The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs of urban sociology and demography and architecture. (Raban 1974: 2)

MEANING AND MEMORY: READING THE URBAN TEXT
If utopian visions for a better society achieved through the transformation of the city had guided urban studies throughout most of the twentieth century, these new cultural approaches were decidedly counter-utopian. In particular, they pivoted on celebrating urban chaos and difference, and advocated exploring the city as it is, not as it might be. This chapter further investigates cultural studies approaches to the city commenced in Chapter 3. Considered, in particular, are conceptualizations of the relationship between the urban landscape, the construction of meaning, and the negotiation of identity. To this end, the chapter begins with a discussion of the foundations of cultural urban thought before moving on to examine semiotics, which provides a methodological frame for many analyses of the city as ‘text’. The chapter then considers the seminal work of Walter Benjamin, whose writings on nineteenth-century Paris explored the ‘knowing’ of that city through the work of artists as well as through the experiences and meanderings of the urban flâneur. Benjamin’s work, in particular, underpins many of the so-called postmodern approaches to studying the city and urban cultures. Also considered is the suggestion that spatial practices create a myriad of narrative maps which, although mytho- logical, imaginary and partial, are central to the process of transforming cartographic space into places of meaning and memory. As a result, within a single urban landscape, a multiplicity of places will exist that have been defined through use, imagination and cultural practice. It also points to the likelihood that such a confusion of meaning and references can lead to a fixation on surfaces at the expense of depth and ‘true’ experience. The significance of place-naming to this process is also discussed.

It is not possible to talk about cultural studies as a unified domain of enquiry or as a discipline like sociology or philosophy. It is highly fragmented and has its roots in a number of quite divergent disciplines and often-competing ‘ways of seeing’ and interpreting the world. Seminal has been the work of a range of scholars, including Roland Barthes (1968, [1957] 1972), Michel Foucault (1972), Jacques Derrida (1976) and those associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom (e.g. Hall and Jefferson 1976; Willis 1977). Cultural studies approaches have also been influenced by poststructuralist theories of language, representation and subjectivity, and often endorse the view that the project of modernity has been rendered obsolete and the world has entered a period of postmodernity. This is a world supposedly dominated by simulations, images and the fragmentation of identity (McGuigan 1999). What is fascinating is the extent to which the city and the urban, as cultural texts, have become central to many cultural studies analyses. In addition, the notion of space has emerged as pivotal to explorations of subjectivity and, more generally, as metaphor, now permeates the language of (post- modern) cultural enquiry (Zukin 1992). Also of significance is the idea of postmodernism as an aesthetic form which is most notably associated with architecture and urban design. Notions of postmodernism have had a significant impact on cultural approaches to the urban, with the idea of the ‘postmodern city’ being particularly important. The theories and methods of cultural studies resonated with urban scholars, many of whom were (as discussed in Chapter 3) becoming dis- satisfied with established theoretical and analytical frameworks by the end of the 1970s (Hall 1992). The key features and orientations associated with the so-called cultural ‘turn’ in urban analysis are succinctly summarized in the following passage from Julie Graham (1988: 60) ‘modernism, homo- geneity, rationality, mass production, metanarrative, tract housing and space are dead. Long live post-modernism, pluralism, power and desire, small batch production, local narrative, indigenous architecture and place’. According to David Harvey (1989), the first indication that a shift in urban theory and analysis was underway emerged in the early 1970s with the publication of Soft City, Jonathan Raban’s (1974) rather idiosyncratic celebration of life in ‘his’ city of London. When considered in retrospect, Harvey (1989: 3) suggests it is possible to see that this book flagged the emergence of new ways of thinking and talking about the city and the ‘prob- lems of urban life’. Specifically, in Harvey’s view, Soft City marked the arrival of the idea of the postmodern city and its representation of urban life can be seen as emblematic of what has come to be associated with the ‘postmodern condition’ (Lyotard 1984). Whether this theoretical shift is to be embraced as transcending or augmenting existing modes of explanation and analysis, or rejected as a retrograde denial of structures, remains a vexed question. For Harvey, however, the approach articulated in Soft City is, ultimately, unconvincing. Of particular concern is that Raban explicitly dismisses the relevance and utility of traditional overarching explanations of urbanism – those grounded in notions of rationality. In their place he proffers an analysis situated in the lived moments of individual everyday urban experiences and imaginings. The significance of the rejection of the metanarrative cannot be underesti- mated because, until this time, the formulation of (and, indeed, necessity for) totalizing theoretical explanations had been accepted as de rigueur in all the social sciences, including urban studies, and underpinned the practical interventions in cityspace of urban policy and planning. In reject- ing such explanatory frames, Raban espouses a view that articulates with perhaps the most trenchant of the theoretical challenges to come from scholars loosely associated with a postmodern cultural critique: the render- ing as contestable the epistemological assumptions underpinning all social research, including those associated with the urban. In particular, the foundations of Marxist political economy (discussed in Chapter 3) and the ecological theories of the Chicago School (see Chapter 2) are destabilized. According to Raban, his actions and those of his fellow city-dwellers are fundamentally irrational. Indeed, everything about London – the place and its people – is, in his view, fragmented and deeply contradictory. The dis- cordant rhythms of the city have their genesis in the accidental intersections of time and space. Raban’s city is a city of signs, images, surfaces, move- ment and transient moments; it is an ‘emporium of style’ (1974: 57–84) where people assume different identities almost at will. Raban tells of his escape from the oppressive boundaries and surveillance of the communal rural village and of finding freedom in the confusion and anonymity of the metropolis. His metropolis is a place that Simmel ([1903] 1995) would recognize where the ‘freedom of the city is enormous. Here one can choose and invent one’s society, and live more deliberately than anywhere else. Nothing is fixed, the possibilities of personal change and renewal are endless and open’ (Raban 1974: 225). But freedom has its consequences, and Raban remains at heart a country mouse – wary of the dangers of the city he ‘run[s] from bolthole to bolthole, unequipped to embrace that spaciousness and privacy of city life which so often presents itself as mere emptiness and fog’ (1974: 225). Hence the city of freedom is, simultaneously, a place of danger and, indeed, the book’s opening anecdote is of an inexplicable act of urban violence (1974: 2–3). The following passage reveals the depths of his urban trepidation: ‘Cities are scary and impersonal, and the best most of us can manage is a fragile hold on our route through the streets. We cling to friends and institutions, exaggerate the importance of belonging, fear being alone too much’ (1974: 225). No doubt influenced by the work of Simmel, this tension between urban freedom and urban fear is at the core of Raban’s postmodern city. In addition, Raban directly takes issue with the urban sociology of the influ- ential Chicago School theorists, Park, Wirth and others . While urban sociology had sought traditionally to identify the patterns and rules governing urban life and their underpinning rationality, Raban (1974: 152) dismisses this quest as both misguided and impossible. The city for Raban is unknowable and its boundaries fluid – it is an ambiva- lent sparead as a metaphor for a postmodern society. It is also tempting to categorize Soft City as a kind of postmodern ethnography in the tradition of community studies and the Chicago School. But this is patently not the case. The fundamental difference between Soft City and urban ethnography is that Raban is not interested in penetrating the backstage of everyday life in order to learn more about a particular group – perhaps the residents of a neighbourhood, or an urban gang – and to uncover their reality. For Raban there is no reality outside of personal experience, and the personal experiences he seeks to explore are his own. The intellectual influences on Raban’s analysis are many and eclectic; however, it is difficult, as Harvey (1989: 6) notes, not to be aware of the significance of Roland Barthes’s (1968, [1957] 1972) theories of significa- tion and symbolic meaning. The following passage is illustrative of Barthes’s influence: Most of the goods we consume come in two kinds: as objects of nutri- tion and investment, or, in slightly modified form, as epigrammatic ideas, liberated from their strict function . . . Their most important function is to tell us something about the people who buy them; they belong to the hazardous but necessary urban art of self-projection. (Raban 1974: 98) Within this conceptualization, Raban suggests that food, motor cars, houses and suburban location have been ‘transformed’ into ‘badge[s] of affiliation to a caste, a symbol not of status but of taste and identity’ (1974: 103). In broad terms, Raban is reading as texts his city, its artefacts and its life. While Raban’s use of Barthes is perhaps subtle, cultural urbanists since have engaged quite explicitly in urban semiotic analysis; it is thus important to explore the underpinnings of this approach and its analytical strengths.