Fragile Cities, Transatlantic and Post-Industrial: A Study in Urban Humanities

Digital humanities research such as the Stanford Literary Lab’s ‘Emotions of London’ study powerfully shows that urban literature tends to neglect the secondary cities and the less famous portions of cities where most residents actually lead their lives (Heuser, Moretti and Steiner 2016). Combating such lacks, this project works to give the right to the city (Lefebvre 1996) to peripheral and non-metropolitan city dwellers who are less privileged in terms of politics, ethnicity and wealth. It does so by seeking and interpreting multiple text types which contribute to and contest the development of city and city-regional personality in multiple in-depth case studies. This is an urban humanities project which means while it has at its heart the study of texts read with the techniques of literary studies, it uses a wide range of techniques current in the humanities to provide interpretations and solutions relevant to the challenges faces by actual twenty-first-century cities and city regions.
The activity of the project is comparative interdisciplinary urban humanities work on seven post-industrial and port cities in the UK and the USA. Key words include: city personality; literary urban studies; mediation; public housing; rivers, special-function cities; port cities; urban region; planning texts. Work on this strand would begin in 2019–20 then be the main focus of research for 2020-23. The outcome will be several articles in highly-ranked journals and a monograph.