When we think of American cities, we have a complex (and often contradictory) set of images in mind, possibly encompassing glimpses of the Boston Marathon bombings, postcard motifs of the One WorldTrade Center, and palm trees on Sunset Boulevard, L.A. In its various, shapes and discourses, the American city functions as both a parameter, and an expression of the complexities of U.S. social practice. At the same time, it also serves as a prism of overarching social and cultural transformation.
This conference is interested in tracking these recent changes by focusing on the ‘oddities’ of the American urban imaginary in the age of globalization and deterritorialization. “The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare,” Jonathan Raban points out, “is as real, maybe more real than the hard city one can locate on maps, statistics, monographs on urban sociology, demography and architecture.” Our line of inquiry refl ects Raban’s idea of the ‘soft city,’ but also follows Henri Lefebvre’s premise in The Production of Space that every society produces its own space as a means of expressing its specifi city and distinction from other societies.
Conference website: http://amerikanistik.uni-graz.at/de/conference-space-oddities/