Representing a long emergency: New approaches to urban change in literary and cultural studies

Abstract

The introduction to this Special Issue considers how literary and cultural representations of cities in transition contribute to interdisciplinary vocabularies for describing urban change beyond gentrification. By ‘urban change’ we refer to shifts in city and regional planning and real estate development, but also to environmental events, patterns of migration and informal uses of the city that shape how urban places transform. The introduction frames scholarship about what gentrification can and should describe as a debate about language and representation. We revisit critical discussions of gentrification and turn to areas of urbanist scholarship that have effectively modelled more specific approaches to describing urban change. We introduce the five articles in the Special Issue and contextualize how their engagement with representations of urban change in London, metropolitan Delhi, Lubumbashi, New York and Manchester intervene in interdisciplinary urban scholarship by offering new tools for describing urban change amid neo-liberal globalization.