Writing the City, or, The Story of a Sydney Walk

Abstract

To have lived in a place, left it, and returned as a visitor. What is this position, this “place”, this state of being no longer at home. Not a resident, with all the easy everyday intimacy and banality of that, nor yet a tourist, adrift in glittering strangeness. This semi-estrangement, this state of being a semi-stranger, is one thing I will explore in this paper. Another thing is walking. I will attempt to evoke and unwind the experience of walking, across the course of a whole day, in Sydney. In this I will reflect upon and extend an earlier body of research work that attempted to write urban space and experience in Stockholm, through the story of a long walk undertaken on a winter's day. The intent there was to explore the deliberately constructed subjectivity of feminist place-writing and where it intersects with that thread of critical tourism studies that focuses on embodiment, sensuality, and phenomenology. Framed as an explicit homage to Soile Veijola and Eeva Jokinen's essay “The Body in Tourism”, using both the form and content of that essay as a point of departure, the essay employed experimental writing practices to attempt a new mode of representing and narrativizing urban experience. Through the manipulation of writerly form, it attempted to render the scholarly text opaque and explicitly constructed, attempted to write both theory and practice into place and time, to incorporate the experiential and observational into scholarly work.

Acknowledgements

I would like to warmly thank the two anonymous referees of this paper for their insightful and helpful comments, and also thank the editors, Annelie Bränström-Öhman, Mona Livholts, and Malin Rönnblom, for their thoughtful and encouraging advice throughout the editing process.

Notes

¹ The paper was presented under the title “Stockholm, Slowly, Still”, at Sensory Urbanism, a conference of the Multimodal Representation of Urban Space project, convened by Raymond Lucas, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, 8–9 January 2008.

² In one sense I intended the essay quite literally as a gift, and sent it (with an audacity which now amazes me) to Professor Soile Veijola, who is Professor of the Cultural Studies of Tourism at the University of Lapland, with the suggestion that we might catch up in Helsinki when I was there in early 2009. To my delight she received the essay graciously, and agreed to a meeting, and we did indeed meet most convivially, and she made a number of comments including giving the essay its published title—“If on a Winter's Day a Tourist”, a reference of course to Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Thus the gift was returned.

³ Annelie Bränström Öhman is one of the co-editors of this special issue, and I thank her for the opportunity to expand and develop my paper into the form in which appears here. The conference took place from 4–6 February 2009, at Stockholm University. The conference website is at: http://www.kvinfo.su.se/femmet09/.

⁴ To this end, in the period between writing the first paper and finishing the second one, I have convened two international conferences on the subject: Writing Architecture: a Symposium on Architectural Criticism and the Written Representation of Architecture (15–16 August 2009, Institute for Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia) and Writing Architecture: A Symposium on Innovations in the Textual and Visual Critique of Buildings (22–23 July 2010, Queensland Art Gallery and the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia). The proceedings of the first will be published as a special issue of Architecture Theory Review edited by Lee Stickells and myself, forthcoming in late 2010. The proceedings of the second will be published as an edited book, published by the Institute for Modern Art, released in 2011.