Though the city has long been associated with speed and spectacle, including its fast-flowing transport systems and towering buildings, it has also always harboured more mundane activity and sights such as the rehearsed small talk of (consequential) strangers and the habitual queues of daily commuters. These everyday practices (in Michel de Certeau’s terms) form ordinary spaces that are fundamental to the urban imaginary yet are rarely explored in artistic endeavours and, connectedly, rarely granted a cultural value that adequately conveys the social value they afford a city’s population.
In broader discourse on cities, when the notion of ‘ordinariness’ is accepted as an urban quality it often fuels a centre/periphery binary, with artistic and scholarly interest only occurring when it is located in the latter (the sustained representation of suburban ennui, for example). Resonating with Njabulo S. Ndebele’s work (1991), it is important that cities – where the spectacle of state trauma and violence is often most obvious – are understood in more complex terms, with everyday urban lives foregrounded. Additionally, there is a tendency within and beyond academia to hierarchise cities, with those in the Global North held up as the model to which all others are compared, despite Jennifer Robinson’s (2006) seminal work in calling for an alternative framework where all cities are considered ‘ordinary’ and worthy of examination.
In linking together different strands of understanding ordinariness then, this conference seeks to (re)establish the value of the ‘ordinary city’ as it is employed, constructed and imagined in a range of artworks including, but not limited to: literature, visual art, screen media, theatre and performance.
The conference is part of a British Academy-funded project, and it is intended that selected papers will become part of an edited collection. More information about the wider project can be found here: https://research.kent.ac.uk/imagining-ordinary-cities/.