd—whom pontenonini referred to as il Pecoraro (meaning the shep-
herd: a bit boring, really)—stayed for a few decades. From time to time, his
sheep invaded the paved streets and the ramp to the highway, wreaking havoc
among drivers raising their fists in anger. The sheep droppings in the park
caused fear of disease, and hardly anyone took the children to play there.
The street on which the Pecoraro had his shed and herded his sheep, although
the only link between Ponte di Nona and the neighboring Colle degli Abeti,
stayed unpaved. Rain and huge potholes made it practically unusable. The
sheep, too, sometimes made it impossible to drive on. And yet, the inhabitants
cared so much for this street that they gave it the only name that is far from
boring, really: Better than Nothing Street, in the intimate yet whipping style
of the Romanesco dialect. Via Mejo de Gnente.
Rome and the Dead

In the summer of 2015, the body of an old woman was found in an apart-
ment in Ponte di Nona, the thin city. Nothing spectacular, except that the
woman had been dead for nearly two years. The neighbors sensed a putrid
smell and called on the lawmen. Without a warrant, the lawmen said, they
could not break the door. The neighbors went about their business, but not
before sellotaping the door of the old woman’s apartment to keep the stench
away from delicate noses. They called the old woman “the mummy of Ponte di
Nona,” and for one short summer the strings from house corner to house cor-
ner became a deplored absence. “That’s what it means to live in a dormitory
city,” they said, shaking their heads. Then they stood up with a shrug and went
to grab an ice cream and a movie at the mall.
Hidden Cities: An Ethnography

of All Ethnographies
If my account of Rome fits so remarkably onto the palimpsest of Calvino’s

Invisible Cities, it is not because of Marco Polo’s tales.
The “conversation of pauses” (Calvino 1974, 117) between Polo and
Khan is less a novel or a poem than an alchemy recipe for ethnographic
composition. In it lies concealed the dialogic to-and-fro of taking in rela-
tionships and giving back model cities, abstracted and therefore “too
334 A. IVASIUC
probable to be real” (ibid., 69). In Invisible Cities, Kublai Khan alchemizes,

in his mind, thin cities of filigree thought from Marco Polo’s thick descrip-
tions and ethnographic vignettes.
We learn of Marco Polo’s inarticulate first accounts, when between
them no common language could give shape to the cities described in
“gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror” (ibid., 21), in “improvised
pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret” (ibid.). Polo, the traveler,
painstakingly catalogues objects, people, events, surprises. He smuggles
“moods, states of grace, elegies” (ibid., 98). The task of the sovereign—
and isn’t theorizing that which we made sovereign?—is to interpret and
build models. But as soon as Polo’s accounts become repetitive, Kublai
Khan changes the rules: “From now on I shall describe the cities and you
will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them” (ibid., 43).
Later, we learn that “the city must never be confused with the words
that describe it. And yet between the one and the other there is a connec-
tion” (ibid., 61). Ethnographies of cities can only ever be imperfect in
word and image: mirrors of the things they describe, of the threads that
the relationships between inhabitants span in the hidden, spiderwebbed
corners of the city, and in the ethnographer’s imagination.
Ethnographies of cities are more than answers to your questions. The
delight lies not in the city’s wonders, but in how the city answers your
question. But the real wonder happens—and it never fails to do so—when
the city asks its own questions and forces you, the ethnographer, to
answer them.
Notes
1. For some of the work that has resulted from my research, see Ivasiuc (2015,
2018, 2019a, b, 2020a, b, c, 2022) and Racleș and Ivasiuc (2019).
2. Inhabitants of Tor Sapienza.
3. Romani festival of the Spring celebrated in the Balkans. The traditional
dishes consumed during this festival are made of lamb meat.
4. Inhabitants of (Nuova) Ponte di Nona.
References
Ivasiuc, Ana. 2015. Watching over the Neighbourhood: Vigilante Discourses and
Practices in the Suburbs of Rome. Etnofoor 27 (2): 53–72.
———. 2018. The Order of Things and People: Urban Surveillance Culture in
Europe. On_Culture 6 (Winter). Accessed December 12, 2021. https://www.
on-culture.org/journal/issue-6/ivasiuc-the-order/.
———. 2019a. Sharing the Insecure Sensible: The Circulation of Images of Roma
on Social Media. In The Securitization of the Roma in Europe, ed. Huub van
Baar, Ana Ivasiuc, and Regina Kreide, 233–259. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2019b. Reassembling (In)security: The Power of Materiality. In
Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization: Beyond State and
International System, ed. Regina Kreide and Andreas Langenohl, 367–394.
Baden Baden: Nomos.
———. 2020a. Threatening the Social Order: The Security—Morality Nexus in
the Crisis of Capitalism. Journal of Extreme Anthropology 4 (1): 227–249.
———. 2020b. Race Matters: The Materiality of Domopolitics in the Peripheries
of Rome. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (6):
1047–1055.
———. 2020c. ‘This Is Not the Bronx’: Contesting Urban Imaginaries of (In)
security. LoSquaderno: Explorations in Space and Society 57: 65–68.
———. 2022. Spatial Mobility as a Threat to Social Mobility: Roma in the
Peripheries of Rome and the NIMBY Politics of campi nomadi. In The Mobility-
Security Nexus and the Making of Order. An Interdisciplinary and Historicizing
Intervention, ed. Heidi Hein-Kircher and Werner Distler, 142–160. London:
Routledge.
Racleș, Andreea, and Ana Ivasiuc. 2019. Emplacing Smells: Spatialities and
Materialities of ‘Gypsiness’. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 28
(1): 19–38.
CHAPTER 26
Nyctopolis, the City of Darkness
Nick Dunn
The Dark Twin of the City

Day is the rehearsal. Night is the performance. As the sun sets, the city of
Nyctopolis exhales. Its air thickens, its temperature lowers and the dance
between dark and light changes its body language. Under the soft gauze of
sodium oranges, the city’s skin gently vibrates with anticipation for the night.
Its hues and tones merge as the last touches of daylight withdraw their finger-
prints from the urban landscape. Now those previous tiny glimmers, indistin-
guishable in the day, become resplendent as night walks us through time itself.
The cobbles of the street, lost amid the sea of asphalt, slowly burnish under the
glow of a streetlamp. Windows that were increasingly darkening mirrors as
daytime fades suddenly become planes of light, portals to miniature worlds
beyond. Up above, roofs meld with the sky as the precise geometry of the city’s
architecture becomes fuzzy. Around a corner, behind a wall, pressed within
the façades of buildings, the City of Darkness sits, biding its cosmic time.
Waiting. Wanting. To be released from the confines of the daytime.
N. Dunn (*)
Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
e-mail: nick.dunn@lancaster.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_26
338 N. DUNN
Here it comes. Slowly, stealthily, stretching out its crepuscular limbs and
gathering up the remains of the day in its pockets. They will inevitably be
relinquished as the cloak of night is shorn with the oncoming dawn. But not
yet. Nyctopolis is the dark twin of the daytime city. Its shadows and bruised sky
overlay the streets and buildings to transform the familiar into the uncanny
and unknown. Exhilaration, liberation, fear, and desire all reside here in the
nocturnal city, sometimes shuffled together and other times laid out alone.
Nyctopolis rarely deals the same hand twice. Streets that seemed familiar in
the daylit hours now wear a different expression—poker faces that mask the
inner workings behind their edifices. Light, meanwhile, throws its dramatic
angles across the urban night. Sharp and luminous forms that awkwardly
slice and dice the city into bright planes and overlapping shapes, leaving
gloomy formations in their wake. This interplay is held in tension until the
bright white beams of an oncoming vehicle temporarily obliterate the composi-
tion then, with the same suddenness, allow it to reassemble as red tail lights
wheel away from the scene. Down in the puddles of rain-kissed avenues,
reflected portals of neon promises ripple in the gentle breeze, inaccessible
underworlds that tantalize those living above street level. Up above, the archi-
tecture folds its way across the skyline. The membrane between the city and the
night sky is an ongoing contest—towers push the night away and yet, else-
where, the filigree of rooftops stitches the sky and the city together. Artificial
stars nestle high, their blinking red light warning of the vertiginous construc-
tions below.
In between these vermillion fireflies and the street, the people of Nyctopolis
ebb and flow. Their nocturnal rhythms are various. Many follow their circa-
dian clock and are at rest in the night. However, while they slumber, fellow
citizens are deliberately out of kilter with this diurnality as they actively
inhabit the nocturnal city. For these people, Nyctopolis is a landscape abun-
dant with potential. They remake the city each night and, in turn, it remakes
them. Identity and place are mutable and can be endlessly reinvented after
sunset. The City of Darkness is open and provisional. It draws its citizens into
its labyrinth as they seek out their own unfurling map through the night. Such
navigations may be routine as night workers enact the city after dark, whether
by providing vital services and maintenance or different forms of hospitality
and experience. Other navigations are impromptu digressions from the struc-
tures, roles, and responsibilities of daytime. The internal logic of Nyctopolis
finds a thread for everyone to be brought into its warp and weft. But unlike
the tapestry that forms a static whole and can be hung, this one made by night
is of temporal threads that will be gone with the first splinters of sunlight.
26 NYCTOPOLIS, THE CITY OF DARKNESS 339
The districts of pleasure-seeking are awash with the colors, sounds, smells,
and tastes that accompany night’s libations and forbidden fruits. Away from
these areas, the City of Darkness asserts itself calmly, beckoning those who
desire its quieter and contemplative spaces into its arms. It is in these places
that the enchantment and richness of Nyctopolis is truly to be found. The City
of Darkness encourages us to embrace unexpected ways of engaging with the
urban night, its ambiances asking us to imagine and sense place differently.
However, in the same way that darkness is situated, plural and diverse,
Nyctopolis is also many cities. As the Earth turns and night falls upon those
cities shielded from the sun, their different cultures and climates, geographies
and politics, histories and futures add to the shadow palimpsest of Nyctopolis
and its myriad stories.
* * *
The description of Nyctopolis provided above is a fictional composition,

drawing from a number of real cities, perhaps those which I have directly
experienced. My travels to date have meant these are largely Western.
Through this brief account, it is my intention to encourage the reader to
think about the urban night and evoke their own memories of cities after
dark. By doing so, I hope to reflect the immersive qualities of Calvino’s
Invisible Cities. Through its short and poetic accounts of places, the book
quickly transports the reader to imaginary cities that are both precise yet
generous enough in their description to enable us to visualize them
through a combination of the unreal and recollections of our own.
This chapter explores the complex relations between text, spatiality, cit-
ies, and imagination. Specifically, it examines the City of Darkness as a way
to investigate the entanglements of memory, desire, and the hidden.
Therefore, the remainder of this chapter is organized into four sections.
The first of these discusses how Invisible Cities enables the reader to oscil-
late between the real and the imaginary. It also investigates more widely
the relationship between literary text and cities at night. The second sec-
tion provides a historical overview of Manchester, UK, using the City of
Darkness as a means to understand the qualities of the nocturnal city in a
specific context. The third section is a creative non-fiction account of a
nightwalk I undertook through Manchester to give a critical and concep-
tual engagement with the form and themes of Invisible Cities. The final
section of the chapter offers reflection and speculation on the once and
340 N. DUNN
future City of Darkness, and the shifting boundaries between the imagi-
nary and the real.
Shadow Cities, Between the Real and the Imaginary

There is a deep relationship between writing and cities. In particular, the
interface between text and spatiality of cities, real and imaginary. Because
we are presented with the text and are prompted to visualize the urban
places being described, the shadows of recollected cities are never very far
away. This is a fascinating process since we may well draw upon experi-
ences of existing cities we have visited or encounter frequently while we
also conjure up ideas and elements from our imagination or from other
fictional cities we have knowledge of. Here, memory and creativity weave
across past and future, helping us produce the city we are reading about.
Even the city we are most familiar with is knowable but never completely
captured. It evades being held firm and static since it reproduces itself in
the mind into multiple versions, akin to the way Marco Polo describes a
succession of exotic and faraway cities to the emperor Kublai Khan in
Invisible Cities, all of which are versions of Venice.
The City of Darkness blurs the boundaries between the real and the
imaginary even further than in the daytime. It is little wonder that the
urban night has proved to be a rich domain, inspiring countless texts, per-
formances, and works across the visual arts (Dewdney 2004; Sharpe
2008). A key aspect of the way many of us think about and experience the
night is in relation to darkness. Literary depictions of darkness have a his-
tory of being entwined with the urban (Bronfen 2013), with the noctur-
nal hours frequently framed as a challenging time for the protagonist.
However, there are also works of literature that seek to investigate the
potential for the City of Darkness to be taken to an extreme. For example,
in Alasdair Gray’s (1981) Lanark: A Life in Four Books, Glasgow is remade
as a city of darkness. Written over a period of thirty years, the four books
combine realist and surrealist portrayals of the city. In the first book, the
protagonist arrives in Unthank, an eerie Glasgow-like city without any
daylight. Taking a similar approach, A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon
(2017) presents Dayzone, a place of perpetual light, and Nocturna, a place
of permanent darkness, as two ends of a spectrum of potentialities for
urban illumination and the lives that are shaped by such conditions.
Works of non-fiction have also embraced the City of Darkness as a
means to elucidate on the overlapping shadows of personal identity and
place. For example, Thomas de Quincey’s (1997 [1821]) vivid accounts

of his opiate-fueled peregrinations in the dark streets of London’s East
End are tales infused by enormous tropical plant life and exotic immigrant
populations from the Far East. The multisensory delirium is reinforced by
the darkness of the city, in which the nocturnal urban experience is where
one “must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and
doubted, whether they had all been laid down in the modern charts of
London” (Quincey 1997, 81). The revitalized interest of de Quincey’s
Victorian readers in the urban night as a site of subversive desires and
transgression was further precipitated by the “night walks” of Charles
Dickens (2010 [1860]). These descriptions of his nocturnal perambula-
tions richly articulated the atmosphere of London during the hours after
dark (Dickens 2010). Literally treading a path between the personal,
restorative qualities of his walks and the diversity of night-time encoun-
ters, Dickens’ writing oscillates between intimate encounter and reflection
on the nature of the City of Darkness.
Using a visual method of investigating this topic, Ian Lambot and Greg
Girard’s (1993) photographic record of Kowloon Walled City, a city
within a city, vividly illustrates the lived experience of a place where infor-
mal development was so dense and unregulated that sunlight was unable
to penetrate its lower levels. Demolished in the early 1990s, this City of
Darkness could be experienced as a compressed urban block with its streets
in a state of almost permanent gloom, irrespective of whether it was day or
night. Although a very distinct form of city living, replete with criminality
and poor living conditions, it featured in a number of literary texts and
films, and post-demolition has continued to inspire works of fiction.
Clearly, the night endures as a realm of fascination in both real and imagi-
nary cities. What is it about the nocturnal hours that is both so sublime
and also ordinary?
Night is both individual and universal. When our sight is diminished
then, as diurnal creatures, we feel less certain about the world around us.
Darkness in cities can be enchanting but also frightening. Urban inhabit-
ants may find themselves mired in a “gaze, moral and psychological, of
ambiguity, mistaken identities, betrayals and shifting allegiances”
(Christopher 1997, 45). The disorientation that the night can bring forth
may also provide fertile ground for the imaginings of “distorted shadows
of night’s always unfulfilled dreams, sliding inevitably into the sinister hole
of nightmarish fears” (Palmer 2000, 392). Despite these negative conno-
tations, I contend that the City of Darkness can also support positive
342 N. DUNN
engagements with the urban night and enable our creativity and imagina-
tion to flourish (Dunn 2016). Revealing the narratives of the city is not
necessarily straightforward and requires attention and attunement since it
“does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the
corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the
steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every seg-
ment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (Calvino
1974, 11).
At night, such detective work is quite different from during the day-
time. The reliance on vision as the dominant way to apprehend the iden-
tity and qualities of place is significantly reduced. The multisensory
experience of being in the city after dark places us in a different dynamic
in how we make sense and meaning of our surroundings and those we
share it with, whether human or non-human. The City of Darkness blurs
the boundaries between body and landscape, dreams and fears, space and
time. Being in Nyctopolis requires us to engage with the city at night on
its own terms, to recognize its different atmospheres, secrets, and sur-
prises. After all, “if you want to know how much darkness there is around
you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the dis-
tance” (Calvino 1974, 59).
Manchester as City of Darkness

Cities are dynamic entities. They are assemblages of people and places,
material and immaterial flows, processes and systems. Manchester in the
UK, like many cities around the world, is undergoing changes that are
altering its nightscapes and multiplicities of darkness. In particular, the
replacement of sodium streetlamps with LED lighting is profoundly alter-
ing its character after dark and creating an urgent need to reconsider the
quality and quantity of artificial illumination in cities (Dunn 2019). To
understand a specific City of Darkness, it is useful to acquire a brief over-
view of key developments that have shaped its relationship with gloom and
night. Manchester has a history of pioneering. It was home to the world’s
first railway and canals. It is the birthplace of vegetarianism, women’s
rights, and atomic theory. It is widely acknowledged as the crucible for the
Industrial Revolution. However, in order for the endless labor of industri-
alization to be able to work, there was also a need for constant energy
production to power their machinery. The use of coal was essential to this
process, and there is an interesting point to be made concerning the
impact of this energy production upon the city. The soot created by the
coal burning furnaces to power the machinery around them was airborne
and quickly accumulated on the surfaces of the buildings across Manchester.
Alexis de Tocqueville captured the ambiance of this City of Darkness when
visiting in 1835: “[a] sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen
through it is a disc without rays. Under this half-light 300,000 human
beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb this dark, damp
labyrinth, but they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great
cities” (Tocqueville 1958, 108).
Friedrich Engels’ account of this coal-powered landscape further
emphasizes the dire conditions: “on re-reading my description, I am
forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black
enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitable-
ness…” (Engels 1892, 53). Manchester during this period was evidently
grim, a Nyctopolis of nightmares rather than nourishment. Traces of the
dirty, dangerous, and squalid character of some of its inner-city areas
endure through the surviving names of Dark Lane and Temperance Street
in the district of Ardwick, places still witness to illicit encounters in the
present day. Another testament to this period of Manchester’s history was
the material deposit of soot that blackened the architecture of the city for
many years. Furnished with some spectacular Victorian architecture, the
coal fires and smoke from nearby industry blanketed the city’s landmarks
black prior to the Clean Air Act of 1956, which reduced pollution. From
being recognized as the first industrial city in the world, in the first half of
the twentieth century, Manchester could arguably also have been the dirti-
est. Its buildings and streets were filthy and dark. The coating of soot
produced a City of Darkness that was dramatic, unified, and uncanny. It is
worth reflecting on the nature of this gloom. Darkness is usually associ-
ated with, and widely perceived as a central feature of, night. Yet during
this period, Manchester’s sooty surfaces were capable of absorbing light
during the daytime. This phenomenon resulted in the city appearing much
darker than without this layer of material deposit and further emphasized
the sense of gloom, forming a very specific urban sublime. The implemen-
tation of the Clean Air Act of 1956 quickly removed the smog in the city,
and its architecture steadily returned to its original state either through
cleaning or the soot being washed off by the rain.
It was this gloomy city that the French writer Michel Butor encoun-
tered when, fresh from teaching in Egypt, he arrived in Manchester in
1951 for a two-year stint as a university lecturer. The shock of moving
344 N. DUNN
from a landscape saturated with sun to one where rain and fog, along with
smoke from chimneys and its black rivers, produced seemingly endless
days without daylight would have been profound. His experience of the
city provided the impetus for his second novel, L’Emploi du temps, pub-
lished in 1956 with an English translation, Passing Time, appearing in
1960. Butor casts Manchester as a dark labyrinth, whose brooding and
ambiguous character is “not a city bounded by walls or avenues, standing
out clearly against a background of fields, but like a lamp in the mist it
forms the centre of a halo whose hazy fringes intermingle with those of
other towns” (Butor 2021, 33). In the novel, the city is described in detail:
discombobulating, forensically examined, and cartographic, yet utterly
disorientating. Crucially, it is a city of perpetual gray and gloom that
remains enigmatic and does not easily disclose its secrets.
More recently, Joseph Knox’s crime novel Sirens depicts a City of
Darkness that is a neo-Victorian, post-industrial wasteland. The ghosts of
Manchester’s past still loom large in the contemporary city, seeping out
from the former industrial landscape and casting shadows on the move-
ments of its citizens. The protagonist is a detective who patrols the night
as a lone and problematic figure, disgraced and displaced, operating out of
sync with the daytime city. Drawing on his own experiences of nightwalk-
ing through the city, Knox brings a palpable tension to his version of
Manchester and its dark twin after sunset, “transforming into something
else between the hours of nine o’clock at night and five in the morning”
(Knox 2017, 23). These two literary works are pertinent given their
respective explorations of Manchester at night, both of which are rooted
in personal experiences of it as a City of Darkness. That they both employ
darkness as a trope for the nocturnal city to be the theater of the sad, the
mad, and the bad connects to a wider body of literature that resonates
with cultural associations and common perceptions of urban places after
dark. Butor’s nocturnal Manchester is one of disaffection and dimly lit
encounters, while Knox’s version accentuates the danger of the City of
Darkness, with all its seductive powers of pleasure, transgression, and
nefarious dealings in the shadows. These interpretations of Manchester
are, in some ways, no less real than the actual city. Night often feels like a
time and space for possibility, less fixed and predetermined than the day-
time. It is this quality that can make the City of Darkness appear unwritten
and unfinished. In my view, the potential of Nyctopolis as site of becom-
ing lies at the heart of its attraction. To further explore this, a creative
non-fiction account of a nightwalk I undertook through Manchester on

12 March 2021 follows.
Nightwalking in Nyctopolis
This is Manchester. It is nearly midnight and the molten ebony of the water-
ways move through the city via culverts and canals, huge yet hidden serpents
of the night flowing gently underneath the city. Walking away from the city
center and up one of the arterial roads, the eerie quiet and lack of urban buzz
due to the national lockdown, implemented as response to the pandemic, is
tangible. Cars and bike couriers move people and food around the city’s cir-
culation system. By an oratory, the illuminated stained-glass window melds
with the late evening sky, capturing its bruised hues in its crystalline frag-
ments. Crossing over and moving down a side street, the roads here all seem to
be held together by the background hum of the city beyond. The width of the
streets and the style of architecture whisper more of small-town Middle
America than an urban center of North West England. Yet, after a fashion,
it is the frontier, still fending off the forces of gentrification and regeneration.
Thanks to the bulwark of the Victorian Gothic prison, human activity around
this part of the city is all the more conspicuous for its general absence. This is
the muffled soundtrack of furtive and illicit movements and transactions:
the slow crunches under rubber of the curb-crawling car and the buzzes of
vibrating mobile phones in hands setting up the next deal. The district around
the prison is a micro-climate where many edges of urban activity overlap and
coexist. Breathing in and breathing out, Nyctopolis purrs, seemingly relaxing
its tendons but ready to spring into life.
Small retail parks, wholesalers, and light industrial units soon bulk into
view, their patchwork sheds offering discounted dreams and convenient park-
ing. Behind these a crescent of light industrial units stakes its way across the
urban landscape. Wholesale clothes retailers, garages, electronics, textiles,
materials, foodstuff. This is the utopia of demand and supply. It provides the
city and the region with portals to the world through its procurement and
logistics of goods and services. Electric light skims along the bottom of a steel
door or illuminates the odd window, but whatever clandestine operations are
going on inside are not disclosed beyond its walls. The ghosts of intense and
poorly paid labor hang heavy around here. Little gatherings of cigarette butts,
close to façade apertures, rest quietly following a flick and then the arc of their
flight from fingers. They are tiny reminders of the day before, specters of rou-
tine and all-too-temporary recuperation. The sleeping hulk of a heavy goods
346 N. DUNN
vehicle lies hard against the curb, its smell of rubber and dust telling tales of
highways and byways near and far. Of other Nyctopoles and the concrete and
asphalt networks that connect them. Its wide eyes and festive cabin lights sit
forlorn, discharged from power. Arcing back again towards the main thor-
oughfare along which cars and trucks shift to and from the urban center,
their bright white headlights growing and blood red rear lights dissipating
into the long avenue.
Turning back into the city center, it is striking how, hidden in plain sight,
this district is both a promise and a premise. It offers countless opportunities
for reinvention in its environs and the ability to have encounter and exchange
with a diverse and mobile set of cultures and identities. Its steadfast refusal to
acquiesce to the planned power of the city, and the latter’s ongoing quest for
an urban renaissance of renewal, has led to its character as much as the forces
of late capitalism have shaped its offer of cheap and counterfeit goods, shady
operations, and both legitimate and illicit provisions to the wider population.
With the return of LED-illuminated hues in the sky, the very radiance of the
city center, it is time to leave the early hours of Nyctopolis behind for
another night.
Reflections on Nightfall and the City

This chapter has sought to illustrate the enduring appeal of Invisible Cities
through critical and conceptual engagement with its ideas, literary devices,
and techniques. To do this, it first presents a new city, Nyctopolis, the City
of Darkness, which is inspired by the accounts of cities given by Marco
Polo in Calvino’s novel of places that are poetic and exotic. At night, cities
are transformed. The dark twin of the daytime city asserts her presence as
the world is refreshed and appears full of potential. Identities of people
and place shift after nightfall, blurring borders between the imaginary and
the real. The confines of daylit hours suddenly dissipate as the boundaries
of body and landscape, dreams and possibilities, slip into the fissures of the
night. The borders of dark and light can be fluid, fragile, and fleeting,
which offers considerable promise for the ways we might conceive, experi-
ence, and practice the urban night. The City of Darkness, then, is many
things. It can be the world of miscreants, shift workers, and transgressors.
It can be the realm of pleasure-seekers, deviants, and dissidents. However,
it can also be the nightscape of creativity, imagination, and contemplation.
Far from the spectacular, Nyctopolis can share the sublime through
encounters with the ordinary. This is because the City of Darkness,
whether real or imaginary, has otherworldly qualities that bring forth our
desires, secrets, and latent characteristics. We remake the city each night
and, in turn, it remakes us.
This lucid yet supernatural aspect of Nyctopolis is synonymous with the
myriad places in Invisible Cities. Each account is individual and universal,
allowing us to connect with its themes and features through our own
experiences of real cities. Narratives of cities are critical to understanding
our relationship with each other and with the places we inhabit, however
temporarily. To conclude, the diversity and plurality within Calvino’s novel
appear more relevant than ever. As we face global challenges that will
impact many cities around the world, the pressing need for ways in which
we can articulate different voices from, and share our stories of, these
places will become increasingly critical. Day is the rehearsal. Night is the
performance. Nyctopolis, the City of Darkness beckons.
References
Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2013. Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Butor, Michel. 2021. Passing Time. Translated by Jean Stewart. London:
Pariah Press.
Christopher, Nicholas. 1997. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American
City. New York: Henry Holt.
Dewdney, Christopher. 2004. Acquainted with the Night: Excursions Through the
World After Dark. New York: Bloomsbury.
Dickens, Charles. 2010 [1860]. Night Walks. London: Penguin.
Dunn, Nick. 2016. Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City. Winchester:
Zero Books.
———. 2019. Dark Futures: The Loss of Night in the Contemporary City?
Journal of Energy History / Revue d’histoire de l’énergie. Special Issue: Light(s)
and darkness(es) / Lumiére(s) et obscurité(s). 1 (2): 1–27.
Engels, Friedrich. 1892. The Condition of the Working-Class in England. Translated
by Florence Kelley. London: Wischnewetsky.
Gray, Alasdair. 1981. Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Knox, Joseph. 2017. Sirens. London: Doubleday.
Lambot, Ian, and Greg Girard. 1993. City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled
City. Brighton: Watermark Publications.
Noon, Jeff. 2017. A Man of Shadows. Nottingham: Angry Robot.
348 N. DUNN
De Quincey, Thomas. 1997 [1821]. Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

London: Penguin.
Palmer, Bryan D. 2000. Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of
Transgression. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Sharpe, William Chapman. 2008. New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in
Literature, Painting, and Photography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1958. Journeys to England and Ireland. Edited by Jacob
Peter Mayer. Translated by George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer. Reprint.
London: Faber and Faber.
CHAPTER 27
Epilogue: A Comparative Palimpsest

of Urban Plenitude and Difference
Ato Quayson
As Benjamin Linder (this volume) and other readers of Invisible Cities

have rightly noted, Italo Calvino’s novel seems to produce a shock of rec-
ognition for the prototypical understanding of a given city, every city
known as well as represented, and of the very experience of living in, trav-
eling through, or even imagining them. The novel’s mathematical and
symmetrical structure and its elusive sensual suggestiveness combine to
make it a highly multi-generative text at different levels and scales. And
serious implications arise for all urban scholars for devising a comparative
framework from the novel. The challenge, however, would be to stabilize
Invisible Cities’ multi-generative suggestiveness and to focus on just one
or two clusters of urban experience that might then be contrasted across
different cities or even within different sectors of the same city. And so, for
example, what might spatial traversal and the means of locomotion open
for us with respect to such experiences in different cities or within them?
More importantly, how are spatial traversal and the means of locomotion
A. Quayson (*)
Department of English, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
e-mail: aquayson@stanford.edu

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9_27
350 A. QUAYSON
to be understood as a morphology of forms, that is to say, as subject to the

kind of structuralist and poststructuralist analyses we are accustomed to in
the study of narrative?
While what I want to share here is inspired by Invisible Cities, I am
deliberately going to cordon off that aspect of surreal undecidability we
are attuned to in Marco Polo’s descriptions of the 55 cities in the novel for
now. Instead, I will focus on palimpsestically overlaying two experiences of
public transport and spatial traversal from my experience in distinct and
indeed quite different cities, namely Accra and New York, both of which
have been formative for my understanding of cities in general. That one is
a postcolonial African city and the other one of the global financial capitals
of the world turns out not to be an insurmountable barrier for comparing
them. If we adopt public transport systems as encapsulating social rela-
tions that can be disentangled and reviewed for what they reveal about
wider society outside of public transport, we find that there are avenues for
systematically comparing different cities not just in terms of their quantita-
tive features such as number of riders, routes serviced, and costs, but
rather in terms of the spatial experience generated by riding in them. For
this exercise I am going to focus primarily on the trotro buses of my youth
and on the New York underground metro system, both of which, if
explored palimpsestically, reveal something of the sense we get from Italo
Calvino about the combined concreteness and elusiveness of urban
experience.
The preceding chapters in this volume all reflect the ways in which
Calvino has been used as inspiration from a variety of theoretical stand-
points and perspectives. One thing that is noticeable about the chapters is
how much they collectively pull in the work of other modernist, postmod-
ernist, and spatial theorists such as Brian McHale, Deleuze and Guattari,
Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Michel Foucault, and many others. This
also means that Invisible Cities can be used to illuminate the conceptual
armature of other systems, that is to say, it is the novel that illustrates the
theories and not the other way round. The volume is thus a boon for
urban studies scholars as much as it is for scholars of Calvino and of litera-
ture more generally. And it is in this spirit that I undertake my own extrap-
olations from the novel.
27 EPILOGUE: A COMPARATIVE PALIMPSEST OF URBAN PLENITUDE… 351
Accra’s Trotros as Incubators of Social Relations

What is it to declare that public transport is an incubator of social relations
in Accra? The public transport in Accra I have in mind here are the ubiq-
uitous trotros, or passenger lorries, that are also typically the bearers of
various slogans and inscriptions. Here is a brief sampling of such slogans
and inscriptions: “Poor Man, No Friend;” “No Woman, No Cry;” “If You
See Me, Tear Your Face;” “A Short Man Is Not A Boy;” “In Trust We
God [sic];” “The Beautyful [sic] Ones Are Not Yet Born;” among many
others.1
What is of interest to me here, however, is that the historical ethnogra-
phy of the passenger lorry reveals it as representing an entirely separate
mode of social condensation from that provided by the privately owned
automobile, which was itself a major engine of modernity not only in
Accra but everywhere it has been used since the start of the twentieth
century.2
Let me illustrate an ethnography of the trotro from personal experience.
Growing up in Accra from the 1970s through the early 1990s, my main
means of transport was the trotro. I realized many years later that what I
had experienced on an almost routine and daily basis was a series of well-
orchestrated and rule-bound forms of socio-cultural exchanges. For a
start, there is a great deal of social commentary exchanged among passen-
gers. These vary according to route, traffic density, overall discomfort, and
the political and social conditions of the day. And so, someone might start
a long complaint about the heat in the vehicle or the lack of music or
against the kind of music that is being played by the driver. This may be
picked up by others or may be refuted depending on the personal disposi-
tion of different passengers. Important in the longer-distance and larger
buses is the presence of peddlers of traditional medicines, and also of
preachers, sometimes one and the same person. There are countless stories
regarding these two groups. Here is one that I vividly remember from
many years back: a nattily dressed young man stood up close to the driver
in one of the larger buses, and turned to face the rest of the passengers.
Slapping the right side of his stomach, he seriously declared in Twi: “Onipa
dasani, wo spinal cord, e bo wo ha!” (Translation: “As a human being, your
spinal cord is located right here!” [i.e., on the right side of your stom-
ach]). This triggered much laughter and a lot of debate in the bus, but the
point had been made. We did not really know the constitution of our bod-
ies and so needed his guidance for expert knowledge of the human
352 A. QUAYSON
anatomy and to maintain our overall health and well-being. He then pro-
ceeded to peddle some traditional herbal concoctions he carried with him.
The trotro passenger lorry is also the site for the circulation of news,
gossip, and sundry urban myths. However, what you and I call gossip and
rumors, security services everywhere call intelligence, while business
schools label them as organizational storytelling.3 Growing up, modes of
organizational storytelling were central to the trotro riding experience. It
was not uncommon for people to split the pages of the daily newspaper
someone happened to have in the trotro and to circulate the different parts
of the newspaper for others to read. Thus the sports pages might go to
one passenger and the international news to another. Depending on the
length of the ride, each person would act as an on-the-spot news reviewer,
summarizing the part they had read and generating often heated discus-
sion on topical subjects, sports and politics being the regular hot button
favorites. I have also heard a bereaved woman break into a traditional
dirge on a ride from Accra to Winneba. She was consoled by the other
passengers in the trotro, but the entire mood until we got to our destina-
tion was somber in the extreme. On the evidence of internet sites like
“Trotro diaries,” the complexity of the trotro as the condensation of a
social form of automobility still persists, even if in different ways.4 The
cellphone has now taken the place of the newspaper as the source for news,
gossip, and rumors, and it is not unusual for passengers to eavesdrop on
telephone conversations and sometimes to comment on them if they hear
something amiss. The point is that the experience of riding in a trotro
provides a different form of insertion into modernity. For modernity is
first and last a socio-cultural construct, the terms of which are set quite
differently between the individually owned automobile and public trans-
port systems such as the trotro.
The New York Underground as Another Crucible

of Social Relations
But if the trotro is not merely a means of locomotion but is also a crucible
of social relations and a significant mode for the active socialization of rid-
ers, how does this insight help us to look anew at modes of public trans-
port elsewhere? The question can be answered in part by comparing the
social experience of riding in a trotro with that of riding on the subway in
different parts of the world—New York, Boston, San Francisco, London,
Toronto, Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, and elsewhere. The social experi-
ence of riding on a subway in any of these places is partly determined by
the infrastructure of the subway car. Thus, the narrower the subway car-
riage, the more predetermined the modes of interaction on them. During
busy times of day, people tend to try and enclose themselves inside of a
personal bubble. This is partly achieved through reading the newspaper,
but with the availability of WiFi underground in many Global North cit-
ies, also by staring at one’s cellphone or other electronic device, either
reading or otherwise studiously scrolling through social media to avoid
eye contact with other riders. However, this bubble effect on the subway
carriage is regularly punctuated by the repeated announcements of upcom-
ing stops, the jostling that takes place as people get on and off the subway,
and the overall repeated space adjustments that riders are required to make
to accommodate the different spatial arrangements between those that sit
and those that stand before or around them. There is thus a particular
rhythm to riding the subway that becomes part of its social production.
Also of interest, however, are the other kinds of interruption of the
social bubble that do not derive directly from the infrastructure of the
subway ride or its regular station stops but rather pertain to different kinds
of personal announcements and appeals for help. New York’s subways
present the most diverse and colorful of these personal announcements. It
is not unusual for a ride on the D or B trains to be interrupted between
59th Street and 125th Street with groups of dancing teens eager to display
their dance skills and to solicit some money from riders. This is so com-
monplace that on some carriages you even find instructions clearly stipu-
lating that the subway car is NOT FOR DANCING! But there is another
class of personal announcements that distinguishes the New York subway
from all others I am familiar with, and that is appeals for help through
what I want to describe as the genre of the medical biography. These go
something like this: “I was recently diagnosed with leukemia or HIV or
some incurable ailment; I have lost my health insurance and cannot sur-
vive for long without my meds. Please help!” A container is then passed
around for people to dole out spare change, after which the person mak-
ing the appeal gets off at a convenient stop and makes their way to another
carriage to continue the appeal. In one such instance, the person was a
decommissioned military veteran, and he went about the carriage display-
ing his veteran’s card as proof of the veracity of what he was telling us
before appealing for help.
354 A. QUAYSON
During Christmas 2018, a woman boarded a carriage with her eight-

year-old child to deliver her medical biography. She said that because of
her circumstances, she could not buy any Christmas presents for her
daughter, and so we should all chip in out of the kindness of our hearts.
Now, while I stand to be corrected, I consider the genre of the medical
biography to be one that is at home specifically on the New York subway.
Because in all my travels elsewhere—in Boston, San Francisco, London,
Paris, or Hong Kong, and Singapore—I have never encountered the genre
of the medical biography as one of the modes of eliciting compassion and
money on public transport. In fact, I would venture to note that the genre
would be completely out of place on London’s Underground, with which
I am also reasonably familiar. This is not just for the narrowness of their
subway carriages, which would make it very difficult for someone to navi-
gate through them at most times of day to beg for alms, but also for the
fact that the British are generally known to cultivate a stiff upper lip, which
essentially means they would close themselves from divulging their private
business in the profane setting of a subway carriage. And so, to divulge
one’s medical biography in such fashion on the London Underground
would likely lead to disgust rather than sympathy. This is not what we find
on the New York Metro or indeed on Accra’s public transport, where the
genre of the medical biography is on occasion also to be heard. This then
tells us that as a mode of public transport, the subway is as much a crucible
of social relations as were the trotros of my youth in Accra.
Back to Calvino
How does comparing these two means of locomotion—the trotro and the
subway—allow us to transpose our experience from our encounter with
Invisible Cities? First, and perhaps most important, is that despite its well-
noted imagistic elusiveness, Invisible Cities actually requires a great deal of
intense attentiveness to be able to decipher the significance of the various
cities and the relationships among them, some of which are picked up and
echoed in ways not entirely predictable in different sections of the book.
Underlying notions of space and time are distributed as emblematic
sequences among the various cities in such a way as to require us to “look”
properly in other to discern them. Is Anastasia, the city where “your
desires waken all at once and surround you” (Calvino 1974, 12), different
from Tamara, where “the eye does not see things but images of things that
mean other things” (ibid., 13)? Or are these two cities simply mirror
images of semiotic systems, one grounded in desire and the other in met-
onymic images, which are on a certain reading the projections of popular
desires codified and concentrated in the shorthand of recognizable images?
To see such a relationship between distinct cities visited, does it not require
a particular quality of attentiveness and of the remembrance of cities past?
Second, are the urban features that reach our senses merely the objec-
tive correlatives of planned and unplanned urbanism? Or are they the trig-
gers for our immersion into the recesses of our own past experience? For
how does one navigate a city without a memory of it beforehand, even if
the new city is being encountered for the very first time? I think, then, that
Invisible Cities provides us a template not just for reading the literary rep-
resentation of cities, but for grasping the conjoined latencies of various
experiences of the urban that we don’t even know we are privy to. As
Marco Polo puts it to Kublai Khan in one of the many nuggets of gnomic
insight to be found in the frame narrative of the conversations between
them: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that
he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no
longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed, places” (Calvino
1974, 28–29).
As the diverse offerings in this volume show, Calvino’s novel continues
to speak to a wide range of fields and interests. The hope, however, is that
urban studies scholars will help migrate the magical offerings of the novel
into more sustained analyses of cities everywhere. This would deliver a
feast well beyond literature departments and into the fields of history,
anthropology, sociology, and of course of the interdisciplinary field of
urban studies itself.
Notes
1. I explore trotro slogans in “The Beautyful (sic) Ones Are Not Yet Born:
Trotro Slogans, Cell Phone Advertising, and the Hallelujah Chorus,”
(Quayson 2014, Chap. 4).
2. For the impact of the introduction of the automobile in Ghana and in West
Africa generally, see Greene-Simms (2017).
3. On organizational storytelling, see especially Gabriel (2000).
4. For a fascinating introduction to the Trotro Diaries platform, see Errol
Barnett and Teo Kermeliotis, “Take the ride of your life in Accra’s crosstown
traffic,” CNN, September 12, 2013; https://www.cnn.com/2013/09/12/
travel/take-the-ride-accra-traffic/index.html; last accessed November
23, 2021.
356 A. QUAYSON
References
Gabriel, Yiannis. 2000. Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, Fantasies.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Greene-Simms, Lindsay. 2017. Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West
Africa. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Quayson, Ato. 2014. Oxford Street, Accra; City Life and the Itineraries
Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Index1
A C
Accra, xiv, 350–352, 354, 355n4 The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 5
Adelma, 259 Cecilia, 44, 240, 262, 322
Aglaura, 34, 87 Chess, 11, 51, 71, 77, 78, 80n4, 87–89,
Andria, 19, 113, 200, 226, 105, 108, 139, 201, 282, 284
230, 233–235 Chloe, 33
Armilla, 91, 104, 131, 133 Clarice, 104, 151, 152, 160, 210
Communism, 4, 5, 152, 154–161,
161n4, 276
B
Barthes, Roland, 6, 11, 21n6,
21n7, 40 D
Baucis, 12, 319 Deleuze, Gilles, 44, 45, 62, 350
Beersheba, 91, 170 Diomira, 90, 104, 212, 265
Berenice, 19, 33, 170, 188, 226, Dorothea, 294
228, 229, 233, 234,
261, 284
Borges, Jorge Luis, 6, 12, 89, E
93n3, 93n5, 93n6, Eco, Umberto, 6, 12, 43
103, 114n1 Ersilia, 123, 127, 200, 297, 331, 332
1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13048-9
358 INDEX
Esmeralda, 41–46, 102, 257 Isaura, 104

Ethnography, xii, xiii, 1, 3, 19, 52, 53, Isidora, 104, 258, 322
117, 119, 120, 123, 126, 127,
159, 160, 161n2, 172, 200, 212,
240, 271, 286, 290n4, 320, 329, J
330, 333, 334, 351 Jakarta, 19, 226–231, 234
Eusapia, 105, 170, 295, 305, 315
Eutropia, 104, 105, 296
K
Kimmerer, Robin, 56
F
Fedora, 33, 104, 135
Foucault, Michel, 6, 40, 350 L
Fourier, Charles, 6, 139, 140, 143 Latour, Bruno, 18, 59–66, 66n1
French Kiss, 18, 70–72, 74–77, 79, 79n1 Lefebvre, Henri, 16, 18, 30–33, 114,
325, 350
Leonia, 19, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181,
G 182, 226–228, 232, 234, 255,
Gender, 16, 18, 50, 72, 79, 80n5, 262, 305, 315, 332
121, 202, 212, 220, 289 Lorde, Audre, 50
Guattari, Félix, 44, 45, 62, 350
M
H Manchester, 19, 267, 339, 342–345
Haraway, Donna, 50, 56, 119, 192 Marozia, 34–36, 43
Harvey, David, 327n10, 350 Materiality, 20, 71, 168, 186, 188,
Heritage, xi, xiii, 18, 104, 209–211, 189, 192, 194, 254, 321
213, 216, 219, 221, 222, Maurilia, 15, 211, 221, 305, 315, 321
229–231, 233, 240 Melania, 104, 258, 296
Heterotopia, 40, 43–45 Milan, 122–127
Hypatia, 87, 104, 261 Montreal, 18, 70, 71, 74–77
Moriana, 296, 331
I
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 5, 79 N
Il Milione, 6, 98, 290n2 New York, xii, xiii, 10, 17, 19, 50, 88,
Inferno, 30, 35, 36, 56, 226, 263, 104, 138, 251, 258, 260, 262,
264, 276, 284, 322, 325 280, 327n10, 350, 352–354
Invisible Cities
structure of, 7, 8, 11, 40, 42, 89,
105, 254 O
writing of, 6 Octavia, 91, 104, 260, 294
Irene, 18, 43, 212, 327n6 Olivia, 87, 321
INDEX 359
Ottoman Empire, 152–155, 157, Sophronia, 104, 105, 118, 119,

159–161, 166, 306, 309, 310, 125, 127
312, 313, 316n6, 316n7, 316n8 Structuralism, 6, 11, 12, 40
OuLiPo, 6, 7, 105
T
P Tamara, 72, 86, 200, 296, 354
Paris, 5, 10, 13, 15, 18, 59–66, 139, Teatro Potlach, 19,
166, 274, 353, 354 266–268, 271–275
The Path to the Spiders’ Nest, 4 Theodora, 53, 54, 262, 284
Pedagogy, 280, 284, 286, 289, 290n4, Tsing, Anna, 52, 53, 56
290n5, 343
Penthesilea, 44, 85, 121, 127, 240
Perec, Georges, 5–6, 105 U
Perinthia, 17, 284, 297 UNESCO, 187, 196n3, 210, 216
Postcolonialism, 304, 350 Urban society, 18, 30–33, 35, 36
Postmodernism, xiv, 2, 9, 11–13, 16, Utopia, 5, 6, 9, 18, 32, 98, 110,
18, 21n8, 43, 45, 118–120, 311 125, 135, 137, 138, 140,
Poststructuralism, 12 141, 270, 271, 276,
Procopia, 240, 260, 262, 284 290n1, 345
Q V
Queneau, Raymond, 5, 93n6, 105 Valdrada, 105, 259, 295, 319
Vancouver, 122–127, 128n5
Venice, 10, 17–19, 42, 43, 97–114,
R 120–122, 152, 171, 225, 251,
Raissa, 34, 284, 296 252, 257, 268, 273, 283, 298,
Rhizome, 40, 44, 45 321, 340
Rome, xii, 19, 161n2, 166, 265,
273, 329–333
Z
Zanzibar, 18, 185–191,
S 193–195
Shenzhen, 19, 226, 231–234 Zenobia, 36n2, 91, 103, 122–124,
Site-specific performance, 267 127, 128, 253
Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Zirma, 90, 169
98, 103, 253 Zobeide, 16, 33, 72–74, 85
Smart city, 19, 227, 293, 294, 296, Zoe, 86
298, 299, 300n6, 300n8, 300n9 Zora, 85, 191, 262, 321

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LITERARY URBAN STUDIES

Invisible Cities and the

Invisible Cities and the

ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Jim Zuckerman / Alamy Stock Photo

“Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a miraculously fascinating work, a postmodern

“Built environment professionals and researchers, social scientists, and literary

“A lively, fresh, and wide-ranging encounter with Calvino’s wonderful Invisible

1 I ntroduction: Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination 1

Part I Cities & Theory 27

Part II Cities & Cities 95

Part III Cities & Practice 249

19 The Architect and Invisible Cities251

22 Invisible Smart Cities293

Vanicka Arora is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Culture and

James Ellison is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer. He studies

Mark Purcell is a professor in the Department of Urban Design &

Fig. 1.1 Graphic representation of the structure of Invisible Cities.

Introduction: Invisible Cities and the Urban

Returning to Invisible Cities

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

practitioners interested in actually existing urban life? This is a collection

55 cities, its framing conceit (a conversation between Marco Polo and

The Author, The Text

owing to disagreements about de-Stalinization and, more acutely, to the

text takes the form of 55 descriptions of fantastical cities, bordering on the

Fig. 1.1 Graphic

through various visualizations in which the patterns become easier to

Literary value is conferred when a mythical-archetypal structure clashes with

Calvino only imposed the infamous structure of Invisible Cities after he

Taken together, the book’s three layers—its numerical structure, its

In classic postmodern fashion, meaning is always unsettled in Invisible

Semiotics is key to Calvino’s writerly disposition (Krysinski 2002).

Passages from Calvino’s 1972 novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calen-

Invisible Cities, Lived Cities

Postmodern literary theory tends to employ spatial language in ways that

New Directions, Other Cities

instill coherence, order, and flow—nevertheless cannot contain the rich

of “real” geography, even if only as foil; meanwhile, the experience of

———. 2004. On Invisible Cities. Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

Howard, Christopher. 2017. Mobile Lifeworlds: An Ethnography of Tourism and

Modena, Letizia. 2011. Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian

Cities & Theory

Invisible Cities: Learning to Recognize

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 29

Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s theorization of cities—and especially some-

Invisible Cities and The Urban Revolution

5–6). The whole of the book, by my reading, is a plea for us to be attentive

without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.

We have to seek and learn to recognize this not-inferno, this Marozia of

How to Map the Invisible

Maps, cities, and narratives are always interrelated and interconnected.

This essay is the revised version of “A Dream of the Perfect Map—Calvino’s

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 39

of Esmeralda is exemplary here (Calvino 1974, 88). To move around

Esmeralda resembles our contemporary sense of space—the loss of the

and literature as challenger to the labyrinthine complexity of the world”

The empire of Calvino’s Great Khan is just such a heterotopia. Radically

Postulated as a model to describe narrative, heterotopia generates confu-

A parallel reading of the Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizome and

conditions of postmodernity result in a deeper anxiety due to the loss of

Invisible Cities and the Work of Storying

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 49

1 I ntroduction: Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination 1

Part I Cities & Theory 27

Part II Cities & Cities 95

Part III Cities & Practice 249

19 The Architect and Invisible Cities251

22 Invisible Smart Cities293