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LITERARY URBAN STUDIES
Literatures of
Urban Possibility
Edited by
Markku Salmela · Lieven Ameel · Jason Finch
Literary Urban Studies
Series Editors
Lieven Ameel, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
Jason Finch, English Language and Literature, Åbo Akademi University,
Turku, Finland
Eric Prieto, Department of French and Italian, University of California,
Santa Barbara, CA, USA
Markku Salmela, English Language, Literature&Translation
Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary medi-
ations and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in
developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of
literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or
literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “citiness” of its
study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban
condition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material
and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The
series’ focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields
such as urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series
sets no restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of
the source material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range,
the series actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an
international and cross-disciplinary audience.
Editorial Board
Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK
Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia
Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada
Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK
Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA
Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15888
Markku Salmela · Lieven Ameel · Jason Finch
Editors
Literatures of Urban
Possibility
Editors
Markku Salmela Lieven Ameel
Tampere University Tampere University
Tampere, Finland Tampere, Finland
Jason Finch
Åbo Akademi University
Turku, Finland
ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic)

Literary Urban Studies
ISBN 978-3-030-70908-2 ISBN 978-3-030-70909-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
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Preface
It would be fair to say that the inception of this book took place
almost a decade ago, when the Helsinki Literature and the City Network
(HLCN) was founded—an organisation that has since been transformed
into the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS). HLCN/ALUS
aims to connect scholars working in the field of literary urban studies
(broadly defined) and wants to establish this field in a discipline in its
own right. In part, the activities of HLCN/ALUS have been struc-
tured around regular symposia and biannual conferences. Starting in
2013, three biannual conferences have been organised in Finland: City
Peripheries/Peripheral Cities in Helsinki (2013), Literary Second Cities in
Turku (2015), (Im)Possible Cities in Tampere (2017). On the basis of
the first two conferences, two edited volumes were developed, Litera-
ture and the Peripheral City (2015) and Literary Second Cities (2017)
respectively, both published by Palgrave Macmillan. The present volume
can be considered a continuation of these previous books—a closing of
sorts, to a trilogy that we have seen developing over these years of close
collaboration.
The (Im)Possible Cities conference was in many ways an unusual—and
unusually inspiring—event. The conference theme straddled a variety of
fields, including literary urban studies, urban planning theory, cultural
geography, and future studies. The two keynote speakers, Ayona Datta
(then at King’s College London) and Eric Prieto (University of California,
Santa Barbara) represented this variety of perspectives. The conference
v
vi PREFACE
was set up back-to-back with another urban studies conference, Re-City,

which focused on urban studies and urban planning and shared the
focus on urban possibility. The two conferences took place on the same
campus and the conference programmes partly overlapped, with one
joint panel session. Re-City’s keynote speaker for 25 August was David
Pinder (Roskilde University), and the collaboration between these two
conferences and different approaches to (im)possible cities continues into
this volume, for which David Pinder has written the afterword. We would
like to thank the University of Tampere, our colleagues who organised
the Re-City Conference, and the City of Tampere for the excellent
collaboration that enabled discussions and dialogue to thrive, with this
volume as one of the concrete outcomes.
Indeed, the city of Tampere is an apt vantage point for the conclusion
of our book trilogy. Despite being undoubtedly peripheral from a global
perspective, and a rather typical second city, as a hub along Finland’s
northward artery, it has recently seen several developments that mirror
the concerns of this book. Some of these are large-scale construction
projects, such as the 2.3-kilometre road tunnel now bypassing the city
centre, the tramway scheduled to open in 2021, or the grandiose Deck
and Arena complex being built atop the railway tracks. One of the editors
of this book has observed the daily progress of the last of these through
his office window (except during the period of remote work in 2020),
an experience that has powerfully illustrated the openness of cityscapes to
rapid change. Such development projects aim to maintain and improve
the vitality of the city as a whole, a concern prominent in the first part of
this volume. But Tampere also evidently appeals to individuals as a site of
possibility (the main theme of the second part of this book), consistently
topping the polls as the most attractive residential destination in Finland.
As students continue to flock to Tampere, one of the biggest struc-
tural changes has been seen in academic life. During the 2017 sister
conferences on possible cities, the city’s two universities, which collab-
orated in organising the events, were preparing to merge. Although the
decisive motives for the change may have little to do with city image,
the language employed in branding the merger was highly familiar from
smart-city visions. Potentials were unleashed, creative synergies tapped,
and old-school academics occasionally found themselves thrust into the
role of cutting-edge innovators whether they liked it or not. By now, this
fiercely contested process has been mostly completed, and the phoenix
emerging from the ashes is called Tampere University. Both the utopian
PREFACE vii
rhetoric from the new university’s leadership and the dystopian registers
of the most vocal critics have become somewhat more muted. One lesson
to be drawn from the merger is just how profoundly literary adminis-
trative procedures can be, both in terms of the defamiliarising language
driving them and the gallery of characters they bring into the spotlight. In
this case, the narrative unfolded within a setting that combines the urban
and the academic, with plenty of local colour added. Perhaps observations
like this can serve as further evidence of the ever-expanding possibilities
of literary urban studies as a field.
The activities of the Association for Literary Urban Studies have
considerably expanded during these past years and have led to the estab-
lishment of the Palgrave Macmillan series in Literary Urban Studies,
which has seen the publication of two volumes at the moment of writing,
with several other books already accepted for publication. We are grateful
to Palgrave for their commitment to the series as an active shaper of the
burgeoning field of literary urban studies. In many ways, we think it is
fitting that the present book should be able to be published within the
series. Many thanks to everyone at Palgrave for their work on this volume,
and to the external reviewers for their encouraging feedback.
The most recent ALUS conference, (Un)Fair Cities, took place in
Limerick in December 2019; several publications are planned on the basis
of the conference. Future conferences and symposia are in preparation.
We would like to thank all members of ALUS, and all participants in the
events, for their contribution, and look forward to future developments.
Tampere, Finland Markku Salmela

Turku, Finland Lieven Ameel
Turku, Finland Jason Finch
Contents
1 The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing

the Field 1
Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch
2 The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two Views
from Istanbul 19
Eric Prieto
Part I Possible Cities

3 Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions
of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction 45
Lieven Ameel
4 From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City
in the Aftermath of Modernity 65
Chen Bar-Itzhak
5 Donald Barthelme’s Impossible Cities 89
Markku Salmela
6 ‘Cartographic Ecstasy’: Mapping, Provinciality
and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov’s City Prose 113
Anni Lappela
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Possible Urban Lives

7 Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu’s
The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician 137
Lena Mattheis
8 Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility 165
Hanna Henryson
9 Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb
in Swedish Children’s and Young Adult Literature 191
Lydia Wistisen
10 ‘Double Vision’: Viennese Refugees in New York
and Back Home Again 213
Joshua Parker
11 Utopian Thinking and the (Im)Possible UK Council
Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature, Image
and Experience 231
Jason Finch
12 Afterword: Urban Possibilities in Times of Crisis 255
David Pinder
Index 271
Notes on Contributors
Lieven Ameel is a University Lecturer in comparative literature and

docent in urban studies and planning methods at Tampere University,
Finland. He holds a Ph.D. in Finnish literature and comparative literature
from the University of Helsinki and the JLU Giessen. He has published
widely on literary experiences of the city, narrative planning, and urban
futures. His books include Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Litera-
ture (2014) and The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning (2020) and
the co-edited volumes Literature and the Peripheral City (2015); Literary
Second Cities (2017), and The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban
History (2020).
Chen Bar-Itzhak is a Post-doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies and
Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her forthcoming book
explores the city of Haifa in the Israeli literary imagination and develops
a new model for the study of literary cities. Her other published works
address the complex relations between space, memory, language, and
ideology in Israeli literature. She is currently working on a book-length
project on Retrotopia in contemporary Israeli culture.
Jason Finch is an Associate Professor in the Department of English
Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University. From 2019 to 2022,
he is Principal Investigator for Finland on the ERC HERA-funded project
‘Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experi-
encing, Contesting’ (PUTSPACE). He is the author of Deep Locational
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching (2016)

as well as co-editor of seven books and special issues, most recently The
Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (Routledge 2020).
Hanna Henryson holds a PhD in German literature from Uppsala
University, Sweden. In her dissertation project, she investigated literary
representations of social inequality and resistance related to gentrifica-
tion processes in twenty-first-century Berlin. Her research interests also
include other aspects of urban literature such as representations of housing
and physical living conditions in cities, the role and function of literary
discourses in social processes, and narrative structures connected to the
representation of urban life.
Anni Lappela is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Helsinki, in the
Doctoral Programme in Philosophy, Arts and Society. In her doctoral
dissertation, she examines depictions of nonmetropolitan urban space in
contemporary Russian prose and comics. Lappela is especially interested
in Arctic urban spaces in contemporary fiction.
Lena Mattheis is a Lecturer and Research Assistant at the University
of Duisburg-Essen. In 2019, Lena completed her Ph.D. in the field of
contemporary global writing and urban studies. She holds B.A. and M.A.
degrees in French and Anglophone Literature, as well as Media Studies,
from the University of Duisburg-Essen where she studied from 2010 to
2016, after completing a year of social service in the field of cultural
education. She finished her studies with an M.A. thesis on urban narra-
tives in Namibia, which she wrote during a research stay at the University
of Namibia in Windhoek.
Joshua Parker is an Associate Professor of English and American studies
at the University of Salzburg, with interests in place and space in American
literature, transatlantic relations, and narrative theory. He is co-editor of
the volumes Austria and America: Cross-Cultural Encounters 1865–1933
and Austria and America: 20th-Century Cross-Cultural Encounters, and
author of Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century
and a volume of translated Austrian refugee poetry, Blossoms in Snow:
Austrian Refugees in Manhattan.
David Pinder is Professor of Urban Studies at Roskilde University in
Denmark. His research focuses on utopianism and urban imaginations
particularly in relation to modernist and avant-garde movements of the
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
twentieth century, and to critical urban theory. He has also written widely
on art, performance, and spatial politics with reference to practices of
urban walking, radical cartographies, sound art, and psychogeography.
He is the author of Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Poli-
tics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (2005) and recently co-edited ‘On
Drifting’, a theme issue of Performance Research (2018).
Eric Prieto is a Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
where he teaches French and Comparative Literature. He has published
widely on postcolonial literature, spatial studies, ecocriticism, and glob-
alisation. His second book, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern
Poetics of Place (Palgrave 2012) studied the development of innovative
literary strategies designed to better represent emergent or paradoxical
place types. His current book project pursues this exploration in relation
to the rise of the postcolonial megacity and the prevalence of informal
patterns of urbanisation in the developing world.
Markku Salmela is University Lecturer in English literature at Tampere
University, Finland. Most of his publications stem from his long-term
interest in the spatial dimensions of textuality. He is the author of Paul
Auster’s Spatial Imagination (2006) and co-editor of several volumes,
including, most recently, Literature and the Peripheral City (2015),
Topographies of Popular Culture (2016) and Literary Second Cities
(2017). His current project focuses on forms of Arctic spatiality.
Dr. Lydia Wistisen is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of
Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research
interests include YA, picture books, city literature, urbanity, and spatial
studies. She is a member of the editorial board of Nordic Journal of
ChildLit Aesthetics.
List of Figures
Fig. 7.1 Map of Edinburgh showing the routes through it

of the Magistrate and Farai in the first two chapters
of Huchu’s novel 146
Fig. 7.2 Streets and landmarks mapping in the Magistrate’s chapter 148
Fig. 7.3 Farai’s possible locations at the beginning of the novel.
The green circle marks his actual location 153
Fig. 7.4 Lothian Buses map of the route of bus 22 with a large
circle indicating all of Farai’s possible locations 154
Fig. 7.5 Location of Doctors indicates that Farai takes Forrest Road
from Teviot/Lauriston Place 155
Fig. 7.6 Magistrate’s map of Edinburgh (Huchu 286) 158
xv
CHAPTER 1
The Possible in Literature and Urban Life:

Clearing the Field
Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch
A long continuum of cities that envision what might be possible—for the

cities themselves, on the one hand, and the people living in them, on the
other—runs through literary history, connecting early-modern utopian
texts to modernist visions of urbanism and contemporary speculative
fiction. These literatures of urban possibility are one of the central ways in
which imaginative literature expresses the concerns of urban history and
urban studies, from the late Medieval adage that ‘city air makes free’ (Park
12) to the more broadly felt sense that the density, diversity, specialisation,
anonymity, and scale of city life could provide newcomers with the means
M. Salmela (B) · L. Ameel

Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
e-mail: markku.salmela@tuni.fi
L. Ameel
e-mail: lieven.ameel@tuni.fi
J. Finch
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
e-mail: jason.finch@abo.fi
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility,
Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_1
2 M. SALMELA ET AL.
for social or educational advancement, or at the very least a new identity

and a possible fresh start. If the city appears on the individual scale as
a site for personal or communal possibility, it has also become a symbol
for possible societal change. From the time of Plato’s Republic, cities in
writing have been the ‘symbol of conscious design in society’, with a vivid
utopian and dystopian tradition of city writing as result (Frye 27).
Literature of the city has been an important site where such engage-
ments with possibility have been acted out. Some literary cities stage
alternative futures conceivable at a specific moment in time, or stories that
test the limits of egalitarian progress. Others depict individual discoveries
and upward social trajectories made possible by the urban system. Yet
others experiment directly with previously non-existent forms of urban
community or the built environment, emphasising the capability of cities
to foster powerful visions. All these patterns of city literature engage with
the notion of the possible, and many of the narratives in which they mani-
fest themselves indicate, specifically, how existing horizons of possibility
might be expanded, either for individuals or for the city as blueprint of
ordered society. In doing so, imaginative literature does not only docu-
ment experiments with what is possible in the city, or envision speculative
urban futures; it may provide the reader with an expanded ‘sense of the
possible’ (Meretoja 90–97). It is this act of expansion of urban possibility
through the literary imagination that Literatures of Urban Possibility seeks
to address.
A Two-Pronged Approach
Literatures of Urban Possibility examines literary texts that engage with
urban possibility from two distinct but intermingled perspectives. The
first of these focuses on the imagined possibilities for the city, especially
for the city as an imagined community or as an imagined polity. In their
most explicit form, these possibilities may be expressed in large-scale city
visions that can be found in utopian literature (as in Bellamy’s Looking
Backward: 2000–1887 [1888]) or science fiction (such as Asimov’s
Foundation Trilogy [1951–53]). But engagements with the city that are
more realistic—and more mundane—can also be approached from this
perspective of the ‘possible city’. Perhaps this is particularly true in the
case of literature that focuses on a clearly outlined city district and its
social or ethnic makeup, often with some indication of what the urban
environment could be at best: the ‘ecological city novel’, in the terms of
1 THE POSSIBLE IN LITERATURE AND URBAN LIFE: CLEARING THE FIELD 3
Blanche Gelfant (11). More recent examples, which refer to urban social
housing estates as zones of fragile urban possibility, include Jonathan
Lethem’s Dissident Gardens (2013) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012). Yet
it only takes a change in perspective—from the city to the protagonist
in city literature—to see these two texts not so much as expressing the
city’s potential, but rather that of its inhabitants. Such an observation, of
course, is in tune with an understanding of the city novel as a genre in
which the city reveals, facilitates or thwarts the potential of the character,
while simultaneously, the protagonist enables the city to reveal and fulfil
part of its potential (see Ameel, ‘City Novel’ 234; Acke 245–46).
This sense of reciprocity connects with a second, closely related, way of
understanding urban possibility: the urban environment as a site of possi-
bility for individuals and groups. Especially in literary fiction from the
nineteenth century onwards (see Moretti), the city appears as a poten-
tial enabler and social elevator—but it is important also to bear in mind
that many potent counter-narratives exist: many literary narratives with
relevance for literary urban studies are ‘novels of disillusionment’ (Lukács
151). Especially from Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43) onwards, hard-
ship is what shapes characters in many urban stories. Yet often before the
adversity there is the initial sense of the possible, the incentive that takes
characters to the city in the first place, and moments of adversity also
enable new discoveries, new sites of the possible.
This book aims to bring into focus literature’s affordances as a
medium for questioning urban possibility in ways that communicate with
mundane, everyday, highly personal experiences, as well as with high-
flown artistic visions of the possible city, and policy and planning of
future cities. The ten chapters brought together here were selected to
provide a diverse range of geographical and cultural contexts, and to
enable an examination of literatures of urban possibility in their many
aspects, from imagined urban lives to imagined alternative future cities
and urban communities. The material includes different literary genres
and periods, from young adult literature to climate fiction, autobiography
and the postmodernist short story. Specific locations have an equally wide
range from Helsinki to Haifa and Istanbul, from Russian provincial cities
to imagined Edinburgh, from the UK council estate to gentrified Berlin,
and more.
4 M. SALMELA ET AL.
Past, Present, Future

Any viable examination of possibility, as a concept, must acknowledge
that the idea of the possible is built upon the past as much as imag-
ined with the future in mind. Any such analysis will also benefit from the
basic realisation, strongly present in literary urban studies, that to study
cities is also to study specific forms, and stages, of modernity. Richard
Lehan, for example, structures his historical examination of city literature
by following what he sees as the three main functional stages of capi-
talist urban modernity in the West: the commercial city, the industrial city,
and the postindustrial city (289). Bart Keunen, meanwhile, has proposed
four states of urbanity, respectively moving from solid, liquid and gas-like,
to plasmatic. Whichever of these typologies one draws upon, consecutive
historical urban types have been associated with specific textual paradigms,
which have mediated, exposed and evaluated the inherent potentialities of
these versions of urbanism. The Industrial Revolution commented upon
by writers such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell set some funda-
mental parameters for nineteenth-century urban fantasies in England,
whereas the spatial and economic futurism in cities of the digital age is
largely defined by the sense of technological simultaneity that Manuel
Castells’ influential concept of the ‘space of flows’ captures. Each age
creates its own sense of the possible.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, one good starting point for thinking
about notions of possibility is to acknowledge their common indebted-
ness to the past. The concept of nostalgia helps illustrate how visions
drawing on retrospection can also have potential for the future. Urban
possibility is also a case of what could have been, of past subjunctives
and competing possible worlds visible in the layered urban realm. Future
possibilities are complemented by past aspirations, hopes and failures.
Svetlana Boym has pointed out that nostalgia ‘is not always retrospec-
tive; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past determined
by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the realities of the
future’ (xvi). Nostalgia is a form of imagination that focuses on what is
immaterial in the present, thus engaging directly with notions of possi-
bility. Boym employs a basic division into two very different types of
nostalgia, restorative and reflective, arguing that ‘[r]estorative nostalgia
manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while
reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in
the dreams of another place and another time’ (41). The distinction is
informative as we contemplate urban possibilities. Restorative nostalgia, of

which Boym is suspicious, develops from an ultimately destructive insis-
tence on traditions and origins which may or may not have ever existed.
Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, employed by Chen Bar-Itzhak
in this volume, builds upon such fantasies of the past and their relationship
with utopian thinking. The imagined future counterpart for restorative
nostalgia would be an ideological utopia (which to many might appear as
dystopia) that ignores alternative viewpoints, cross-cultural realities and
contradictory experiences. Such a closed view understands the past, which
is transposable to a possible future, as a monolithic formation dominated
by a single narrative (of the nation, the economy, or technology). Boym
contends that these kinds of nostalgic narratives have an affinity with
invented traditions and a simplistic, ‘conspiratorial worldview’ that entails
‘the inevitable scapegoating of the mythical enemy’ (43).
In contrast, the notion of possibility when understood as a counter-
part of reflective nostalgia allows ambivalence, silence and openness. It
can embrace both playfulness and determination, both fragmentation and
coherence, as well as ‘ways of inhabiting many places at once and imag-
ining different time zones’ (Boym xviii). Such conceived possibilities can
be complex, organic and meditative, occasionally expressing themselves
‘in riddles and puzzles’ (Boym xvii). Similarly, in his meditation on the
widespread twenty-first century longing for ruins, Andreas Huyssen has
commented on the status of nostalgia as ‘utopia in reverse’ (7). Nostalgia
informs the ways people look at the ‘shrinking cities’ of ‘industrial heart-
lands’, representing a disappearing form of modernity, ‘because they still
seem to hold a promise that has vanished from our own age: the promise
of an alternative future’ (Huyssen 8). Regaining that promise seems
difficult if one observes cities merely through the lens of unquestioned
continuous progress. City literature that concerns itself with drawing up
possible urban forms tends to be associated with utopia, with all the
associated ideological ballast which that term has acquired over the last
half-century. But Boym’s and Huyssen’s reflections on nostalgia point in
other directions, towards a complex literature of (unachieved) possibility
informed by history’s weight. They serve to counteract utopian blind faith
and visions of a clear-cut future, reminding us that literatures of urban
possibility are never simplistic rhetorical exercises.
6 M. SALMELA ET AL.
The Possible in Literature

While this is not the place to make far-reaching claims about what texts
read as literary are able to do or not able to do, some reflections on the
possibilities of literature, and on literature as site for the possible, may
be helpful to contextualise the ideas on literature and urban possibility
that run through this book, especially for readers interested in urban
studies and positioned outside of literary studies. One starting point
for thinking about the affordances of imaginative literature is provided
by the Formalist school, in particular their concept of ‘estrangement’—
the ability of poetic language to make the familiar appear strange, a
notion with particular political undercurrents (see Shklovsky). For the
Formalists, this ability of literature lies not in the thematics of narratives
(in what is described), but is bound up with formal features and the
poetical language typical of literature. By its very language and narrative
structure, a literary text forces the reader to see the world anew, they
argue. To a considerable extent, such a view still holds within contem-
porary paradigms in literary theory. In her recent book on form, for
example, Caroline Levine argues that she does not understand ‘literary
texts [.. .] as reflections or expressions of prior social forms, but rather as
sites, like social situations, where multiple forms cross and collide, inviting
us to think in new ways about power’ (122). Thinking about literature in
terms of possibility entails seeing literature not merely as a reflection on
but as an intervention into the world. Essential for how this intervention
is acted out is literary form: genres, plot tropes, literary language.
The notion of estrangement is particular to discussions of imaginative
literature, but another important question for this volume is related to
the affordances of literary texts as opposed to other texts within urban
studies, such as historical documents and policy texts. This question is
addressed at more length in another volume, The Materiality of Literary
Narratives in Urban History (Ameel et al.). Among these affordances
is the fact that literature (prose, poetry, drama, as well as types of non-
fiction) tends to work on multiple urban planes, reflecting and re-enacting
urban complexity in its scalar dimensions. Literature’s abilities to enact
translocality, complex connectedness, and an imaginative intertwining
of scales make it a particularly well-suited complement to non-fictional
texts that imagine urban possibility, such as policy or planning texts.
Second, literature tends to embrace a human and experiential scale, as
exemplified by (but by no means limited to) first-person narrators and
stream-of-consciousness techniques. And thirdly, literature is particularly

concerned with counterfactuality (Dannenberg), often structuring plots
around notions of what might be or could have been, which makes it an
ideal ground to test possible worlds, from the individual to the communal
to the planetary.
In the context of the interaction between literary storyworlds and their
impact on real-world spaces, Bertrand Westphal, in Geocriticism, considers
literature as an ‘experimental field of alternative realities’, and a ‘labora-
tory of the possible’ (59, 63). Similar assertions have been made by some
of the most prominent twentieth-century novelists, from the ruminations
on a sense of the possible in chapter 4 of Robert Musil’s The Man Without
Qualities (1943) to Milan Kundera’s thoughts in The Art of the Novel
(1986). In the most comprehensive recent study of literature and the
possible, The Ethics of Storytelling, Hanna Meretoja examines literature as
a site for the reflection of the possible and what this means for ethical
questions and literature’s role within ethics, arguing ‘that the power of
narratives to cultivate and expand our sense of the possible is ethically
crucial’ (34–35).
A key theoretical paradigm connecting literature and the possible is
possible worlds theory, an approach rooted in the work of Gottfried
Leibniz and Nelson Goodman that examines questions of modal logic,
and the working of storyworlds, from the perspective that any given
world (including the one we experience) is but one of a potentially infi-
nite number of possible worlds. Possible worlds theory, as developed
within narrative studies by Lubomír Doležel, Marie-Laure Ryan and
others, provides a model with which to consider the key modalities: What
is possible, impossible, or necessary? What is permitted, prohibited, or
obligatory? What is good, bad, or indifferent? What is known, unknown,
or believed? (Doležel 113–32, esp. 114). In this volume, some of the
consequences of literary possible worlds are explored in Eric Prieto’s
chapter, which argues that ‘the “indirect referentiality” of metaphor and
fiction enables literature to explore hypothetical situations and “possible
worlds” in ways that often generate more powerful insights into real-
world phenomena than directly referential accounts of factual situations’
(23).
8 M. SALMELA ET AL.
Possible Cities
Literature of urban possibility, in terms of the possibilities for a city as
an imagined community and/or an imagined polity, brings this volume
close to existing research within utopian studies and urban studies of
future urban visions (see Ameel, ‘Cities Utopian’; Pinder, Visions ). Within
urban and planning studies, recent research has repeatedly foregrounded
the potential importance of fictional cities for envisioning city futures.
In a recent article that echoes the Formalist concept of estrangement,
for example, Amy Butt argues that architects should read science fiction,
which is able to ‘make the familiar strange, to reveal fears about the future,
to confront us with ourselves, and to shape the world we inhabit’ (151).
Similarly, in a 2001 article, Rob Kitchin and James Kneale suggest that
cyberfiction provides ‘planners with a cognitive space for the contempla-
tion of future cities’ (25). Activating literary cities’ potential for use in
urban planning or policy should not lead to neglect of literature’s formal
characteristics—the language and narrative form that enables it to act as
a ‘laboratory of the possible’, in the words of Westphal. It is important
to frame these investigations in a way that takes into account the literari-
ness as well as the citiness of the material at hand, an approach that is at
the heart of the developing discipline of literary urban studies (see Finch
et al.).
To frame the topic of literary cities positively, as textually constructed
horizons of possibility, is obviously to encroach into the rhetorical terri-
tory of visionaries, politicians, consultants and entrepreneurs, who have
long employed the vocabulary of limitless possibility in describing the
smart, green, and sustainable futures of their urban constituencies. The
urban plans of today have as their inevitable precursors the utopian cities
conceived in the previous centuries. The material (and often profoundly
textual and symbolic) consequences of the rhetoric of optimistic urbanism
today include made-from-scratch cities built to promote business invest-
ment as well as smart urban design, many of which have the status of
Special Economic Zones (SEZs).
Two prominent examples among numerous recent projects can be
mentioned. Dholera Industrial City, a work-in-progress in Gujarat, India,
is a Special Investment Region of huge projected size and manifest
utopian undertones. ‘The future is Dholera’, the development’s website
declares, proceeding to claim that ‘there’s no better place to leap forward
into the future’ (DholeraSIR), statements that neatly capture both the
collective, futuristic significance of such large-scale envisioning and the

potential empowering effect it may have, if realised, on aspiring individ-
uals. At the same time, as Ayona Datta has demonstrated, the corporate-
driven enterprise city created from scratch can hardly become a miracle
cure for societal problems—if it ever fully materialises. Even while existing
only as a rhetorical construct in consultants’ and politicians’ speeches,
with no material counterpart on the ground, Dholera smart city has been
‘bifurcated by conflicting demands of economic growth and social justice’
(Datta 17). For a second example, New Songdo, a green seafront business
city built on reclaimed land in South Korea, was constructed upon equally
utopian promises. According to one observer, it aimed ‘to do nothing less
than banish the problems created by modern urban life’ (McNeill).
And yet it should be noted that all the unrealistically optimistic
overtones in urban planning visions for future cities run counter to a
predominantly pessimistic view of urban possibility in much of contem-
porary urban studies, a view which led Guy Baeten, as early as 2002,
to declare that ‘[u]topian thinking, both as a literary and political genre
has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban
dystopia, or “Stadtschmerz”, is now prevalent in critical Western thinking
about city and society’ (143). This volume wants to go against the grain
of such approaches to literary cities that have seen possible cities predomi-
nantly in terms of dystopia. The chapters brought together in this volume
are sceptical of an imagined ‘end of utopia’ as a starting point for thinking
of the (future) city (see e.g. Kumar). Instead, they are broadly aligned
with David Harvey’s call for a renewed investigation of the city as a ‘space
of hope’, a stance that still avoids translating the idea of urban possi-
bility into an unequivocal panegyric to the city. The literary cities explored
here are considered as evoking, questioning and critiquing urban possi-
bility, and as negotiating, in their plot developments and spatial dynamics,
between the possibility of renewal and redemption on the one hand, and
failure and fall on the other.
Several of this volume’s chapters have affinities with thinking in utopian
studies and engage with the idea that the concept of utopia provides ways
for urban researchers to ‘open up to the possible and what could be’
(Pinder, ‘Reconstituting’ 31). Yet we would like to emphasise that the
outlook of this volume is not to present a book on literary utopias or on
the urban geographies of science fiction, questions that have been exam-
ined extensively elsewhere (see, e.g., Frye; Jameson; Kitchin and Kneale,
Lost; Pinder, Visions ). Rather, the aims of this book are more closely
10 M. SALMELA ET AL.
rooted in real-world material cities, including the everyday practices of

living in them, even when the texts examined depart from realist conven-
tions. The objectives are also explicitly interdisciplinary: the book aims
to provide urban studies scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds
with new insights into how literary cities can inform their practice and
research.
Possible Urban Lives

Literary accounts of lives led in cities contain a range of recurrent means
of talking about the multiple possibilities such lives necessarily contain.
One approach to this multiplicity of possibility is to see the city as a
‘user city’, in a well-established mode perhaps best-known to literary and
cultural researchers through the prism of Certeau’s ‘Walking in the City’
but equally alive in urban planners’ contemporary efforts to put into prac-
tice user-centred design (see, e.g., Fors et al.; Laatikainen et al.). The
literature of cities can evoke the full implications and potentialities of
everyday urban routes, which as easily can turn out to be possible roads in
life—morally or socially. Walking, in particular, involves a vast multiplicity
of possibilities that are repeatedly considered, activated, ignored and
passed over. The decision to take a particular route contains near-limitless
numbers of occasions on which a change of plan could be effected, or
the walker could improvise a route through areas partially known. In the
‘young man/woman from the provinces’ pattern familiar from numerous
novels (see Chanda), the first and the most important route is the one
that leads into the city, enabling (or suggesting the possibility of) social
rise. Central in a range of city novels is the implied opportunity to remake
oneself upon moving to the city, for example by changing one’s name.
Urban lives develop in dialogue with specific urban locations and the
possibilities these hold. Some of this urban possibility is site-specific, such
as that embodied in cities which are built around particular forms of
leisure, Las Vegas being a prime example (see, e.g., Salmela), or in cities
which are massively culturally over-determined thanks to the recorded
imagination of them by previous visitors (e.g. Venice and Rome). Thus
the city space itself generates for the user the possibility to fulfil partic-
ular functions and take on certain roles within society. Often this involves
acquiring intimate knowledge of particular urban locations and their
codes—city novels tend to include the pairing of the protagonist with a
guide—and the ability to cross meaningful distances (spatial, social, moral
as well as metaphorical) during the negotiation of competing possible lives

(Ameel, ‘City Novel’).
At the heart of literary urban studies as a developing field is its insep-
arability from questions concerning the actual city and its inhabitants:
questions of planning, mobility and social policy; questions of visions for
the future and the ‘makeability’ and malleability of urban society. As a
concept, possibility brings together the necessarily provisional and imag-
ined quality of what happens in literature—the fact that anything can be
made to happen in fiction, simply put—with the efforts of policy-makers,
municipal governments, activists and others to shape the city in specific
images. The subject of urban possibility emphasises the interdependency
of the literary and material world in a move away from paradigms in
literary studies that tended to see literary worlds as stuck in a prison-house
of language, towards engaging more deeply with literature’s material
entanglements (see also Ameel et al.). The toponymical referentiality in
much city literature, combined with the position of several contempo-
rary notable city authors as vocal public intellectuals (from Zadie Smith
to Orhan Pamuk), lends further urgency to a reading of the literature of
urban possibility in view of the referential world, and in conjunction with
non-literary texts of the city, from historical and sociological sources to
planning and policy documents.
Outline of Chapters
Literatures of Urban Possibility showcases several methodological avenues
of enquiry for literary urban studies conceived on this model of constant
interaction with other disciplines and activities of the city. These include
examinations which aim to explore specific urban phenomena such as
gentrification, social housing, squatter settlements, the future visions
proposed by urban planners, and the translocal lives of migrants. The
volume is structured to reflect the two-pronged approach to possibility
presented above, in which individuals’ possibilities in life exist in dialogue
with possible futures for cities and their individual districts.
The two sections of this book are preceded by the present intro-
duction and a separate chapter intended to engage with both aspects
of urban possibility outlined in this book: Eric Prieto’s ‘The Possibili-
ties of Urban Informality: Two Views from Istanbul’. Prieto approaches
the phenomenon of urban informality in the developing world through
the problematics of representation, rhetoric, and ideology. Organised
around a comparative analysis of two well-known novels set in Istanbul’s
‘gecekondu’ districts of informal housing—Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness

in My Mind and Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin—his essay emphasises the
performative ability of literary texts to generate new ways of seeing. These
are texts that suggest correctives to a number of established sociological
and urban categories that have made it difficult to see informal settle-
ments as more than symbols of economic injustice or symptoms of social
dysfunction. Despite their differences, both novels approach informal
urbanisation as a promising reservoir of possibilities, in the human and
geographical senses foregrounded throughout this volume. As such, these
texts are emblematic of literature’s ability to contribute in meaningful
ways to the development of more adequate conceptions of city life, urban
planning, and social justice.
Possible Cities
The book’s first section proper opens with Lieven Ameel’s chapter ‘Rising
Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in
Planning and Fiction.’ As a site of the possible, this examines the Helsinki
waterfront, an area onto which future visions of the city and the good
society have been projected. Ameel starts out from the first Finnish novel
to critique urban planning developments at the waterfront, Maila Talvio’s
Niniven lapset (‘Children of Nineveh’, 1915). Several comparisons are
drawn between the rhetorical features outlined in the defence of the
high-rise described in the novel, and elements highlighted in the compe-
tition for a Guggenheim museum in the early decades of the twenty-first
century. This introductory part sets the stage for an examination of
competing visions for the Helsinki waterfront, within which utopian and
apocalyptic visions in literature have participated from the early twen-
tieth century onward. The most substantial part of this chapter focuses
on the complex interaction between Antti Tuomainen’s dystopian novel
The Healer (Parantaja, 2010) and various future visions of the Helsinki
City Planning Department. What sets Tuomainen’s novel apart from the
majority of other future-invested novels is that its future city provides a
commentary on the Helsinki city planning department’s future visions at
the time of publication.
Chen Bar-Itzhak’s chapter ‘From Utopia to Retrotopia: The
Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity’ focuses on the idea
of the city as a cosmopolitan utopia and examines the changes it has
undergone in the shift from Modernity to, on Zygmunt Bauman’s terms,
Liquid Modernity. By examining a particularly revealing case study—the

literary depictions of the Mediterranean city of Haifa—she argues that
these changes in the imaginings of the cosmopolitan utopian city can be
explained by the shift from utopia to what Bauman termed Retrotopia.
This is a move from the ability to project an imagined ideal social order
onto a possible future, to the possibility of locating such ideal social orders
only in an unattainable, lost past. The examination of the hopes and long-
ings put into the literary creation of possible and no-longer-possible cities,
Bar-Itzhak argues, can shed new light on contemporary societies’ ability
to reimagine themselves and their possible futures.
Markku Salmela’s chapter ‘Donald Barthelme’s Impossible Cities’
investigates the improbable city visions of Barthelme’s short stories
from the viewpoint of literary urban studies, taking into account the
cultural moment of the stories’ composition. Barthelme’s cities are often
constructed in ways reminiscent of architectural models, and they point
towards several theories of postmodernity and urbanism formulated much
later, including Edward Soja’s notion of ‘Simcities’ and Fredric Jameson’s
ideas concerning postmodern disorientation. These prophetic but absur-
dist urban stories are thoroughly permeated by forms of media, principles
of storytelling, and various manipulations of perception. Salmela argues,
however, that an image of the city as a meaningful community is
discernible in these texts. As such, showing some appreciation for the
materiality and corporeality of everyday urbanism, Barthelme’s outlandish
creations maintain their connections with the possible.
In the final chapter of this section, ‘“Cartographic Ecstasy”: Mapping,
Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov’s City Prose’, Anni
Lappela examines the idea of creating the perfect city text, or an alter-
native map of urban Russia, in Dmitrii Danilov’s prose. Danilov has
dedicated many of his works to smaller, non-metropolitan Russian cities,
which are otherwise rarely depicted in literature. Theoretical frameworks
are drawn from Jason Finch’s Deep Locational Criticism and Lyudmila
Parts’ explorations on the image of Russian provinces in the cultural imag-
ination. Lappela pays special attention to Danilov’s texts about the Arctic
city of Norilsk, in which the influence of geographical location on the
imagined urban space is particularly strong.
Possible Urban Lives

This second section, which is structured around possible urban lives, starts
out with Lena Mattheis’s chapter ‘Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in
Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician.’ In
her chapter, Mattheis employs a literal mapping of urban performance,
movement and trajectories, in order to explore the different functions of
translocal urban space in Huchu’s 2015 novel. This approach questions
the metaphorical mapping lexicon used extensively in urban, postcolo-
nial, gender and queer studies. The physical locations and trajectories
referenced by a text—and thus, as it were, the text’s implied mental
map—can provide further insight into how translocally perceived urban
spaces and places are layered over memories and immediate walking expe-
riences. Mattheis’s analysis is informed by Ayona Datta and Katherine
Brickell’s use of the term ‘translocal’, Tania Rossetto’s thoughts on maps
and literature and Franco Moretti’s approaches to abstraction.
In ‘Tipping Points: Gentrification and Urban Possibility’, Hanna
Henryson discusses representations of gentrification in three Berlin novels
published between 2009 and 2015: Fire Doesn’t Burn (Feuer brennt
nicht ) by Ralf Rothmann, Kress by Aljoscha Brell and Der amerikanische
Investor (‘The American investor’) by Jan Peter Bremer. Acknowledging
that gentrification recasts social and spatial relations in fundamental ways,
Henryson’s analysis targets questions about characters’ perceptions of
their situation within that process, their views of their own possibilities, as
well as imaginations of possible visions of an alternative Berlin. The sharp
differences in characters’ experiences are coupled with the complexity
of the depicted gentrification processes, and the result is an ambiguity
reflected in the novels’ open endings.
Equally strong tensions and ambiguities emerge in Lydia Wistisen’s
chapter ‘Concrete Possibilities: The High-Rise Suburb in Swedish Chil-
dren’s and Young Adult Literature’, which examines representations of
the high-rise suburb from the 1970s. With an emphasis on young-adult
(YA) novels and children’s picture books set in the Swedish Million
Programme, it investigates the potential of an urban society where inhab-
itants are becoming increasingly disenfranchised, especially regarding the
control they have over city planning. Wistisen argues that images of the
suburban environment are marked by a constant tension between dystopic
and encouraging representations, despair and possibilities. Her chapter
demonstrates how YA and picture books participate in the creation of the
image of the high-rise suburb by reinforcing, as well as challenging and

deconstructing, the representation provided by mass media.
Joshua Parker’s ‘“Double Vision”: Viennese Refugees in New York and
Back Home Again’, is another chapter focusing on the translocal imag-
ination. With an emphasis on poetry, Parker examines several texts by
Austrian authors who fled Europe before or during the Second World
War, highlighting a sort of ‘double vision’, the combination of a ‘lost’
Vienna and a contemporary Manhattan, in these writers’ works. Stefan
Zweig, Max Roden, Ernst Waldinger, and Greta Hartwig-Manschinger
all embodied a lost generation for whom the prospects and possibilities
offered by the bewildering American city were far from obvious. Yet,
as these authors’ memories of Vienna are transposed onto Manhattan’s
cityscape, they discover uncanny traces relevant to their own identi-
ties, and such discoveries allow them, in Parker’s words, ‘to project
and concretise their notions of home, with all the unconscious cultural
baggage the term carries’ (229).
In the final chapter of this section, ‘Utopian Thinking and the
(Im)Possible UK Council Estate: The Birmingham Region in Literature,
Image and Experience’, Jason Finch develops a new account of the UK
mass housing zones known colloquially as ‘council estates’ in discourse
from the mid-twentieth century onwards. As case studies, Finch exam-
ines representations of two peripheral estates built between 1960 and
1980 in the West Midlands, a multipolar English urban region with Birm-
ingham as its largest city. One is Lynsey Hanley’s Estates, first published
in 2007, a polemical literary memoir about ‘estate’ lives and the poli-
tics of class. The other is a set of photographs originally taken in 1991
on the Lion Farm estate just beyond the western edge of Birmingham
in Oldbury, West Midlands. These visual images, by Rob Clayton, have
in the 2010s been reassessed and given symbolic value as an encapsu-
lation of the estate as itself as a representative site of the post-war era in
British history. Combining David Pinder’s thinking with the author’s own
methodology of Deep Locational Criticism, the chapter experiments with
the interaction of techniques originating in cultural geography and literary
studies in urban and post-urban considerations, assessing what each can
learn from the other. Avoiding dystopian modes, the essay combines read-
ings of Hanley, Clayton and a promotional film about Clayton’s book
Estate narrated by Jonathan Meades, with an account of a walk Finch
took from Lion Farm to Birmingham’s city centre in October 2018. In
the twenty-first century, Finch argues, there are multitudinous possibilities
for public housing to have a nurturing and equable function, beneficial

to public health and democratic decision-making. The aim is to find out
what the contributions of both artists and academic researchers should be
to expand the boundaries of possibility towards such a goal.
The volume ends with an afterword by David Pinder, which assesses
the contribution of the preceding chapters in the light of previous discus-
sions of urban possibility, in utopian contexts and beyond. One specific
context that has forced cities and their inhabitants to reassess what is
possible is the global COVID-19 pandemic, which (at the time of writing)
maintains a powerful grip on the ways in which urban society operates and
imagines itself. The afterword provides a final way to summarise litera-
ture’s contribution to our understanding of urban possibilities from an
interdisciplinary viewpoint, taking into account both alternative cities and
alternative urban lives.
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CHAPTER 2
The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two

Views from Istanbul
Eric Prieto
The centre of gravity of urban theory is shifting south. This is true in at

least two senses. First, in terms of demographics: the cities of the South
now account for over 90 per cent of urban growth worldwide (UN-
Habitat, Updated 3), a fact that has suggested to some that ‘the rise
of the West is over’ (Brand 29). Second, in terms of shifting theoretical
paradigms: the demographic, institutional, and infrastructural challenges
facing the generally younger and poorer cities of the Global South are
of a kind that makes them difficult to address using the strategies on
which modern Western urban planning theory has been premised. There
is, then, a strong need for new urban strategies better able to account for
the specific kinds of challenges facing these cities, a need to, as Ananya
Roy has emphasised, explore ‘policy approaches that learn from the Third
World cities’ (147). All of this is happening, moreover, at a time when
the world’s rapidly growing human population and energy consumption
is putting increasing stress on the planet’s natural resources, leading to
E. Prieto (B)
UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Salmela et al. (eds.), Literatures of Urban Possibility,
Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70909-9_2
20 E. PRIETO
climate change, resource depletion, and polluted environments. Mean-

while, as East and West, North and South become ever more entwined
through economic and informational globalisation, the risks are shared
more widely too, as the effects of localised crises—whether military,
economic, environmental, epidemiological, or other—tend to ripple out
ever more widely and rapidly from their point of origin. (This notion
of globally shared risk plays a central role in Ursula Heise’s seminal
reconfiguration of environmental studies in Sense of Place and Sense of
Planet.) One might even say that the recent resurgence of ethnic nation-
alism and religious fundamentalism is a kind of perverse recognition of
this state of affairs: fear and resentment of the other as a populist mani-
festation of the sense that dangerously dwindling local resources must
be protected from the forces of globalisation, even as prosperity and
economic growth seem to depend ever more on maintaining strong global
ties. This tension was already central to Benjamin Barber’s 1995 rebuttal
of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis in Jihad vs. McWorld.
From a Literary Urban Studies (LUS) perspective this dual shift, from
North to South and local to global, implies several important things. First,
it suggests the need for LUS scholars to pay more attention to cities in
the developing world, whether directly, by devoting more attention to
the urban literatures of the Global South, or less directly, by factoring
in, implicitly or explicitly, the kinds of issues that come to the fore there
and asking about the extent to which they call for shifts in one’s thematic
and analytic priorities. The first, direct, approach is close to the kind of
work already being done in postcolonial studies, but there are impor-
tant questions specific to urban representation that would benefit from
the attention of critics attuned specifically to the historical and scientific
literature on cities.
As for the second—indirect—approach, it involves a shift towards
a more worldly perspective, where topics that have traditionally been
discussed in the regional or national context are reframed in relation
to global processes and transnational forces. This includes the kind of
demographic and environmental changes already mentioned, as well as
changes in how the city itself is defined, which might, for example, involve
putting more emphasis on the informal economy, peripheral and under-
represented neighbourhoods, and, more generally, the interplay between
the top-down logic of state planning and the bottom-up logic of individ-
uals and local communities. It is, no doubt, this interplay that explains the
necessity of the two-pronged approach to urban possibility adopted for
2 THE POSSIBILITIES OF URBAN INFORMALITY … 21
this volume. It will also, I believe, involve important shifts in the ways we
think about economic and political globalisation, requiring a revised sense
of what constitutes a ‘global city’ (Sassen) and a better understanding
of how events and decisions in the command-and-control centres of the
global economic system shape (and are shaped by) those in the secondary
and tertiary nodes.1
Towards a New Language of Urban

Possibility: Representing Urban Informality
One of the central challenges facing the cities of the South has been
their explosive growth, which is moving at a speed unprecedented in
human history. Fuelled largely by rural-to-urban migration—itself linked
to population growth due to improved life expectancy and continued
high birth rates—the populations of many cities in Latin America, Asia,
and Africa have ballooned so quickly that the managerial capacities of
their governments have been essentially unable to keep up. Consequently,
according to UN estimates, fully half of the city dwellers in the Global
South live in some type of extra-legal housing, typically in conditions of
extreme poverty and precarity, often lacking such basic amenities as clean
water, electricity, and sanitation facilities, and often on land deemed too
dangerous or otherwise undesirable to be developed. (See UN-Habitat,
Challenge and Updated. These figures, of course, are in constant evolu-
tion.) Left to their own devices by cities whose administrations are often
completely overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and lack the finan-
cial resources and/or political will necessary to effectively integrate the
new populations, these city dwellers must largely fend for themselves.
(China in the post-Mao era of ‘state capitalism’ provides a major, albeit
complicated, exception to this pattern of unmanaged growth.)
Historically, of course, improvised housing solutions have always played
a significant role in the growth of cities. They might even be thought of
as ‘normal’, to the extent that they mark a transitional phase of urban
development, part of the growing pains of cities as they struggle to absorb
sudden migratory influxes, or find themselves dealing with unexpected
1 See, for example, the widely used textbook Geographies of Development, recent editions
of which have argued for the need to update Sassen’s list of global cities in a way that
foregrounds ‘an emerging network of world cities’ (Potter 155–59). See also Barber, If ;
Glaeser; and Sassen et al. for updated prognostications on world citydom.
22 E. PRIETO
economic and political shocks of various kinds. What is new in the current
era, however, is the unprecedented size and apparent permanence of many
such settlements.
Many in the architectural and urban planning communities have
understood that the scope and persistence of urban informality in the
developing world has created something new and unprecedented, and
that these changes represent a major challenge to their discipline. Thus,
Tom Avermaete asserts that ‘It is time to rethink the list of “great”
cities’ in terms of ‘the megalopoli of the global South’, and to use ‘the
experiences with infrastructure in these cities [to] reconfigure the heart-
land of architectural and urban thinking’ (Avermaete 2016). Similarly,
the Dutch ‘starchitect’ Rem Koolhaas emphasises the sense of disciplinary
crisis provoked by this new set of realities.
The result is a theoretical, critical, and operational impasse […] the entire
discipline possesses no adequate terminology to discuss the most pertinent,
most crucial phenomena within its domain nor any conceptual frame-
work to describe, interpret, and understand exactly those forces that could
redefine and revitalise it. (Koolhaas 27)
And the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, who was awarded a Pritzker
Prize (architecture’s highest honour) for his work on innovative housing
solutions for the poor, has challenged socially-conscious architects to
rethink their discipline in more interdisciplinary terms.
As architects, we are living at a time of shifting paradigms […] and this

demands a new, more open approach. It’s why I’m so interested in how
architects and urban planners engage with other fields – economics, secu-
rity, the environment and so on. Our challenge must be to go beyond
architecture and speak the languages of these other disciplines, before
translating our discussions into formal design proposals.2
These are just three examples of a growing number of urban theorists—

including AbdouMaliq Simone, Filip de Boeck, and Edgar Pieterse—who
agree that there is a need for a new language of urban design, and
that the most pertinent objects of study for the development of such a
2 Aravena, ‘It’s Time’. See also Aravena’s 2014 Ted Talk, ‘My architectural philos-
ophy? Bring the community into the process’, which emphasises the importance of local
consultation in urban planning.
language are in the megalopoli of the Global South, although they do not
necessarily agree on, or even claim to know, what those changes would
be.
Literature, Transduction, and the Larger

Discursive Field of Urban Informality
As a humanist who comes at the subject of informal urbanism from a
literary perspective, the enabling premise of my work has been that literary
depictions of the informal city can play a valuable role in ‘reconfiguring’
(Avermaete) our ‘terminology and conceptual frameworks’ (Koolhaas) in
order to adapt to the ‘shifting paradigms’ (Aravena) of contemporary
urbanisation. My sense is that the kinds of perspectives brought into play
by imaginative writing can help to bridge the gap between existing urban
theory and changing urban realities. My point is not that literary repre-
sentation or criticism can in some way supersede or supplant the work
of professionals and experts—I don’t subscribe to the romantic notion of
literature as having privileged access to reality—but it does have a number
of comparative advantages that enable it to contribute meaningfully to the
larger effort to understand informal urbanism and develop meaningful
strategies for addressing the problems associated with it.
Some of these advantages are fairly obvious and need no explana-
tion. Literature enjoys more immediate access to the broader public
of non-specialists than scientific discourse and has a greater ability to
bring the implications of policy to life for readers by emphasising the
subjective, experiential dimensions of its effects. Others are perhaps less
obvious but equally important. For example, the ‘indirect referentiality’
of metaphor and fiction enables literature to explore hypothetical situ-
ations and ‘possible worlds’ in ways that often generate more powerful
insights into real-world phenomena than directly referential accounts of
factual situations (see Ricoeur, Pavel, and Westphal). And the poietic (i.e.,
creative or active) aspect of literary invention—as in the development
of new concepts through catachresis, the revelatory potential of a good
metaphor, the persuasive power of a well-constructed plot, or the empa-
thetic insights that a well-delineated character evokes—makes it a valuable
ally for theorists and planners, whether they are in search of a way to
understand the phenomena before them, to think through the potential
human consequences of their theories, or to generate support for their
proposals.
24 E. PRIETO
None of this should be taken to imply that planners, theorists, and

policymakers are devoid of poetic insight, poietic creativity, or imagina-
tive flights of fancy. Rather than treating literature as something that can
be regarded in isolation from or opposition to scientific or theoretical
modes of discourse, it is important to recognise its continuity with them,
to understand the various logical, rhetorical, and symbolic functions that
literary works share with non-literary works, and to emphasise their ability
to work together within the larger discursive field of city writing. Interdis-
ciplinarity does not here mean reading literary works ‘in the context of’
scientific and public policy approaches to the subject, but rather treating
literature as a mode of discourse that can be situated on the same discur-
sive plane with them and is constantly engaged in a kind of performative
exchange with them.
Henri Lefebvre has discussed the creative work that brings about
spatial innovation in terms of ‘transduction’ and ‘lived space’, terms
which are meant to designate the process through which new concep-
tions of space come into being (see ‘Le droit à la ville’ and Production).
Lefebvre emphasises the dialectical nature of this process, which he sees
as an ongoing interaction between the top-down, abstract conceptions
of theoretical knowledge (a.k.a. ‘conceived space’) and the bottom-up
concreteness of phenomenological experience (‘perceived space’) that is
facilitated by the imaginative work he associates with the term ‘lived
space’ (Lefebvre, Production). As for the term ‘transduction’, it expresses
the same dialectical conception of innovation encoded in the term ‘lived
space’, but frames it in terms of a logical trans fer between deductive
and inductive logics. In both cases, the key is to break out of congealed
thought patterns and revise outdated theories by constantly testing them
against direct experience. This creative process should not then be under-
stood as specific to literature, but Lefebvre acknowledges that it is an area
in which literature and the other creative arts excel.
In the following pages I will be seeking to build on the compara-
tive advantages of literature by leveraging its transductive contributions
to theoretical knowledge. I will be particularly concerned with its ability
to expose the weaknesses of one-sided or overly abstract sociological and
urbanistic categories that make it difficult to see informal settlements as
more than emblems of economic injustice or symptoms of social dysfunc-
tion, as Mike Davis does in his highly influential polemic Planet of Slums
(2006). Davis’s book is, to be sure, a powerful and valuable text that did
much to bring the problems associated with informal urbanism into view
for a large segment of the reading public. But it is also built around a
deeply problematic argument, which promotes an apocalyptic vision of
informal settlements, treating them essentially as undifferentiated places
of absolute suffering and social death, while treating their inhabitants
as dehumanised populations almost completely deprived of agency and
hope. Space constraints preclude an extended critique of Davis’s book
here.3 But LUS scholars should be aware that although Davis’s book
continues to be cited favourably by a number of humanities scholars (see
the Dawson, Gilligan, and Ty entries in the bibliography), it has a rather
dismal reputation amongst social science researchers and activists, partic-
ularly those working in informal settlements and with their inhabitants,
who find that it greatly misrepresents important aspects of life in the
informal city.
Two Contrasting Visions of Istanbul’s

gecekondu Neighbourhoods
In what follows I’ll be discussing two Turkish texts: Orhan Pamuk’s
A Strangeness in My Mind and Latife Tekin’s Berji Kristin. The latter
deals with the foundational moments of a gecekondu settlement on the
outskirts of an unnamed but clearly implied Istanbul, while the first is
organised around what we might call the adolescence and maturity of
an Istanbul gecekondu neighbourhood. The word gecekondu, it should be
noted, means literally ‘put up overnight’. It is commonly used to refer
to extra-legal self-built homes (considered to have been built stealthily,
under cover of night) and, by synecdochic extension, neighbourhoods
that were originally composed of such homes.
The choice of Istanbul here is not fortuitous. The city has an inter-
esting intermediary status in the Global North/South divide. Straddling
Europe and Asia geographically, the former capital of two world historical
empires (Byzantine and Ottoman), it is one of the world’s great cities, full
of architectural gems with a long and storied literary and cultural history.
It has, moreover, remained the cultural and economic (if not political)
capital of modern Turkey, a nation that fits no more comfortably under
the ‘Global South’ or ‘postcolonial’ label than Istanbul does. (Turkey
3 For that see Brodwyn Fischer’s patient and measured critique, or that of Richard
Pithouse, an activist who has worked closely with shack dweller organisations in South
Africa, or that of Tom Angotti, a Marxist urban planning specialist.
26 E. PRIETO
successfully fended off European colonisation in 1923 and is considered a

‘middle income’ country by the World Bank.) Nonetheless, the history of
modern Istanbul has followed a path similar to that of many cities in the
Global South. Its population has grown exponentially in the last 60 years,
from less than a million in 1950 to around 15 million in 2017, making
it one of the fifteen largest cities in the world. Moreover, the majority of
this growth, fuelled primarily by rural-to-urban migration from Anatolia,
was initially concentrated in the rapidly proliferating gecekondu bölgesi
(squatter settlements) that grew up on the ever-expanding periphery of
the city. However, it has, as Kemal Karpat has emphasised, gone a long
way towards resolving the worst aspects of its urban crisis. ‘The gecekondu
of Turkey’, Karpat writes, now have ‘very little in common with the
enduring shantytowns of Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia. How
Turkey prevented the gecekondu from becoming a permanent blight on
its urban landscape is a subject of vital interest’.4 Indeed, might Istanbul’s
experience hold clues that could help other cities manage their growing
pains, as Karpat seems to suggest here?
Before launching into the heart of my analysis it will be useful to make
a preliminary distinction between the two literary texts. Pamuk’s depic-
tion of the informal city in A Strangeness in My Mind is predominantly
a normalising vision, whereas Tekin’s approach in Berji Kristin involves
a poetics of estrangement. Pamuk adopts a largely realist framework that
would not be out of place in a Balzac, Dickens, or Tolstoy novel, whereas
Tekin deploys a narrative apparatus that has been compared to magical
realism. While Pamuk’s message about informal urbanism seems to be
an optimistic one about social advancement, Tekin emphasises the dismal
conditions and suffering of her gecekondu population. A number of ques-
tions arise. To what extent is the mode of representation determined
by (or determinate of) the intended message? To what extent are the
respective social messages of the two novels determined by the social
‘positionality’ of their authors? And how does all of this affect what we
think about informal urbanisation in relation to questions of social justice
and economic development? In attempting to answer these questions, it
will be important to avoid forcing either of these authors into simplistic
pro- or contra-stances with respect to informal urbanisation. Both of these
4 Karpat’s 1976 book, The Gecekondu, was an early and important entry into the
academic field of informal urbanism, appearing in the same year as the inaugural volume
of Habitat International, a flagship journal for research on informal settlements.
authors have important things to say about both the hardships and the
potentialities of gecekondu life. And, as I will try to show, their messages
have in turn important implications for the general field of urban infor-
mality, conceived here as a promising reservoir of urban possibilities, in
both the human and geographical senses of the term foregrounded by the
editors of this volume.
A Strangeness in My Mind
A Strangeness in my Mind has a Defoesque subtitle that, in a move remi-
niscent of many eighteenth-century novels, doubles as a plot summary.
A Strangeness in My Mind
Being the Adventures and Dreams of Mevlut Karataş, a Seller of Boza, and
of His Friends, and Also a Portrait of Life in Istanbul Between 1969 and
2012 from Many Different Points of View. (2)
Pamuk’s use of this convention seems meant to establish a sense of bygone

times, reflected in the mood of hüzün (nostalgia) that permeates the
novel, and in his protagonist’s uncommon devotion to the past. It also
establishes the polyphonic narrative strategy Pamuk will use to give the
novel its panoramic feeling. But, most importantly, the novel’s subtitle
juxtaposes the personal life of Mevlut with the public life of Istanbul in a
way that suggests distinct allegorical possibilities. Indeed, Pamuk misses
no opportunity to remind readers of the profound interdependence of
personal identity and urban geography.
Mevlut sensed that the light and darkness inside his mind looked like the
nighttime landscape of the city […] Mevlut came to understand the truth
that a part of him had known all along: walking around the city at night
made him feel as if he were wandering around inside his own head. That
was why whenever he spoke to the walls, advertisements, shadows, and
strange and mysterious shapes he couldn’t see in the night, he always felt
as if he were talking to himself. (579)
The physical act of exploring the changing face of the city is strictly
equated with Mevlut’s mental act of exploring his own spiritual and
psychological development. Urban development and personal develop-
ment, in this novel, are related in a way that strongly emphasises
28 E. PRIETO
the reciprocal relationship between the two kinds of urban possibility

examined throughout the present volume.
So what does the life path of Mevlut have to tell us about Istanbul—
and vice versa? In order to answer that question we need to under-
stand the relationship around which Mevlut’s personal life revolves: his
marriage. Mevlut, we are constantly reminded, is famous in his circle of
family and friends for being, ‘the man who wrote to the younger sister,
but got married to the older one instead’ (536). Having fallen madly
in love with Samiha, a girl he has only seen once, he tries to court her
through an elaborate letter-writing campaign but is duped by a rival into
eloping with her older, and decidedly plainer, sister Rayiha. Despite this
inauspicious beginning, Mevlut and Rayiha do get married, and go on
to lead a long and happy, if complicated, life together, forging a deeply
loving marriage that is strong enough to survive a variety of setbacks,
including their inability to definitively escape poverty. Indeed, years after
Rayiha’s untimely death, Mevlut looks back on his life and affirms that ‘I
have loved Rayiha more than anything in this world’ (584). These words,
the last ten words of the novel, are addressed directly to the city: they are
‘what he wanted to tell Istanbul’, a turn of phrase that highlights their
significance as urban allegory.
Obeying this allegorical logic, Mevlut’s relationship to the city follows
a path that is rigorously parallel to that of his relationship to Rayiha. The
novel introduces us to Mevlut after he has left his impoverished rural
village in central Anatolia in order to join his father and other emigrants
from his village. Filled with dreams of making it big in the big city, he
is disappointed to find himself living the life of a poor student, in a one-
room gecekondu shack with a pit toilet and dirt floor that his father built
with his own hands. And yet, just as with Rayiha, Mevlut comes over time
to love the place, in a complex but hopeful way.
HOME WAS a gecekondu, a slum house. This was the word Mevlut’s father
used to refer to this place whenever he got angry about its crudeness and
poverty, but on those rare occasions when he wasn’t angry, he preferred to
use the word ‘home,’ with a tenderness akin to what Mevlut felt toward
the house. This tenderness fostered the illusion that the place might hold
traces of the eternal home that would one day be theirs in this world, but
it was difficult to truly believe this. (46)
This sense of tenderness grows, despite the physical hardships, until, years
later, after Mevlut has moved on and lived in a number of other neigh-
bourhoods, he realises that this is the only one where he feels truly at
home. So much so that after Rayiha’s death he decides to move back to
his father’s old gecekondu home, where he will live with his new wife, the
still beautiful although now ageing Samiha, in a gesture that sheds a new,
more mature light on his dual quest for marital and urban contentment.
Finally, at the very end of the novel, when his old neighbourhood
Kültepe is slated to be redeveloped and the residents relocated to modern
high-rise buildings, Mevlut and his neighbours come to watch the
demolition of their old homes, and react with an unexpected burst of
emotion.
Mevlut saw people cry, laugh, look away, or start fights as their houses were
knocked down. When the time came for his own one-room house, Mevlut
felt his heart breaking. He observed his whole childhood, the food he’d
eaten, the homework he’d done, the way things had smelled, the sound
of his father grunting in his sleep, hundreds of thousands of memories all
smashed to pieces in a single swipe of the bulldozer shovel. (559)
Just as with Rayiha, his home never met any ideal standard of beauty or
prestige, but it is the place that enabled him to make a life for himself
in the city he loves and is, therefore, the place he remains most attached
to. What was once an underappreciated fixture in his life, the best he
could manage, has become a cherished part of it. And something similar,
apparently, is true of his former neighbours.
One of the perhaps underappreciated accomplishments of this novel
is the way in which it normalises life in the informal city. Rather than
treating it as a place of marginalisation, exclusion, or dehumanisation,
as critics in Davis’s mould tend to do, Pamuk’s novel emphasises the
extent to which life goes on there much as it does anywhere else, with
opportunities for joy as well as suffering, fulfilment as much as frustra-
tion, and social advancement as well as periods of sometimes grinding
poverty. Indeed, to the extent that we judge the novel’s message about
gecekondu life in terms of its larger narrative structure, it is clear that
the overall trend of the novel is upward. This is clearly a novel of urban
possibility. All of the members of Mevlut’s milieu, with one significant
exception, progressively improve their financial and material situations,
eventually moving on to live in more established neighbourhoods. There
30 E. PRIETO
are some, like Mevlut’s best friend Ferhat, who become city employees
and political operatives, some, like Mevlut’s daughter Fatma, who go to
college and move away, and some, like the Vural and Aktaş families, who
go into construction and real estate and return to the old neighbour-
hood as landlords, developers, and/or speculators. And there is even,
in the case of Hadji Hamit Vural, one who becomes a ‘construction
magnate’ (588). As for the most significant exception to this narrative
of economic progress, it is Mevlut himself, who seems, with his naïve and
somewhat passive manner and his quixotic devotion to the folkloric plea-
sures of selling boza (a traditional, artisanally-produced fermented malt
drink), to have made a conscious decision to remain out of the rat race
of modernisation and economic advancement. He does so, not because
he is oppressed or exploited (although he is at various points in the novel
those things too) but out of a desire to devote himself to what he loves
most, which is to walk the streets of Istanbul at night, communing with
the city and himself before returning home to his wife.
Before drawing any overly exuberant conclusions from these obser-
vations, however, there are several important questions to consider,
beginning with the question of positionality raised earlier. There are good
reasons to be suspicious of what Pamuk’s novel has to say about gecekondu
life, especially given the gauzy ambiance of hüzün that pervades the novel
and the somewhat rosy tint that it casts on urban poverty. A sceptic
might point out that Pamuk’s own upbringing was a decidedly privi-
leged one and that he might simply be romanticising the picturesque
aspects of poverty, poverty that he never experienced from the inside.
Pamuk himself admitted such a possibility in his autobiographical memoir
Istanbul: Memories and the City, recognising that it is easy for someone
who has not been directly subjected to its hardships to pine for an older
simpler time that featured picturesque forms of urban informality like the
cries of street vendors or fleetingly glimpsed images of gecekondu interiors
(Pamuk 2004, 262–64).
It makes sense then to seek out an opposing viewpoint against which
to test Pamuk’s vision. Latife Tekin’s novel Berji Kristin: Tales from the
Garbage Hills will play that role here.
Berji Kristin
First published in 1984, thirty years before Pamuk’s novel, Berji Kristin
gives a rather hellish view of gecekondu life, presenting it in terms that
appear, at least on a first reading, to be much closer to Mike Davis’s apoc-
alyptic vision than to Pamuk’s normalising depiction of the lives of the
urban poor. Moreover Tekin’s social position would appear to be almost

diametrically opposed to that of Pamuk: she spent her early childhood in
a village in the province of Kayseri before migrating with her family to
Istanbul’s periphery. In representational strategy too, Tekin provides an
interesting contrast to Pamuk, taking the idea of strangeness in a much
more literal direction than Pamuk. Tekin has insisted on her effort to
forge ‘a language of the deprived’ able to give expression ‘not only to
their way of life but also to their outlook on life, perception of reality,
sense of humour and dreams’.5 Her approach is designed to depict the
extreme hardships that her characters must endure, and to present them
as they would have been experienced by a group of largely illiterate peas-
ants encountering the harsh realities of industrial modernity for the first
time.
To Pamuk’s straightforward allegory, which maps the inner life of
its protagonist onto the history of the city of Istanbul, Tekin’s novel
responds with characters who don’t even seem to have an inner life, or
at least not one that is accessible to readers, and who seem to have no
sense of history or world affairs. Theirs is a kind of pre-individual, almost
infra-human reality, reinforced by the narrator, whose voice is that of the
collectivity itself, not of a privileged spokesperson for that collectivity.
John Berger, in his preface to the English translation of the novel, calls
this the voice of rumour, emphasising its collective, mythical qualities.
The novel, divided into 21 short chapters, is structured as a series of
vignettes that recount the successive stages of development of a gecekondu
settlement on the outskirts of the city. What they depict is in essence a
series of battles between the squatters and their successive enemies. Thus
the novel opens with an account of the arrival of the first settlers, and
of their first battle, which turns out to be against the wind, which is
to say, against nature itself. Given the unusual style and representational
strategies of this novel, and their importance for the ways in which the
novel makes meaning, it is worth examining an extended excerpt from
this passage.
The hill was engulfed in pitch darkness, but in the small hours a wind
sneaked up, loosened the rooftops, and carried them away. And the babies
too, asleep in the roof-cradles, flew off along with the roofs.
5 From Saliha Paker’s translator’s preface to Berji Kristin (Tekin 12).

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
chestnut or brownish-orange, as are the outer webs of the inner
tertiaries; alula, primary coverts, outer secondary coverts and quills
blackish-brown, their inner webs becoming white towards the base; a
broad band of white extends across the wing, including the bases of
the primary quills, excepting the outer four, and the ends of the
secondary coverts; the shafts of the primaries white. Tail white, with
a broad blackish-brown bar towards the end, broader in the middle,
the tips white. A dusky band crosses the rump.
Length to end of tail 9 inches, to end of wings 8 3/8, to end of claws
10; extent of wings 18 3/8; along the ridge 9 1/2/12, along the edge of
lower mandible 11/12; wing from flexure 6 1/12; tail 2 4/12; tarsus 11/12;
hind toe 2 1/2/12, its claw 2/12; middle toe 10/12, its claw 3 1/2/12. Average
weight of three specimens 3 2/3 oz.
Male in winter. Plate CCCIV. Fig. 2.

In winter, the throat, lower parts, middle of the back, upper tail-
coverts, and band across the wing, are white, as in summer; the tail,
and quills, are also similarly coloured, but the inner secondaries are
destitute of red, of which there are no traces on the upper parts, they
being of a dark greyish-brown colour, the feathers tipped or
margined with paler; the outer edges of the outer scapulars, and
some of the smaller wing-coverts, white; on the sides and fore part of
the neck the feathers blackish, with white shafts.
Individuals vary much according to age and sex, as well in size as in
colour, scarcely two in summer plumage being found exactly similar.
In a male bird, the tongue is 6 1/2/12 of an inch in length, sagittate and

papillate at the base, concave above, narrow, and tapering to the
point. The œsophagus is 4 1/4 inches long, inclines to the right, is
rather narrow, and uniform, its diameter 4 1/2/12. Proventriculus
oblong, 8/12 in length, 5/12 in breadth, its glandules cylindrical.
Stomach oblong, 11/12 in length, its cuticular lining very tough and
hard, with broad longitudinal rugæ, its lateral muscles moderately
large. Intestine 17 1/2 inches long, slender, varying in diameter from
2 1/2/ to 1 1/2/12; rectum 1 1/2; cæca 1 8/12, 11/12 in diameter at the
12
commencement, 2/12 toward the end; cloaca globular.
The trachea is 3 1/4 inches long, 2 1/2/12 in breadth, contracts to 1/12;

its lateral muscles very thin; sterno-tracheal slender, a pair of
tracheali-bronchial muscles. The rings are very thin and unossified,
104 in number. Bronchi of moderate length, with about 15 half rings.
In a female, the œsophagus is 4 1/4 inches long, the intestine 18. In
both individuals, the stomach contained fragments of shells, and
claws of very small crabs: which were also found in the intestine,
although there more comminuted.
PURPLE GALLINULE.
Gallinula martinica, Lath.

PLATE CCCV. Male.
Reader, although you may think it strange, I candidly assure you that
I have experienced a thousand times more pleasure while looking at
the Purple Gallinule flirting its tail while gaily moving over the broad
leaves of the water-lily, than I have ever done while silently sitting in
the corner of a crowded apartment, gazing on the flutterings of
gaudy fans and the wavings of flowing plumes. Would that I were
once more extended on some green grassy couch, in my native
Louisiana, or that I lay concealed under some beautiful tree,
overhanging the dark bayou, on whose waters the bird of beauty is
wont to display its graceful movements, and the rich hues of its
glossy plumage! Methinks I now see the charming creature gliding
sylph-like over the leaves that cover the lake, with the aid of her
lengthened toes, so admirably adapted for the purpose, and seeking
the mate, who, devotedly attached as he is, has absented himself,
perhaps in search of some secluded spot in which to place their
nest. Now he comes, gracefully dividing the waters of the tranquil
pool, his frontal crest glowing with the brightest azure. Look at his
wings, how elegantly they are spread and obliquely raised; see how
his expanded tail strikes the water; and mark the movements of his
head, which is alternately thrown backward and forward, as if he
were congratulating his mate on their happy meeting. Now both birds
walk along clinging to the stems and blades, their voices clearly
disclosing their mutual feelings of delight, and they retire to some
concealed place on the nearest shore, where we lose sight of them
for a time.
Now, side by side, they look for the most secure spot among the tall
rushes that border the lake, and there they will soon form a nest,
removed alike from danger to be dreaded from the inhabitants of the
land as of the water. On the thick mass of withered leaves are
deposited the precious eggs, from which in time emerge the dusky
younglings, that presently betake themselves to the water, over
which they wander, guided by their affectionate parent, until it
becomes expedient for the party to disperse.
The Purple Gallinule is a constant resident in the United States,
although peculiar to their southern districts, where I have met with it
at all seasons. It is in the Floridas, the lower parts of Alabama, and
among the broad marshes bordering the Gulf of Mexico, in Lower
Louisiana, that I have observed its habits. Beyond the Carolinas
eastward, it is only met with as an accidental straggler. It never, I
believe, ascends the Mississippi beyond Memphis, where indeed it is
but rarely seen; but between Natchez and the mouths of the great
river, it is abundant on all the retired bayous and small lakes. The
southern portions of Georgia are also furnished with it; but in South
Carolina it is rare. Proceeding southwestward along the Gulf of
Mexico, I have found it as far as Texas, where it breeds, as well as in
Louisiana, where I observed it coming from the south in May 1837.
Having studied the habits of this bird under every advantage in
Louisiana, and especially in the neighbourhood of New Orleans, and
the mouths of the Mississippi, I will now, good Reader, place before
you the results of my observation. In the summer months, the Purple
Gallinules remove with their broods to the prairies or large
savannahs bordering the bayous or lakes on which they have bred,
and remain in those places, which are generally covered with thick
and tall grass, until the beginning of September, when the vegetation
having been dried up by the intense heat and drought, neither food
nor sufficient concealment can be obtained. The young birds usually
abandon these plains first, and while the colour of their plumage is
still green, instead of purplish-blue, which tint, however, is assumed
before the return of spring. During all this while, its notes are as
frequently heard as during the breeding season. They resemble the
delicate whistling sounds of the Blue-winged Teal during its
residence with us. At this season also its flesh is best, although it
never equals that of the Freshwater Marsh-hen, Rallus elegans, or of
the Sora Rail, Rallus carolinus.
On the approach of winter, all the Purple Gallinules leave the
savannahs, and betake themselves to the immediate vicinity of
ponds, bayous, or rivers, where through experience they become
shy, vigilant, and cunning. They seldom remove from one place to
another, or travel at all, unless by night, although in sequestered
parts they feed both on land and on the water by day.
The Purple Gallinule breeds at a remarkably early period of the year.
I have found young birds in their jetty down clothing in February, and
they have been observed in the same month by the keepers of the
lighthouse at the south-west Pass of the Mississippi, at Key West,
and in other places. The parent birds are sometimes so very intent
on saving their young, as to suffer themselves to be caught. At this
period their calls are almost incessantly heard during the whole
night, and are elicited during the day by any musical or remarkable
noise. The nest is generally placed among a kind of rushes that are
green at all seasons, round, very pithy, rarely more than five feet
high, and grow more along the margins of ponds than in the water
itself. The birds gather many of them, and fasten them at the height
of two or three feet, and there the nest is placed. It is composed of
the most delicate rushes, whether green or withered, and is quite as
substantial as that of the Common Gallinule, flattish, having an
internal diameter of eight or ten inches, while the entire breadth is
about fifteen. The eggs, which are from five to seven, rarely more,
are very similar to those of the Common Gallinule, being of a light
greyish-yellow, spotted with blackish-brown. The young are at first
quite black, and covered with down. They are fully fledged by the
first of June, when, as I have said, they and their parents remove to
the wet savannahs in the neighbourhood.
The jerking motions of the tail of this bird, whenever it is disturbed, or
attracted by any remarkable object, are very quick, and so often
repeated as to have a curious appearance. It runs with great speed,
and dives with equal address, often moving off under water with
nothing but the bill above. The lightness and ease with which it walks
on the floating plants are surprising, for in proceeding they scarcely
produce any perceptible disturbance of the water. When swimming in
full security, they move buoyantly and gracefully, throwing the head
forward at every propelling motion of the feet. The flight of this
species is less swift than that of the Common Gallinule, or of the
Rails, unless when it is travelling far, when it flies high, and advances
in a direct course by continued flappings; but when it is in its
breeding or feeding grounds, its flight is slow and short, seldom
exceeding thirty or forty yards, and with the legs hanging down; and
it alights among the herbage with its wings spread upwards in the
manner of the Rails. It often alights on the low branches of trees and
bushes growing over the water, and walks lightly and gracefully over
them.
It is seldom that more than one Purple Gallinule is shot at a time,
unless in the beginning of the love season, when the male and
female are apt to swim or walk close together. The male at this
period is said to be able to inflate the frontal plate while strutting, but
I have never been fortunate enough to observe this.
The Purple Gallinule not unfrequently alights on ships at sea. While
at the Island of Galveston, on the 26th of April, I was offered several
live individuals by the officers of the Boston frigate, which they had
caught on board. My friend John Bachman once received three
specimens that had been caught three hundred miles from land, one
of them having come through the cabin window. He also obtained
from the Hon. Mr Poinset a fine specimen caught on board, on the
Santee River, in South Carolina, in May. It is easily kept alive if fed
with bread soaked in milk; and on this food I have known several that
remained in good health for years. In Louisiana, where it is called
Rale Bleu, its flesh is not held in much estimation, but is used by the
negroes for making gombo.
My friend Bachman considers this species as rather scarce in South
Carolina and Georgia, but states that it breeds there, as he has
occasionally observed pairs on the head waters or preserves of rice
plantations during summer, but never met with any in winter. The
extreme limit of its range eastward is the neighbourhood of Boston,
where a few individuals have been procured.
I think I may safely tell you that the figure of the Purple Gallinule
exhibited in the plate, is the first ever published from a drawing taken
from Nature!
Fulica martinica, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 259.

Gallinula martinica, Lath. Ind Ornith. p. 769.—Ch. Bonaparte, Synops. p.
336.
Gallinula porphyrio, Wils. Amer. Ornith. vol. ix. p. 67. pl. 73. fig. 2.
Purple Gallinule, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 221.
Adult Male in Spring. Plate CCCV.

Bill as long as the head, nearly straight, stout, deep, compressed,
tapering. Upper mandible with a soft ovate plate at the base
extending over a great part of the head, the dorsal line beyond this
plate straightish and slightly declinate as far as the middle, then
arcuato-declinate, the ridge gradually narrowed until over the
nostrils, afterwards considerably widened, the sides nearly erect, the
edges sharp, the notch obsolete. Nasal groove extending nearly to
the middle of the bill, broad; nostrils sub-medial, lateral, oblong,
direct, pervious. Lower mandible with the angle rather long and
narrow, the sides nearly erect and slightly concave, the dorsal line
beyond the angle ascending, straight, the edges sharp and direct,
the tip narrowed, rather sharp.
Head small, oblong, compressed. Eyes of moderate size. Body
much compressed. Feet large, long; tibia bare a considerable way
above the joint, and reticulated; tarsus long, stout, compressed,
anteriorly covered with very broad scutella, laterally and posteriorly
with two series of broad scutella, between which on the posterior
edge is a series of very minute scales; hind toe comparatively small,
middle toe longest, and much longer than the tarsus, fourth longer
than second; toes free, slender, compressed, with numerous broad
scutella above, obliquely flattened beneath, marginate; claws very
long, slender, slightly arched, much compressed, tapering to a very
acute point.
Plumage blended, firm, glossy, the feathers ovato-oblong, broad at
the end. Wings rather long, broad, rather concave; ovula large:
primaries incurvate, broad, third longest, second a twelfth of an inch
shorter, fourth two-twelfths shorter than second, which exceeds the
first by eleven-twelfths; secondaries broad and grounded. Tail short,
much rounded, of twelve rather weak, rounded feathers, which but
slightly exceed the lower coverts.
Frontal plate ultramarine blue; bill bright carmine, tipped with bright
yellow. Iris bright carmine; margins of eyelids white. Tarsi, toes, and
claws bright yellow. Head, fore part of neck, and breast rich purplish-
blue; abdomen and feathers of legs dusky; sides green; lower wing-
coverts light green; sides of the neck light purplish-blue, shaded into
verdigris and brownish-green above; the fore part of the back
verdigris-green, shaded with olivaceous; the hind part and upper tail-
coverts olivaceous; the coverts and outer webs of the quills
greenish-blue, the inner webs clove-brown; tail-feathers olivaceous.
Length to end of tail 13 1/2 inches, to end of wings 13 1/2, to end of
claws 18; extent of wings 21 1/2; bill along the ridge, including frontal
plate 2; edge of lower mandible 1 1/4; tarsus 2 1/4; hind toe 1, its claw
10/ ; middle toe 2 4/12, its claw 9/12.
12
Weight of one individual 7 1/2 oz., of another 8 1/2, both males; of a

fourth 7 oz.; of a fifth 5 1/2; and of a sixth only 4 1/2.
The female is somewhat smaller, but similar to the male, the frontal
plate is less extended, and the tints of the plumage a little less vivid.
The young are at first covered with black down. When fledged they
are olivaceous on the upper parts, dull purple beneath; the bill dull
green. After the first moult, the bill is light carmine, greenish-yellow at
the end, the head dark purple; the plumage coloured as above
described, but less brilliant, the tarsi and toes greenish-yellow.
In a male bird, the tongue is 10 twelfths of an inch long, sagittate at
the base, with conical papillæ, of which the outer are larger, slightly
concave above, horny towards the end, which is thin, rather obtuse,
and lacerated. On the middle line of the roof of the mouth anteriorly
is a row of large blunt papillæ, behind which are two rows; aperture
of posterior nares linear. Œsophagus 7 inches long, of moderate
width, its greatest diameter, at the lower part of the neck, where it is
a little dilated, 8 twelfths. Proventriculus 1 2/12 long; its glandules
1/
1 /12 long. Stomach a large and powerful gizzard, broadly elliptical,
4
1 1/2 inch long, 1 5/12 broad, its lateral muscles large, the tendons
covering nearly their whole surface, the left muscles 1/4 inch think,
the right 5/12, the cuticular lining moderately rugous. Intestine 21
inches long, from 5/12 to 3/12 in diameter. Rectum 2 3/4 inches; cæca
2, their diameter 3/12 towards the end.
Trachea, moderately extended, 5 1/2 inches long, its greatest breadth

3 1/4/12, its least 1 1/2/12. Its rings 130, very slender, unossified,
collapsed, and owing to their narrowness in the middle line before
and behind, seeming as if broken there; bronchi with 15 half-rings.
The contractor muscles moderate, the sterno-tracheal slender; a pair
of muscles on the lower larynx, from the lower rings of the trachea to
the membrane over the first bronchial ring.
In the mouth was a small frog, in the pharynx two, in the œsophagus
two more, a large piece of root, numerous fragments of insects, and
a leach, the frogs 2 1/2 inches long. In the gizzard were seeds, and
fragments of white fleshy roots.
GREAT NORTHERN DIVER OR LOON.
Colymbus glacialis, Linn.

PLATE CCCVI. Adult Male and Young Male.
The Loon, as this interesting species of Diver is generally called in

the United States, is a strong, active, and vigilant bird. When it has
acquired its perfect plumage, which is not altered in colour at any
successive moult, it is really a beautiful creature; and the student of
Nature who has opportunities of observing its habits, cannot fail to
derive much pleasure from watching it as it pursues its avocations.
View it as it buoyantly swims over the heaving billows of the Atlantic,
or as it glides along deeply immersed, when apprehensive of danger,
on the placid lake, on the grassy islet of which its nest is placed;
calculate, if you can, the speed of its flight, as it shoots across the
sky; mark the many plunges it performs in quest of its finny food, or
in eluding its enemies; list to the loud and plaintive notes which it
issues, either to announce its safety to its mate, or to invite some
traveller of its race to alight, and find repose and food; follow the
anxious and careful mother-bird, as she leads about her precious
charge; and you will not count your labour lost, for you will have
watched the ways of one of the wondrous creations of unlimited
Power and unerring Wisdom. You will find pleasure too in admiring
the glossy tints of its head and neck, and the singular regularity of
the unnumbered spots by which its dusky back and wings are
checkered.
I have met with the Great Diver, in winter, on all the water-courses of
the United States, whence, however, it departs when the cold
becomes extreme, and the surface is converted into an impenetrable
sheet of ice. I have seen it also along the whole of our Atlantic coast,
from Maine to the extremity of Florida, and from thence to the
mouths of the Mississippi, and the shores of Texas, about Galveston
Island, where some individuals in the plumage characteristic of the
second moult, were observed in the course of my late expedition, in
the month of April 1837. Indeed, as is the case with most other
species of migrating birds, the young remove farther south that the
old individuals, which are better able to withstand the cold and
tempests of the wintry season.
The migratory movements of this bird seem to be differently
managed in the spring and autumn. In the latter case, a great
number of young Loons are seen to alight on the head waters of our
great streams, on which, without much exertion, being aided by the
current, they float along, diving at intervals in pursuit of the
numerous fishes, as they proceed toward milder climes. The few old
birds which, at a later date, appear on the same water-courses,
frequently take to wing, and shorten their way by flying at a
considerable elevation directly across the great bends or peninsulas.
These modes of travelling are also adopted by those which advance
along the Atlantic coasts, where, indeed, the birds have the double
advantage of meeting with food and obtaining repose, on the rivers
and on the sea. I think, however, that this maritime course is followed
only by such of the Loons as have bred in the more immediate
vicinity of the coast. But whether you are in the interior, or on the
coast, it is seldom that you see at a time more than one Loon
travelling at this season; whereas, in spring, they proceed in pairs,
the male taking the lead, as is easily ascertained by observing that
the bird in the rear is the smallest.
Although, its wings are rather small, its flight is strong and rapid, so
that it is enabled to traverse a large extent of country on wing. When
travelling, or even when only raised from its nest, it moves through
the air with all the swiftness of the other species of its tribe, generally
passing directly from one point to another, however distant it may be.
Its long transits are at times performed at so great an elevation, that
its form can scarcely be distinguished, and yet, even then, in calm
weather, the noise of its wings striking the air comes distinctly on
your ear. I have seen them thus, on their way towards Labrador,
passing over the head waters of the Bay of Fundy, to cross the Gulf
of St Lawrence. Whenever it chances to alight on the water, in the
course of its long journeys, it almost immediately dives, as if to taste
the water, and judge whether it contains food suited to its appetite.
On emerging, and after having somewhat raised the fore part of its
body, shaken its wings, and by a strong shiver rearranged its
plumage, it emits its loud echoing call-note, to induce, perchance,
some traveller of its tribe to alight for awhile, that they may
communicate to each other their experience of the past, or their
hopes of the future. There is an absurd notion, entertained by
persons unacquainted with the nature of this bird, that its plaintive
cries are a sure indication of violent storms. Sailors, in particular, are
ever apt to consider these call-notes as portentous. In the course of
a voyage from Charleston to the Florida Keys, in May 1832, I several
times saw and heard Loons travelling eastward; but, notwithstanding
all the dire forebodings of the crew, who believed that a hurricane
was at hand, our passage was exceedingly pleasant. Although I
have heard the notes of the Loon in rainy and blowy weather, yet I
never heard them so frequent or so loud, both by day and by night,
as on the Ohio, during that delightful and peculiarly American
autumnal season called the Indian Summer; when, although not so
much as a cloud was seen for weeks, I have frequently observed the
passing birds checking their flight, or heard the murmuring plash
which they produced on alighting upon the placid water, to rest and
refresh themselves.
Another strange notion, not deserving of credit, although you will find
it gravely announced in books, is that, when the Loon is breeding, it
will dart down suddenly from the air, and alight securely in its nest. I
have never witnessed such a procedure, although I have closely
watched, from under cover, at least, twenty pairs. On such occasions
I have seen the incubating bird pass over the dear spot several times
in succession, gradually rounding and descending so as at last to
alight obliquely on the water, which it always did at a considerable
distance from the nest, and did not approach it until after glancing
around and listening attentively, as if to assure itself that it was not
watched, when it would swim to the shore, and resume its office.
The Loon breeds in various parts of the United States, from
Maryland to Maine. I have ascertained that it nestles in the former of
these States, on the Susquehannah river, as well as in the districts
between Kentucky and Canada, and on our great lakes. Dr
Richardson states that it is found breeding as far north as the 70th
degree of latitude. The situation and form of the nest differ according
to circumstances. Some of those which breed in the State of Maine,
place it on the hillocks of weeds and mud prepared by the musk-rat,
on the edges of the lakes, or at some distance from them among the
rushes. Other nests, found on the head-waters of the Wabash River,
were situated on the mud, amid the rank weeds, more than ten yards
from the water. Authors have said that only one pair breed on a lake;
but I have found three pairs, with their nests, on a pond not
exceeding a quarter of a mile in length, in the State of Maine. One
that I saw after the young had left it, on Cayuga Lake, in 1824, was
almost afloat, and rudely attached to the rushes, more than forty
yards from the land, though its base was laid on the bottom, the
water being eight or nine inches deep. Others examined in Labrador
were placed on dry land, several yards from the water, and raised to
the height of nearly a foot above the decayed moss on which they
were laid. But, in cases when the nest was found at any distance
from the water, we discovered a well-beaten path leading to it, and
very much resembling those made by the Beaver, to which the
hunters give the name of “crawls.” The nest, wherever placed, is
bulky, and formed of the vegetable substances found in the
immediate vicinity, such as fresh or withered grasses and
herbaceous plants. The internal part, or the true nest, which is rarely
less than a foot, and is sometimes fifteen inches, in diameter, is
raised upon the external or inferior mass, to the height of seven or
eight inches. Such was one found on the 5th July 1835, in Labrador,
and which was placed within three yards of the edge of a
considerable pond of limpid water, supposed to have been produced
by the melting of the snow, and upwards of a mile distant from the
sea. Of the many nests which I have examined, I have found more
containing three than two eggs, and I am confident that the former
number is that which more frequently occurs, although many
European, and some American writers, who probably never saw a
nest of this bird, allege the contrary. The eggs average three inches
and three quarters in length, by two inches and a quarter in their
greatest breadth, and thus are considerably elongated, being
particularly narrowed from the bulge to the smaller end, which is
rather pointed. They are of a dull greenish-ochry tint, rather
indistinctly marked with spots of dark umber, which are more
numerous toward the larger extremity. The weight of two of these
eggs, containing young nearly ready to emerge, was ten ounces and
a half. In Maine the Loon lays fully a month earlier than in Labrador,
and about the same period as on the Wabash.
On approaching the female while sitting on her eggs, I assured
myself that she incubates with her body laid flat upon them, in the
same way as the Domestic Duck, and that, on perceiving the
intruder, she squats close, and so remains until he is almost over
her, when she springs up with great force, and makes at once for the
water, in a scrambling and sliding manner, pushing herself along the
ground. On gaining the water, she dives at once, emerges at a great
distance, and very rarely suffers herself to be approached within
gunshot. Sometimes they swim so deeply immersed as scarcely to
be perceptible, and keep as much as possible among the rushes and
other water plants. When the eggs are on the eve of being hatched,
the mother, when disturbed, often cries loudly and dismally for some
time, but seldom flies off. At other times, when I found the eggs to
have been recently laid, the bird, on reaching the water, and diving,
swam lightly, flapping its wings, drank once or twice, and moved
about at a respectful distance. On such occasions, should you
persist in watching it, it rises on wing and flies off. Should you not
mark the spot in which the nest is, but leave it to go in pursuit of the
bird, you may search for hours before finding it, for the path leading
from the water to it is generally covered over by the herbage. Once
while approaching a spot in which I knew a Loon to be engaged in
forming her nest, I was disappointed at not finding her at work: her
keen sense of hearing had apprised her of my purpose, and
cunningly must she have slipped away, for, on finding her absent,
although I had not heard any noise, I happened to look toward the
water, and there she was, gliding off in the quiet manner usual on
such occasions.
The young of the Loon are covered at birth with a kind of black stiff
down, and in a day or two after are led to the water by their mother.
They swim and dive extremely well even at this early stage of their
existence, and after being fed by regurgitation for about a fortnight,
receive portions of fish, aquatic insects, and small reptiles, until they
are able to maintain themselves. During this period, grey feathers
appear among the down of the back and belly, and the black quill-
feathers of the wings and tail gradually elongate. They are generally
very fat, and so clumsy as to be easily caught on land, if their retreat
to the water be cut off. But should you miss your opportunity, and the
birds succeed in gaining the liquid element, into which they drop like
so many Terrapins, you will be astonished to see them as it were run
over the water with extreme celerity, leaving behind them a distinct
furrow. This power of traversing the surface of the water is
possessed not only by the young and old of this species, but by all
other kinds of swimmers, including even Gallinules and Coots. When
the young are well able to fly, the mother entices them to remove
from the pond or lake on which they have been bred, and leads them
on wing to the nearest part of the sea, after which she leaves them
to shift for themselves. Now and then, after this period, the end of
August or beginning of September, I have still seen the young of a
brood, two or three in number, continuing together until they were
induced to travel southward, when they generally set out singly.
Having given you a figure of a young bird, taken in October 1819
from a specimen obtained on the Ohio, I will not here trouble you
with its description, but merely state that the young undergo their first
moult in December, when they are seen singularly patched with
portions of new plumage beautifully speckled with white, on a bed of
almost uniform ash-brown. I was told, while in the State of Maine,
that if the young were caught soon after being hatched, and before
they had been in the water, they would, if thrown into it, immediately
follow a paddled canoe anywhere; but, as I have not myself made
the experiment, I cannot speak of this as a fact.
Although it has been generally asserted that Loons cannot walk or
run in an efficient manner, I feel assured that on emergency the case
is very different. An instance which occurred to my youngest son,
John Woodhouse, who accompanied me to Labrador, may here be
related. One day, when he was in pursuit of some King Ducks, a
Loon chanced to fly immediately over him within shooting distance of
his enormous double-barrelled gun. The moment was propitious, and
on firing he was glad to see the bird fall broken-winged on the bare
granitic rocks. As if perfectly aware of its danger, it immediately rose
erect on its feet, and inclining its body slightly forward, ran off,
stumbled, rose again, and getting along in this manner actually
reached the water before my son, who is by no means slow of foot.
The space traversed was fully an hundred yards, and the water to an
equal distance was not more than ankle-deep. The bird and its
pursuer ran swiftly through the water, and just as both reached a
sudden break about four feet in depth, the Loon, which had been
wounded elsewhere than in the wing, expired and floated at the
disposal of its enemy, who brought it on board the Ripley; when I
entered this anecdote in my journal.
These birds are so very strong and hardy that some of the old ones
remain in Maine and Massachusetts until all the fresh waters are
frozen, first leaving the quiet lakes and ponds, then the slow
streams, and lastly the turbulent pools below waterfalls, which latter
they do not quit until they are overhung by icicles and deserted of
fish. On the other hand, this species returns northward at a later
period than most others that breed in high latitudes. I have witnessed
the arrival of some on the coast of Labrador, after they had crossed
the Gulf of St Lawrence, as late as the 20th of June, after which they
had scarcely four months to seek out a breeding place, lay their
eggs, hatch and rear their young, and with them remove southward,
before the rigour of winter commenced.
The Great Northern Diver is a heavy-bodied bird, and generally
swims rather deep in the water, more especially if apprehensive of
immediate danger, when scarcely more than two inches in height of
its back can be seen above the surface. As its body is more flattened
than that of the Cormorant, this circumstance might seem to favour
the action in question; but other species less depressed exhibit the
same peculiarity; and I have thought that in all of these the internal
structure alone can account for this peculiar faculty.
With the exception of that most expert of all divers, the Anhinga, and
the Great Auk, the Loon is perhaps the most accomplished. Whether
it be fishing in deep water amid rolling billows, or engaged in eluding
its foes, it disappears beneath the surface so suddenly, remains so
long in the water, and rises at so extraordinary a distance, often in a
direction quite the reverse of that supposed to be followed by it, that
your eyes become wearied in searching for it, and you renounce the
wish of procuring it out of sheer vexation. At least, this has very
frequently happened to me; nay, I have at times abandoned the
chase when the bird was so severely wounded as to be obliged to
dive immediately beside my boat, and had it not died of exhaustion
and floated near enough to be seized by me, I felt as if I could not
have pulled my oars any longer, and was willing to admit that I was
outdone by a Loon.
In Labrador, where these birds were abundant, my son John one
day shot at one on wing, which fell upon the water to appearance
quite dead, and remained on its back motionless until we had
leisurely rowed to it, when a sailor put out his hand to take it up. The
Loon, however, to our surprise, suddenly sprung up, and dived, and
while we stood amazed, watching its appearance, we saw it come up
at the distance of about an hundred yards, shake its head, and
disgorge a quantity of fish mixed with blood; on which it dived again,
and seemed lost to us. We rowed however to the spot in all haste,
and the moment it rose, sent another shot after it, which terminated
its career. On examining it afterwards, we found it quite riddled by
the heavy shot.
If ever so slightly wounded, the Loon prefers diving to flying off, and
all your endeavours to kill it are almost sure to prove unavailing, You
may shoot at it under such circumstances, but you will lose both your
time and your ammunition. Its keenness of sight defies the best
percussion-locked gun, for it is generally deep in the water before
the shot reaches the spot where it has been. When fatigued with
diving in the ordinary manner, it will sink backwards, like a Grebe or
a Frog, make for some concealed spot among the rushes, and there
lie until your eyes ache with searching, and your stomach
admonishes you of the propriety of retiring.
Loons are now and then caught in fishermen’s nets, and are soon
drowned. I have also caught them with hooks fastened to lines laid
across the Ohio, but on no such occasion have I taken the bird alive.
A method of shooting these birds, which I have often practised, and
which was several times successfully employed by our Labrador
party, may here be related. On seeing a Loon on the water, at
whatever distance, the sportsman immediately places himself under
the nearest cover on the shore, and remains there as carefully
concealed as possible. A few minutes are allowed to pass, to give
the wary and sharp-sighted bird all due confidence; during which
time the gun, charged with large shot, is laid in a convenient position.
The gunner then takes his cap or pocket-handkerchief, which if
brightly coloured is so much the better, and raising it in one hand,
waves it three or four times, and then suddenly conceals it. The bird
commonly detects the signal at once, and, probably imagining the
object thus exhibited to be one of its own species, gradually
advances, emitting its love-notes, which resemble a coarse laugh, as
it proceeds. The sportsman imitates these notes, making them loud
and yet somewhat mellow, waving his cap or kerchief at the same
time, and this he continues to do at intervals. The Loon, in order to
arrive more quickly, dives, perhaps rises within fifty yards of him, and
calling less loudly, advances with considerable caution. He shews
the signal less frequently, imitates the notes of the bird more faintly,
and carefully keeps himself concealed, until the Loon, having
approached within twenty or even ten paces, dives and on emerging
raises itself up to shake its wings, when off goes the shot, and the
deluded bird floats dead on the water. Many species of Ducks are
procured in nearly the same manner. The male Turkey, in the

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ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic)

Cover credit: Kadir Celep/EyeEm/Getty Images

was set up back-to-back with another urban studies conference, Re-City,

Tampere, Finland Markku Salmela

1 The Possible in Literature and Urban Life: Clearing

Part I Possible Cities

Part II Possible Urban Lives

Lieven Ameel is a University Lecturer in comparative literature and

Criticism: Imaginative Place in Literary Research and Teaching (2016)

Fig. 7.1 Map of Edinburgh showing the routes through it

The Possible in Literature and Urban Life:

Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel, and Jason Finch

A long continuum of cities that envision what might be possible—for the

M. Salmela (B) · L. Ameel

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

for social or educational advancement, or at the very least a new identity

Past, Present, Future

informative as we contemplate urban possibilities. Restorative nostalgia, of

The Possible in Literature

stream-of-consciousness techniques. And thirdly, literature is particularly

collective, futuristic significance of such large-scale envisioning and the

rooted in real-world material cities, including the everyday practices of

Possible Urban Lives

as well as metaphorical) during the negotiation of competing possible lives

‘gecekondu’ districts of informal housing—Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness

Liquid Modernity. By examining a particularly revealing case study—the

Possible Urban Lives

image of the high-rise suburb by reinforcing, as well as challenging and

for public housing to have a nurturing and equable function, beneficial

Castells, Manuel. ‘Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for a Theory of

The Possibilities of Urban Informality: Two

The centre of gravity of urban theory is shifting south. This is true in at

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 19

climate change, resource depletion, and polluted environments. Mean-

Towards a New Language of Urban

As architects, we are living at a time of shifting paradigms […] and this

These are just three examples of a growing number of urban theorists—

Literature, Transduction, and the Larger

None of this should be taken to imply that planners, theorists, and

Two Contrasting Visions of Istanbul’s

successfully fended off European colonisation in 1923 and is considered a

Pamuk’s use of this convention seems meant to establish a sense of bygone

the reciprocal relationship between the two kinds of urban possibility

urban poor. Moreover Tekin’s social position would appear to be almost

5 From Saliha Paker’s translator’s preface to Berji Kristin (Tekin 12).

Male in winter. Plate CCCIV. Fig. 2.

In a male bird, the tongue is 6 1/2/12 of an inch in length, sagittate and

commencement, 2/12 toward the end; cloaca globular.

The trachea is 3 1/4 inches long, 2 1/2/12 in breadth, contracts to 1/12;

Gallinula martinica, Lath.

Fulica martinica, Linn. Syst. Nat. vol. i. p. 259.

Adult Male in Spring. Plate CCCV.

Weight of one individual 7 1/2 oz., of another 8 1/2, both males; of a

Trachea, moderately extended, 5 1/2 inches long, its greatest breadth

Colymbus glacialis, Linn.

The Loon, as this interesting species of Diver is generally called in

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