Local Memory and Worldly Narrative: The Remote City in America and Japan

Abstract

This paper describes the uncharted terrain of the 'remote city', an ubiquitous modern urban space. Concentrating on four cities to the north-east of Tokyo and New York, it argues that worldliness is hardly a monoply of 'world cities'; that historical narratives of connection not only construct the 'locality' of many places, but establish imperatives for regular re-engagement. The remote, local, historical and small are revealed as aspects of globality, rather than alternatives. The worldly narratives of Bangor and Lewiston, Maine (US), and Hakodate, Japan, are contrasted not only with each other, but with the studied non-worldliness of the larger but still remote Japanese city of Niigata. The essay ends with a possible explanation for why 'heroic' or local worldliness actually flourishes in an era of the global mundane.

The Cultural Economy of Small Cities

“…Studies of small cities enable important interventions into a diverse range of debates within urban theory, including the study of how small cities are integrated into global flows of capital, culture and people, not only by highlighting the role of small cities as global nodes, but also by critiquing the limited number of measures currently being used to categorize ‘global cities’ (Burayidi 2001; Clancey 2004; Hardoy and Satterthwaite 1986; Herrington 1977; Ofori‐Amoah 2007). Other studies have addressed economic growth in small cities (Erickcek and McKinney 2004; Lipscomb 2003; Paradis 2002), the social implications of the in‐migration of ‘creative labour’ (Asheim 2009); the importance of community and sense of place (Paradis 2000; Talen 1999; Zeldin 2002), as well as showing how urban regeneration is conceived and pursued in small cities (Barnes et al.…”

From Big to Small Cities: A Qualitative Analysis of the Causes and Outcomes of Post–Recession Municipal Bankruptcies

“…Not only must we see small cities as part of the heterogenous mix of cities (Bell and Jayne ), we must also recognize that distinctive forms of policy‐making and economic development take place in all cities. How then can we use the insights of the small literature (Bell and Jayne , ; Clancey ) to inform existing debates of post‐recession urban restructuring?…”

“…If all cities are deeply integrated and intertwined with global urbanization processes, can we talk meaningfully about cities at all? Although this position likely overstates the absence of city-scale processes (see Davidson and Iveson 2015), it again highlights how generating urban theory from the experiences of a city, or sets of cities, can generate flawed theoretical explanations (see Clancey 2004).…”

“…Current debates about "small cities" and post-recession urban restructuring suggest we should be cautious about relying on high profile, big city cases for understanding broader processes of urban change. The small cities literature (see Bell andJayne 2006, 2009;Lorentzen and van Heur 2012) has argued that by focusing on large cities, social theorists have (1) uncritically associated theoretical significance with city size, (2) undertheorized the forms of connection between different cities (see Clancey 2004;Robinson 2006), and (3) lacked a concern with how smaller cities can negotiate and influence regulatory processes (see Gibson 2010;Jansson and Power 2010). Public policy scholarship on post-recession urban restructuring (Aldag et al 2019;Warner 2016, 2017) has also argued that bankrupt cities like Detroit represent exceptional cases that tell us little about general patterns of urban fiscal reform.…”

Place, memory and identity: Imagining 'New Asia'

“…The focus here is on the provincial level rather than urban as Erb shows how debates on Asian values, heritage and place resonate at the edges of cities and not just at their heart (cf. Clancy, 2004). However, geography is never far away as she shows how differences in social memory and place identification are attributed to scalar divides.…”