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作者

Lisa Kosok

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue6,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

Abstract “Pleasurescapes,” also called amusement or entertainment quarters, are public spaces that are constituent for modern cities. They emerged during the period of urbanization and were constantly reshaped and negotiated. “Pleasurescapes” is an analytical concept that describes and reflects the historical, spatial, sociocultural, and infrastructural development of pleasure spaces during the long turn of the century around 1900. This issue explores the particular role of pleasurescapes on waterfronts and in port cities. Introducing Pleasurescapes as a New Analytical Concept1 It was not without irony that a research project investigating entertainment culture in port cities was launched at the very moment when a global pandemic brought all public entertainment to a standstill. Pubs, cinemas, and theaters closed, and festivals and open-air events were banned—collective and public entertainment ceased from one day to the next. Curfews, lockdowns, and confinement dominated everyday life. In such a situation of abstinence and lack of collectivity, the research team had the sad opportunity to experience firsthand what it meant when cities were deprived of their entertainment culture: without these pleasures they were no longer cities. As unfortunate as the disruption caused by the pandemic was for people, for urban cultural industries and, eventually, for our collaborative fieldwork, it did expose the immense importance of public urban pleasure culture in an entirely unexpected way. It revealed how much we had taken it for granted—without being aware of the fact that these public places were contested spaces whose freedoms had been fought for through a long history. Seeing public pleasure as vitally important for people, this special issue sheds new light on this as yet underestimated field by exploring specific historical case studies in urban public pleasure. The special issue is a result of a collaborative research project titled “Pleasurescapes. Port cities’ transnational forces of integration,” funded by the European Commission within the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) network as part of the “Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe (2019-2022)” program. The project centers on Barcelona, Gothenburg, Hamburg, and Rotterdam: European commercial port cities. This special issue, however, takes a wider perspective, including two further case studies on Istanbul and Monte Carlo. These were not chosen for their importance as commercial ports, as in the case studies of our original project; instead, due to their specific waterfront-related pleasure infrastructures, the cases of Istanbul and Monte Carlo helped us to probe the analytical strength of the concept. Landscapes of Urban Pleasure: Terminology and Methodological Scope “Pleasurescapes” is a new analytical concept in urban history and urban cultural studies. The term itself has appeared sporadically in literature on urban nightlife and architectures of pleasure, but its use remained either arbitrary2 or illustrative of neighboring terms such as “nightscapes” and “playscapes.”3 “Pleasurescapes,” however, is much more than yet another variation on the “scape” suffix.4 We adopted the term “pleasurescapes” from design historian Josephine Kane,5 who has applied it to the zoned areas of amusement parks in the United Kingdom. Kane focused on the inherent relationships between pleasure architecture and its appropriation by people, which we then took as a starting point, extending it to a wider public urban sphere. At the heart of our concept stands the assumption that space and the built environment have reciprocal impacts on social structures and cultural practices. Architecture and space affect people’s behavior and vice versa. Space is not just passive scenery.6 Established vocabulary such as “pleasure district” or “entertainment quarter” does not capture this spatial approach sufficiently,7 whereas the “scape” suffix, coined for the humanities by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai8 in the 1990s, meets this requirement better. After all, a landscape is a built environment as well, it is not wilderness; but its borders are vaguely organic and fluid in nature. Such are the borders of “scapes” in Appadurai’s sense, and such are the borders of the urban landscapes of pleasure—pleasurescapes—that are the center of our research. Additional aspects of Appadurai’s concept are crucial to our approach: the “fluid, irregular shapes” and borders of and within Appadurai’s different spheres of cultural economy (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes) mean that the pleasurescapes framework has to take into account the overlapping influences on pleasure culture of (local) social and cultural practices, commercial stakeholders and public institutions, infrastructures, governance structures such as police control and communal policies, and the discursive processes of memory making. Appadurai’s9 characterization of scape-entities as “not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, [. . .] deeply perspectival constructs,” urges us to embrace the representational dimension of urban pleasurescapes. In attributing an active role to space and architecture in generating social change, the contributions of this issue also adopt a posthumanist perspective in considering how human and nonhuman forces assemble or collide in and around pleasurescapes. More particularly, this perspective is put forward by the infrastructural turn in the social sciences,10 according to which urban social life should be narrated through infrastructures as “gatherings” of “trunk networks, the built environment and public utilities and services” of a city.11 In this view, material forms and cultural practices are seen as “hyphenated, each closely implicated in, and part of, the other.”12 Thus, the waterfront pleasurescapes explored here are not merely seen as being related to human entertainment but also as based on matter, which enables movements of and relationships between people and things. This also means that infrastructures shape the “envelopment”13 that provides access to and immersion within a specific atmosphere of pleasure. Now, “pleasure” is significant to us as a subjective perception, a positive feeling, which can be experienced and can create meaning in very different ways, depending on the person.14 The term “pleasure”—and also synonymous variants, such as amusement, fun, joy, entertainment, and lust—denotes a “basic human need, a cultural-anthropological constant inherent in the drive structure of human beings, which can be very multifaceted and in which high energies are involved, especially when they are publicly released en masse.”15 Societies therefore develop rules and rituals within which pleasure can take place. Accordingly, when social changes occur, pleasure is always renegotiated, and disputes arise between the actors involved around its tempos and modes.16 In the nineteenth century, an entertainment sector emerged as a framework for public pleasure, established primarily as commercially authored entertainment.17 To encompass all the dimensions of pleasure—the commercial as well as the noncommercial, the tolerant as well as the sexist and racially discriminating—we adopt the generic term “pleasure” as our analytical concept. Port Cities, Sailortowns, and Waterfronts: Notes on Our Spatial Frame Port cities are a particular type of city, located on the borders of land and sea and shaped by global maritime developments, economies, and technologies. They are cities on the edge—the visible sign of which is the waterfront—and tangible testimonies of past globalization, “an important lens for analyzing difficult pasts and uncertain futures.”18 This border is ambivalent: on one hand, it forms an inward-facing boundary, while it is open to the outside world. Because of their open position on the sea, harbor cities were considered unsafe, prone to raids and revolts, and, as a result, were rarely chosen as capitals. Many port cities, however, became “second cities,” significant for international and global trade and the national-economic well-being of their countries, while, for the abovementioned reasons, not enjoying sufficient security for the representation and demonstration of power (although there are certainly exceptions to this pattern).19 Port cities are seen as having a special role in national and local identity-building and memory culture since they gained high symbolic importance in terms of not only prosperity and growth, but also for maritime strength and the development of national pride.20 At the local level, they are said to have a distinct sense of self, which Carola Hein21 describes as a “maritime mindset,” expressive of the relationships between space, society and culture. These maritime mind-sets are influenced by the developments that led to the separation of the working port from the city, in particular the containerization and deindustrialization of harbor areas that began in the 1960s. Regardless of their particular characteristics, port cities shared forms of development in the course of the urbanization process with other metropolises and large cities: migration, social and spatial segregation, gentrification, functional separation of housing and work, regional industrial development, development of modern infrastructures, centralization of the functions of administration and political power, and the formation of differentiated cultural and recreational amenities. These factors took a special shape in port cities, however, due to the economic, technical, and spatial development of the port,22 which changed in the course of its industrialization, thereby also shifting its boundary with the outside world. Brian Hoyle identifies five phases of development for port cities: while the port was located within the city in the Middle Ages and early modern period, its location later shifted further and further from the urban center; subsequently, it became industrialized, turned into a demarcated terrain with limited access, and, finally, as a container port, required entirely new infrastructures that made its prior architecture, infrastructures, and industrial handling techniques obsolete.23 In this phase, abandoned port areas were reclaimed by the city and coupled with a maritime memory culture.24 As the port and the city developed spatially, so did the spaces linked to the port in terms of life and culture. The so-called sailortowns in particular became objects of urban planning intervention. Around 1900, local elites striving for social reform and modernization framed sailortowns as places of “otherness,” as ambiguous urban territories with negative characteristics. “Sailortowns were the districts of merchant and naval ports where sailors visited, often lived and were entertained,” writes port historian Brad Beaven. “It was a distinct area characterized by its public houses, brothels and low entertainment that employed significant numbers of working people.”25 Stan Hugill,26 himself a sailor, has bequeathed to us a more colorful and now well-known definition: “It was a world of sordid pleasure, unlimited vice, and lashings of booze, but a dangerous place too.” Not only was the sailortown a place of boundless hedonism, it also came with a certain image of otherness, often with countercultural connotations.27 “The sailortown songs and tales of seafarers were subversive: they do promote an alternative vision of gender and class.”28 Paul van de Laar speaks of a “strong sense of urban identity and local pride,”29 and Brad Beaven writes of “resilience” “against attempts at civic and moral reform.” Thus it becomes clear that sailortowns had a culture of their own that “remained meaningful for those who lived in this distinctive intersection between maritime and urban space,”30 but which “became [a] counterpoint to middle-class idealism, stressing tight family relations, work ethics, morality and typical bourgeois attitudes.”31 Acknowledging the ambiguity of sailortowns, here we pay special attention to the pleasurescapes of port cities and the question of whether their urban situation contributed to the development of a specific culture of pleasure. Thus the focus is on both the so-called sailortowns and on waterfronts specifically designed and used for the purposes of public pleasure. That is why this special issue does not solely consider “genuine” port city districts such as Hamburg’s “East End” or Rotterdam’s Zandstraatbuurt. Instead, it encompasses a wider variety of urban waterfronts, ranging from Monte Carlo and Istanbul’s city beach to port city areas such as Barcelona’s Montjuïc that were not directly situated on the waterfront but connected to it in multiple ways. When referring to these different waterfront spaces, we use the notion of the “edge,” rather than analogous terms such as “borderlands” or “threshold spaces,” to highlight the liminal situation of urban waterfronts seen from a spatial, cultural, social, and political point of view. “Edge” in this sense has multiple meanings, not only as a spatial category, indicating a place of otherness, but also referring to cultural exchanges between different transnational worlds. Currently, the term “edginess” stresses the importance of the artistic and cultural life promoted in gentrified waterfronts, such as that initiated in Liverpool for its year as European Capital of Culture in 2008.32 Public Popular Pleasures—Gateway to Modernity? Recently, researchers from the project “Metropole und Vergnügungskultur. Berlin im transnationalen Vergleich, 1880-1930” have put forward the hypothesis that pleasure culture and urbanity are more than simply two sides of the same coin: in contrast, they are literally built on each other. The modern entertainment industry catalyzed urbanization in the early 1900s and, in turn, the ever-increasing process of urbanization accelerated the flourishing of entertainment businesses.33 Entertainment, then, is not merely a symptom of the modern metropolis but one of its constitutional elements. In other words, entertainment culture fulfilled and embodied exactly those traits of the metropolis that turned it into a “laboratory of progress.”34 Dance halls, amusements parks, and cinemas, among many other things, were the testing sites for new cultural practices, experimental social behavior, nonconformist modes of thought and innovative technologies.35 At the turn of the twentieth century, landscapes of pleasure became integral elements of the urban and of the metropolis in particular. Here, we enquire into the specific role of port cities in this development, for if the rise of the city is intertwined with entertainment, was it even more so in the port city, its waterfronts, and its traditional pleasure districts? This modernization process had enormous significance for waterfronts and sailortowns as traditional commercial, social, and cultural contact zones between land and water. The modern seafarer, employed on regular steamships, became a part-time resident member of the working class and was no longer the free-spirited rover of the heyday of sail. Sailortowns and waterfronts turned into highly frequented contact and transit zones. In the early 1900s, when urbanization processes peaked, sailortowns gradually became “nightlife districts appealing for citizens and tourists alike.”36 Now modern places of pleasure, the red-light districts offered new forms of commercial entertainment catering both to residents and tourists, less dominated by seafarers than they had been in the past.37 Despite their general popularity, however, their overall representation as “wicked places”38 made them an ideal test case for new ideas of urban planning and social and moral reform strategies, in particular after the Second World War, when the old sailortowns were irretrievably wiped out. Nevertheless, currently, the traditional waterfront with its sailortown has reappeared as a nostalgic counterpoint to an era of modernization. In almost all European port cities since the 1980s, these narratives, as part of a reinvented popular maritime port culture, have become an integral part of city promotion in postmodern waterfront redevelopment strategies, including the maritime heritage industry. The sea and the port as a place of longing and imagination are now key features of tourist programs. Pleasurescapes in port cities attracted their clientele because of their notorious and excitingly liberal, even anarchic image, and this has a particular historical rooting in sailortown. Did sailortowns set the markers for the twentieth century’s urban pleasurescapes? Or did sailortowns at least shape particular kinds of pleasurescapes in port cities? Have sailortowns passed down their “strong sense of urban identity and local pride”39 to the pleasurescapes of the modern port city, regardless of their complete absence of sailors? Finally, the emerging key question, again going back to Appadurai,40 is as follows: Do pleasurescapes in port cities have a group identity of their own, and if so, how much convergence do these group identities show across national borders? The Pleasurescapes project sets out to explore this question and to examine pleasure culture as a transnational feature of maritime urbanity. Our Case Studies Our issue presents six case studies on public amusement on European urban waterfronts. The articles contribute to the historical investigation of city-making and popular culture by exploring the role played by “pleasurescapes” in the reshaping of Europe’s urban waterfronts, in line with the “project of modernity” between the 1880s and 1960s. With its transnational perspective, this issue presents cases from different European countries to highlight—with all due respect to national singularities—representative transnational convergences in European pleasurescapes on the waterfront. The issue’s contributions cover, on one hand, different forms of pleasure and liminal practices, and, on the other hand, political initiatives aimed at upgrading and “modernizing” the waterfront’s image. The tensions between these (seemingly) contradictory practices point to the ambiguous character of the “modernizing project” and the way it played out on the urban waterfront. By reconstructing these collisions of interest among different city actors and between locals and foreigners, we also problematize the notion of pleasure as a coherent and conciliatory force. While spaces of pleasure are likely to unite people and to bridge sociocultural boundaries, they also imply exclusion mechanisms and tools for social control. Overall, the selection of studies reveals the construction and development of public urban spaces on the waterfront through a triangle of governmental design, spatial-material regimes, and social appropriation, with pleasure culture as the driving force. The articles we see as contributing to the concept of pleasurescapes address the overarching theme of producing modernity and urbanity through pleasurescapes in several different ways. The first four articles explore different layers of planning and construction processes by foregrounding three major actors: the city council (Christina Reimann, Aurelio Castro-Varela), a powerful private company (Paul Franke), and the nation state (Ceren Hamiloğlu). Behind these lie intricate discursive patterns, technological regimes, and political ideologies deeply entangled with the particularities of each local urban space and time. The following two studies (Alina Just, Vincent Baptist) build on this and enhance the topic by moving on to examine processes of identity and memory making, focusing on questions of class, gender, social status, and cultural background, ranging from the lower classes, the industrial working class and skilled workers, to a thriving middle class. Christina Reimann examines the urban development of Gothenburg between the late 1860s and early 1920s, with a special focus on inner-city borders and their shifts. She argues that borders, whether natural (the river), artificial (city fortifications, canals, and streets), or symbolic (stigmatized former sailortowns), were always strongly linked to “institutions of pleasure” and entertainment culture. Local authorities, consisting mainly of the city council and the temperance and workers’ movements, were mainly concerned with combating and managing excessive drinking habits, and limiting the heavy alcohol consumption of the lower classes. Under the “Gothenburg System,” set up in 1865, alcohol could no longer be served in many places of entertainment and its retail sale was controlled by the state. Through an account of the alcohol restriction policy, urban planning interventions, and officially arranged amusement, Reimann shows that Gothenburg’s project of modernity was characterized by pleasure turning away from the port and being established in increasingly distant urban spaces. At the city’s Jubilee Exhibition in 1923, the—now often alcohol-free and spatially enclosed—pleasurescapes, with the amusement park Liseberg as a prime example, no longer had any connection to the waterfront. Aurelio Castro-Varela investigates the transformation of Montjuïc, a hill bordering on the port of Barcelona. Following the “infrastructural turn” in urban studies, he considers the agency of places, things, and infrastructures, alongside discourses and narratives, in describing different “regimes of pleasure” that were inscribed on Montjuïc. Originally, the mountain was a green area located outside the city borders and used by the city authorities as a sanitary camp during epidemics. Also, until its complete transformation for the International Exposition of 1929, the area was a major resource for the lower classes of Barcelona for dancing, socializing, and picnicking around a number of fountains—a practice called fontades. In public discourse, Montjuïc had a bad reputation as a place of immorality, while for the common people of Barcelona it held great sociocultural importance as a place of pleasure and recreation. The transformation of Montjuïc for the 1929 Exposition turned the hill into a comprehensively designed park, with landscaped paths, an illuminated fountain, and numerous technological innovations. Montjuïc thus became an urban artwork that had great appeal to a middle-class and tourist audience. The infrastructures of the hill, Castro-Varela argues, shape both the uses and physical or sensual perceptions of it, as well as the ambience of the place. The rough, untamed, green, rural infrastructure of Montjuïc had allowed for forms of pleasure that appealed to all the senses. In contrast, the modern infrastructure of the International Exhibition reordered the perception of pleasure, centering it on sight and contemplation while walking. The port and the city formed visual backgrounds that were important for the attraction of the place and for which the magic of artificial lighting became indispensable. Another powerful developer of the waterfront as a modern pleasurescape is introduced to us by Ceren Hamiloğlu: the national government, in this case the government of the first Turkish Republic. President Atatürk developed the Florya Beach waterfront near Istanbul from the mid-1920s as the place where the new republic and its representatives, including the president himself, represented themselves and performed their public personas. Western-oriented state policies forced a break with traditional leisure activities—such as enclosed seaside baths or cafés segregated by gender—and created modernist-inspired architectures on the waterfront, such as casinos, dance halls, beach resorts, and promenades. The beach, with its sports and mixed-gender cultural activities, was the stage on which the members of the modern republic performed. At these pleasurescapes, the educated elites and the migrant lower classes could meet and share the same republican values: as healthy, hardworking, honest individuals, they could see themselves as part of a new nation. Paul Franke examines the development of Monte Carlo from about 1860 to 1940, centered on the construction and operation of the famous casino, where a pleasurescape was created that focused exclusively on one target group and one goal: a wealthy cosmopolitan elite who used their money to gamble at the casino and temporarily visited Monte Carlo to do so. This pleasurescape was developed, financed, designed, organized, and operated by a single cash-rich company, the Société des Bains de Mer (SBM). Franke gives an account of Monte Carlo’s “spatial script,” arguing that the entire layout of the casino and its surroundings were designed so that, in this artificial and pleasant atmosphere, all activity led to gambling in the casino. All factors that literally did not contribute to this purpose and distracted from it were banished from this territory: the Monegasque state administration, the supply companies, the infrastructures that ensured supplies and waste disposal at the casino, and finally the workers who took care of its operation, maintenance, and décor. What remained was a pleasurescape that was “on the edge” in two senses. It was segregated from both the sea and Monaco, and with its spatial script including architectures, gardens, restaurants, hotels, and, last but not least, the casino, it constituted a space reserved for a hedonistic, solvent, bourgeois upper class. The spatial script, Franke argues, regulated its use not through laws, but through spatial-atmospheric design and certain rules of the game; meanwhile, the power of the operating company, which had created and financed the space, extended into the political sphere and was exercised by other means when necessary. Monte Carlo’s pleasurescape represents the ideal type of a thoroughly capitalistically structured place of amusement. The contrasting pole to Monte Carlo is Hamburg’s East End, which Alina Just examines. She devotes her study to the specific pleasurescapes of the eastern parts of Hamburg harbor, more precisely to the Veddel, Peute, and Rothenburgsort quarters, and parts of Hammerbrook and Billwerder. This area fulfilled all the criteria of a typical port city waterfront: port-related industries, cheap housing for port and industrial workers, businesses for everyday life, and cultural amenities for leisure could be found there. Just identifies the inland skippers, part-time residents of the area, as an influential population group. They and their barges ensured the distribution of port goods to the eastern hinterland and central Eastern Europe. Another special feature of the area was the presence of emigrants, who were accommodated at the Hapag emigration halls from 1901 onwards. Veddel was a transition space for several million emigrants who embarked from there to the Americas until the 1930s. Just examines the emergence and development of pleasure spaces, their stakeholders, and local cultural practices in the first half of the twentieth century. Male-dominated pubs for everyday life, garden restaurants for outings, dance halls, and a lively range of clubs and associations with numerous festivals and Sunday events for families and young people characterized the pleasurescapes of the East End. Just describes them as modest, family-oriented, and socially homogeneous—as a self-contained community. There was surprisingly little contact with the emigrants. All in all, this represented more of a traditional working-class culture that had little overlap with the sailortown image of, for example, St. Pauli—Hamburg’s famous entertainment district. The devastation of World War II and the postwar traffic plans for a car-friendly city destroyed the pleasurescapes of Hamburg’s East End. The architectural heritage of the era was sacrificed to customs houses, bridges, and multilane highways. This modern infrastructural regime contributed to the fact that the territories of pleasure in Hamburg’s East End did not become part of the collective memory of the port city. Vincent Baptist on the contrary, focuses on the creation of nostalgic urban sentiments in his article. He examines how the removal of a pleasurescape contributes to the formation of stories, myths, and nostalgia and how its absence triggers “memory making.” Baptist’s case study explores Zandstraatbuurt in Rotterdam. With its typical mix of modest workers’ housing, hostels for sailors, pubs, restaurants, theaters, brothels, and numerous other amusements, Zandstraatbuurt was a pleasurescape typical of early sailortowns. The neighborhood, however, had to make way for the construction of the City Hall and the reshaping of Rotterdam into a modern city with a central business district. The removal of this pleasurescape was legitimized as an urban reform project that furthered the city’s leap into modernity. Baptist sees this type of urban development as an early form of gentrification. Moreover, mixing qualitative and digital quantitative methods, he is able to demonstrate that Zandstraatbuurt was a “lieu de memoire” that was already charged with sentimental memories both before and after its destruction. This finding fits into the conceptual framework of “memory making.” The ambivalent character of the pleasurescape becomes clear in its media presentation and promotion as a place of memory. The study also reveals that the special character of the port city pleasurescape became part of Rotterdam’s culture of memory at an early stage, and that more recent strategies of promoting this image for tourism were able to draw on this. Conclusions and Further Perspectives Pleasurescapes on waterfronts, understood as condensed, “on the edge” urban territories of pleasure and entertainment that were spatially defined, developed, designed, infrastructured, contested, negotiated, and commemorated, served different functions. They became important actors in the project of modernity as they were the spaces where “inner urbanization”41 took place. They served not only to adapt people to the requirements of an industrial urbanized environment, but also to ease the pressures of that environment on them. In this role, they could become collective counter spaces—heterotopias—sometimes subversive and nonconformist. In their ambivalence, they were perfectly suited to triggering processes of memory making. However, the contributions in this issue show that there were different ways of modernizing and instrumentalizing pleasurescapes, both wild and unplanned and newly created. Provided with modern infrastructures and subjected to political programs, they could not only serve urban or national self-representation but also be eliminated or domesticated. In the process of memory making, they had the twofold potential either to be forgotten or, in contrast, to become an urban field for creating group identities. The “imaginaire”42 of the waterfront pleasurescape could be used in many ways: It was suitable not only for city marketing and tourism, but also for memory making and creating neighborhood self-image and group identity. In the end, these “pleasurescapes on the edge” not only catalyzed urban paths to modernity but also modernized their own structures of being; thus, temporary pleasures became permanent—or disappeared. Mobile pleasures settled down or were driven out. Occasional pleasures became part of everyday life and were constantly available. Unruly pleasures were tamed and governed. Cheap and simple pleasures were commercialized and became market-oriented on a large scale. Self-managed pleasures turned into professional businesses. Local formats went international. Formerly limited undertakings, in terms of social structure, content, format, and medialization, were deeply diversified. To put it in more general terms, pleasurescapes, for all their diversity, are characterized not only by some common traits, but also by a number of variations that can be historicized. The term is reflexive, changing not only with the historical conditions of pleasure areas, but also with the perception of these areas, which in turn can be instrumentalized, by the tourist industry and the interests of the cities concerned. From this point of view, the pleasurescape is always both an economic structure, a social order, and a mental construction that thematizes and thereby perpetuates itself.