This document provides an overview of the seminar "Urban Imaginaries" to be held in the summer of 2015. It lists required readings that participants must complete before the seminar begins. The document then outlines the table of contents, which includes sections on overview texts of urban theories, conceptual and theoretical texts on storytelling and planning, and case studies analyzing representations of cities in literary texts, films, and documentaries. Participants will further discuss topics and case studies of interest during the seminar. The goal is to explore how cities are represented and imagined through various cultural forms.

1. Seminar “Urban Imaginaries” (Summer 2015)
Prof. Dr. Jens Martin Gurr
University of Duisburg-Essen
Department of Anglophone Studies
Please note:
Participants are expected to have read ALL the texts marked with an x above BEFORE THE
SEMINAR BEGINS (there will not be enough time during the week)!
Further texts and fields of study will be agreed upon in the seminar depending on the
interests of participants.
Table of Contents
Overview and “Classics”
x Setha M. Low, “Introduction: Theorizing the City” (2005) 1
x Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) 21
x Kevin Lynch, from The Image of the City (1960) 25
Conceptual/Theoretical Texts
x James A. Throgmorton, “Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a Global-Scale Web of Relationships”
(2003) 35
Leonie Sandercock, “From the Campfire to the Computer:
An Epistemology of Multiplicity and the Story Turn in Planning” (2010) 63
Merlijn van Hulst, “Storytelling, a model of and a model for planning” (2012) 84
Hubert Zapf, “Literature as Cultural Ecology” (2001) 106
x Jens Martin Gurr, “Urbanity, Urban Culture and the European Metropolis” (2010) 114
Martin Butler/Jens Martin Gurr, “Urbane Populärkultur als Bewertungspraxis und -ressource”
(2014) 129
William Sharpe/Leonard Wallock, “From ‘Great Town’ to ‘Nonplace Urban Realm’:
Reading the Modern City” (1987) 146
Case Studies/Material on Individual Literary Texts, Films, Documentaries …
x Frederick Burwick, “Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London: Urban Representations and
Mirror Reflections” (2011) 178
x Jens Martin Gurr, “The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural Analogies
between ‘City’ and ‘Text’: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades Project” (2015, in press) 186
x Norman M. Klein, from The History of Forgetting: The Erasure of Memory in Los Angeles (2008) 203
x Marcus Hartner, “Psychogeography and In/Sanity: Walking London, New York, and Dubai with
Will Self” (2011) 217
x Berit Michel, “Urban Identity in a State of Flux: Strategies of Representing
Simultaneity, Chaos, and Complexity in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2011) 233
Bond Love, “‘Architectural jungle” or the ‘sum of its people’: Policing Post-War
Urban Space in Anthony Mann’s Side Street” (2011) 257
x Alexandra Ganser, “Navigating Little Italy: Carceral Mobility in Martin Scorsese’s
Mean Streets” (2011) 274
x Karin Höpker, “The Cab and the City: Chance Encounters and Certalian
Perspectives in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth” (2011) 290
Rüdiger Kunow, “City of Germs: Biological Identities and Ethnic Cultures in the Metropolis” (2011) 306
Jens Martin Gurr, “Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation” (2013) 325
x Jens Martin Gurr, “The Politics of Representation in Hypertext DocuFiction: Multi-Ethnic
Los Angeles as an Emblem of ‘America’ in Norman M. Klein’s Bleeding Through:
Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986” (2011) 344
x Jens Martin Gurr, “Urban Complexity from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective:
Key Cultural Dimensions and the Challenges of ‘Modeling’” (2014) 358
Literary Texts:
John Denham, from Coopers Hill (1642) 380
William Wordsworth, from The Prelude (1805/1850) 381
x T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) 383
Alan Brownjohn, from “Ode to Centre Point” (1972) 391
x Paul Auster, from The City of Glass (1985) 393