The International Colloquium ‘The Image of a City: Research and Representational Strategies in Modern Urban Studies’
23-24 May, 2013 by our research group (with the support of the Faculty of Philosophy, HSE) was carried out the colloquium with participation of our collegues from Technical University of Darmstadt. Over the course of two days, the event's participants discussed the theoretical and practical problems of a modern city's identity . The key aspect of all the reports was the concept of a city image, which relates to the saturated visual experience of a modern city dweller. Summing up the results of the first part of the event, Ilya Inishev noted that currently, urban researchers are having to discuss not so much imaginary communities, as imaginary environments. The reports of the participants highlighted various aspects of this imagery.
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The colloquium started with speeches from our German colleagues. Peter Noller presented the project ‘Typical Darmstadt’ (‘Typisch Darmstadt’), which focused on research of the character of this small town in Germany by means of emotional contextualization, and attempted to determine its basic mood. Darmstadt is compared to a person, and it was this familiar metaphor which helped the researchers to get representative answers from the residents about the image of their town.
The presentation given by Martina Löw was based on the model of a city, in this case Mannheim, which set about describing itself. The attempt to explain the architectural 'unattractiveness' of the town showed that problems with identity drove the residents of Mannheim to view it as a cosmopolitan and self-sufficient city. Another explanation for this could be self-defense..jpg)
Professor Helmuth Berking addressed the audience with the wider problem of how to define a city from a modern sociological perspective. A city's image can have visible and objective outlines. We can view the city as a whole in two ways: as an imaginary space on the map or as an overview, which is now available to all thanks to advances in technology. The presentation included photos of cities at night taken from space.
Viktor Vakhstain from The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences spoke on the theme of 'frames' of a city's space. The frames of 'utopic imagination' were presented as limiters of a city's image. The selection of several opposing examples helped to analyse the architecture of the innovation centre ‘Skolkovo’, as did the behavior of shoppers in the mall ‘Okhotny Ryad’ on Manezh Square in Moscow.
Sergey Nikitin (Moscultprog) also used Manezh Square as a case-history in order to demonstrate how a city's image had been constructed with place names. Other examples of this approach of connecting a place to its name were given in the case-history citing the squares of Monza in Italy.
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The presentations on the second day of the colloquium also dealt with the ambiguity of the problem of how to describe a city's image. Dmitry Zamyatin (Heritage Institute, Moscow) suggested using notions of post-geography and co-presence in order to overcome this problem, which, in turn, gave rise to heated discussions among the colloquium's participants.
Ilya Inishev’s (HSE, Moscow) presentation ( this presentation file) was also dedicated to the theoretical aspect of this question. He suggested considering the city as an iconic object. By viewing the environment in this way, we remove the contradictions between the external and internal perspectives of the city's reality.
Elena Trubina (Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg) saw the connection between the mythology of modernity and its reflection in archaic and post-industrial elements, which have helped to construct the image of the city during big events, such as the World Football Championship. Critical analyses of case-studies from Russia and Ukraine raised the question of the connection between a city's image and the conflicts arising from different temporalities.
Vitaly Kurennoy, Head of the HSE Department of Cultural Sciences, talked about on the department's main project – the annual summer research in Torzhok, and presented the latest results.
Yulia Bedash’s presentation was also dedicated to the connection between everyday city practices and the creation of a city's image.
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At the end of the colloquium, Dmitry Zamyatin and Elena Trubina made a presentation about a special issue of the journal ‘Cultural and Liberal Geography’, in which they plan to publish the articles of the event's participants.
The colloquium started with speeches from our German colleagues. Peter Noller presented the project ‘Typical Darmstadt’ (‘Typisch Darmstadt’), which focused on research of the character of this small town in Germany by means of emotional contextualization, and attempted to determine its basic mood. Darmstadt is compared to a person, and it was this familiar metaphor which helped the researchers to get representative answers from the residents about the image of their town.
The presentation given by Martina Löw was based on the model of a city, in this case Mannheim, which set about describing itself. The attempt to explain the architectural 'unattractiveness' of the town showed that problems with identity drove the residents of Mannheim to view it as a cosmopolitan and self-sufficient city. Another explanation for this could be self-defense.
Professor Helmuth Berking addressed the audience with the wider problem of how to define a city from a modern sociological perspective. A city's image can have visible and objective outlines. We can view the city as a whole in two ways: as an imaginary space on the map or as an overview, which is now available to all thanks to advances in technology. The presentation included photos of cities at night taken from space.
Viktor Vakhstain from The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences spoke on the theme of 'frames' of a city's space. The frames of 'utopic imagination' were presented as limiters of a city's image. The selection of several opposing examples helped to analyse the architecture of the innovation centre ‘Skolkovo’, as did the behavior of shoppers in the mall ‘Okhotny Ryad’ on Manezh Square in Moscow.
Sergey Nikitin (Moscultprog) also used Manezh Square as a case-history in order to demonstrate how a city's image had been constructed with place names. Other examples of this approach of connecting a place to its name were given in the case-history citing the squares of Monza in Italy.
The presentations on the second day of the colloquium also dealt with the ambiguity of the problem of how to describe a city's image. Dmitry Zamyatin (Heritage Institute, Moscow) suggested using notions of post-geography and co-presence in order to overcome this problem, which, in turn, gave rise to heated discussions among the colloquium's participants.
Ilya Inishev’s (HSE, Moscow) presentation ( this presentation file) was also dedicated to the theoretical aspect of this question. He suggested considering the city as an iconic object. By viewing the environment in this way, we remove the contradictions between the external and internal perspectives of the city's reality.
Elena Trubina (Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg) saw the connection between the mythology of modernity and its reflection in archaic and post-industrial elements, which have helped to construct the image of the city during big events, such as the World Football Championship. Critical analyses of case-studies from Russia and Ukraine raised the question of the connection between a city's image and the conflicts arising from different temporalities.
Vitaly Kurennoy, Head of the HSE Department of Cultural Sciences, talked about on the department's main project – the annual summer research in Torzhok, and presented the latest results.
Yulia Bedash’s presentation was also dedicated to the connection between everyday city practices and the creation of a city's image.
At the end of the colloquium, Dmitry Zamyatin and Elena Trubina made a presentation about a special issue of the journal ‘Cultural and Liberal Geography’, in which they plan to publish the articles of the event's participants.
Photo: Ilya Inishev.
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