>Date: Wednesday, May 16, 2001 10:01 PM
>From: Deborah L. Parsons <PARSONDC@hhs.bham.ac.uk>

Exploring the Virtual City: A Review of City Sites

The flow of texts and critical readers produced each year on cities and
urban culture shows little sign of abating, and the fact that many continue
to fascinate and stimulate testifies to the richness of the
interdisciplinary field that is urban studies. Particularly interesting,
however, is an increasing turn to non-conventional methodologies and forms
of publication, influenced by the themes and metaphors of urban studies
itself, of which the electronic book City Sites, published by the University
of Birmingham Press, is a leading example.

A cultural history of the different and changing modes of visualising and
writing New York and Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, City Sites offers a conceptually astute and innovative analysis
of the role of representation in the production of urban space. As a
technological resource it is extremely impressive, its multimedia format
incorporating photographic and moving images, sound, statistical charts and
maps of the physical landscape and cultural landmarks of the two cities, but
the editors have in no way subordinated intellectual thought, instead
providing a stimulating model for the electronic dissemination of academic
research that has also been carefully designed to be extremely
reader-friendly. The framework of the volume is based in ten individual
essays by scholars of international repute, five on New York and five on
Chicago, which can be read singly, in order or in relation to each other. On
opening the e-book the reader can enter the essays in one of two ways, the
first by choosing either the 'New York' or 'Chicago' icons, the second
through the more comparative gateway of the 'Essay' icon. On the physical or
conceptual urban maps that then appear, a series of 'signposts' (Harlem,
Times Square, Flatiron Building, Lower East Side and The Skyline for New
York, and Maxwell Street, White City, Marshall Field, The South Side and
Chicago Gateway for Chicago) indicate the areas of critical focus. Following
the Lower East Side, for example, leads to Douglas Tallack's 'The Rhetoric
of Space', a fascinating piece that draws on contemporary spatial analysis
to explore the complex ideological resonances of the slum photographs taken
by the writer and reformer Jacob Riis for his more wealthy and middle-class
viewers and readership. Tallack's discerning account of the selective
framing of space and place through the means of the photograph is
well-illustrated with examples of Riis' work, but, again indicating the
possibilities of web-based publication, it is also supported by hyperlinks
to useful sites such as the Museum of the City of New York and the Library
of Congress, where the interested reader can find further archives of early
film and photography in the city. It is this combination of exemplary
scholarship with the suggestion of avenues and resources for further
research that characterises the e-book as a whole and that makes it such a
valuable addition to interdisciplinary urban studies.

One of the particularly valuable features of City Sites is the editors'
methodological decision to facilitate links across the essays, which enables
a synchronic reading and highlights points of broader dialogue between the
specific examples of urban representation considered by the individual
authors. By following a number of pathways, therefore, headed Architecture,
Leisure, Race and Space, it is possible to read, not sequentially through
one essay, but horizontally between cognate areas across all the essays. The
productive tension between the pathways and the perhaps more conventional
single essay 'routes', offers a reflection in style and form of the
exploration of multiple relations of space, history and representation that
is the critical focus of the essays themselves. In so doing, moreover, it
combines the now familiar metaphor of the 'city as text' with the scenario
of the spatially resonant text or 'text as city'. For, taken as a whole,
City Sites is an experiment in writing the city, or in this case two cities,
in which it becomes more than the integration of its parts. It is a critical
study but it is also a guidebook, an urban walking tour, a cultural
tourist's map of signposts, to be used by the reader for his/her own purpose
and orientation. As in the city, there is no one, linear route upon which to
explore and no one, panoramic perspective from which to view encompassingly,
but instead a choice of routes and a multiplicity of representations, all
linked, to which the reader also adds his own.

City Sites is an important contribution to urban studies and an excellent
resource for both academic researchers and students, as well as the
interested reader more generally. A collection of critically penetrating and
stimulating essays, it is yet also much more - a prompt to rethink not only
our formulations for exploring and analysing the city, but also the very
processes and practices by which we do so.

Deborah Parsons
University of Birmingham
<PARSONDC@hhs.bham.ac.uk>

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