The Schillers of the suburbs – creativity and mediated sociality

Theories around the cultural geography of creativity have given new life, in recent years, to negative perceptions of the suburbs as ‘isolated’. These theories have emphasised the importance of ‘clusters’, ‘precincts’, ‘incubators’ and ‘hubs’, suggesting that even in the era of the Internet, creativity requires an immediacy of social interaction, which can only be found where there is social concentration. The paper brings these theories into question through a long historical perspective on the relation between creativity and ‘mediated sociality’. Drawing on the work of Elias, it suggests some surprising parallels between the position of German artists and intellectuals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and suburban creative practitioners today. The former were in many respects ‘isolated’, relatively dependent on mediated sociality, and yet they produced a major historical flowering of creative activity. The example prompts us to think more sympathetically and optimistically about the creative potential of contemporary suburbia.     

The ‘Liverpool model(s)’: cultural planning,Liverpool and Capital of Culture 2008

Within the UK, the ‘Liverpool model’ is being celebrated as the new template for Capital of Culture festivals, and culture led urban regeneration in general. This paper will question this celebration and argue that there are, in fact, two ‘Liverpool models’: the first, outlined in its bid and developed within its initial planning strategy, represented the apogee of a New Labour informed ‘cultural planning’ framework for urban development; the second, developed post-2008 within the impact analysis Impacts08, is a more sober and realistic reflection of the role of culture in urban regeneration. This paper will demonstrate how this first model, while politically expedient and rhetorically seductive, was both theoretically unstable and practically unrealizable. Its subsequent abandonment represents an indictment of cultural planning as a nostrum for the complex structural, social and economic problems of the post-industrial city.     

Post‐totalitarian national identity: public memory in Germany and Russia

Through a comparative analysis of Germany and Russia, this paper explores how participation in the memorialization process affects and reflects national identity formation in post‐totalitarian societies. These post‐totalitarian societies face the common problem of re‐presenting their national character as civic and democratic, in great part because their national identities were closely bound to oppressive regimes. Through a comparison of three memorial sites—Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial in Germany, and Lubianka Square and the Park of Arts in Russia—we argue that even where dramatic reductions in state power and the opening of civil society have occurred, a simple elite–public dichotomy cannot adequately capture the nature of participation in the process of memory re‐formation. Rather, mutual interactions among multiple publics and elites, differing in kind and intensity across contexts, combine to form a complex pastiche of public memory that both interprets a nation's past and suggests desirable models for its future. The domination of a ‘Western’ style of memorialization in former East Germany illustrates how even relatively open debates can lead to the exclusion of certain representations of the nation. Nonetheless, Germany has had comparatively vigorous public debates about memorializing its totalitarian periods. In contrast, Russian elite groups have typically circumvented or manipulated participation in the memorialization process, reflecting both a reluctance to deal with Russia's totalitarian past and a emerging national identity less civic and democratic than in Germany.     

The modern cemetery: a design for life

In discussing the importance of public health anxieties within the birth of modern forms of governmentality, Foucault frequently mentions, but does not develop, the questions that arose about the appropriate disposal of the dead. In this paper, I explore the spatial rationalities of the modern cemetery in England in the mid-nineteenth century. As an illustrative example, I provide a detailed analysis of John Claudius Loudon's proposals for cemeteries. Loudon, a horticultural writer and designer who campaigned vigorously for cemetery reform, became crucial in the reconfiguration of the cemetery. I use Loudon's ideas as a dispositif, a material space that also provides a method of analysis for illuminating the operation of various inter-related governmental spatialisations and techniques. Specifically, I illustrate how the cemetery captures the diversification and widening of dispositional techniques of institutions and, at the same time, integrates hygienic imperatives, aesthetic-moral registers and an array of educational-civic functions. I argue that the cemetery, in real and ideal terms, manifests and intensifies a variety of rural and urban spaces and, paradoxically, generates a model milieu for the living.