Baghdad, Banda Aceh, Beirut, Detroit, Dhaka, Harare, New Orleans. In these times chronicling the devastation and annihilation of cities—through capital flight, natural disaster, slum eviction, and war—I gravitate to stories about restoring ruined cities. Halfway through Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut's novel about the firebombing of Dresden, we find an eccentric scene. After surviving Dresden's conflagration, Billy Pilgrim, optician and ex-GI, escapes traumatic memories by becoming “unstuck in time” (93). He journeys with the Tralfamadorians, creatures from outer space who teach him to time-switch so that he can move fluidly through his own private and public histories. Finding a war movie intolerable, Pilgrim imagines it in reverse: “American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen.” Pilgrim changes space by changing time. German guns suck bomb fragments from wounded American airmen as “the formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes” (93–94). How can we shelter or care for, how can we nurture, the ruined city in the belly of the text?

This essay focuses on a little–studied narrative form I call the modernist miniature. Its practitioners after Baudelaire include novelists like Kafka and Musil, poets like Rilke and Benn, social thinkers and critics like Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno. Central concerns of these modernist miniatures, written primarily for the newspaper feuilleton and published only later in book form, were the perceptions and image spheres of urban space, which were undergoing radical change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernist miniatures can be alternately narrative or philosophical, lyrical or sociological, temporal or spatial. I draw on photographic and architectural discourse to analyze this hybrid literary form, which flourished in the interwar years in Austria and Germany.

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (Passagen-Werk) is discussed here as an unacknowledged treatise on methodology: a hermeneutics of the modern city that aims to interpret how a city is evidence of an era's Wollen, its drive to manifest its self–understanding in distinctive material forms. My coinage Stadtwollen alludes to an undervalued source for Benjamin: Alois Riegl's Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (1897–98), which discusses a Kunstwollen, a collective will to art, or a drive leading a culture to create works of art revealing and predicating its self–understanding. This essay sets Riegl's treatise next to Convolute N of the Passagen-Werk and the project's two Exposés (1931 and 1933) in order to illuminate Benjamin's critical–materialist phenomenology and hermeneutics of the city as encompassing new classes of technical–industrial artifacts–a discourse on method sensitive to the political critiques initiated by Marxism but far outdistancing the claims to epistemological critique made by his era's Marxisms.

This article attempts to reconstruct a mental cartography of early modern London, the ensemble of material, social, and symbolic codes that made up the social architecture of the city. The article extends Steven Mullaney's work by giving scholars a more accurate understanding of the geography of London and its liberties, especially those that housed private theaters, such as Shakespeare's Blackfriars. I look in particular at the liberty of the Whitefriars, arguing that between 1600 and 1615, two theaters used the liberty's reputation to draw visitors to both the theater and the neighborhood in an early modern version of cultural tourism. The theater thrived on a symbolic economy, a commodification of local color that drew people to the district, from in and outside London. I bring theories of space and tourism into play when considering the complexities of how a theater commodifies its neighborhood in this manner.

In Ben Jonson's Epicoene, the misanthropic Morose pathologically seals his home against the “common noises” of London, “turning Turk” against his neighbors. What opens up the queer space of Morose's home, ironically, is his equally queer marriage to a cross-dressed boy, a travesty of marital domesticity that parallels the urban travesty of spatial isolation. While the eventual breaching of architectural and gender facades seems to reinscribe social norms, Jonson's play profoundly questions how we construct the space of home, the space of self. Indeed, by setting Epicoene near the Whitefriars theater, where the play was first performed, Jonson adopts chorographic techniques to represent “home” to viewers drawn from that social and spatial milieu. Through a reconsideration of Plato's chora, this essay explores how a vengeful community wrenches open Morose's closet-cum-home, forcing him to renounce his manhood and reducing him to a nonsubject.

Using archival sources, interviews, and memoirs, this essay documents the surprisingly extensive connections between London's extant modernists and West Indian writers during the 1950s. With the support of Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, T. S. Eliot, and other luminaries, a vibrant group of Caribbean artists quickly established themselves as known literary commodities. Such forms of collaboration between metropolitan intellectuals and their colonial counterparts were structured by shared interests in high culture. London's modernists feared English culture was faced with terminal decline; West Indian writers exploited that fear by insisting that the metropolitan culture industry badly needed an infusion of colonial talent. The brevity and fragility of these bonds, however, led to the emergence of postcolonial literature as a distinct but marginal cultural niche. London's postwar identity as center of global cultural production, I suggest, was intimately connected with the recruitment and assimilation of colonial intellectuals.

This essay explores Venice's recurrence as an implicit structure in Ezra Pound's Cantos, arguing that the built archipelago provides a model for the modernist text, created through engagement with recalcitrant objective dynamics opposed to their containment by an imperious subject–and proffering the canalized republic as a counter to Pound's eventual fascist city of man. The rigorous empiricism of Ruskin's Venetian histories supplies a founding set of tropes through which the fluid, fractured cityscape becomes a taunt to find material ground for historical meaning. Pound, taking up the multiple construction of Venice that haunted Ruskin, locates in it a utopian–and site–oriented–poetic structure valorizing the interstitial and thus the relational, the differential. The Venetian complex that emerges intermittently in The Cantos literalizes the unsettling of Pound's attempt to monumentalize the body politic, remaining unassimilated–and challenging to efforts to transfix any totality construed as part of the project of modernity.

The foundations of global cities of the present and of cities striving to become global are firmly rooted in the colonial past—whether one considers a metropolitan center like London or cities that developed under colonialism, like Bombay, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Yet questions of foundations, roots, and the past are arguably most problematic in the formerly colonized cities. In Shanghai, for instance, the multiply colonized past has of late become a kind of virtual reality in the present remaking of the city; such redevelopment initiatives as the recent Xintiandi project, in which an entire neighborhood was emptied of its residents, restored to its colonial-era appearance, and transformed into a shopping and entertainment complex, offer the visitor nostalgic fantasies of the past as drained of critical understanding as the marshy ground beneath the project was of water. Tis perception of Shanghai and its past as a virtual reality produced out of a history of colonialism is, however, hardly new and indeed was a perception that haunted selfrepresentations of Shanghai at the height of the colonial era, during the first half of the twentieth century. As the modernist writer Mu Shiying put it in a 1933 text, Shanghai's streets were “transplanted from Europe” and “paved with shadows” (568).

This essay explores the ruins trope in representations of the turn–of–the-millennium Latin American city. Like Sabina Berman in her dramatic evocation of Mexico City, Latin American artists represent urban ruins as volatile locales of cultural and historical presences that conflict and resist banishment. This analysis of Berman's Muerte súbita (“Sudden Death”), first staged in 1988, draws on recent theoretical inquiries that highlight the ruin's nonlinear juxtaposition of time frames and its association with the underbelly of Western modernity's rationalist narratives of progress and with a forward–looking critical consciousness. I examine the play's work with ruins and the ghostly presences they harbor to evoke contentious social, cultural, and artistic presences in a disintegrating Mexico City landscape. In stirring up the debris of vanishing urban utopias, works such as Berman's play constitute critical refusals of closure and conjure up unresolved cultural debates vying for a hearing. They also link the ruins trope to constructive, nonutopian imaginings of a less ruinous future and to creative engagements with the urban terrain, however devastated, in search of something of value.

If, as Angel Rama claims in The Lettered City, the city dictates everything one must think, forcing its inhabitants to repeat its discourse, how might shifts in the city's contours affect the construction of civil society? How might urban designs that facilitate the work of recollection help inform conceptions of citizenship for historical actors emerging from dictatorship? These are the questions cultural practitioners in Argentina address through interventions in the Buenos Aires cityscape that honor victims of state terrorism (1976–83). By analyzing three memorial sites that illuminate the complex relation between space and democratic practices, this essay traces how geography, architecture, trauma, and memory interface in the rearticulation of a collective Argentine national identity.

The metaphor of the cidade partida (fragmented or broken city), which has been used to characterize Rio de Janeiro's darker aspect—its stark inequality, its class conflicts and violence—is not new but has gained, in the last couple of decades, widespread circulation. Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, when formal democratic practices such as free speech and open elec–tions were reestablished, it has become more obvious than ever that equal citizenship rights for all, de facto rather than on paper, are still an elusive ideal in Rio and in Brazil as a whole (as in many other places). The neoliberal economic policies of recent decades, with curtailed social spending and privatization of state-owned property, have increased poverty in Rio significantly. The arrival of the large-scale commercialization of cocaine since the late 1970s has deepened urban divisions and intensified violence. The retail end of the drug business often takes place in poor neighborhoods, or favelas. But the violence that prevails in Rio is not limited to warring drug factions or their conflicts with the police. It also inheres in unemployment and inadequate education and health care for the poor, as well as in severely flawed security, judiciary, and penal systems. All in all, the urban experience is fraught with violence and the fear of violence for all residents—though here too there is inequality, since this violence and fear affect some segments of the population far more than others.

Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World, by the Anishinabe author Gerald Vizenor, shows how people can come to form a profound relationship to a place even in sites of (in this case, American Indian) displacement and relocation. I argue that Vizenor's text reflects a complete formation of an urban community in its reclamation of landfills and sewers as integral and religiously significant human spaces that must not be ignored. The community in this novel is not only multicultural but also interspecies, as Native ties to physical place and plant and animal species are reinforced. Moreover, I show the importance of this portrayal of urban community and belonging in a Native context, considering that over two-thirds of all Native people in the United States live in urban settings.

Moving beyond ecocriticism, this essay argues that an ecosocial reading of narratives of the Atlanta child murders (1979–81) is better able to examine the sometimes functional, sometimes broken interactions between sociocultural circumstances and particular urban ecologies. Far from latching onto an idealized, utopian sense of a restorative natural world, the ecosocial approach introduced here focuses critical attention on the traumatized and traumatic social and cultural histories that play out in particular natural as well as built environments. In various ways, child-murders narratives by Toni Cade Bambara, Tayari Jones, and others bear the conflicting burdens of memory and forgetting, of old and new and never–changing and ever–changing Souths. They do so in large part by acknowledging ecosocial dysfunctions as one way of moving, however provisionally and problematically, toward a more grounded, more communal idea and practice of interrelatedness.

CAPE TOWN, A GLOBAL CITY IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN POSTCOLONY. The emancipatory or transformative moments signaled by the prefix post are often incomplete, unfinished, haunted. This essay is about the human bones on which the foundations of Cape Town are built. It is a story about the human cost of the city's development, which led to the resurfacings of disavowed histories of violence. It is a recounting of a slowly unfolding reckoning with the haunting claims of the dead as they return, in their time and on their terms.

In September 1995, corresponding in the hebrew calendar to the month of ELuL 5755, Jerusalem celebrated its three-thousandth anniversary, dating from King David's conquest of the Jebusite city. Of those three millennia of recorded history, the Israelites dominated the region for only six centuries; although many physical and textual reminders of ancient Jerusalem attest to its status as the center of the Hebrew political and religious imagination, the city remains the most contested site on the global map.

From the city as an eighteenth-century version of the philosophical Encyclopédie through its depiction as mystery novel, modernist collage, and complex of virtual networks, the image of the city as a book or collection of books to be read has persisted in the imaginary of modern writers. The literary works of Sébastien Mercier and Charles Nodier provide a window into the intersection of modes of literary interpretation with physical urban rebuilding that began in Paris after 1770. This evolving relation continues to play out in the Bibliothèque de France, completed in 1995, and in controversial plans to scan the world's collections of books for online access.

The sociocultural forms of accra, whose population is now an estimated 2.5 million people, grew form interactions with Europeans from the fifteenth century onward. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were three major European trading outposts on the coast—Ussher Fort (Dutch), James Fort (British), and Christiansborg Castle (Danish). Each European post imparted a particular character to its neighborhood and, more importantly, triggered specific dynamics of social struggle both between the locals and the Europeans and within each local group. Traces of the European influence can also be discerned in some of the street names—Bannerman Road, Hansen Road, Bruce Road, Lokko Road, Rev Richter Road, Joel Sonne Street—which evoke the Euro-African families that formed the earliest local elites. The postmodern maxims that reality is a product of language and that language is essentially unstable and contradictory are by now standard views in critical theory. But I sometimes wonder what conclusion the postmodernists would have come to if for their reflections they had taken not the history of Western philosophy but rather the evolution of the polyglot and hybrid forms of language, ideas, society, and culture that are abundant in the non-Western societies that make up the bulk of the world's population. Accra might have provided a rich site for such reflections.