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• Published: 07 October 2022

The creative city approach: origins, construction and prospects in a scenario of transition

• Chema Segovia 1 , 2 &
• Julie Hervé 3  

City, Territory and Architecture volume  9 , Article number:  29 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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The change of the century saw the emergence of a series of discourses that conceptualised different aspects related with culture as key elements in the future of urban realities. The fact that these notions have become encompassed within the celebrated label of “the creative city” leads us to think that they form a self-evident model, fully assimilated and of general value. However, the review of the process through which a reasonably cohesive and accepted framework was constructed unveils the complex nature of the creative city. This article introduces the idea of the creative city as an “approach”, in the sense of an epistemological and methodological focus that is distinguishable, yet neither rigid nor closed. An understanding of this type is useful for assessing the validity and the imbalances of the creative city in the midst of an epoch of problematic transition, in which culture and the city are alternatively defined as spaces of conflict or spaces of hope.

Introduction

Between the early 1990 s and the first years of the 21st century, local and regional development theories saw the emergence of a series of discourses that conceptualised different aspects related with culture as key elements in the future of urban realities (Scott 1997 ; Landry 2000 ; Evans 2001 ; Florida 2002 ). In a slightly problematic way, due to the loss of nuance, although acceptably operational, these notions were encompassed within the label of “the creative city”.

While the successful reception and enthusiastic dissemination of these discourses acquired hues of a policymaking fad, at present we can affirm that their influence has become long-lasting. Nowadays, intense attention continues to be paid to the importance of the cultural dimension of urban environments (Pratt 2014 ; Rausell-Köster 2015 ; Rodrigues and Franco 2018 ), numerous cities and regions design policies that seek to act on that sphere (Culture for Cities and Regions 2015 ; Kagan et al. 2018 ) and the main international organisations recognise the central importance of culture, creativity and innovation in urban governance and city development (OECD 2018 ; UNCTAD 2019 ; UNESCO & World Bank 2021 ).

Paradoxically, in spite of this broad acceptance, the idea of the creative city is far from becoming enshrined within clearly defined limits. A point important to underline is that at no time has it been nor is it likely to become so. The ideas that hold up the creative city framework possess a polyhedral and even contradictory nature. In addition, the shape of this polyhedron has shifted over time, adding new vertices and corners depending on different changes of comprehension (Evans 2017 ). The recognition of the creative city as a field for research and action must acknowledge its tangled, oscillating and slightly vague status. This particularity makes it necessary to regularly adjust its conceptual baselines and review its evolution, with these being two exercises that define a specific area within the studies of creative cities (Bianchini 2004 ; Chatterton 2010 ; Landry 2012 ; Grodach and Silver 2013 ; Pratt and Hutton 2013 ; Markusen 2014 ; D’Ovido 2016 ; Banks and O’Connor 2017 ).

The contribution that this article hopes to make is centred on this area and is supported by a key argument: faced with the extended idea that considers the creative city to be defined as a self-evident model, fully assimilated and of general value (Van Damme and De Munck 2018 ), the review of its genealogy and its transnational validation reveals that it is more appropriate to talk in terms of “approach”, in the sense of a distinguishable epistemological and methodological focus, but one that is neither rigid nor closed.

Furthermore, paying attention to the process through which the creative city framework was assembled places its emergence within a specific geographical context and epoch, where many different factors coincide, having a profound influence on that framework’s configuration. Although the evolution that followed the articulation of a baseline notion is read in terms of enrichment and sophistication, it can also be argued that to a good extent, the core of the creative city framework, the point where its main bents and dilemmas lie, still remains the same as that which was constructed with the turn of the century.

The introduction of an idea of the creative city as an approach which, despite having evolved over time is deeply rooted within a specific context, serves as a bridge to the argument where this paper redoubles its relevance, which means using historical reflection to critically question and revise the usefulness of the creative city nowadays. Relating the period in which the creative city emerged and the moment that we are living is especially relevant from two perspectives. On the one hand, as regards difference, we understand that the permanent crisis that began in 2008 and which has been reaffirmed by the Covid-19 pandemic affects the validity of a part of the founding statements of the creative city. And on the other, speaking in terms of similitude, we observe that the cycle in which the creative city framework was proposed and validated has a direct relationship with the current time, given that they both share the fact that the understanding of the ideas of city and culture are objects of discussion and reformulation.

This paper thus proposes an exercise divided into two parts. We will begin by describing the process through which the creative city policy proposal emerged and was integrated into the transnational agendas for the future as a distinctive but malleable framework. We will do so by using a broad perspective, particularly focusing on the understandings, debates and inertias that were influential in the articulation of such a framework. Once an idea of the creative city as an approach is formulated, we will re-situate it in the current transition scenario. We will list the cultural challenges large western cities -those that played an active role in the introduction of the notion of urban creativity- face nowadays, and we will identify the positive trends of change with which the creative city, conceived as an approach, could establish links of mutual renovation and reinforcement. The global objective of this paper is to infuse some open-ended historical reflexivity in order to appraise the current validity of the creative city. To conclude, we will propose a series of key issues for a new insight.

Constructing the creative city approach

The articulation of the creative city as a relatively cohesive framework is inscribed in the span of time which goes from the 1970 s to the first decade of the present century. As we will see, the United Kingdom played a key role in this process, it being necessary to also consider the weight that the European region exercised when adapting and validating a policy proposal that has obtained a global dimension.

Although our description is mainly linear, it is important to stress that the construction of the creative city approach is better understood as an organic process, carried out on different fronts, based on the imperfect combination of disparate ideas, characterised by multiple ramifications and overlaps. The exposition below aims to account for this.

The basis of the creative city vision: cities and culture in a post-industrial world

The first formulation of the creative city was influenced by a series of assumptions which, in an agitated and not particularly placid manner, took shape during the process of economic and political restructuring fed by the acceleration of globalisation in the last decades of the 20th century.

From the economic perspective, after the decline of the Fordist regime, the announcement of the arrival of a post-industrial world (Bell 1976 ) caused a strong change of patterns in the manner of observing reality and imagining the future. Although there were voices that warned of the risks of a too literal and deterministic reading of those descriptions (Cohen and Zysman 1987 ), the narratives from that period outlined an idea of development built upon “the end of industry”. From that moment onwards, the western states sought to change their productive models towards a globally competitive service economy.

As for the political aspect, the post-fordism roll-out coincided with the growing questioning of the Welfare State and the subsequent expansion of neoliberalism (Kus 2006 ). The phase between the 1970 s and the 1980 s showed complex and divergent movements that were a reflection of the crisis of the preceding model and the search for a new direction. The British context was a clear example and a precursor of many of the problems and transformations that were occurring. The United Kingdom especially suffered from the industrial offshoring process caused by globalisation and the impacts of that were strongly noted in its metropolitan regions, where the production resources were concentrated. This caused the idea of “urban decline”, understood as a pressing matter, to acquire a central position in the public debate (Cheshire and Hay 1989 ). The semi-abandoned physical landscape left behind by the flight of production resources served as a tangible reflection of the collapse of the industrial world and of the multiple social problems deriving from the increase in unemployment. It is within this context that the ideas that economic growth is a prior requirement for social welfare and that our cities are spaces where the battle for reconstruction will take place began to take root (Cochrane 2004 ).

The way to tackle this new outlook was neither immediate nor univocal. The confrontation between the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher and the brief experience of municipal socialism (Boddy and Fudge 1984 ) shows how the discussion regarding the possible alternatives took place within the same national sphere. The contrast between these two stances also reveals agreements on two influential ideas that took hold at this time: the new relevance of the local scale and the new value of culture.

Both Thatcherism and municipal socialism defended the city as a space of strategic importance. The new right contemplated the urban areas as places where to make the rhetoric of the national economic regeneration visible, also filtering the idea of the convenience of privatisation and investment in large infrastructures for managing the transition (Barnekov et al. 1989 ). Paradoxically, this narrative was reconciled with a governance model leaning towards centralisation. On the other hand, for the new left that had managed to take over local governments of significance, the city was envisioned as a place of resistance against the central state project and as a trench from which to test grassroots policies of an innovative nature, susceptible to providing alternatives to the neoliberal advance and the old Keynesian labour movement simultaneously (Bianchini 1989 ). With hindsight, municipal socialism’s vision of the local scale unveils a clear idealised and defensive character. Combined with the movement from the right and fed by different discourses that underlined the importance of cities in the global scenario (Castells 1989 ; Sassen 1991 ), it contributed to further cementing the misleading and persistent myth of cities as autonomous entities and as places brimming with opportunities.

In the cultural field, municipal socialism identified a strategic space to boost the transformation that it argued for. The rise of advanced modes of cultural production and the associated labour market expansion gave birth to the idea of “cultural industries”, an economic sector of rising importance that was seen as a niche of opportunity for the reconstruction of the British production model without relinquishing its industrial tradition (Cochrane 1986 ). Beyond the macroeconomic perspective, the recognition of the economic dimension of culture had an added political aim, as it was understood as a front of action for improving the working conditions of the cultural agents, favouring labour inclusion by paying attention to the auxiliary jobs and shattering the elitism of which the paradigm of cultural democratisation was accused (Garnham 2005 ). In contrast, during the dismantling of the Welfare State carried out by neoliberalism, the usefulness and legitimacy of public investment in culture were cast into doubt. Because of this, cultural policy was obliged to justify its contribution on the basis of new demands, such as economic, social and urban development (Belfiore 2004 ; Subirats et al. 2015 ). In the right-wing political framework, the idea of cultural industries (production-based) was replaced by that of “economics of amenities” (consumption-based) (McNulty et al. 1985 ). Under the latter perspective, cultural assets were used to capture international attention, by attracting tourists and investment, and boosting property development. Once again, the diverging postures ended up giving rise to an unexpected convergence: culture became a space from which to act and not only in which to act.

The practical preamble: Glasgow 90 (and Barcelona 92), the creative city acquires body

The creative city approach is not only constructed within the realm of theory. The exercises of policy design and its implementation act as additional vertices in a continuous process of cross-triangulation (Bianchini 2018 ). This is a constant and characteristic trait which is reflected in the abundance of conceptual reviews, discursive analyses and case studies in academic literature. In fact, the applied experience, guided by the comprehensions which we saw flourish in the previous section, had a crucial role as a preamble for the formulation of an initial policy proposal for the creative city.

The transition from the 1980 s to the 1990 s saw how a large number of European cities went through profound transformations characterised for including arguments associated with culture. The publication Cultural policy and urban regeneration: The West European experience (Bianchini and Parkinson 1993 ) becomes a bibliographical reference of great interest for the way in which, through the analysis of eight cities belonging to six different countries (United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Germany and France) gives an account of the panorama that was unfolding, as well as the opportunities and conflicts that could be made out on its horizons (Bianchini 1993a ).

Although the experiences compiled in the book were heterogeneous and reflected a path dependency that went beyond the local scale, their general willingness was aligned with the mindset introduced in the previous section: urban regeneration, economic reconstruction and improvement of the local-national image on the global stage (Bianchini 1993b ). Therefore, the approximations prioritising economic growth by treating culture as an amenity pre-dominated, but it is important to note that these not only included a high range of degrees and declinations, they also coexisted with other forms of action. In particular, frequent cultural strategies and projects aimed at community development and/or caring for run-down urban areas (Belfiore 2002 ). These type of approaches reflected the demands that were being placed on cultural policies to demonstrate their public value and were also related to a certain persistence of the sociocultural animation and community arts projects within the advance of the cultural management paradigm (Kelly 1984 ).

Although clear frictions are observed between the approximation from the economic aspect with the global perspective and the approximation from the social aspect with local focus, these also show a certain complementarity (Pratt 2010 ). The eight cities presented in the book integrated both perspectives, the differences being in their orientation, connection and balance.

The possibility of combining objectives and diverse forms of action to achieve crosscutting change was illustrated with the experience that opened the practical section: the urban transformation of Glasgow based on its designation as European City of Culture 1990 (Booth and Boyle 1993 ), a case which at the moment of the publication of the book was already recognised as a model for success. Glasgow was the perfect embodiment of a British city economically and socially broken by the deindustrialisation. Its regeneration was directed by the City Council, but, as is sometimes forgotten, it could not have been carried out without the decided support of the central government, which as we said needed clear images to disseminate - both internally and externally- the message of national reconstruction. Nor could it have been done without the support of the European Commission, which reformulated the ECoC programme that served as a vehicle for the process (García 2005 ; Immler and Sakkers 2014 ).

The regeneration of Glasgow deployed actions which in that period were already considered close to conventional: cultural flagships, regeneration of the riverfront, tourist marketing, moderate decentralisation of urban interventions, the search for community support, etc. However, the element which served to lend distinction to the experience and draft the success story was the commitment to the cultural industries -mainly art, design and audiovisual- as a resource for economic and urban reinvention. On that basis, and directly connecting with the experience of municipal socialism, the path was opened towards a new economy that presumed to restore the skills of the local working class labour force (Booth and Boyle 1993 ). Glasgow presented itself as a city that was rebuilding itself through culture, creatively converting its weaknesses into strengths. It is important to note that Glasgow’s transformation strategy was designed by Comedia, a consulting firm headed by Charles Landry, who admitted that the first time he had ever used the concept of “the creative city” was in the title of the document they prepared (Landry 2005 ). As we have mentioned, applied experience served as a test for intuitions, linking theoretical thought with a strong practical vocation.

To close this section, it is worth briefly mentioning Barcelona 92 as a somewhat similar experience but, at the same time, contrastive to that of Glasgow 90. Here we have another great urban transformation, within the same period and which employed most of the actions listed in the first lines of the above paragraph. However, between both examples there are differences that go beyond the nuances. The baseline objective of Barcelona 92 was not so much the urban relaunch through an overhaul of the economic model, but rather to reflect the re-establishment of democracy in Spain and the integration of an idea of modernity in accordance with the European canon (Molas 1991 ). That is to say, in the case of Barcelona 92, culture was employed from an erudite and civilising perspective rather than economic. The interventions in the public space and on the urban landscape became the cornerstones of its strategy (Borja 1995 ), understood as the means through which to develop civic pride and construct a sense of a collective project.

Although there are occasional mentions of Barcelona 92 in the book by Bianchini and Parkinson, the repertoire of case studies chooses Bilbao as a Spanish example, this being a transformation which stands apart from that of Barcelona for the greater centrality of the idea of urban-economic reconstruction in the post-industrial world. This detail is expressive of how the Anglo-Saxon viewpoint introduces biases in the construction of a comprehension of the role of culture in urban policies, emphasising certain aspects while discriminating others.

The synthesis: an initial policy proposal for the creative city

As we have seen so far, different lines of analysis and the testing of a series of new trends progressively set out a complex understanding of the links between development, culture and city. In relation to this, a field of research that gained relevance was the one that sought to characterise the logics of production and consumption of the new capitalism. On the basis of the identification of an economic dynamic characterised by flexibility and for displaying complex geographic patterns (Sabel 1989 ), the call for attention towards the growing importance of aspects of a symbolic type in the global flows of exchange (Lash and Urry 1993 ) and the focus on the competitive advantage that changing from a labour-intensive model to a knowledge-intensive one meant (Porter 1989 ), “cultural economy” became an area of study that also acquired sophistication and acknowledgement (Pratt 1997 ; Scott 2000 ).

Having a solid analytical support, at a time when public policies aimed to work through evidence-based technical criteria in order to reaffirm their legitimacy (Young et al. 2002 ), acted as a driving force behind the programmes that promoted the development of the cultural and creative sectors for an economic turnaround. Furthermore, the influence of the studies of cultural economy was even broader due to the way in which they prepared the way forward for discourses that pointed towards the importance of culture, creativity and innovation within the entirety of the urban governance (Scott 2014 ). Although this new focus on urban creativity was conceptualised in different parts of Europe (particularly in Germany by the cultural policy consultancy STADTart, who established eventual collaborations with Comedia), the UK context continues to play a central role in its development and circulation.

At this point, the contact between Peter Hall, Franco Bianchini and Charles Landry acquires particular importance. The exchange of ideas between them set the tone for the first presentation of the creative city as an articulated policy proposal. Hall had dedicated years to working around the idea that, throughout history, the cities that have had the greatest moments of splendour had done so thanks to having configured themselves “creatively”. The energies to do so were born of the concentration of people, ideas and skills to which they are home, elements that establish a “creative milieu” (Hall 1998 ). As Hall indicates, creativity was not only a key for success, but rather a natural tendency of the city that was necessary to understand and stimulate.

For his part, Franco Bianchini introduced the notion of cultural planning, a concept that had arisen in the US and Australia but which he addressed from a European point of view, granting centrality to the idea of “cultural resources” (Bianchini 1999 , 2016 ). The key here was in the way in which these resources were defined. Bianchini’s proposal goes beyond the conventional idea of material assets (works of art, built heritage, museums, cultural centres, etc.) to include elements of a more complex nature such as memories, citizens’ identities, shared values, lifestyles, democratic sturdiness, the propensity to civic engagement or the storytelling that revolves around a city. Bianchini also indicated that these resources affected matters that went beyond the understanding of culture as a sector, owning potentialities for a crosscutting action. Understanding how to activate and mobilise them was the basis of an endogenous development model that went beyond the scope of urban regeneration. From the perspective of cultural planning, culture was no longer a mere instrument to restore cities in decline, but rather a complex dimension that concerns the entire urban dynamic and public life.

The combination of these ideas, supported by the practical experience of the authors, served to present a preliminary proposal of The creative city (Landry and Bianchini 1995 ) that warned of an “urban crisis”, recognised a “time of transition” and called for a more holistic thinking and greater risk acceptance when responding to the cities’ challenges. In order to discover unforeseen opportunities, the creative approach needed to challenge the overestimation of the role of instrumental rationality in policymaking. It was also indicated that urban governance and city development should focus on the smart use of local resources rather than globalised formulas. As the authors state (Landry 2012 ; Bianchini 2018 ), this vision was a reaction against the generic, technocratic, top-down and cataclysmic urban transformation model which was extending throughout the West.

This creative city in its germinal stage was presented in a book of little more than fifty pages. Half of them formulated a conceptual framework which acknowledged Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs as theoretical references. The other half of the work consisted of the listing of multiple examples, many of which were trivial and little known, that sought to transmit the idea that urban creativity, in the terms on which it was considered, was not a question of epic deeds, but rather something that happened repetitively, unperceived but successfully.

A few years later, Charles Landry was responsible for taking that rough draft of the creative city and converting it into a more detailed and acceptably cohesive policy proposal. His book The creative city: A toolkit for urban innovators (Landry 2000 ) once again called attention to the crucial importance of “rediscovering urban creativity” and, from there, built an articulated framework combining the perspective of cultural planning with that of urban governance. Landry’s exposition was punctuated with a large number of strong ideas, showing a special ability to formulate attractive statements acquired in the field of consultancy. This does not mean to say it is an exercise full of hot air. His central thesis, the idea that gives unity and meaning to the explanation, is that urban creativity is not defined in terms of production or consumption (Cunningham 2012 ), but rather in terms of process. In the words of Andy C. Pratt, Landry’s proposal “is about an inclusive and participatory city where arts and culture are a means and a practice of place making and living” (Pratt 2008 ). Additionally, it is appropriate to note that the choice of the term “toolkit” in the subtitle of the book has frequently been used by the detractors of the creative city to reduce it to an aspirational and formulaic proposal that leads to naive solutions. It is a criticism that does not correspond to the content of the publication, which places the weight of its attention on defining conceptual and methodological premises rather than giving specific instructions to follow. One of Landry’s declared objectives is to influence policymaking and urban governance. His discourse is formulated and presented from this point of view and this is how the emphasis in the applied side of the creative city and the use of the examples that illustrate the explanation must be understood.

Our assessment of Landry´s work is far from uncritical, which on the other hand reflects many of the preconceptions and contradictions of its epoch in the form of disproportionate optimism; focusing on the opportunities rather than on the problems; a vague hierarchy between heterogeneous objectives; the assumption of a corporate language that insists on economic reasoning; discrediting the bureaucratic logic in favour of ambiguous flexibility; a harmonic and virtuous idea of citizenry; entrepreneurial rhetoric surrounding the creative sectors or a misrepresentation of the city as a stand-alone entity. It is easy to recognise the origin of many of these inclinations in the historical itinerary that we have described. Taking into account the specific moment in which Landry’s book was published, it is essential to also consider the climate of enthusiasm (lately tempered) generated in the United Kingdom by the victory of Tony Blair in 1997, with a government project that announced a new importance of culture and, specifically, creativity (Banks and O’Connor 2017 ). In fact, Franco Bianchini identifies a slight shift of tone between the creative city discourse he and Landry presented in the 1990 s and the one that was proposed in the year 2000. In his opinion, that shift could be defined by a move from a radical and participatory willingness towards a more self-referential and technocratic elite style (Bianchini 2018 ).

Although Landry’s policy proposal had a big success, a couple of years later Richard Florida burst onto the scene with the “creative class” theory (Florida 2002 ) and rapidly got all the attention in the debates that linked creativity and city (Peck 2005 ). Even if both proposals (the one formulated by Landry and the one by Florida) tend to be cited together as if they were analogous approaches, the differences between them are more than significant. Florida’s proposal draws from diverse sources and uses them in a very particular manner. Jane Jacobs acts as a shared reference with Landry due to her vision of the good city as a socially vibrant space that functions as a generator of well-being (Jacobs 1961 ). Particularly in Florida’s discourse, but also in Landry’s, clear influences can be found of the descriptions that drew attention to the remarkable changes in contemporary urban lifestyles and the rising importance of leisure and cultural consumption (Zukin 1998 ; Brooks 2000 ). Even so, the theory of the creative class fits better in the field of studies of the new economy, its dynamics and its geographies. In the manner in which it is conceptualised, the creative class is an asset that offers a competitive advantage in the face of the reduction of production costs. The claims presented by Richard Florida that go further than this, as the representativeness of the preferences assigned to this specific group of people or their supposed propensity towards civic engagement, usually become the centre of attention when they are actually the weakest and most secondary elements of the discourse (Glaeser 2005 ). Despite substantial discrepancies, Richard Florida’s perspective is closer to that of Alan J. Scott when working around the geographic logic of cultural production ecosystems (Scott 2000 ), or that of Ann Markusen when she places artists in the centre of the analysis and proposes assessing their contribution to the regional economies by defining an “artistic dividend” (Markusen et al. 2004 ; Markusen and Schrock 2006 ). Our intention is not to establish a valuation hierarchy between one type of approximation and the other, but rather to introduce a certain order between ideas that have tended to become mixed much too lightly.

Lastly, it is worth discussing another extended idea, the one that argues that the theory of the creative class had an overwhelming impact on a global scale. It is undeniable that Florida’s discourse became a circulating policy model that made its way around various territories (Peck 2009 ), but this does not mean that its influence had a homogeneous reach. This affirmation is particularly reflected in the European context, where the dynamics described by Florida from a US perspective do not correspond very well in functional terms (Martin-Brelot et al. 2010 ) and also cause frictions with the region’s common values.

It is on this last point that we will close our review of the emergence and consolidation of the creative city discourse and its transformation into an -open but specific- approach. We will show that, in the international arena and particularly in Europe, the policy proposal distilled by Charles Landry has had a considerable influence, although its acceptance has been subject to a process of correction and adjustment in order to create a comprehension of the creative city in accordance with more consensual frameworks.

Adaptation and acceptance: the creative city under the prism of sustainability

We have explained that one of the factors that surrounded the emergence of the creative city discourse was a shift in the understanding of the value of culture, mostly motivated by an increasing attention to its economic dimension. As globalisation advanced, culture became an object of intense debates, but the above was not the only way towards which the arguments leaned. The need to delimit the treatment of cultural products and services in the global market intensified the defence of the intrinsic value of culture, which in the scope of international organisations was reaffirmed by concepts such as “diversity” (UNESCO 2001 ) and “cultural rights” (The Fribourgh Group 2007 ). The emphasis on the inherent importance of culture also gained recognition within the framework of sustainable development with the assimilation of the idea of the “fourth pillar”(Hawkes 2001 ). The reformulation of the concept of development formulated by Amartya Sen (Sen 1999 ), understood as a process that expands the capabilities to live a good life, connected with this entire movement endorsed internationally (PNUD 2004 ). Recent contributions such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (ONU 2015 ) reflect the integration of culture within the prisms of sustainability and human rights.

The idea of culture for sustainability was constructed at the same time as the creative city vision and, in the same manner, needed a process of gradual structuration. It would be a mistake to assume that this process only involved large international organisations. To the contrary, the agents that took part in it -creating narratives and applying pressure, contributing to the progress proactively or approaching it in an opportunistic manner- are numerous, varied in nature and closely connected to the territory; these include civic associations, cultural agents, regional and local governments, coordinating platforms, transnational networks, and so on (Pascual 2021 ).

It would also be wrong to consider the culture for sustainability perspective as a complete alternative to the culture for urban development and economic growth focus, as a paradigm arising within a totally different context of forces and trends. To such an extent did the culture for sustainability perspective participate in the reality described in the previous sections that, the Universal Forum of Cultures celebrated in Barcelona in 2004, a top-down urban transformation project based on the mega-events formula, served to stage its consolidation (Majoor 2011 ).

The culture for sustainability perspective does not turn its back on the studies of the economy of culture, as it draws multiple statements from them. This is particularly perceptible within the context of the European Union, which has logically assimilated discourses that arose, to a large extent, within its geographic scope. For example, the New European Agenda for Culture (European Commission 2018 ) assigns a key importance to creativity to reinforce the economic dimension of culture and calls for it to be connected with education and innovation to foster the creation of jobs and growth. Even so, the objectives of an economic nature are placed second, behind the social goals, which are framed within a discourse clearly influenced by Sen’s idea of development, highlighting welfare and quality of life as emerging fields for cultural action and introducing concepts such as “cultural capacity”. The latter acquires particular interest, as it calls for "making available a wide range of quality cultural activities, promoting opportunities for all to take part and to create, and strengthening links between culture and education, social affairs, urban policy, research and innovation” (European Commission, 2018 , p. 3). It is possible to affirm that the idea of culture as an element that can take part in other public policy areas in favour of comprehensive development is akin to the vision of creativity that Landry and Bianchini proposed in the mid-1990 s.

Additionally, the European Union has shown a growing interest in promoting cities, seeing them as potential nodes for the economic and cultural cohesion of the region (Eurocities 2017 ). The urban policy programmes promoted by the European Commission from this angle also reflects the specific influence of the creative city policy proposal (Vinci 2008 ). The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor Footnote 1 is one of the more obvious examples, to which the experience of the Urban Innovative Actions Footnote 2 can be added. The latter presents a strategic framework structured into different topics, with one dedicated to “culture and cultural heritage” that includes objectives in relation to social cohesion, improving regional competitiveness, innovation for governance and contributing to “culture-centred participatory urban processes”. Once more, the holistic and crosscutting overview which Landry and Bianchini’s proposal claimed for urban governance is reflected through the idea of creativity.

In any event, it is important to highlight once again that the integration of the creative city perspective within the framework of culture for sustainability does not result in a refined paradigm or a general model for action. The study of cases in different geographic realities continues to account for the wide range of intervention modalities and the importance of the contextual factors regarding applied experience (Culture for Cities and Regions 2015 ). As Franco Bianchini indicated very early on (Bianchini 1993b ), the implications of path dependence include the national attitudes towards culture, the local urban planning traditions, the inertias of public policies, the distribution of power within the systems of government, the relationships of force between market dynamics and social movements, and the permeability to external influences. Furthermore, the importance of context -which includes time and place- is not to be understood mechanically, but rather in terms of complexity, it being necessary to assume that the policies that explore the intersections between culture and city act in fields of unstable chemistry (Comunian 2011 ).

In summary, the creative city policy proposal has managed to connect with the sustainable development perspective and, from there, it has transitioned towards international urban and cultural agendas. By doing so, the creative city has positioned itself in a policymaking framework which nowadays has a high degree of consensus on a global scale and especially within Europe. The creative city discourse has introduced diverse aims and almost literal statements within the culture for sustainability perspective. In the other direction, by coming under the prism of sustainability, the creative city came into contact with concerns and ideas which, even though they are familiar to it, provide a new mould for its conceptual and operational apparatus. The sustainability perspective reinforces the arguments of the creative city which called for an understanding of the cultural dimension of the urban environments as a complex ecosystem, which exceeds both the sectorial understanding of culture as well as its instrumental usage. In any event, the creative city framework is not completely emulsified into the discourse on sustainability, which is also configured as an assemblage of ideas rather than as a closed equation. In this regard, the calls for creativity in current urban policies continue to reflect the origins and the route followed by the creative city through its emergence and consolidation, but now they are fitted into a larger and more complex framework, the principal function of which is to provide guidance. This is why, at this point, it is especially appropriate to understand the creative city as an “approach”; as an epistemological and methodological focus that, as mentioned, was originally conceived to manage periods of transition.

The prospects of the creative city in a new time of transition

Although we have focused on its theoretical and discursive component, we have also indicated that the creative city approach is constantly nourished by practical experience. The complex overlap between vision and execution (Doyle and Mickov 2019 ), emphasised by the abundance of strategic orientations and modes of action, complicates the task of presenting a general assessment of the contributions of the creative city. This point, which in fact generates noticeable discrepancies, is central when discussing the validity and limitations of the approach.

While the debate is frequently reduced to a black or white confrontation between those defending the creative city as a virtuous paradigm and those that present it as a mere lubricant for the neoliberal city, the descriptions that speak of entangled interventions and partial materialisations are more nuanced and plausible. From this perspective, the creative city approach is often obliged to coexist with other urban and cultural policy models, and is frequently used as a rhetoric device for conventional economic development strategies (Grodach 2013 ). This leads us to think of an approach that is less hegemonic than what it sometimes appears to be, affected by instrumentalisation when not, simply and plainly, by confusion. The lack of understanding of its theoretical premises, its ambitions and its dilemmas is, to a large extent, the reason why the creative city becomes a hollow concept or a repertoire of clichés when facing action. We think that it is worthwhile to resituate the creative city approach by deepening its understanding. Our exercise to review its construction process aims to be useful in this regard.

However, our explanation underlined the fact that the creative city was defined in a specific period and place. In spite of its evolution over time, the creative city approach conserves certain preferences and biases rooted in its origins. The extensive academic literature on the creative city has pointed out all its flaws, of particular significance being the pre-domination of economic objectives even when coexisting with other goals (Evans 2017 ); prioritisation of growth losing sight of redistribution and equality (Gerhard et al. 2017 ); opportunistic attitudes deriving from the insistence on finding opportunities (Chatterton 2010 ); poor use of the possibilities of culture, sometimes reduced to a mere question of image and storytelling (Vanolo 2008 ); promotion of a cosmopolitan culture over local or indigenous styles (Pratt 2011 ); idealised and non-representative characterisation of cultural and creative agents (Markusen 2006 ); primacy of an entrepreneurial orientation that marginalises the majority of the cultural community (Ponzini and Rossi 2010 ); the way in which a discourse formulated by the urban elites contributes to the reproduction of disadvantages and inequalities (Leslie and Catungal 2012 ); and the tensions and confrontations that sometimes arise from these exclusions (Novy and Colomb 2013 ; D’Ovidio and Cossu 2017 ).

If in these matters, and practically right from the first moment (Bianchini 1993a ), the feebleness of the creative city have been foreseen, the persistent crisis which began in 2008 and the need to find new points of reference will accentuate the tensions surrounding the approach (Harris and Moreno 2012 ).

Today we find ourselves in the midst of a transition scenario of a problematic nature, defined by the increase in inequality, the normalisation of precariousness (affecting the economic and political structures), and the growing tensions between central spaces and peripheral realities (from a social and geographical point of view). The misgivings and discomforts that this situation produces are directly reflected in the cultural field, emphasising its conflictive dimension rather than its condition as an arena for mutual recognition and unity. Vigorous progressive movements, in favour of a new generation of politics of representation, coexist with reactionary trends that contribute to the advancement of new nationalisms that defend an idea of culture which is historicist, hermetic, static and anchored in traditional values. This second dynamic clashes against the growing diversity of the urban populations, which finds an additional challenge in the inclusion of migrants and refugees. The contemporary cultural wars are based on disinformation and on relativism, incrementing the ideological polarisation and impeding public debate. In the area of government, all of these tensions feed statist postures, centred on security and based on authority. The leadership capacity that was presumed to local governments become highly dubious in the light of the threat of seeing their resources and powers once again reduced. Seen from a broader perspective, the relation of the problems listed with an unsustainable global development model becomes tangible, with the climate crisis being one of its more pressing, alarming and unpredictable consequences.

The description of such a turbulent panorama will give new arguments to those who judge that the creative city has become an outdated proposal with no traction capacity (O’Connor and Shaw 2014 ). This statement, however, seems slightly hasty if considering the significant influence that the creative city still exerts on the urban and cultural agendas; if performing the task of critically reviewing its conceptual basis and its various evolutions; and if paying attention to a number of positive trends emerging during these convulsive times to which the creative city, understood as an approach, could contribute while discovering new concerns and ideas to reconfigure its outlines.

The last part of this section will be devoted to completing the argumentation we have constructed, pointing towards six emergent trends which are attempting to consolidate themselves and with which the creative city approach could establish mutually reinforcing synergic relationships:

Rights and justice for a new comprehension of the city

Urban realities are spaces in which many of the challenges of the contemporary world manifest themselves. In contrast to the “millennial tone” that pervaded the creative city discourse in the 2000 s, urban challenges are currently understood in terms of problems rather than of opportunities (Florida 2017 ). The city is no longer considered as a mere element for production or consumption. Instead, a call is made to envision urban environments as contexts for personal and collective development and as places that must guarantee the coverage and exercise of fundamental human rights (Fainstein 2014 ; Grigolo 2019 ).

Another notable change is the deterioration of the idea that cities have creative agency and engender innovation spontaneously (Van Damme et al. 2018 ), which was central -and still is- in the creative city discourses. Questioning whether creativity is a natural propensity of cities leads to a greater politicisation of the creative city and this can incorporate the recovery of the idea of “the right to the city”, which is nowadays enunciated in a strongly activist and radical way (Harvey 2012 ; Novy and Colomb 2013 ).

Under this view, cultural rights demand greater recognition as an integral part of the right to the city and the Agenda 21 for culture (UCLG 2004 ), that was presented when the creative city enjoyed great popularity but never really connected with it, becomes an important reference to pay attention to the cultural dimension of urban policies.

Well-being for a broader understanding of the value of culture

The creative city emerged at a time when increasing attention was being paid to the capacity of culture to generate externalities. The use of culture for urban development and economic growth (Vivant 2007 ), an idea towards which part of the statements of the creative city pointed to, was only one of the fields of action that were explored. Published by Comedia, the book Use or ornament? by François Matarasso drew attention to many other opportunities, including intergenerational contact, skill-building and employment, or community empowerment (Matarasso 1997 ). Matarasso’s discourse had a notable impact on the debates on culture and was specifically combined with the insights of Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini on urban regeneration (Landry et al. 1995 ).

Although discussions around the instrumentalisation of culture tend to emphasise its most problematic aspects, it can be argued that it helped to forge a wider understanding of the value of culture (Gibson 2008 ). In fact, scientific analyses are less dichotomous nowadays in their understanding of what the proper and improper objectives of cultural action are, firmly recognising the importance of culture in matters such as health or psychological well-being (Grossi et al. 2012 ).

Studies that address the role of culture in local development have incorporated this enriched comprehension, overcoming narrow visions and mono-causal understandings (Sacco et al. 2014 ). Therefore, in this increasingly complex understanding of the value of culture another opportunity is found to revise and reinforce the creative city approach.

Crosscutting cultural policies that call for a new centrality:

The growing attention to the capacity of culture to contribute to human development and generate social value brings multiple fields of research and praxis into the light. In many cases, these accumulate a long-standing experience, with education (Grupo de Educación de Matadero Madrid 2017 ), health (Gordon-Nesbitt 2015 ), inclusion (Baltà Portolés 2016), intercultural dialogue (European Agenda for Culture 2014 ), the enhancement of public space (Toolis 2017 ) and environmental commitment (Arts Council England 2020 ) being some of the topics in which the arts and creativity claim importance. These new spaces for cultural action (Segovia et al. 2015 ) are located beyond the classic sectorial boundaries and also break with the conventional strategies for economic development, tourism or attractiveness. They exemplify and work towards a possible new approach to cultural policies, which could serve to resolve the exhaustion of the models of democratisation and cultural management.

If we draw attention to this special dynamism in the field of cultural policies it is because it could be helpful in solving one of the main pending issues of the creative city approach. Paradoxically, creative city strategies often have little interaction with cultural policy departments, with areas such as urban planning, economic development or tourism promotion being more frequently involved (Grodach 2013 ). There is now a window of opportunity to link the emergence of innovative cultural policies with the creative city approach. This relationship is particularly coherent as both share a cross-sectoral and experimental outlook.

The search for social innovations in the urban context

The spaces neglected by the withdrawal of public action due to the crisis of 2008 saw innovative processes flourish, many of them driven by civic initiatives (Walliser 2013 ). These were not only interesting due to the way in which they achieved to respond effectively to unattended needs, they also managed to generate transformative social practices and construct new shared values (Subirats and García-Bernardos 2015 ).

In their search for new formulas for intervention and development, public policies in general and urban policies in particular have paid considerable attention to this type of initiatives, trying to promote them, institutionalise them and scale them up. This manner of observing innovation overcomes its technology-centered comprehension and emphasises its social and political nature. Even so, it is possible to contend that approaches to social and urban innovation continue to be made from a primarily scientific focus; the constant emphasis on the need to create “solutions” serves as an example.

The creative city approach, particularly in its most radical early formulations, is closely related to that of urban innovation. The connection between the two is clearly exemplified in “creative placemaking” (Markusen and Gadwa 2014 ) and “urban manufacturing” (Savini and Dembski 2016 ), two emerging frameworks that Carl Grodach defines as “new creative city movements” (Grodach 2017 ). The transformative capacity of cultural action, the way in which creativity incites experimentation or the disruptive potential of the arts are some of the valuable issues that the creative city approach introduces in the field of urban innovation. As Bianchini and Landry pointed out when reflecting on this issue (Landry and Bianchini 1995 ), creativity is a divergent process while innovation has a convergent logic. Both need one another.

Redefinition of the concept of governance

In it is early formulations, linked to the notion of New Public Management (Schedler and Proeller 2005 ), the idea of governance was proposed in favour of seeking efficiency. To do so, it was advocated to introduce complementary and corrective capacities for public action in the form of expertise, independence and monitoring. The emergence of a civic vision that demanded the possibility of a broader, more plural and more direct political participation (Harvey 2012 ) reconfigures the concept of governance by converting it into a matter that is defined in terms of deepening democracy rather than technical improvement (Melo and Baiocchi 2006 ). This trend, which connects urban and cultural debates (Baltà Portolés et al. 2014 ), could also contribute to correct the shift that Franco Bianchini identifies in the evolution of the creative city discourse, from a participatory willingness to a more technocratic style (Bianchini 2018 ).

It is also interesting to point out that, in contrast with the anti-planning mentality that spread in the 1980 s and influenced the early formulations of the creative city, the political transformation that is sought tries to connect with the logic of the public action rather than break ties with it. Charles Landry’s recent defence of bureaucracy (Landry and Caust 2017 ) marks an enormous novelty in relation to a subject that, in the initial policy proposal of the creative city, was treated only in terms of disaffection. That this novelty does not appear incoherent reflects the capacity of the creative city to incorporate new inputs and reconfigure itself.

Lastly, as regards to the new understanding of the city that we have described above, addressing urban problems from a closer perspective reveals the limitations of local governments while debunking the myth that cities had become key players in the contemporary world who could reorient themselves with high levels of autonomy thanks to creativity. In the light of this, a reformulation of the multi-level governance structures is demanded (Blanco and Subirats 2012 ), with cities still exerting a strategic role but in more differentiated ways (Le Galès 2018 ). This adds complexity to the creative city approach concerning its call for urban governance.

Planning for uncertainty

The growing instability around the current world is leading to more complex understandings of reality. As we have indicated, this affirmation is especially suitable when referring to the interrelations between culture and cities. Experimentation gains importance and, with it, the aim of planning is no longer to control its context of action but rather to understand its intricate configuration in order to be able to generate progress in a desired direction.

New discourses on urban governance and city development ask that importance be assigned to the learning acquired throughout the process and not only on the objectives to be achieved, that the ideas of success and failure be refined and that tactical attitude be combined with a strategic perspective (Sendra and Sennett 2020 ; Marrades et al. 2021 ). With these arguments, some of the statements contained in the first draft of the creative city are once again repeated (Landry and Bianchini 1995 ).

The comeback of these ideas is particularly important, as it relativises one of the most successful areas of creative city studies, which would be the one that tries to measure all its attributes and anticipate the results of any intervention (Campbell et al. 2017 ). Without denying the importance of analysis and evaluation, in this unstable epoch it seems necessary to overcome the limitations of a certain logic of instrumental rationality and move away from our culture of risk aversion. The creative city approach can be inspiring for such a purpose.

Finally, the following diagram represents a synthesis of the preceding argumentation, while portraying the relations between the main elements that influenced the initial construction of the creative city approach and those new trends that could be useful for its fruitful reformulation (Fig. 1 ).

The creative city approach, initial construction and possible reorientation

We have dedicated the first part of this article to review the process through which the creative city was assembled as a reasonably articulated and transnationally validated framework. Although at first sight it may seem slightly contradictory, we have sought to reflect the multiple and divergent interpretations that surrounded this process and played a role in it, while at the same time indicating the existence of a distinguishable epistemological and methodological focus. Thus, the creative city is presented as an approach, as a distinctive and at the same time malleable framework. This malleability is valuable when placing the creative city approach under new concerns that contribute to its reinvigoration; the manner in which the creative city approach was integrated into the prism of sustainability serves as an example. As a counterpoint, the malleability of the creative city approach reveals limitations due to specific biases, linked to its origins, which are deeply rooted in its conceptualisation. The possibility of resolving these constrictions in order to provide a renewed usefulness to the creative city approach requires an adequate understanding of its motivations and dilemmas.

The understanding of the creative city as an approach appears to be pertinent for two main reasons. The first is the capacity that this policy proposal retains to influence within the fields of urban and cultural policies. Paradoxically, in spite of this, the creative city functions to a large extent as an empty signifier that depends on who gets to assign meaning to it. Therefore, that its political potential is used positively is a matter in contest. Secondly, it is necessary to recognise that the creative city approach contributed to introduce a complex comprehension of the cultural dimension that urban environments, public life and the governance of the city possess. Such an understanding is equally far from being fully assimilated, even at a time when the main challenges of urban societies have a marked cultural component.

It is on this last note that the reflection we have proposed achieves its main relevance. We find ourselves immersed in an epoch of problematic transition, in which culture and the city are alternatively defined as spaces of conflict or spaces of hope. The prevailing unrest adds pressure on the traditional weaknesses of the creative city, which could definitely be seen as a docile proposal with no transformative capacity. A less pessimistic view recalls that the creative city was formulated originally as an approach to cope with times of transition and, in addition, identifies an incipient set of changes of understandings and ways of action that could find support in the creative city approach and, in turn, positively contribute to its reformulation.

The revitalisation of the creative city to advance towards a new horizon or its progressive cornering until its disappearance are two plausible possibilities which will be determined with the passage of time. In one way or another, the review of the emergence and transnational validation of the creative city approach shows how new visions are forged within contexts of transition. On the other hand, the claim that the potential value of the creative city wants to draw attention to the fact that these new insights do not just appear out of thin air, but rather they are politically built, using the preceding foundations and the cracks that let us see the future. Today, the creative city approach is a useful resource in this sense, to which others should be added.

Availability of data and materials

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Tony Ramos Murphy and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this article. All opinions (and mistakes) are our own.

This article is developed and funded under the umbrella of the MESOC Project. MESOC (Measuring the Societal Value of Culture) Project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 870935. (More info at: https://mesoc-project.eu/ ) The opinions expressed herein are solely by the authors and do not reflect the official point of any EU institutions nor of any other member of the MESOC Consortium.

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Urban utopics: writing the city in the light of utopia.

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Michael G Kelly, Mariano Paz, Urban Utopics: Writing the City in the Light of Utopia, Forum for Modern Language Studies , Volume 59, Issue 1, January 2023, Pages 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqad012

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One of the abundant uncanny features of the Covid-19 lockdowns was the still photography and video footage that emerged of cities deserted, emptied of their ordinary human activities, in broad daylight. While commentary sometimes focused on the potentially positive impact on air quality and the renewed sense of a natural presence taking hold in the urban space – thereby underlining the challenges posed by ‘business as usual’ in a dynamic of permanent activity and expansion – there was also an awareness that here, revealed in an exceptional way, were the infrastructure and decor of the urban phenomena stripped of their human actors. 1 The uncanniness of such a revelation was that it showed, at one and the same time, the enabling constructions of ongoing urbanity and interdependence (matters of acute collective awareness in the circumstances) together with an urban world as if after the end of human presence: a prefiguration of post-apocalypse; the ‘day after’ become the day underway. 2

It was in this period, Spring 2020, that work on this Special Issue began, and it seems to us necessary at the outset to acknowledge how this amplifying event both revealed to us our subject in a new way, and arguably changed the terms of the problem – in its entirely contemporary iteration. The migration of much activity to online platforms and the displacement of much physical circulation (e.g. of goods) into the invisible circuits of logistical systems (i.e. outside the ‘social’ spaces of inhabited agglomerations), led many to predict an imminent demise of the city as focus and localizer of human activities and energies – along with a great leap into the unknown for the human subject, for human sociability and community, that this represented. Likewise, hierarchies of essential and non-essential work were (at least temporarily) revised and placed in ever starker contrast with the system of reward in the ‘market society’ – as frontline workers were mobilized under classical notions of a shared, common good and need, the fortunes of those at the top of reconfigured economic food chains grew exponentially. The sense was of social and economic systems facing unprecedented levels of inner inconsistency, stress and conflict. As we complete work on this issue in Autumn 2022, and as other crises move to the fore, these questions are now embedded in the discussion of social futures, with a sense of fundamental shifts begun, if not completed nor even fully manifested.

The ‘urban’, in this perspective, finds itself open to question and revision at the very moment of its becoming a majority human experience – indeed, it is common for contemporary discussions of urbanism, across disciplinary boundaries, to open with the observation that urban life has become the dominant setting of social interaction for human beings. 3 Urbanization and urban redevelopment, argues David Harvey, may be understood as the response of the different modes of capitalist organization (industrial, post-industrial) to the multiple crises that have affected the European and global economies from the nineteenth century to the present. 4 But the predominance of urban space in human experience and interaction has become even more pronounced over the past decade: overall, more of the world’s population now lives in cities than in rural areas, reaching as high as between seventy and eighty percent in parts of Europe and Latin America. As such, the ‘urban’ could be argued to have migrated from a major discrete object of reflection, representation and analysis to the status of a constitutive element (and metonym) of the global prospects and challenges now faced by humanity. 5

Such an evolution of the status of the urban requires a diversification of the ways in which the city is constituted within and subjected to analysis and critique – one to which the category of writing is well placed to contribute. As several urban theorists and sociologists have noted, a consideration of literature can serve as ‘an entry point to the ‘big’ questions of comparative and global urban research’. 6 According to this view, literary texts can provide insights into the dynamics of urban life that would not necessarily be captured by quantitative research – and can thereby supplement and act as correctives to other modes of scientific investigation into the urban. Literary and cultural criticism, then, should also pay attention to this phenomenon, since the scope and methods of these disciplines would also contribute to the understanding of ‘urban texts’, no longer confined to the minorized disciplinary status of merely ‘literary’ objects.

To reason thus, in our view, is to move slightly too efficiently to the assignment of a service role to the writing of the city, in the calculation of disciplinary utilities. In particular, it elides the ways in which writing and the city have evolved symbiotically – both as technological realizations and as cultural realities. Writing’s function, in this respect, is not necessarily limited to one of more or less accurate or nuanced ‘representation’, it may just as readily inhabit a range of different, partial ‘perceptions’, from envisioning to glimpsing. It is towards the great diversity of modes in which such writing can occur and be realized that our longer title (‘Writing the City in the Light of Utopia’) gestures.

We will return to this longer title below, but we remark from the outset, here, that our concern is not frontally with a utopian object , in the writing of the urban, but with the variable effects and manifestations of a utopian parameter to such writing. This parameter has its origins, but not its exclusive form(s), in the debate on utopia as both a distinct literary genre and a mode of political and social practice. The possibility of envisaging a transformed urban reality is a key component of the complex category of utopia, 7 and the corpus of works partaking of the utopian genre clearly involves different forms of what Lyman Tower Sargent calls ‘social dreaming’. 8 Although the term entails, in the words of Lucy Sargisson, ‘a conflict between desire and realization’, 9 this does not mean that urban utopia should be approached as an estranged fantasy with no connection to lived urban reality. Utopia, furthermore, encompasses not only what is imagined in cultural production, but also an experienced impulse that informs collective practice, 10 itself related, in the words of Ruth Levitas, to a recourse to utopia as method . 11

An established view in the field of utopian studies thus sees utopia as the name both of a literary genre and a practical impulse infusing attempts to plan and build neighbourhoods, cities and other social and political communities and infrastructures. 12 In its positive sense, as a eu topia, it entails the imagination of a society that is never perfect, but is intended to be considered as better than that in which the text has been produced. Other prefixes have been applied to the suffix topos . Within this interpretive framework, utopia and dystopia are generally regarded as interdependent concepts with different generic outcomes and related temperamental signatures. Dystopia, often associated with science fiction (but an automatic conflation should not be assumed, as some of the articles in this Special Issue will demonstrate), has become a widespread presence in contemporary cultural production, but it may entail an ideological function: naturalizing the idea that the future will be negative, normalizing feelings of pessimism and thus inducing conformance with the present order of things. Not all dystopias are ideological in this sense, and scholars of utopianism have identified a number of subforms that coexist within a utopian spectrum. They include the anti-utopia (a text that is intended to reject the impulse to change society, informed by the idea that eutopian projects lead to the creation of failed or totalitarian societies) and the critical dystopia (a dystopian text that is nonetheless directed at proposing a positive social alternative by warning against existing social problems). Much has been written about these categories and shadings of utopian concern, their interrelations and their ongoing relevance both to evolving literary practice and to increasingly urgent reflections on the state of the world at present and in an unclear but impending future. 13 The very prevalence of the resultant (sub)genres in contemporary debates, however, has had a tendency of imposing them frontally upon our attention as readers and scholars. One of the consequences of this development, arguably, is to elide the extent to which a broader, more wholly dialectical and less generically codified utopian problematic can be seen to inhabit a wide range of literary production.

What might be termed the utopian problematic can be thought to derive from the original figure of the literary utopia, from Thomas More onwards, and understood to act as shorthand for a set of conceptual relations which stem from that figure, both within literary production and across a wider history of cultural and political thought. 14 While the most prominent such relation is thus that between utopia and dystopia, both as cultural and political forms and variably enacted historical realities, a structuring tension of central critical concern characterizes the relations between ideology and utopia – in which the utopian moment is understood variously as a subcategory of, or an oppositional force with respect to, the contextually dominant constructs governing economic, social, political and cultural attitudes and actions. 15 Although other lines of development can also be brought into play, our core point here is to distinguish the classic figure of utopia from the dynamic configuration of issues to which the term provides more oblique access across a wide range of texts and contexts. 16

To pose the question of the utopian at this angle is thus not, in the first instance, to focus on the fortunes of generic trends more or less in phase with the rhythms of the publishing world. It is, rather, to see in the ‘utopian’ a problematic locus of contending forces and considerations, a representational fault-line in and around which refreshed forms of reflection on contemporary lived experience can crystallize and be developed. Moving to some extent beyond the widely recognized relations between the question of the city in literature and the genre of utopia, 17 the question of utopia can be seen to be woven, imperfectly and on occasion destructively, into the fabric of everyday urban life and cultural representations thereof.

PROPOSITIONS: 1. Le plan de la ville représente la production du discours sur la ville. 2. La déconstruction de cette représentation met à jour l’idéologie dans laquelle ce discours est saisi. 3. Le plan de la ville est une ‘utopique’ dans la mesure où il laisse apparaître une pluralité de lieux dont la non-congruence permet de figurer l’espace critique de l’idéologie. 20 [PROPOSITIONS 1. The city map represents the production of discourse about the city. 2. The deconstruction of this representation uncovers the ideology controlling it. 3. The city map is a ‘utopic’ insofar as it reveals a plurality of places whose incongruity lets us examine the critical space of ideology.] 21

The ‘utopic’ is thus the name of a property of spatial representational practices, where that property is understood to disclose a potential or opportunity for a critical reading of underlying ideological forces. Marin is significant as a theorist of the tensions between processes of ‘utopian’ representation and the realities of historical power and ideology. His representational concerns throughout Utopiques are wide-ranging, and merge into the simulacrum-reality of a built space such as Disneyland (read as a ‘degenerate utopia’), which would subsequently re-emerge in writings as diverse as those of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. The particular text he identifies as a ‘utopic’, in the discussion containing the given quotation, is the city map – and we draw from this the hypothesis of a particular pertinence of the urban to the utopic as a conceptual tool. While Marin could be argued to have implied a cartographical horizon of textual practice more generally, we would argue that the ‘urban’ is one major name of this horizon for contemporary literary production and provides a comparative category in which the utopian problematic can be observed to play out in its full complexity.

Though the urban phenomenon is unarguably a contemporary question – and, indeed, crisis – there is less consensus as to the centrality of an urban poetics to contemporary concerns. An influential intervention such as Franco Moretti’s 1983 discussion of ‘Balzac and Urban Personality’ made the case for a high point of such poetics in the nineteenth-century configuration of the becoming-modern city, as if urban poetics were to exhaust their possibilities even as the realities that shaped them became ever more dominant. 22 The ‘utopic’ in Marin’s sense can be of help in addressing this décalage or time lapse between aesthetic implications and lived realities, as it is concerned, by definition, with ways in which the spatial experience and its representations are not internally coherent or consistent, and leave the subject (whether reader, viewer or citadin [civic subject]) in an incomplete or at least suboptimal relation to the always elusive whole, the city as both city and as complete proposition. It suggests that it is in this very experience of breakdown that the critical import lies and that valuable meanings become available to the reader.

Quelques-uns de ces ponts sont encore chargés de masures. D’autres soutiennent des mâts, des signaux, de frêles parapets. Des accords mineurs se croisent, et filent, des cordes montent des berges. On distingue une veste rouge, peut-être d’autres costumes et des instruments de musique. Sont-ce des airs populaires, des bouts de concerts seigneuriaux, des restants d’hymnes publics? L’eau est grise et bleue, large comme un bras de mer. – Un rayon blanc, tombant du haut du ciel, anéantit cette comédie. 23 [A few of the said bridges are still covered with hovels. Others support poles, frail parapets and tropes. Minor chords cross each other and fade away; ropes ascend from the embankments. You can make out a red coat, perhaps other costumes; musical instruments you may note. Are these popular tunes, snatches of seigneurial spree, fragments of public anthems? Wide as an arm of the sea, the water is grey and blue. A white ray falling from the outer sky annihilates this comedy.] 24

The prose poems of the Illuminations , following on from those of Charles Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris [1869], mark a key evolution in the relations of literary form with urban transformation. That Carson would bring out an underlying musicality, the trace of a versified structure, in this contemporary translational response is already a comment on the non-linear natures of both literary relations and literary evolution. But of particular interest to us is the closing representation of a moment of illumination, which – in both the original and its derived, linguistically and culturally othered form – captures with great clarity and power the temporality and gravity of a utopian epiphany, beyond all existing forms of socialized ‘music’. As if in a moment of suspension, a new light is thrown on the human ‘comedy’ (one notes the Balzacian connection), bringing it to nothing ( néant ) and revealing it in the same, momentary movement. Here, poetic illumination and the act of critical understanding enter into suggestive contact – in a passing moment outside of ordinary, or everyday, time.

Dal mio discorso avrai tratto la conclusione che la vera Berenice è una successione nel tempo di città diverse, alternativamente giuste e ingiuste. Ma la cosa di cui volevo avvertirti è un’altra: che tutte le Berenici future sono già presenti in questo istante, avvolte l’una dentro l’altra, strette pigiate indistricabili. 25 L’inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà; se ce n’è uno, è quello che è già qui, l’inferno che abitiamo tutti i giorni, che formiamo stando insieme. Due modi ci sono per non soffrirne. Il primo riesce facile a molti: accetare l’inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo più. Il secondo è rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui: cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all’inferno, non è inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio. 26 [From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you is about something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable. 27 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. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.] 28

In these concluding lines of the work, Calvino can be argued to have outlined a central possible telos for the critical reading of writings of the city. It is that of a sifting discernment, which would disclose what is life-giving both within the complex tensions and reversals of city life and within the writing that weaves those positive and negative elements into a continuum analogous to (if not directly representative of) that of the built urban complex. This is how we understand a consideration of the utopian to impact upon the writing of the city – as issuing in a recognition of how, even in its most suboptimal experiences, the city carries within it the question, and the promise, of a better life. 29 To write the city in the light of utopia is, then, far from the assembly of a simple transcript of what appears in the glare of the floodlights – a poetics of complete visibility and self-transparency, that could be attributed to a dominant tradition of utopian thought and representational practice. It is to be attuned and attentive to something fragmentary, intermittent – and momentarily absolute: in the mode of Rimbaud’s epiphanic illumination but where what is revealed is the very immanence of the scene, its presence, its givenness. 30 The everyday is thus liberated from any characterization as simple repetition – and rendered visible in the fullness of its ability to mean transformatively , to enable living differently. 31

Hence also, in our view, the fruitful incongruity, for a project with utopia in its title, of a preponderance of studies which highlight far from ideal qualities in far from ideal lived and represented urban realities. The studies collected here are not primarily first-order representations of urban utopia, but of urban realities considered where the question (or shadow) of utopia is a live and shaping presence. ‘Writing the City in the Light of Utopia’ as a critical remit can thus result in a focus on nonconformist or disruptive spaces within the urban fabric, an attention to spatial discontinuities and their textual correlates, and to their accompanying discourses and poetics. It can equally lead to a focus on singular experience, on the event and its afterlife, on memory and anticipation of that which itself evades satisfactory representation. But it can also, furthermore and critically, lead to a focus on the transitional processes internal to the utopian problematic itself, in particular those historical movements through which utopia and dystopia reveal their interrelatedness and, on occasion, interchangeability.

The articles brought together in this Special Issue point to the relevance and urgency of these concerns across a number of literary cultures and languages, and suggest new lines of approach to the utopian problematic in its full(er) complexity. These articles thus allow us to observe the actual or erstwhile promise of utopia as it finds itself enacted and on occasions diffracted or indeed distorted in available representations of urban life, across cultural and linguistic boundaries. 32 This is the case firstly for articles which deal with literary treatments of aspects of a particular named city in a broadly contemporary context – as do the contributions of Ruth Glynn (on Naples), Hanna Henryson (on Berlin) and Michael G. Kelly (on Marseille).

Two strongly comparable Mediterranean port cities, Naples and Marseille, evolve as singular urban spaces in a tense relation to their broader national contexts, enjoying an ambivalent status within them. Both have been the object of contradictory imaginaries in cultural representation, dismissed as a social stereotype or praised as a symbol of national identity. Glynn and Kelly explore representations of these cities across a range of contemporary texts. In ‘Utopia in Late Modernity: Literary Critiques of the “Neapolitan Renaissance”’, Glynn focuses on works that respond to the period of civic confidence that characterized Naples in the 1990s. This ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’, realized in part by urban regeneration and cultural development, counteracted the usual image of Naples as a ‘vilified Other’ in Italian culture – a city associated in the national imaginary with organized crime and social degradation. Glynn discusses two novels – Giuseppe Montesano’s Di questa vita menzognera [ Of This Lying Life ] (2003) and Ruggero Cappuccio’s Fuoco su Napoli [ Fire over Naples ] (2010) – as examples of texts that engage critically with the apparent utopianism of this Neapolitan resurgence. Montesano’s novel imagines a Naples fully controlled by a criminal family and turned into a theme park. This is a dystopian fantasy that plays out as an allusion to different vectors that connect the city with consumerism, with the pervasiveness of mediatized spectacle and with the politics of the Berlusconi era. Cappuccio’s text also revolves around organized crime and the control exerted by the Camorra at municipal level. The vision here is much darker, perhaps because of the novel’s later publication date, at a time when mafia wars and the literary phenomenon of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra [ Gomorrah ] (2006) had already overtaken the positive associations of the ‘Renaissance’. Yet, as in Montesano’s novel, the solution offered to reinvigorate a declining city is to turn it into a site of spectacle and circulation of people – in this case as a museumified, elite tourist destination. Ultimately, in both fictions the exploitation of the cultural and architectural heritage of Naples traces a passage between imaginaries of utopian potential and dystopian scenarios that capture the city as a form of merchandise, to be sold for the profit of criminal gangs.

Kelly’s article begins by referencing a text whose political discourses echo the denunciation of urban corruption and greed found in the novels studied by Glynn. Marseille (2015), the first non-English language series produced by Netflix, marks a new parameter to the problematic of urban representation and storytelling in this context – allowing for a reframing of the writing question that is of central concern to us. The series mobilizes for potentially global consumption a vision of the city as a mythological sign that manifests quite differently in the three prose works that are the primary focus of discussion: Emmanuel Loi’s Marseille amor (2013), Sabrina Calvo’s Sous la colline [ Beneath the Hill ] (2015) and Maylis de Kerangal’s Corniche Kennedy (2008). These works are connected because they underscore an association between the utopian and a set of specific cognitive vectors (respectively, melancholy, curiosity and disobedience), while elaborating different forms through which the space of possibility (as derived from a conjoined reading of Pierre Bourdieu and Marin) is occupied in writing. Marseille amor – the Latin or Spanish amor of the title playfully mixing resonances of love ( amour ) and death ( mort ) in French – merges several modes of representing the city (including sociological realism and autofiction) in a text that comes to terms with an experience of Marseille as a formally elusive entity. The utopian possibilities found in the city’s architecture by the text’s wandering protagonist, however, do not necessarily deliver on their original expectations – but without the narrative fully foreclosing their potential for social change (which is ultimately linked to self-healing in a dialectical relation between the subject and the city). Sous la colline illustrates the links between utopia and curiosity, through a story revolving around Le Corbusier’s first Unité d’habitation , whose iconicity is directly traced to the identity of Marseille when, venturing into the fantastic and the supernatural, the protagonist (Colline – identified playfully with the telluric site or colline of the title) travels back to the mythological origins of the city. Here again, the urban environment and the inner psychology of the protagonist are entwined, and it is in this nexus that Kelly sees utopic plays emerge. Territorial and temporal constraints are in the end fully disrupted, enabling the appearance of new forms of identity and agency in and beyond the imagined city. The final text discussed, Corniche Kennedy , is understood to contain a heterotopia (located within the titular place name) within which a gang of teenagers signal, in defiance of authority and with liberated agency, the existence of a potentially utopian underside to the life of the city, a potential marginalized both socially and spatially.

Hanna Henryson’s Berlin article returns to more conventional realism to focus on the literary representation of a very specific urban version of a wider utopian phenomenon – intentional communities, a term which refers broadly to a group of people living together with the same communal aim, but is actualized here in the housing collectives of the contemporary German capital. 33 Henryson analyses the literary representation of this type of housing arrangement in two recent novels by German writer Anke Stelling: Bodentiefe Fenster [ Floor-length Windows ] (2015) and Schäfchen im Trockenen [ Higher Ground ] (2018). These two tell realist stories set in the district of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, a residential neighbourhood situated in what used to be the East-German sector of the city. After the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), its dilapidated buildings were occupied by students, artists and activists, taking advantage of low rents – conditions which facilitated the emergence of private-collective living arrangements. Under such schemes, groups of city-dwellers would pool their resources to develop communal housing projects in which they would live according to certain rules, while also fostering an atmosphere of creativity and energy in their locality. A decade into the twenty-first century, however, gentrification had significantly changed the demographics of Prenzlauer Berg – a phenomenon that is registered and explored in the Stelling novels. Each tells the story of a couple building and negotiating their lives in communal housing projects, tracing, at the same time, the economic and urban challenges faced by these forms of living arrangements, which had been originally conceived with utopian intent. Indeed, communal living was supposed to promote the development of ties between residents, thus reducing the alienation of modern urban life, while also ensuring social diversity through the inclusion of residents that belonged to different social classes, age groups and ethnic origins. This sense of solidarity and inclusion, however, is challenged by cultural and economic change, and the protagonists of both novels experience how the initial expectations of communal living give way to new forms in which diversity is lost, the founding ethos is exposed to the pressures of evolving life circumstances and individual needs, and external economic factors operate to confound the ethical self-understandings of different actors.

Each of these three articles focuses on an ambivalent leveraging of the utopian within a difficult, differentiated, contemporary urban terrain – revealing issues both with respect to the appropriation of the utopian impulse or aspect within the urban utopic, and questions as to the location of utopian potential within the social and symbolic configuration of the urban territory. Such considerations move from a broader prehistory of the utopian as an urbanistic question – indeed, a symbiotic aspect to the questions of utopia and of the urban environment as a designed, willed and rational plan for the improvement of individual and collective lives. 34 This important and (again) ambivalent legacy of the historic relations of utopia and the city are explored in the contributions of Giulia Brecciaroli and Stephan Ehrig to this Special Issue. They deal with the literary representation of urban space as an expression of both promise and disenchantment in two different post-World War II contexts of reconstruction and redevelopment: Italy and the GDR. In ‘Writing Milan and Turin in the Light of (Failed) Utopia: Luciano Bianciardi and Paolo Volponi’ Brecciaroli discusses two writers whose work chart the urban changes brought about in the Italian north by the economic boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s and its aftermath. The Italian economic ‘miracle’ generated massive internal migration from the impoverished south to the industrialized north. Brecciaroli shows how the ensuing social changes are registered by Bianciardi and Volponi in novels that combine autobiographical experiences with a dystopian appraisal of the new urban realities. Whereas Volponi worked in Turin for the Olivetti company (the renowned manufacturer of typewriters, whose owner Adriano Olivetti was also known for this attempt to develop a progressive approach to industry), Bianciardi was employed by the Feltrinelli publishing house in Milan. In his novels, Volponi describes an urban landscape of increased consumerism and an industrial system that dehumanizes and alienates its labourers. Similarly, Bianciardi debunks the myth that Milan would stand for the materialization of the promise of a better life for the thousands of new residents looking for a more prosperous existence. Thus, the dystopian tone of their novels does not stem from an estranged or fantastic perspective, but flows directly from their pessimistic narratives about the failure of the urban space to provide the levels of happiness and fulfilment that post-war economic development had been supposed to deliver. This is seen in portraits of a congested Milan overwhelmed by cars, where citizens no longer have time for leisure and art, and the imperative of efficiency undermines the search for personal self-realization; and of an empty Turin in which the city centre has been displaced by the factory as a site of social interaction.

In ‘Circular Utopia(s): Alfred Wellm’s Morisco and the Socialist City’, Ehrig discusses a novel produced under very different conditions from those of Bianciardi and Volponi, in the GDR. Yet the underlying preoccupations about urban space and redevelopment in a pessimistic and disenchanted manner seem to echo those of the writings analysed by Brecciaroli. Ehrig is concerned with the building of new towns not as a by-product of capitalist industrialization but as the result of a carefully planned, state-led socialist economy. Despite the differences in social context, urban redevelopment in the GDR is comparably informed by a utopian intention to build new cities that will allow their inhabitants to live efficient, comfortable and fulfilling lives. Urban planning in the 1950s GDR, argues Ehrig, was informed by a Marxist, teleological belief in rationalism and the principles of a fair, equal society. But the promises of equity and emancipation that new cities would bring about failed to materialize. Alfred Wellm’s novel Morisco looks back at the construction of an unnamed city (though the allusions mark it as Halle-Neustadt) with a sense of retrospective scepticism. The protagonist is an architect who had been involved in the planning of the new socialist city, somebody who had faith in this utopian project and who was convinced of the possibilities offered by modern architecture to contribute to those aims. Ehrig traces the connections between the building of a Neustadt and the urban imaginary described in Tommaso Campanella’s La città del sole [ The City of the Sun ] (1602), one of the foundational works of the utopian genre. However, the initial enthusiasm gives way to disappointment and disenchantment after the realities of industry and politics result not only in a less creative design of the city but also in a lived reality in which the promise of equality and personal realization, and a classless society, have not been achieved.

The ever-present danger for discussions of the utopian, especially via studies of work in some of the dominant European languages, is the implication, if not the open suggestion, that such problematics are either inherently or predominantly ‘European’ or Eurocentric. While acknowledging the practical limits to any multilingual and multicultural survey of this sort, we would argue that such a view is blinkered, even as the need for epistemological and cultural discernment and sensitivity is clear. In three further contributions to the present issue, our hope is that lines of flight towards a more general, generically and geopolitically diverse plotting of the question come into view. The first of these, by Carla Almanza-Gálvez, outlines an expansive underlying engagement with the urban question in its discussion of three different works by the Spanish novelist Ray Loriga. This engagement is across genres (the novel and short prose), modes (such as contemporary ‘supermodernity’, as outlined by the French anthropologist Marc Augé; technologically enhanced anticipation; allegorical dystopia) and territories, with the global wanderings of the protagonist of Tokio ya no nos quiere [ Tokyo Doesn’t Love Us Anymore ] (1999) giving way to the city as global microcosm of El hombre que inventó Manhattan [ The Man Who Invented Manhattan ] (2004) before turning to the city as allegorical horizon in Rendición [ Surrender ] (2017). A key implication of Almanza-Gálvez’s analysis is that the urban question in contemporary literature resolutely exceeds the customary national or jurisdictional framings while offering significant symptomatic underpinnings to a broader attempt to think the world and the contemporary human condition. The article also makes important connections between the problem of memory at individual and collective levels and the evolving nature of designed urban spaces – in an engagement with the concept of the non-lieu (the transitional, friction-less and depersonalized spaces of the consumer-subject), and its related categories (supermodernity; anthropological space) in the thought of Augé. It is the resistance of such contemporary and future urban spaces to the sense-making processes of the human subject that is understood in this study to underpin the continuum between apparently utopian spatial arrangements and manifestly dystopian subjective conditions in the fictional work under discussion. In this way, Loriga’s fiction can be seen to illustrate the inherently perspectival nature of the ‘urban’ problem – existing only by and through the fragile and evolving realities of those subjects who occupy the urban space – while reframing the question as one of shared concern for a global human community traversing trauma and crisis at both micro (individual) and macro (societal and inter-societal) levels.

Similar hints at universality, whether actual or anticipatory, appear in the contributions by Karen Bouwer and Mariano Paz, both of which also extend the territory of ‘writing’ as envisaged in this Special Issue to the domain of film and wider audio-visual practice. Cinema has been a distinctly urban medium ever since its emergence at the end of the nineteenth century, and the narrative strategies and tropes in utopian cinema are borrowed from its literary counterpart. Film, then, whether fictional (Paz) or documentary (Bouwer), is another platform through which the urban can be imagined and ‘written’ (the etymology of the term used by the Lumière Brothers to name their invention of a camera/projector, the cinématographe , denoting of course a ‘writing in movement’). Bouwer and Paz both focus on cities located in the Global South, which share an experience of a colonial past and levels of inequality that far exceed those found in the Global North. In fact, the cities of the Global South are characterized by the presence of vast areas of slum dwelling, a phenomenon that demonstrates one of the worst undersides of modern and contemporary urbanization. 35 It is not surprising, therefore, that the representation of these cities edges towards dystopia. Yet the idea that these environments can only evoke despair is challenged by Bouwer in ‘Axes of Hope: Flights of Fancy in Recent Work on Urban Congo’, her discussion of two contemporary texts from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The first is a documentary film, The Tower: A Concrete Utopia (2016), by Congolese artist Sammy Baloji and Belgian anthropologist Filip De Boeck, shot in Kinshasa. The second is the novel Généalogie d’une banalité [ Genealogy of a Banality ] (2015), by Sinzo Aanza – set in Lubumbashi, the third-largest city in the DRC. Both cities struggle with a colonial legacy of exploitation that has resulted in vast sections of the population living in poverty. At the same time, the texts that Bouwer analyses portray ad hoc utopian strategies for generating a better urban life for citizens. In the case of The Tower , this is through the unlikely but actual development of a high-rise building; in Généalogie d’une banalité , through the possibility of escaping poverty offered by mineral resources, to be accessed through the excavation of an improvised mine. Bouwer contrasts the movement in two different directions along a vertical axis (building upwards and excavating downwards) and highlights that in both projects the agents are not corporations or the government but private citizens operating informally and independently. In both cases examined, these are social actors who lack the financial resources to professionally carry out their utopian projects. Although neither of them is ultimately successful, Bouwer concludes, they exemplify the resilience of the excluded, who manage to generate their own spaces of hope.

The scenarios discussed by Bouwer speak of cities in which the state has vanished, with people left to improvise strategies to protect and improve their lives. In his contribution, ‘City of Fury: Urban Violence, Dystopia and Anti-Utopia in Nuevo orden and Era uma vez Brasília ’, Paz discusses two feature films that show, on the contrary, an authoritarian state asserting control over the city. Nuevo orden [ New Order ] (Mexico, dir. Michel Franco, 2020) portrays a present-day Mexico City overtaken by widespread social violence through riots that do not seem to obey a political programme. It is a graphically violent film in which impoverished citizens (all dark-skinned and mostly with indigenous features), enact a literal class struggle by killing the rich and destroying their property. In its attempt to re-establish order, the Mexican military imposes a form of repressive dictatorial regime. The film might be read as a denunciation of inequality and authoritarianism, but by warning against attempts to change the social order, and by racializing and Othering the excluded, it becomes a reactionary and anti-utopian text. Era uma vez Brasília [ Once There Was Brasilia ] (Brazil, dir. Adirley Queirós, 2017) focuses on an underground resistance movement operating in the city of Brasilia in 2016, just as the then President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff was being impeached. Here, the city and its metropolitan area are portrayed in an estranged, science-fictional manner as decaying, post-industrial spaces, ruled by a police state. While the ultimate view proposed by the film is pessimistic, the portrayal of the small group of dissidents as political actors attempting to resist the increasingly undemocratic government also offers, as in the works discussed by Bouwer, a sense of resilience and hopeful possibility.

Beyond the comparative and intercultural remit of the present project, our (inter)disciplinary dialogue in this Special Issue is with the emerging field of Literary Urban Studies, in which an expansive notion of the literary (the amenability of a diverse range of texts to the tools of literary reading and critique) confronts the urgency of the contemporary urban phenomenon. In this textually mediated encounter, the concern is both for a deeper understanding of how rhetorical and representational processes feed into the realization of built urban realities, and for an enhanced sense of how urban realities impact upon and are in turn impacted by the subjects (individual, sectoral and collective) of urban experience. The objectives and orientations of this developing field place the reading and interpretation of texts in relation to an understanding of urban challenges and transformations – with the potential to influence urbanistic thinking and action, and public policy more generally. There are, equally, potential implications for the way literature is studied and taught, as well as for the interpretative stance of the general reader as both critical and broader political concerns turn ever more urgently to problems of organization, resilience and survival in the face of human-generated catastrophe(s). 36 Our hope in bringing together the work presented here is to contribute to opening up the space of possible discussions in this developing field of reflection and to demonstrating in a diversified manner that field’s relevance to a shared future.

This emptying of the ‘urban’ scene is a generic property of much publishing that takes the ‘city’ as its discursive and visual object – whether architectural publications or more general-public albeit ‘high-end’ presentations of the ‘urban’ offering. Pictures showcase prime architectural, cultural and social sites emptied of all direct human presence. This anticipates eerily the effect of lockdown. It is in itself, at the same time, an ideological-aesthetic commonplace of urban consumer utopia – the iconic ‘space’ of self-realization most fully itself when cleared of actual bodies (even as all such spaces speak of the work done to create and maintain them). Hence there is a curious paradox in the way the city as offering is consumed: reified, cooled, distanced, curated; where the human excess or mess is an imaginary adjunct, setting off the full value of the privileged objects and spaces for the busy, discerning visitor to come (to be joined by the exemplary – presentable if not present – local inhabitant ). This aesthetic meshes thus seamlessly with the discourse of leisured commodification and its ideological underpinnings. An example might be the standard series description for the Wallpaper* City Guide: ‘a tightly edited, discreetly packaged list of the best a location has to offer the design-conscious traveller. Here is a precise, informative insider’s checklist of all you need to know about the world’s most intoxicating cities. Whether you are staying for 48 hours or five days, visiting for business or a vacation, we’ve done the hard work for you, from finding the best restaurants, bars and hotels (including which rooms to request) to the most extraordinary stores and sites, and the most enticing architecture and design. [The guides] enable you to come away from your trip, however brief, with a real taste of the city’s landscape and the satisfaction you’ve seen all that you should. In short, these guides act as a passport to the best the world has to offer. Enjoy.’ Antwerp (London: Phaidon, 2008) rear inner flap text; reproduced across the series.

Among the many examples of this type of text one could single out the music video for the song Living in a Ghost Town , by The Rolling Stones. Shot on location during lockdown, the video shows the deserted streets (and underground networks) of cities such as London, Toronto, Osaka and Cape Town. The images convey an apocalyptic tone, and the fisheye shots of urban settings, with their circular frame, connote that this is a global phenomenon. At the same time, the music is rather lively, and the shots of the band enjoying themselves as they play act as a counterpoint to the imaginary of gloom. See The Rolling Stones, Living in a Ghost Town , online music video, YouTube, 23 April 2020, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNNPNweSbp8 > [accessed 17 January 2022].

Edward W. Soja and J. Miguel Kani, ‘The Urbanization of the World’, in Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization , ed. by Neil Brenner (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), pp. 142–59.

David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’, Volume 2 (London: Verso, 2013).

This is the status of a ‘hyperobject’, in the terminology of the philosopher Timothy Morton. See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Stefan Kipfer, ‘Worldwide Urbanization and Neocolonial Fractures: Insights from the Literary World’, in Implosions/Explosions , ed. by Brenner, pp. 287–305 (p. 294). See also The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature , ed. by Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 5.

In an influential act of categorization, Lyman Tower Sargent has assimilated ‘city utopias’ to what he terms ‘utopias of human contrivance’. These function so as ‘to put the whole thing under human control and create an entirely new tradition – the utopia of human contrivance or city utopia. Plato’s Republic is the most cited early Western example, although I think that his Laws fits better.’ Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The Three Faces’ in Rethinking Utopia and Utopianism: The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited and Other Essays (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022, pp. 1–49) p. 9 (first publ. as ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’ in Utopian Studies , 5.1 (1994), 1–37).

‘At its root […] utopianism is the result of the human propensity to dream while both asleep and awake’: Sargent, ‘The Three Faces’, p. 8.

Lucy Sargisson, Fool’s Gold? Utopianism in the Twenty-First Century  (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 7.

See Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on Utopian Thought and Practice ed. by Michael J. Griffin and Tom Moylan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007).

See Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

See, for example, Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991); Gregory Claeys, Utopia: The History of an Idea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2011); Roberto Mordacci, Ritorno a utopia (Rome: Laterza, 2020).

On these categorizations see, for example, Sargent, ‘The Three Faces’, and Tom Moylan , Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (London: Routledge, 2000).

An imaginary and consolidated vision of an urban reality is a widespread feature of the foundational texts of utopian literature, such as those of More and Tommaso Campanella. The links between the city, the built environment and architecture have been a concern of several studies devoted to the utopian, as well as more focused chapters and articles. See Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method ; Lucy Sargissson, Fool’s Gold? ; Antonis Balasopoulos, ‘Celestial Cities and Rationalist Utopias’ in The Cambridge Companion , ed. by McNamara, pp. 17–30; John Friedman, ‘The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 24.2 (2000), 460–72.

See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge [1936], trans. by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955); Paul Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia , ed. by George H. Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Fredric Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, Diacritics , 7.2 (1977), 2–21.

Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel and Jason Finch have argued that the diverse tradition of literature of the city is encompassed within the category of ‘literature of the possible’. This includes, alongside a ‘more realistic branch’ of texts, a corpus described as ‘the imagined possibilities for the city, especially for the city as an imagined community or as an imagined polity’, which itself includes ‘large-scale city visions that can be found in utopian literature […]’: ‘The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing the Field’, in Literatures of Urban Possibility , ed. by Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel and Jason Finch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 1–18 (p. 2). The account they propose has the advantage of avoiding a common misperception regarding the notion of utopia: that, whether urban or not, as a literary genre it engages by definition with impossible scenarios, with ideal worlds that could never be enacted.

In this respect, see inter alia, Writing the City: Eden, Babylon, and the New Jerusalem , ed. by Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley (London: Routledge, 1994) and Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), for example.

Louis Marin, Utopiques. Jeux d’espaces (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1973); Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces , trans. by Robert A. Vollrath (New York: Humanity Books, 1984).

Further consideration is given to this aspect of Marin’s study in Michael G. Kelly’s article on contemporary Marseille in this Special Issue.

Marin, Utopiques , p. 257.

Marin, Utopics , trans. by Vollrath, p. 201.

See Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms , trans. by Susan Fischer (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 109–29.

‘Les Ponts’, in Arthur Rimbaud, Poésies. Une saison en enfer. Illuminations (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 170–71.

‘Invisible Cities (Les Ponts)’, in Ciaran Carson, In the Light Of (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2012), p. 38.

Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili [1972] (Milan: Mondadori, 1993), pp. 161.

Ibid., p. 164.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities , trans. by William Weaver (London: Picador, 1979), p. 125.

Ibid., pp. 126–27.

As Giovanna Rizzarelli notes, Calvino’s account of Berenice is one in which ‘il giusto e l'ingiusto convivono; anzi, in un gioco di scatole cinesi la città giusta contiene quella ingiusta, e l'ingiusta racchiude un germe di giustizia e così via, all'infinito. Il polo positivo e quello negativo sono ormai inestricabili, ma non si fondono, non si superano’ [the just and the unjust coexist; indeed, in a game of Chinese boxes, the just city contains the unjust one, and the unjust city includes a seed of justice, and so on ad infinitum. The positive and the negative sides have become inextricable, but they do not merge, they do not supersede each other]: Giovanna Rizzarelli, ‘La città di carta e inchiostro: ‘Le Città invisibile’ di Italo Calvino e la letteratura utopica’, Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana , 31.2/3 (2002), 219–35 (p. 225). Translation our own.

Observable in the canon across generic divides, in modernist urban fiction such as Ulysses (1922), quite as much as in the poetry of French late-Romantic and Symbolist periods.

On the broad intersections of the utopian and the everyday see, inter alia, Michael E. Gardiner, Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013) and Davina Cooper, Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

Indeed, a key aspect of the present Special Issue is its intuition as to the importance of languages and linguistic diversity to the study of the topic – and to Literary Urban Studies (LUS) in general. The city is itself no longer a homogeneous linguistic reality – if it ever was. Indeed, the city often stands in counterdistinction to the nation in the imaginary and reality of language. If it is to have methodological relevance to wider social debates, LUS must be a multilingual practice and conversation. There are limits to what can be done in the context of this Special Issue, but our effort was towards a modicum of linguistic and territorial spread in the articles included. This also counters the inherent abstraction and generalization of discourse on the ‘urban’, which constructs its object across what is by definition at each point a singularity.

Sargisson places intentional communities within the category of ‘empirical utopia’, a category that complements the fictional utopias in literature and the theoretical utopias of social and political philosophy. See Sargisson,  Fool’s Gold? , p. 2.

See Françoise Choay’s influential anthology, in this respect: Françoise Choay, L’Urbanisme, utopies et réalités. Une Anthologie (Paris: Seuil, 1965).

See, inter alia, Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2017).

See Lieven Ameel and others, ‘Teaching Literary Urban Studies’ in Lieven Ameel, The Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 11–26.

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Writing the city

A creative writing workshop on urban landscapes and the literary flâneur/flâneuse.

Applications are now closed.

A practical, one-week creative writing course that enables you to develop your own original literary work in response to the urban environment.

We contextualise the writer in the city by examining such concepts as the literary flâneuse as urban explorer and the poetics of place, as well as exploring some of the narratives of the built environment and the ways in which the wild takes root in the city. It is a chance to learn about the wider context of urban and experimental writing through seminars, workshops and the production of literary non-fiction, fiction, poetry or hybrid work.

Glasgow is a vibrant creative city with a thriving artistic scene that embraces numerous forms and disciplines – especially writing. It is also a city with incredible built heritage, including medieval houses from the 15th century, an atmospheric Victorian necropolis, enough parks to earn it the literary nickname ‘the dear green place’, hidden murals by Alasdair Gray, and the stunning Gothic university at which this course is based. The Creative Writing programme at University of Glasgow is the oldest and most prestigious in Scotland, with a strong ethos of encouraging a supportive community of writers and an openness to form and genre.

Applications are now closed

Key information

Course length: One week

Arrival date : Thursday 13 June 2024

Orientation day : Friday 14 June 2024

Classes start: Monday 17 June 2024

Classes end: Friday 21 June 2024

Credits: 12

Tuition fee:  £670

Accommodation cost: £212

Application deadline:  30th April 2024

What you will learn

This course aims to:

• Identify the concept of urban literature through reference to specific texts, authors and theories
• Examine genres employed in urban writing e.g. memoir, experimental writing, poetry, hybrid forms
• Develop the practical skills of close reading and workshop critique of creative works in progress.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Describe and analyse the role of place in informing literature relating to the urban environment
• Compose high quality original creative work
• Critique samples of creative work through close reading and discussion.

Teaching pattern

The course is taught in one week, with assessment being due in one week after course completion. In the taught week, there will be:

• 5 one-hour seminars
• 5 two-hours workshops
• 1 half-hour, one-to-one tutorial.

Entry requirements

• GPA of 3.0 (or equivalent)
• you should be currently enrolled at an international higher education institution.

If your first language is not English, you must meet our minimum proficiency level:

• International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Academic module overall score of 6.0, no subtest less than 5.5
• we also accept equivalent scores in other recognised qualifications such as ibTOEFL, CAE, CPE and more.

This is a guide, for further information email  [email protected]

Princeton Correspondents on Undergraduate Research

Writing a Creative Thesis: An Interview with Edric Huang ’18

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Kristin Hauge about her independent work in the Music Department to highlight creative independent work in the arts. This week, I got in touch with Edric Huang, a senior in the Anthropology Department with certificates in Urban Studies and Creative Writing. Unlike most students on campus, he will be writing two theses this year. One is the classic research-based thesis that seniors in the sciences and humanities are familiar with, but the second will be a collection of poems for his Creative Writing Certificate. If you are unfamiliar with the kind of work that goes into creative theses, here’s what Edric had to share about his personal experience:

What topics do you write about in your work?

I’ve been thinking a lot about superstitions and hauntings lately, especially the ones that come up in conversations with my mom. Sometimes, she’ll tell me about Chinese folk superstitions that she or our relatives believe in, and it amazes me how these superstitions create worlds around us all — how they protect us, create conflict, stimulate us to action. I also write poems based on my anthropological fieldwork this past summer when I visited a migrant reception center in Paris and studied the survival strategies of Sudanese refugees who had made it there. Patterns of migration inevitably weave together a lot of my poems, both from a personal lens and through my observations.

How do you go about doing research for your poetry?

In some ways, attentively living is research for my poems. By paying attention to minute details, or lingering a little longer and taking a photo of a particularly arresting image, I naturally make connections to other life experiences or other topics. I recently walked along an industrial street in Brooklyn, and the scene, which reminded me of the 1992 LA Riots, created a starting point. An image creates the language from which I can begin to write.

But research for poetry can take many forms. I look to answer several questions: How do other poets write about certain topics, and how does the form of poetry create a chance to speak about something and speak to someone? How do these other writers use the page? I’ve read a lot of Asian-American writers lately, trying to figure out how I can write my “Asian-Americanness” into my poems. When I draw inspiration from specific poets, songs, etc., I will mention at the beginning of the poem that I am writing “after” something. For example, I wrote a poem after listening to Jhene Aiko’s new album, and included some lyrics from her song into mine.

I also do research on the topics I want to write about, especially if I don’t already know much. I believe that as someone who wants to use poems to grapple with myself and the larger processes that affect or surround me, proper representation of certain themes, histories, etc. cannot be done without a genuine investment in this research process.

Are there any work habits you find to be helpful?

I tend to set limits on how much time I allow myself to spend on this research because I often get so engrossed with some topics that I forget that I still have a poem (and a second thesis…) to write. I also have been trying to free-write by just spewing out lines onto a Word document — with my computer screen dimmed out completely. I edit and judge a little too much, and I’ve come to recognize that there’s a time and place for critique, but it can’t come too early or I won’t get past the first five lines of a poem. When I do edit  my work, I try to keep my writing minimal; I want each word to have gravity and to say as much as possible about the poem. Writing is such an individual process, though, and I’m still trying to find the best practices for me.

What are your plans for your creative thesis?

The standard poetry thesis consists of 30-40 pages of poems, and I hope to use this not only as a way to grow personally and sort through a lot of my complicated emotions around these topics,  but also as a starting point. I’m not sure what I’m doing post-grad yet, but no matter what, I hope to continue writing, editing through this manuscript, and revisiting a lot of these topics that I’ve been thinking about for the past three years.

Whether you’re a poet or not, Edric’s experience shows how there are several ways of going about research. When it comes to inspiration, you could draw from your personal experiences, from previous works that have intrigued you, or even from pausing to take a closer look at your surroundings. The writing process too is not set in stone and can involve a little experimentation to figure out what works best for you. If you’re looking for more tips on research and writing, you can visit the McGraw Center or the Writing Center . Moreover, if you’re interested in finding out more about creative writing, you can speak with a Peer Arts Advisor or apply for a class through the Lewis Center !

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Creative Writing

Related subject guides, a sampling of literature databases.

• Finding Books
• Resources by Genre
• Literary journals
• Organizations and events
• Getting Published
• Citing Sources This link opens in a new window

Contact Ask a Librarian via email , text us at +1-646-265-1342, or schedule an appointment .

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Subject Guide

This guide draws together resources for creative writers in all genres. The pages of this guide highlight books and other resources from our collection and suggestions for finding books on creative writing in general. The "Resources by Genre" page lists books from our collection on writing in specific genres (fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, and creative nonfiction). Other pages point to publication venues, local writers' organizations, and more.

The Libraries offer a wide variety of resources for research in many subjects. If you're looking for background information for any kind of writing project, you can use our Research Guides menu to browse by topic or search for a particular keyword.

Here are a few other subject guides that may be of particular interest:

• Comparative Literature by Amanda Watson Last Updated May 2, 2024 970 views this year
• English and American Literature by Amanda Watson Last Updated May 2, 2024 2419 views this year
• Essays and Essayists by Amanda Watson Last Updated May 2, 2024 523 views this year
• Finding fiction (and other books) to read for fun by Amanda Watson Last Updated May 2, 2024 654 views this year
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• Plays and Playwrights by Rye Gentleman Last Updated Apr 17, 2024 238 views this year
• Poems and Poets by Amanda Watson Last Updated May 2, 2024 1062 views this year

Many of the literary databases that the NYU Libraries subscribe to include full text of literary works in many genres. If you're looking for examples of fiction, poetry, or drama to read online, the following may be helpful. You can also search the Libraries' catalog for authors and titles of print works. (See the "Finding books" section of this guide for more guidance on locating print materials and ebooks.)

• Alexander Street Literature This link opens in a new window Alexander Street Literature is a cross-searchable package of full-text literature collections, focused on place, race, and gender. The collections include poetry, short fiction, novels, full-text plays, and film scripts.
• Columbia Granger's World of Poetry This link opens in a new window Columbia Granger's World of Poetry contains citations for poems that appear in anthologies and collections, as well as poet biographies, commentaries, a glossary of poetic terms, and full text for some poems. Users can search poems by title, first line, author gender, genre, and more.
• Drama Online This link opens in a new window Drama Online contains full texts and full-length filmed performances of plays ranging from Aeschylus to the present day, with supplementary material including first night program texts, critical analyses, and images from the Victoria and Albert Museum's archive of production photos. Includes the Core Collection, Critical Studies and Performance Practice, Nick Hern Books Modern Plays, National Theatre Collection, RSC Live Collection, and Aurora Metro Books, among others.
• Literature Online (LION) This link opens in a new window Literature Online includes full text of literary works in English from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It also includes the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, together with biographic and bibliographic reference materials for each author. More information less... A fully searchable library of more than 350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose. LION is the single most extensive and wide-ranging online collection of English and American literature.Resources included in this resource are: Bibliographies Biographies Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms Encyclopedia of African Literature Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, 1900-2003 Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 vols.) Encyclopedia of the Novel Handbook of African American Literature New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Oxford Companion to Irish Literature Penguin Classics Introductions Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory Routledge Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (2nd Edition)
• New Play Exchange This link opens in a new window The New Play Exchange is a digital library of scripts by living writers which can be filtered by title, length, age level, genre, subject matter, production history, script availability, cast size and characteristics, playwright, and playwright demographics. The database includes a directory of organizations and one of people, which are faceted by role (dramaturgs and types of writers), gender identity, race/ethnic identity, sexual identity, and location. While the focus is currently North American, the intended scope is international.
• Next: Finding Books >>
• Last Updated: May 2, 2024 10:52 AM
• URL: https://guides.nyu.edu/creative-writing

How to Describe a City in Writing (100+ Best Examples)

Crafting compelling descriptions of cities is a skill that can vividly immerse your readers in your narrative.

Here’s how to describe a city in writing:

Describe a city by considering its size, culture, age, geography, architecture, infrastructure, economy, climate, landscape, and nightlife. Each characteristic offers a unique perspective, allowing you to craft a vivid, engaging description. Tie your description to your theme.

This article will guide you through the process of describing a city, focusing on ten crucial elements that add life and color to your descriptions.

10 Elements for Describing a City in Writing

Table of Contents

When describing a city in writing, you need to know these 10 elements:

Architecture

Infrastructure.

Next, let’s explore each of these elements in more detail and provide examples of how to apply them to your own stories.

Size refers to the scale of a city in terms of its physical extent and population.

By mentioning the size, you set a foundation for the readers, giving them a sense of the city’s vastness or compactness.

Words to Describe the Size of a City in Writing

• Densely populated
• Medium-sized

Examples of Describing a City by Size

• Sprawling across the landscape like a behemoth, the metropolis swallowed the horizon whole.
• With a population exceeding millions, the city buzzed with ceaseless activity.
• The dense network of streets formed a compact, labyrinthine cityscape.
• It was a small city, where everybody knew everybody.
• The city was vast, its boundaries stretching as far as the eye could see.
• Its towering skyscrapers were a testament to its grandeur and size.
• Nestled in the valley, the city covered a small area, yet housed a myriad of cultures.
• The size of the city was deceptive; it was more densely populated than it appeared.
• The city was a sprawling canvas of urbanity, cutting across county lines.
• The petite city was neatly crammed into a pocket of the mountainside.

Culture comprises the beliefs, traditions, arts, and history that influence a city’s way of life.

Highlighting the culture paints a vivid picture of the people, customs, and ethos that define the city.

Words to Describe the Culture of a City in Writing

• Traditional
• Cosmopolitan
• Multicultural
• Conservative
• Progressive

Examples of Describing a City by Culture

• The city was steeped in ancient traditions, echoing its ancestral roots.
• Its lively arts scene painted the city with an irreplaceable cultural vibrancy.
• The city was a melting pot of diverse cultures, blending seamlessly into one another.
• The annual festival was a cultural extravaganza that transformed the city into a carnival.
• The city was synonymous with classical music, its soul resonating in symphony.
• The local cuisine, a testament to the city’s rich culture, left a tantalizing aroma in the air.
• An artistic hub, the city was a cradle of avant-garde movements.
• The city’s cultural tapestry was woven with threads of countless ethnicities.
• The city wore its history like a proud badge, its culture speaking volumes of its glorious past.
• The city was a cultural cocktail, stirred with vibrant arts, and timeless traditions.

The age of a city refers to how long it has existed, which is often reflected in its architectural style, infrastructure, and historical landmarks.

Describing the age can transport your reader back in time or into the future.

Words to Describe the Age of a City in Writing

• Prehistoric
• Contemporary

Examples of Describing a City by Age

• The city’s ancient walls were steeped in history, whispering tales from centuries ago.
• The futuristic skyline was a testament to its recent establishment.
• Age-old monuments punctuated the city, standing tall as symbols of its venerable past.
• The city was a blend of old and new, where modernity met antiquity.
• Modern skyscrapers towered over the city, evidence of its recent urban development.
• The city was an enduring relic of the Medieval Age, its cobblestone streets weaving tales of yore.
• With buildings dating back to the Victorian era, the city was an open history book.
• Despite its youthful age, the city wore an old soul.
• The city was a testament to the future, a spectacle of cutting-edge technology and sleek architecture.
• Age-old traditions thrived amidst the modern cityscape, telling tales of a city that respected its past.

Geography describes the city’s location, its physical features, and how these factors influence the city’s character and lifestyle.

Words to Describe the Geography of a City in Writing

• Mountainous

Examples of Describing a City by Geography

• The city was built on hills, its houses twinkling like stars on an undulating landscape.
• Its coastal location made the city a paradise for beach lovers.
• Tucked between mountains, the city was a serene oasis in a rugged setting.
• The desert city was a mirage of golden sands and sparkling oases.
• The city was a confluence of rivers, forming a scenic waterfront that buzzed with life.
• Surrounded by dense forests, the city was an island of urbanity in a sea of wilderness.
• The coastal city was a playground of surf and sand, where the sea kissed the cityscape.
• The city was a picturesque valley carved into the heart of the mountains.
• A city of islands, it was a constellation of vibrant urban life amidst the tranquil sea.
• The city was an urban jewel nestled in the heart of the vast plains.

Architecture refers to the style and character of the city’s buildings and structures.

It speaks to the city’s history, culture, and technological progress.

Words to Describe the Architecture of a City in Writing

Examples of describing a city by architecture.

• Gothic spires and Romanesque arches painted a canvas of architectural marvels.
• The cityscape was a fusion of Brutalist concrete and sleek glass towers.
• Traditional thatched cottages adorned the city, a spectacle of rustic charm.
• The city was a palette of Art Deco buildings, their geometric patterns a testament to its rich architectural legacy.
• Modern skyscrapers dotted the city skyline, interspersed with green terraces and solar panels.
• The city was a sprawling labyrinth of narrow alleys, flanked by ancient terracotta houses.
• The city was a spectrum of architectural styles, from Victorian houses to modern lofts.
• The city’s architecture was a reflection of its sustainable ethos, with green roofs and walls covered in foliage.
• The city’s colonial architecture narrated tales of a bygone era.
• Futuristic architecture characterized the city, with self-sustaining buildings and smart infrastructures.

Infrastructure speaks to the functionality of a city – its roads, bridges, public facilities, and utilities.

It provides insights into the city’s level of development and organization.

Words to Describe the Infrastructure of a City in Writing

• Well-developed
• Sustainable
• Disorganized

Examples of Describing a City by Infrastructure

• The city boasted an intricate network of subways, making commuting a breeze.
• Its wide boulevards were lined with trees, merging functionality with aesthetics.
• The city had a robust public transportation system that kept its lifeblood flowing.
• Advanced telecommunication infrastructures turned the city into a global hub of digital innovation.
• Its well-planned bike lanes made the city a paradise for cyclists.
• The city was illuminated by solar-powered streetlights, a testament to its green infrastructure.
• The city’s skywalks connected buildings, forming a labyrinth above the hustle and bustle.
• The city’s efficient waste management system kept its streets clean and green.
• The city’s infrastructure was a seamless blend of urbanity and nature.
• The city was a beacon of technological prowess, its infrastructure speaking volumes of its progress.

The economy of a city speaks about its wealth, main industries, and job opportunities.

It gives the reader a sense of the city’s prosperity or lack thereof.

Words to Describe the Economy of a City in Writing

• Impoverished
• Agricultural
• Technological

Examples of Describing a City by Economy

• The city was a bustling hub of commerce, its markets buzzing with activity.
• It was an industrial city, its skyline punctuated with factories and smokestacks.
• The city’s booming tech sector attracted talent from around the globe.
• Its struggling economy painted a city in decay, with boarded-up storefronts and desolate streets.
• The city was a hub of finance, home to towering banks and bustling stock exchanges.
• A rich agricultural economy defined the city, its verdant farms a testament to its wealth.
• The city thrived on tourism, its bustling streets a carnival of foreign faces.
• The city was an emblem of prosperity, its thriving economy lifting people out of poverty.
• Despite the economic downturn, the city held onto its vibrant spirit, a testament to its resilience.
• The city’s economy was a vibrant tapestry of trade, services, and manufacturing.

Climate characterizes the city’s weather patterns throughout the year.

It can deeply influence a city’s culture, lifestyle, and even architecture.

Words to Describe the Climate of a City in Writing

• Mediterranean
• Continental
• Subtropical

Examples of Describing a City by Climate

• The city was blessed with a temperate climate, keeping it lush and vibrant all year round.
• Its harsh winters painted the city in shades of white, with frost-etched buildings and snow-blanketed streets.
• The tropical climate kept the city in a perpetual state of summer, with azure skies and sun-kissed streets.
• The city was a desert, its climate oscillating between scorching days and frigid nights.
• The city’s Mediterranean climate filled it with fragrant breezes and clear, sunny days.
• The city was caught in an eternal spring, awash with blooming flowers and chirping birds.
• The city experienced four distinct seasons, painting a vivid palette of changing landscapes.
• The city was infamous for its torrential rains, transforming its streets into rivulets.
• The city’s harsh climate made it a fortress of solitude, its cold winters keeping outsiders at bay.
• The city’s mild climate was a relief to its residents, offering respite from extreme weather.

Landscape refers to the natural and artificial features that shape the city’s terrain and overall visual appearance.

Words to Describe the Landscape of a City in Writing

Examples of describing a city by landscape.

• The city was a symphony of undulating hills and glass-and-steel towers.
• Its landscape was punctuated with verdant parks, like emeralds set in concrete.
• The city was a mosaic of picturesque canals and charming footbridges.
• The city’s landscape was a spectacular blend of towering cliffs and sweeping beaches.
• The city’s landscape was dominated by a majestic mountain that stood as a silent sentinel.
• The city was a concrete jungle, a dense matrix of buildings interspersed with occasional pockets of green.
• The city’s vast plains stretched to the horizon, a vast checkerboard of farmland and urban clusters.
• The city was characterized by its dramatic coastline, where jagged cliffs met the roaring sea.
• The city was nestled in a lush forest, its buildings camouflaged amongst the towering trees.
• The city’s landscape was a harmonious blend of the old and new, where verdant vineyards met sprawling shopping malls.

Nightlife includes the after-dark activities that a city offers – from dining, music, and theater to clubs, bars, and other entertainment venues.

It reflects the city’s vibrancy and energy when the sun sets.

Words to Describe the Nightlife of a City in Writing

• Nonexistent
• Underground
• Sophisticated

Examples of Describing a City by Nightlife

• The city came alive at night, its streets pulsating with lights and music.
• The city’s nightlife was a whirlwind of neon signs, lively bars, and pulsating dance floors.
• The city was famous for its jazz clubs, their sultry tunes wafting into the night.
• The city’s vibrant night markets were a treasure trove of culinary delights.
• The city’s nightlife was a spectrum of opera houses, theaters, and art galleries, enriching the cultural fabric.
• The city’s skyline glittered with rooftop bars, offering panoramic views of the starlit cityscape.
• The city’s after-hours was a playground for night owls, teeming with nightclubs and music venues.
• The city’s tranquil nights were a respite from the bustling days, its streets bathed in the soft glow of streetlights.
• The city was a nocturnal paradise, its nightlife teeming with gourmet restaurants and wine bars.
• The city’s night scene was a melting pot of cultures, its streets resonating with music from around the world.

Here is a good video about how to describe a city in writing:

3 Full Examples of City Descriptions in Writing

Here are three full examples of how to describe a city in writing.

Nonfiction Essay

Los Angeles is a sprawling city, spreading across a vast, flat coastal plain nestled between mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Its multicultural nature is palpable, a melting pot where hundreds of cultures converge to create a rich tapestry of humanity. From Little Tokyo to Olvera Street, the city offers cultural enclaves that transport visitors to different corners of the world.

The architecture of Los Angeles tells a tale of its age and history.

From the contemporary designs of downtown skyscrapers to the Spanish Colonial Revival structures that pay homage to the city’s early days, LA offers a visual feast of architectural styles. Infrastructure-wise, Los Angeles is a car-centric city, known for its iconic freeways, yet, it is also actively expanding its public transportation system.

The climate in LA is Mediterranean, providing its residents with sunshine nearly all year round.

This, combined with the city’s picturesque landscape of rolling hills and sandy beaches, contributes to the quintessential Southern Californian lifestyle. The nightlife in Los Angeles, known for its glitz and glamor, mirrors the city’s reputation as the entertainment capital of the world.

Mystery Novel

The city of Edinburgh, ancient and mysterious, was shrouded in a veil of fog.

Narrow, winding streets wound their way up and down the city’s undulating terrain, past centuries-old Gothic buildings that seemed to hold whispered secrets in their cold stone. The towering Edinburgh Castle, perched atop an extinct volcano, cast long, eerie shadows across the Old Town, lending an air of mystique.

Despite the Scottish capital’s gloomy weather, the city was alive with culture. The annual Fringe Festival transformed the streets into a vibrant tapestry of theatre, music, and dance. Meanwhile, tucked away in the corners of the city were hole-in-the-wall pubs, where folk music hung heavy in the air.

Even in the dead of night, the city refused to sleep.

The pubs and clubs of the Royal Mile, teeming with locals and tourists alike, created an eclectic nightlife. The cobblestone streets echoed with faint laughter, ghostly footfalls, and the faint skirl of bagpipes, imbuing the city with an aura of enchanting mystery.

Romance Novel

Venice, with its endless maze of canals and charming footbridges, seemed to have been woven from dreams.

It was an intimate city, its compact geography fostering a unique, close-knit culture. The melodies of the gondoliers’ serenades drifted through the air, their words telling tales of age-old love stories.

The city’s Gothic architecture, ornate and elegant, reflected in the shimmering waters of the Grand Canal. The iconic Rialto Bridge, a testament to Venice’s architectural prowess, served as a lover’s meeting spot, its stone balustrades bearing witness to countless stolen kisses.

The Venetian economy thrived on tourism and the arts, its numerous mask shops, and glass-blowing factories testifying to the city’s artisanal heritage.

Venice was a city that never hurried. Its pace was defined by the gentle ebb and flow of its canals.

As twilight descended, the city transitioned from a bustling tourist hub to a serene sanctuary. The street lamps flickered to life, casting a romantic glow on the cobblestones. The serenade of the gondoliers intertwined with the soft whispers of the wind, composing a nocturnal symphony that was the heartbeat of this city of love.

Final Thoughts: How to Describe a City in Writing

Before you type “THE END” to your story, essay, or piece of writing, consider how your city weaves into the tapestry of your narrative.

Particularly, how your city embodies and exposes the theme.

Related Posts:

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• How to Describe the Wind in Writing (100 Words + Examples)
• How To Describe a House in Writing (21 Tips for Beginners)
• 400+ Words to Describe a Flower Garden: Best Writers Guide

112 Urbanization Essay Topics, Questions, and Examples

🏆 best questions to ask about urbanization, ✍️ urbanization essay topics for college, 📌 discussion questions about urbanization, 👍 good research questions on urbanization, ❓ questions about urbanization.

• Advantages and Disadvantages of Urbanization Essay These resources are easily exploited because of the availability of facilities and labor in the cities, which leads to economic development and improvement of living standards of the city dwellers.
• Urbanization and the Environment Due to urbanization, the number, the size, the kind and the compactness of cities, in addition to the effectiveness of their management of the environment are major concerns for attainment of the international sustainability.
• Urbanization Merits and Challenges Urbanization is in most cases associated with the human movement from the rural to the urban areas. This is as a result of increased population in the rural areas in relation to the lands and […]
• Urbanization Process in Mesopotamia History of the involvement of the cities in the world has different reasons that lead to the development and establishment of the towns.
• Social, Economic and Environmental Challenges of Urbanization in Lagos However, the city’s rapid economic growth has led to high population density due to urbanization, creating social, economic, and environmental challenges the challenges include poverty, unemployment, sanitation, poor and inadequate transport infrastructure, congestion in the […]
• Urbanization and Environment The resources can be identified through the acquisition of knowledge about the environmental conditions of the areas in which urban development is expected to take place.
• Urbanization in Mexico Some services are available in the urban areas but most of the residents are not in the position to pay for them.
• Technological Innovation Effect on Urbanization By the 20th century, as large-scale industrial production became effective, the idea of urbanization appeared, leading to the further growth of the world’s leading cities. As such, the idea of urbanization is the cornerstone of […]
• Urbanization in Hong Kong and Effects on Citizens However, “while the proportion of people living in small cities is expected to decline, the million-plus cities accounting for about 40% of the total urban population in 2011 is expected to increase to 47% percent […]
• Is Taiwan Urbanization Rate Growing? Urban & Rural Areas The ratio of the urban population to the total population determines the degree of Taiwanian urbanization. There has been a decline in the agricultural industry and this could be one of the ways to revive […]
• Urbanization and Technological Development in the Philippines In the course of writing the material, not only data from previous works were used, but also static data that allowed us to track the dynamics of the development of Philippine in the last 15-20 […]
• Urbanization: Origins and Growth of Cities That is why there is no doubt that the emergence of social classes and the distribution of labor significantly contributed to the rise and growth of ancient cities.
• American Cities and Urbanization After the Civil War American cities’ central development and urbanization occurred in the years after the end of the Civil War. Firstly, the active development of urbanization was caused by the fact that people began to move to cities […]
• Aspects of Chinese Urbanization The urban changes in Beijing started in the second half of the 20th century. Since the 1990s, urbanization in China has continued to increase due to economic and technological advancements.
• Urbanization and Suburbanization Therefore, more people come to life in the city, in order to be able to take advantage of the many opportunities it offers.
• Demography, Urbanization and Environment The coefficients of migration, immigration, and emigration show the movements of people, which also change the number of people living in a particular territory.
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• Rapid Urbanization and Underdevelopment The essay through examples of the developing world and the developed world establishes the linkage between rapid urbanization and underdevelopment in both; the cities as well as the outlying peripheral areas.
• The Relationship Between the High Rate of Urbanization in Africa and AIDS Spread This movement results in to increase in the number of people in the towns and cities in a particular year. The increased social interaction of people in towns has led to increased HIV/AIDS infections in […]
• New Urbanism: The Problems of Urbanization The scales of differentiating private to public space include the following: spatial, degree of exclusivity and openness, and modes of social encounter.
• Aegean’s Urbanization: Technology and Pattern The intense trading activity in the Aegean region was also supported by the geographical positioning of the region near to the ocean so as to be accessible to the urban civilizations of the Near East.
• Agricultural Revolution and Changes to Ancient Societies in Terms of the State, Urbanization, and Labor This made the climate and soil more adaptable to plant growth and farming as some of the wild variants of barley and fruit began to grow in the region on their own.
• Rural Residents in “Rapid Urbanization” by Jennifer Weeks Research shows that many rural dwellers in developing nations move to towns and as cities struggle to accommodate the high growth, the rural residents often end up living in slums that are already teemed.
• Urbanization and Sub-Urbanization in the United States The exposition resulted in the creation of a beautiful urban space, and people acknowledged the benefits of city planning as well as the cooperation of different professionals.
• Urbanization Processes in Post-Socialist China To explain this phenomenon, this paper answers three questions what is the cost of forming this middle class what led to the emergence of this middle class how has the formation of the middle class […]
• Affirmative Action, Social Movements and Urbanization Affirmative action, according to Messerli, can be conceptualized as the preferential treatment of minorities in various aspects in the society. The following are some of the arguments supporting and opposing affirmative action in employment and […]
• China’s National New-Style Urbanization Plan The problems related to the rapid growth of the city population have accumulated at a certain point and started to prevent the further improvement of the quality of life of the population.
• Industrialization, Urbanization, and Migration The beginning of the Industrial Revolution is shown both in the article and the book focusing on terrible working conditions in the factories.
• Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Urbanization Challenges As documented in the literature, Port-au-Prince is faced with many urban challenges and problems, ranging from social and geographic segregation to elevated poverty levels and occurrence of natural disasters which compound the problem of poverty.
• China’s Success in the Urbanization Process The current paper aims at reflecting and analyzing the article to comprehend the reasons of why the challenges appear during the process of urbanization when it is so important for the society and becomes a […]
• Urban Economics: The Urbanization Process and its Effects However, the rate of urbanization started to increase in the late 20th century and by the beginning of the 21st century, a significant portion of the developing world’s population lived in urban settlements.
• How do Migration and Urbanization Bring About Urban Poverty in Developing Countries? When there is a high rate of rural to urban migration, there is pressure on the limited resources in the urban centers.
• History of Urbanization in Brazil in 1980 In addition, according to Morrison, “there is a disparity in term of salary or wage differentials, and therefore aspirations and lifestyles, among classes in the country”.
• Baseball and Urbanization For instance, at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, the urban population in the United States was 5% of the total population.
• Human Geography: Urbanization The high prices of food in some regions of the world make most of the people to starve. Most of the people in developed countries like in US, UK, Canada and Australia are well endowed […]
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• The Roles of Women in Urbanization vs the Challenges of Living in the Countryside
• Urbanization, the Creation of Cities and the Impacts on the Natural Environment
• Urbanization, Mortality, and Fertility in Malthusian England
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• Relocating or Redefined: A New Perspective on Urbanization in China
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• Sustainable Development Policies Can Reduce Urbanization Problems
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• Urbanization, Lifestyle Changes and the Nutrition Transition
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• Urbanization Trends in Chicago Versus Houston
• What is the Role of Globalization on Urban Urbanization
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• The Relationship Between Urbanization And Industrialization
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• What Is Urbanisation and Its Effects?
• Why Urbanization Is a Problem?
• What Are the Main Effects of Urbanization?
• What Is the Impact of Urbanization on the Environment?
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• What Are the Four Stages of Urbanization?
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• When Did Urbanization Become a Trend?
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• What Are the Three Reasons Why Urbanization Is Increasing?
• Does Population Mobility Contribute to Urbanization Convergence?
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• What Is Evolution of Urbanization?
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IvyPanda. (2023, November 30). 112 Urbanization Essay Topics, Questions, and Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/urbanization-essay-topics/

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My Writing Students Were Arrested at Columbia. Their Voices Have Never Been More Essential

O n April 30, 56 years after Columbia sent the police in to arrest student protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall in protest of the Vietnam War—protests the school loves to promote—I was walking my 12-year-old daughter home after her choir performance. We had gone an extra stop on the subway because the stop at 116th, Columbia’s stop, was closed. Instead, we had to walk back to our apartment from the 125th stop. When we got within sight of Columbia, a line of dozens of police blocked our path. I asked them to let us through; I pointed to our apartment building and said we lived there. As a Columbia professor, I live in Columbia housing.

“I have my orders,” the cop in charge said.

“I live right there,” I said. “It’s my daughter’s bedtime.”

“I have my orders,” he said again.

“I’m just trying to get home,” I said.

We were forced to walk back the way we came from and circle around from another block. Luckily, our building has an entrance through the bodega in the basement. This is how I took my daughter up to her room and sent her to bed.

Read More: Columbia's Relationship With Student Protesters Has Long Been Fraught

A week earlier, I had brought some food for the students camping out on Columbia’s West Lawn and had met with similar resistance. Security guards asked whether I was really faculty; I had already swiped my faculty badge that should have confirmed my identity. They asked to take my badge, then they said I hadn’t swiped it, which I had, two seconds earlier, as they watched. They said their professors had never brought food to them before. I didn’t know what to say to this—“I’m sorry that your professors never brought you food?” They called someone and told them the number on my badge. Finally, they were forced to let me through. They said again that their professors had never brought them food. “OK,” I said, and walked into campus. I reported their behavior and never received a reply.

On April 30, after I had got my daughter to bed, my partner and I took the dog down to pee. We watched the protesters call, “Shame!” as the police went in and out of the blockade that stretched 10 blocks around campus. Earlier that day, we had seen police collecting barricades—it seemed like there would be a bit of peace. As soon as it got dark, they must have used those barricades and more to block off the 10 blocks. There were reports on campus that journalists were not allowed out of Pulitzer Hall, including Columbia’s own student journalists and the dean of the School of Journalism, under threat of arrest. Faculty and students who did not live on campus had been forbidden access to campus in the morning. There was no one around to witness. My partner and I had to use social media to see the hundreds of police in full riot gear, guns out, infiltrate Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where protesters had holed up , mirroring the 1968 protests that had occupied the same building.

In the next few days, I was in meeting after meeting. Internally, we were told that the arrests had been peaceful and careful, with no student injuries. The same thing was repeated by Mayor Adams and CNN . Meanwhile, president Minouche Shafik had violated faculty governance and the university bylaws that she consult the executive committee before calling police onto campus. (The committee voted unanimously against police intervention .)

Read More: Columbia Cancels Main Commencement Following Weeks of Pro-Palestinian Protests

Then, Saturday morning, I got an email from a couple of writing students that they had been released from jail. I hadn’t heard that any of our students had been involved. They told me they hadn’t gotten food or water, or even their meds, for 24 hours. They had watched their friends bleed, kicked in the face by police. They said they had been careful not to damage university property. At least one cop busted into a locked office and fired a gun , threatened by what my students called “unarmed students in pajamas.”

In the mainstream media, the story was very different. The vandalism was blamed on students. Police showed off one of Oxford Press’s Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction . (This series of books offers scholarly introductions that help students prepare for classes, not how-to pamphlets teaching them to do terrorism.)

“I feel like I’m being gaslit,” one of my students said.

I teach creative writing, and I am the author of a book about teaching creative writing and the origins of creative-writing programs in the early 20th century. The oldest MFA program in the country, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was funded by special-interest groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and, famously, the CIA, and was explicitly described by director Paul Engle as a tool to spread American values.

Read More: 'Why Are Police in Riot Gear?' Inside Columbia and City College's Darkest Night

The way we teach creative writing is essential because it shapes what kinds of narratives will be seen as valuable, pleasurable, and convincing. Today’s writing students will record how our current events become history. One of the strategies Columbia took with its police invasion was to block access of faculty, students, and press to the truth. It didn’t want any witnesses. It wanted to control the story.

For weeks, Columbia administration and the mainstream media has painted student protesters as violent and disruptive—and though there have been incidents of antisemitism, racism, and anti-Muslim hatred, including a chemical attack on pro-Palestine protesters , I visited the encampment multiple times and saw a place of joy, love, and community that included explicit teach-ins on antisemitism and explicit rules against any hateful language and action. Students of different faiths protected each other’s right to prayer. Meanwhile, wary of surveillance and the potential use of facial recognition to identify them, they covered their faces. Faculty have become afraid to use university email addresses to discuss ways to protect their students. At one point, the administration circulated documents they wanted students to sign, agreeing to self-identify their involvement and leave the encampment by a 2 p.m. deadline or face suspension or worse. In the end, student radio WKCR reported that even students who did leave the encampment were suspended.

In a recent statement in the Guardian and an oral history in New York Magazine , and through the remarkable coverage of WKCR, Columbia students have sought to take back the narrative. They have detailed the widespread support on campus for student protesters; the peaceful nature of the demonstrations; widespread student wishes to divest financially from Israel, cancel the Tel Aviv Global Center, and end Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University; and the administration’s lack of good faith in negotiations. As part of the Guardian statement, the student body says that multiple news outlets refused to print it. They emphasize their desire to tell their own story.

In a time of mass misinformation, writers who tell the truth and who are there to witness the truth firsthand are essential and must be protected. My students in Columbia’s writing program who have been arrested and face expulsion for wanting the university to disclose and divest, and the many other student protesters, represent the remarkable energy and skepticism of the younger generation who are committed not only to witnessing but participating in the making of a better world. Truth has power, but only if there are people around to tell the truth. We must protect their right to do so, whether or not the truth serves our beliefs. It is the next generation of writers who understand this best and are fighting for both their right and ours to be heard.

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Creative Writing Worksheet: Urban Myths

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

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16 August 2021

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Setting Description Entry: Urban Street

January 3, 2009 by BECCA PUGLISI

cars, trucks, SUVs, bicycles, delivery trucks, pedestrians, homeless people, stray dogs, pavement, reflectors, sidewalks, cigarette butts on the ground, litter, broken glass, concrete medians, street lights, small trees with fences around them, street signs…

honking, tires screeching, alarms going off, cars speeding by or slowing down, wheels bumping over reflectors, shoes clacking/slapping against pavement, whirr of bicycle tires, voices talking/shouting/laughing, cell phones ringing, car doors slamming, store doors…

exhaust, gas fumes, rubber, hot pavement, cigarette smoke, garbage, urine, food smells from restaurants and corner vendors, sweat, incense/potpourri/fragrance from nearby shops, sewage, old water in rain puddles

foods: hot dogs/pretzels/soda/hamburgers/french fries/bottled water, smoky exhaust, bitter cigarettes, paper butts, soda straws, sweat, rain

gritty pavement, heat coming off the concrete, slap of shoes against sidewalk, sweat trickling, breeze blowing your hair/clothes, metallic fence under your fingers, wind from passing cars, uneven sidewalk, brick/stucco/concrete buildings, cold doorknobs…

Helpful hints:–The words you choose can convey atmosphere and mood.

Example 1: Snow dusted the gutters and the trash they contained with a humpy white blanket. It drifted down from the street lights–I swear, it jingled as it fell. Gone were the gasoline and greasy food smells; the air tasted clean, as if it had just been loosed upon the world.

–Similes and metaphors create strong imagery when used sparingly.

Example 1: (Simile) Music concussed from one vehicle after another like warring DJs in a night club.

Think beyond what a character sees, and provide a sensory feast for readers

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers —a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

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Reader Interactions

January 5, 2009 at 9:09 am

I liked the clean air too — wish we had more of that here; it’s cold right now, but it is as clean and crisp as it could be.

I’ve been revising and my characters are indeed rolling their eyes and sighing far too much. I may be visiting here a lot more…

Happy New Year!

January 4, 2009 at 5:25 pm

Thanks girls you are awesome.

January 4, 2009 at 3:28 pm

Thanks, Christy!

Yeah, it’s probably about an hour for me, too. the hardest ones are the places I haven’t been, or haven’t visited in a long time. Since I’m fairly sure Angela hasn’t been to the rainforest, either, that one should be a little sparse. 🙂

January 4, 2009 at 12:37 am

You never cease to amaze me! Another great list!

January 4, 2009 at 12:08 am

Becca’s probably faster than me…maybe an hour? I struggle on the similies and metaphors. Some days they come, bam, just like that, other times…I have to yank them out of the imaginative ooze.

January 3, 2009 at 11:31 pm

You really don’t waste time getting back to business. Thanks for amazing descriptions. How long does it take you to make these lists?

January 3, 2009 at 12:50 pm

Nice! I can use this TODAY in my revisions!

January 3, 2009 at 12:43 pm

Thanks, Marian! Clean air–sad to think that some day we may need a record of it to remind us what it was really like.

January 3, 2009 at 10:10 am

There are some lovely turns of phrase here. I especially like, “the air tasted clean, as if it had just been loosed upon the world.” That’s exactly what clean, crisp winter air feels like.

[…] Urban Street […]

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Many people write creatively, but few hone their skills to develop their writing craft to its highest form. Even fewer learn the other skills it takes to become a successful writer, such as the steps needed to get a book published and into the hands of readers. Liberty’s 100% online Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing can help you develop your writing passion into a career so you can set your works free to impact culture and the world.

Employers in every industry need professionals who have strong writing skills, so you can be confident that your ability to write effectively can also help set you apart in your current career. With in-demand writing expertise and the ability to customize your degree with electives in literature or writing practice, Liberty’s online MFA in Creative Writing can help you achieve your professional writing goals.

Our online MFA in Creative Writing is designed to help you build on your writing skills with specific workshops dedicated to the craft of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, or screenwriting. With a work-in-progress approach to writing practice and mentorship from our faculty of experienced writers and scholars, you can learn the specific skills you need to make your writing stand out.

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Admission Information for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Admission requirements.

• A non-refundable, non-transferable $50 application fee will be posted on the current application upon enrollment (waived for qualifying service members, veterans, and military spouses – documentation verifying military status is required) .
• Unofficial transcripts can be used for acceptance purposes with the submission of a Transcript Request Form .
• Creative Writing Sample – A creative writing sample of one creative writing work of at least 2,500 words or a culmination of creative writing samples totaling 2,500 words.*
• Applicants whose native language is other than English must submit official scores for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or an approved alternative assessment. For information on alternative assessments or TOEFL waivers, please call Admissions or view the official International Admissions policy .

*A sample of one or more poems totaling a minimum of 750 words may also be submitted. Song lyrics are not accepted at this time as writing samples.

Preliminary Acceptance

If you are sending in a preliminary transcript for acceptance, you must:

• Be in your final term and planning to start your master’s degree after the last day of class for your bachelor’s degree.
• Complete a Bachelor’s Self-Certification Form confirming your completion date. You may download the form from the Forms and Downloads page or contact an admissions counselor to submit the form on your behalf.
• Submit an official/unofficial transcript to confirm that you are in your final term. The preliminary transcript must show a minimum of 105 completed credit hours.
• If you are a current Liberty University student completing your undergraduate degree, you will need to submit a Degree/Certificate Completion Application .
• Send in an additional, final official transcript with a conferral date on it by the end of your first semester of enrollment in the new master’s degree.

Dual Enrollment

Please see the Online Dual Enrollment page for information about starting graduate courses while finishing your bachelor’s degree.

Transcript Policies

Unofficial college transcript policy.

Unofficial transcripts combined with a Transcript Request Form can be used for admission. Official transcripts are required within 60 days of the admissions decision or before non-attendance drops for the first set of matriculated classes, whichever comes first, and will prevent enrollment into future terms until all official transcripts have been received.

Before sending unofficial college transcripts, please make sure they include the following:

• Your previous school’s name or logo printed on the document
• Cumulative GPA
• A list of completed courses and earned credit broken down by semester
• Degree and date conferred (if applicable)

Official College Transcript Policy

An acceptable official college transcript is one that has been issued directly from the institution and is in a sealed envelope. If you have one in your possession, it must meet the same requirements. If your previous institution offers electronic official transcript processing, they can send the document directly to [email protected] .

If the student uses unofficial transcripts with a Transcript Request Form to gain acceptance, all official transcripts must be received within 60 days of the admissions decision or before non-attendance drops for the first set of matriculated classes, whichever comes first. Failure to send all official transcripts within the 60-day period will prevent enrollment into future terms until all official transcripts have been received.

Admissions Office Contact Information

(800) 424-9596

(888) 301-3577

Email for Questions

[email protected]

Email for Documents

[email protected]

Liberty University Online Admissions Verification

1971 University Blvd.

Lynchburg, VA 24515

Ready to Apply?

Submit your application online or over the phone.

Apply by phone: (800) 424-9595

Liberty University is dedicated to providing world-class educational experiences to military students across the globe.

Who May Qualify?

• Active Duty
• Reserve/National Guard
• Veterans/Retirees
• Spouses of Service Members and Veterans/Retirees
• Current Department of Defense Employees

Available Benefits:

• Tuition discounts – $275 per credit hour for graduate courses
• Additional discount for veterans who service in a civilian capacity as a First Responder (less than $625 per course) *
• 8-week courses, 8 different start dates each year, and no set login times (may exclude certain courses such as practicums, internships, or field experiences)

*Not applicable to certificates.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an mfa in creative writing.

A Master of Fine Arts degree, or MFA, is a terminal degree in an artistic craft that demonstrates that you have achieved the highest level of training and skill in your discipline. Like a doctorate, an MFA often allows you to teach courses at the graduate level while also providing many opportunities for scholarship and leadership in education. If you want to grow your creative writing skills to become the best writer you can be, then the Master of Fine Arts can help you get there.

How will students work towards developing their writing skills?

With creative writing workshops and a thesis project, you will receive support and guidance to help you become the best writer you can be.

How long will it take to complete the MFA in Creative Writing?

You can complete the MFA in Creative Writing in just 48 credit hours!

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Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop Alum Deborah Olatunji featured in Penn Today

Check out this fantastic  Penn Today feature on fourth-year student Deborah Olatunji, whose journey at Penn began with the Kelly Writers House Summer Workshop . Though initially intending to major in nursing, Deb discovered that her true passion lay in exploring identity, vulnerability, and mental health advocacy.  

Four years later, Deb has changed her major, started a podcast , studied abroad in South Africa, and launched the Black Storytellers Collective, a transnational project that connects Black writers across the diaspora. Through it all, the Kelly Writers House has remained a source of community and Deb's "third place" at Penn.

Read more about Deb's extraordinary path at the link below.

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‘My own inner critic is a bully’: Julia Cameron on creative demons and updating The Artist’s Way

Creativity guru Julia Cameron has long inspired others. Now she’s sharing her own secret weapon

Mention the name Julia Cameron to an artist, actor, writer or creative and a reverential gasp will go up, followed by an outpouring of praise for her life-changing Morning Pages (MPs) practice. Cameron’s version of journalling became a word-of-mouth sensation with the publication of The Artist’s Way (1992) . In this workbook, the now prolific author, poet, songwriter, filmmaker and playwright invites anyone wanting to unblock their creativity to follow her precise instructions: wake up, write what is on your mind, fill three A4 pages (no bigger, no smaller) in longhand, and then stop. Repeat every day.

With MPs, you’re not flexing for the next Anna Karenina, you’re getting rid of all the stuff clogging your mind, what actor and MPs fan Michaela Coel calls the “gunk”. It could be: “I forgot to buy kitty litter,” says Cameron, 76, on one of her many promotional videos, or a plan for revenge – also OK because: “You are becoming acquainted with all the dark corners of your psyche.” MPs are a “clearing exercise”, says Cameron. In Jungian terms: “You are meeting your shadow and taking it out for a cup of coffee.” When you get back to your day, or your desk, the gremlins of self-sabotage, distraction, fear and all the many negative thoughts that thwart creativity have been acknowledged and set aside.

All kinds of stellar achievers, from actor Reese Witherspoon and US self-help guru Tim Ferriss to pop star Olivia Rodrigo and writers Anna Burns and Elizabeth Gilbert are declared fans. So is her daughter Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, who practises MPs. Julia was married to Martin Scorsese in the 1970s – long enough for her to make substantive edits on the screenplay of Taxi Driver (1976). But while the fans have been doing their MPs, as well as using Cameron’s two other unlocking tools – walking alone twice a week and going on a solo Artist Date (visiting a gallery, say) – Cameron went quiet on us.

“I went 30 years silent,” she tells me from the wood-panelled library in her adobe home on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I was afraid.” From a global guru who long ago conquered alcohol and cocaine addiction, this admission is unsettling. What was she afraid of? “I was afraid of sounding too woo-woo. By that I mean, of taking a footstep off our rational path and talking about something that could only be known through intuition.” She is referring to guidance, a tool she briefly mentioned in The Artist’s Way and which she has been using ever since, but which, she says, “I kept secret.”

Now, with her new book, Living the Artist’s Way: an Intuitive Path to Creativity , she’s decided to explain how guidance works and, in doing so, to share the self-doubt she frequently experiences. “Guidance,” she writes, “is direction that comes from a higher source of wisdom than we ordinarily encounter,”’ or as she has said elsewhere, it’s about “Asking to hear and to trust that you have a source of inner wisdom”. Knowing that readers might think this all sounds woo-woo makes her feel vulnerable. But the evangelist in her wants to share her secret weapon, so she’s willing to take the risk.

As we talk and I try to nail this bestselling guru’s new tool, Cameron speaks as she writes: slowly and with deliberation. She repeats phrases and she comes at the same point from different directions. Cameron has been sober for 46 years. She writes prayers and spiritual poems and invokes the Serenity Prayer used in AA support circles. There is a sense when listening to this gentle soul that for her, every moment, thought and action is lived both with intention and in the knowledge that to step away from this path of learned resilience would be to step towards darkness and chaos. Repetition of words and phrases are incantatory: they mould the mind, they work on it like a salve, as do her almost devotional daily routines, which include walking with her Westie terrier, Lily.

The practice of guidance goes like this. “After you’ve done MPs, you’ve opened yourself up and that’s when you ask for guidance,” explains Cameron, “although you can ask for guidance at any time during the day.” When you “write for guidance”, you ask pointed questions about anything (“Romance, finance – no topic is taboo”), then you listen for the answers, which you write down. Later, you are encouraged to refer to them, which you are instructed never to do with MPs.

“The process of writing out our response is very important, because otherwise we ask for guidance, we hear it and we forget it. But if we have a written record of guidance, we can go back to it a couple of weeks later and say, ‘Oh, it was right!’” She refers to guidance in the second person, the guru seemingly invoking a deity or higher force. Later, when talking about how “we don’t want to talk about the higher power in definitive ways,” she tells me that she once addressed guidance directly. “I finally said, ‘Well, who are you?’ I was told, ‘We prefer to remain anonymous.’”

Cameron isn’t religious, though she was raised as a Catholic in the Chicago suburb where she grew up. “I thoroughly rejected Catholicism and I found that left me with a gap and I needed to believe in something. And so I found myself praying as if maybe there were a presence and, over time, I became convinced that there was. A turning point for me was when I got sober and was told I had to believe in something and I thought about it and decided that I believed in the line from Dylan Thomas – ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’ I thought, well, I can believe in that, in a creative energy underlining the universe.”

She taps into that energy and the Transcendentalists’ belief in the interconnectedness of all things. “Like right now I am sitting in my library and there is a good window that looks out on the mountains and looking at them gives me a sense of faith.” Faith is a habit, she says, a “spiritual muscle” that she has worked hard at. She loves to walk, mindful that all the creatures she and Lily encounter – bears, deer, coyotes, rabbits, snakes and the lizards that Lily longs to eat – “have their place”. As she walks, she “pays attention, finding in the now a sense of benevolence and optimism”.

Sometimes she writes for guidance on gritty stuff, like anger. For the new workbook she interviews people who practise MPs about their thoughts on guidance and its reach. One interviewee proved “troublesome”, however, and Cameron excises him from the book. “I asked for guidance,” she writes, and was promptly told: “‘ You are correct to cut him from the book. He is arrogant and wants more credit than he is due.’ I thought of mailing him a dead mouse.”

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Far from woo-woo, this is delicious, gloves-off fury. Cameron stands by it. “I think anger is a signal that we have a boundary,” she says. “As we work with our anger we find ourselves saying, ‘Oh, perhaps it was justified.’”

Nigel is someone else she locks horns with. Nigel is her inner critic and Cameron, an Anglophile, says that he “is a British interior decorator”, no gesture made to his imaginary nature. Nigel has been “hissing in her ear” since she started writing, aged 18. She writes at one point that, as a teacher, “I want to be brilliant,” which suggests Nigel has finally been hounded out. She shakes her head. “He’s alive and well. He continues to be critical and I continue to fight back and say to him, ‘Oh Nigel, thank you for sharing,’” and she does a simpering voice. “I get a little bit sarcastic back. Nigel is a bully and, like most bullies, if you stand up to him, he backs down.”

In the early days in New York, back when she was starting out and writing for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice , she ran with a tough, egotistical crowd. Today, even though she is a self-help phenomenon, her own ego seems remarkably in check. “Again, it comes back down to sobriety,” she says, “and being told to let a higher force right through me. When I was told that, I said, what if it doesn’t want to?” She smiles at the recollection. “And they said, just try it, and I tried it, and my writing straightened out and I began to be useful and I found myself saying, ‘Oh, being useful is actually rather nice.’ I don’t think of myself as a self-help star. I think of myself as a helper.”

Living The Artist’s Way: An Intuitive Path to Creativity by Julia Cameron is published by Souvenir Press at £18.99. Buy a copy for £16.52 from guardianbookshop.com

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