Cinar, Alev, and Thomas Bender, eds. Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City.

• Author: Gatti, Josephine
• Position: Book review

Cinar, Alev, and Thomas Bender, eds. Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 336 pages. Cloth, $75; paper, $25.

Thomas Bender, a New York University history professor, has been deconstructing urban theory since the 1970s. Bender's latest publication, Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, which he edited along with Alev Cinar, a political scientist at Bilkent University in Turkey, demonstrates his ideal in urban scholarship, rethinking traditional approaches to knowledge. This collection of essays describes diverse places in a seminal way: the "urban imaginary." Fiction and narratives are the epistemology of choice for these essays. As the editors contend, "It is not possible to represent a city in any impartial and objective way, independent of a context of networks and boundaries and from the many and diverse ways in which the city is subjectively experienced" (p. xvii). To challenge the reader to look beyond a theory-based science of urbanization, ten essays are presented here on three separate themes: boundaries, inclusion and exclusion, and nation building. The main themes are intended to negate the reification of cities and broaden the scope of sources of information relating to the study of urban environments. This is evident, for example, in an essay by Anthony D. King, a scholar in architecture and the social sciences, in which he explains that a city exists only in our minds and it is the interaction of time and people that truly defines the space we occupy.

The epistemologies used to explore a place are broad; they include literature, art, music, film, myth, history, memory, and nostalgia. Only through an approach that leaves no detail unexamined and no perspective disregarded can one truly understand the nature of an urban city, the editors argue. The compelling essayists demonstrate the valid use of imaginaries as sources of information. Through a narrative about the interaction of people, sociologist Deniz Yukseker tells the story of a hinterland with no boundaries that forms a place where inhabitants with no shared history, culture, or religion come together. Through trade and commerce, women and men are united; they find connections that cross all real and conceptualized boundaries. Narratives of fictional characters in film also highlight the importance of borders. El Norte is the story of a Guatemalan brother and sister who cross the border of the United...