Street haunting : sounding the invisible city

Sarah Barns

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    Abstract

    In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974), fluid assemblages of signs and images litter a subterranean landscape, marking the destinations to which Marco Polo has traveled. Polo recounts these destinations to his emperor, Kublai Khan, without recourse to a map or a wayfaring guide; he offers little by way of their geography, or any sense of the spatial connections between each recalled location. Instead there are only fragments, the improbable exceptions of remembrance and experience. These "invisible cities" are all given names, women’s names like Irene, Chloe, Raissa and Adelma. Irene, for example, "is the city visible when you lean out from the edge of the plateau at the hour when the lights come on" (p. 112). There are many cities, but in fact they are always the one: Venice. This is the Venice collapsed or hidden behind its contemporary, overexposed tourist facade, whose "invisibility" Calvino cultivates as the imaginative potentiality of everyday encounters with a familiar space. Of this Venice no general claims are made; instead, from the singularity of this one city are teased provisional cities that capture a mood, a memory, a fleeting gesture, or the tracery of a half-glimpsed pattern.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationFrom Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement
    EditorsMarcus Foth, Laura Forlano, Christine Satchell, Martin Gibbs
    Place of PublicationU.S.
    PublisherMassachusetts Institute of Technology
    Pages203-216
    Number of pages14
    ISBN (Print)9780262016513
    Publication statusPublished - 2011

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