The Civic University, Creative Placemaking and the Discipline of Literature

Abstract

The city holds a privileged position in Anglo–American literature. From Charles Dickens's labyrinthine London and Henry James's multitudinous New York City skyline to George Sterling and Francis Bruguière's collaborative photo–poetry of San Francisco and contemporary Latinx authors' engagements with Los Angeles, literature and allied arts have long sought to capture metropolises in all their complexity and contradictoriness. The city also figures prominently in much recent work by American and British education reformers seeking to reconceptualise the contemporary urban university as civically engaged and responsive to societal problems. For decades, figures of speech such as town and gown and ivory tower have been used to evoke the relationship between a university and the wider community of which it is a part. The former trope suggests a division between the residents of a given area and the academic community of the university. The latter phrase evokes remote and privileged isolation. In recent years, new terminology has emerged as a response to persistent questions by legislators, the media and the public about the purposes of higher education, including the entrepreneurial university and the university as anchor institution–that is to say, an institution that embraces its rootedness in the local community through various forms of engagement. Yet the role of literature and photography–two entwined modes of representation whose relationship is often central to English studies curricula–in large–scale projects of educational reform and urban redevelopment is rarely broached.