cities in imaginaries

Hello,

I think most of us hold a special place in our hearts for the cities that we first cut our teeth upon. Where were you living when you began that treacherous transition from teenager to young adult? Do you love that place for trying to make you grow? Or do you resent it? The bridge over Lamar in Austin at night or a wide-blue sky over the slate roofs of Paris can make my chest swell with adoration.

The thought I bring you today is spatial imaginaries. They represent, in part, the sentiment attached to a place. I was first introduced to it in undergrad by feminist geographers (I know, I know). Truthfully, I haven’t thought about it much since, but it’s been on my mind more and more recently.

Imaginaries, at their core, are narratives — the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we are reared upon. In one sense, they are deeply personal and emerge as cognitive maps from the social nature of living. But as with all narratives, they can be politicized, and they often are — the West, the Orient, the American South. This land was empty, it was devoid of culture, it was up to us to civilize. This land was always ours and never theirs, it belongs to us, it is our right to occupy. Land has economic value, and narratives can help win the discourse of ownership.

“I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the Imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin

When I was living in Woodside, Queens, someone introduced a term to me: POW, prisoner of Woodside. So much of the neighborhood simply stuck around — some since birth, others for a few decades at least. Regulars at the bar would describe street corners to each other by the restaurants that used to be there in the 90s. Often, the Woodside that lives in their imaginaries doesn’t reflect the contemporary Woodside. With all the talk of transplants, I was surprised that a neighborhood like this could still exist in New York City.

No one ever really remembers a place the exact same way, but the commonalities are the thing itself. They are tangible ties of family, amity, community — of love — because you grew up together, because you went those places together, because you love those streets and you love each other.

Maybe an easier way to condense this train of thought is that cities within imaginaries are the way we turn the alienness of infrastructure into home. It’s the poetry of people in a place. We do it in the quotidian without even noticing. Humanity is very good at forming attachments. Yet, we are perhaps even better at waging war, at deconstruction. When the people are destroyed along with the place, some imaginaries disappear forever.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
This book is perhaps a bit too on the nose. Framed as a fictious conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the Italian explorer is sent out to survey the kingdom of the Mongol Emperor, and he returns with stories of 55 imaginary cities. Calvino positions Polo’s stories as mediations upon cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and the dead, etc. etc. Eventually, Khan asks Polo why he does not tell him of Venice, his home. Polo is made to respond, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”

As always, I hope the universe remembers to treat you with gentle hands,
Jessie