The Urban Imaginary: Writing, Migration, Place

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Notes

1. ‘Moving Manchester: How migration has informed writing from Manchester 1960–the present’ was an AHRC-funded project based at Lancaster University, UK, that ran from 2006–2010. Lynne Pearce was its Principal Investigator and other team members included Robert Crawshaw, Department of European Languages and Cultures; Graham Mort, Creative Writing; Corinne Fowler, Postdoctoral Researcher, now a Lecturer at the University of Leicester; and Jo McVicker, Project Administrator. For full details of the project and its various outputs see www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/movingmanchester/ or www.transculturalwriting/movingmanchester (where the project will be permanently archived from 2012).

2. As I argue in the M/C Journal editorial: ‘although the material wealth and presence of the transnational corporations has undermined the power of the nation state in some respects (especially if we include the world banks and finance organisations in their number), the financial crisis that has rocked the world for the past three years, along with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ascendancy of Al-Qaida (all things yet to happen when Beck was writing in 1997), has arguably resulted in the nations of Europe reinforcing their (respective and collective) legal, fiscal, and political might through rigorous new policing of their physical borders and regulation of their citizens through “austerity measures” of an order not seen since World War Two’ (Pearce, 2011).

3. The reluctance of white diasporic groups and individuals to see themselves as ‘migrants’ was something that we came across repeatedly in the course of the ‘Moving Manchester’ project, despite the fact that Manchester (little more than 150 years old) is, and always has been, a ‘migrant city’ (Haslam, 2000, p. xi); as we have observed in several project publications, very few residents of the city can claim a Mancunian heritage of more than a few generations (Fowler & Pearce, 2006; Pearce, 2007).

4. See, in particular, the article by Zahera Harb (2011), ‘Arab revolutions and the social media effect,’ which discusses the success of social media (in particular, Facebook) in the ‘Arab Spring’.

5. ‘Migrant’ as opposed to ‘multicultural’: these are two concepts are usefully distinguished from one another via the mobility paradigm. While ‘multicultural’ is typically used to refer to a community where ethnic diversity is a fixed and established social reality, ‘migrant’ suggests that the groups and individuals concerned have only recently arrived (or, indeed, are still in the process of arriving), as well as numerous other negative connotations (‘alien’, ‘invasive’ and so forth).

6. See, for example, Geoff Peters’ ‘Time lapse journey to work in Manchester’ (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaPrzrAE034) and the BBC website’s ‘Time lapse video shows Manchester on the move’ (available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/manchester/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8547000/8547740.stm). Both are superb illustrations of the alternative, ocular-centric model of perception presented here.

7. Notwithstanding its signal importance in helping develop what Thrift, in 1996, identified as an ‘almost/not quite […] trope of mobility’ (Thrift, 1996, p. 258), it seems important to recognise the perceptual and conceptual detachment implicit in the flanerie promoted by Benjamin and his followers and considered in Pearce’s article (2012b) vis-à-vis W.G. Sebald’s taxi rides through the Manchester.