In/different cities: a case for contact at the margins

Long before embarking on the academic life of a geographer, I made films about cities. In the following essay, I reflect on a series of my short films, shot in the magical aesthetic of super8 film, which meditate on themes that continue to preoccupy and interest many urban geographers, in particular, the dialectic between social life and the built landscape of contemporary urban space. A central argument suggested by these cinematic excursions is that the margins of urban space share an immediate homology with the margins of the social self and that experiencing difference in spatial life is a political and social good analogous to regular encounter with difference in the lives of strangers. Such experiences of difference, these films suggest, are under threat in the neoliberal city in which gentrification, privatisation, labour deregulation and urban policing increasingly homogenise and politically neutralise the social landscape. The films can be viewed at http://www.brettstory.com/category/films-video/