Hi all,

Sorry it’s taken a bit to jump into this lively discussion. To answer Cecillia’s question, I for one am very interested and committed to a “Writing Cities book” of some form and would definitely take the time to re-work my paper with Brian.

As for the themes, I’m similar to Suzi in being at a point where I’m still stuck on broad, open questions. So, a few thoughts to throw out there…

Should we consider developing a framework that can be repeated for coming years? If “Writing Cities” intends to become an ongoing research group with ongoing local seminars and an annual transatlantic conference, does the publication serve to reflect the general identity of this broader initiative or just the specifics of our first gathering? Or is there a way to combine these two dimensions, and could the publication function like a scholarly journal that declares a broad field of inquiry and then produces more topically-driven issues? My sense is that we should aim for something like the latter, so I think that part of this initial discussion needs to be further refinement of what “Writing Cities” actually is. What is it that distinguishes us a group?

After our conference, the thing I found most unique about our gathering was the tremendous diversity of intellectual perspectives and professional backgrounds. There was a real cross-polination between the humanities and social sciences, history and theory, academic and professional concerns, etc. I would suggest we try to find a way to build an identity that really plays up this eclecticism, seeing the general concept “Writing Cities” as a sort of collage and the publication as a montage sequence. In this regard, I find the concept of “city as metaphor” a potentially very productive starting point, as it enables us to encompass all of this diversity with a concrete starting-off point along the lines of the general question of “What are cities and why do they matter?” Maybe that’s simply too broad, but for me at least, such a formulation invites political, formal, social, cultural, juristic, etc.  methodologies, along with forcing us all to heed Richard’s persistent “So what?”

Thinking more about this, I guess what is latent in my comments is the question of whether or not we need categories. For the sake of provocation, I wonder if instead there is a way where we can create a general framework based on our diversity within which each piece can be situated, and then we find ways to constantly draw connections between pieces and to the general questions in a more experimental fashion, not enforcing a more traditional bracketing of work. Maybe that’s impractical, too much work, or too confusing, but for the sake of discussion, would be interested to hear people’s thoughts.

That’s it for now. Hopefully this is helpful, and just a bunch of garbly-gook.