Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo

Dr Miriam Paeslack is Assistant Professor of Arts Managerment at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, NY, USA.

• Contents: Preface; Prologue, Andreas Huyssen; Introduction: ineffably urban, Miriam Paeslack; Part I After-Urban: The world according to rubble, Jeff Byles; The Fargo house, Dennis Maher; American pyromania, Jean-Michel Reed; Peripheral spaces, Julian Montague; Excavations: Last House, Carl Lee. Part II Retro-Urban: Imagining the managed city: representing Buffalo in transformation, 1804-1929, Peter Bacon Hales; Portraits of the ineffable city: Milton Rogovin’s serial photography, Michael Frisch and Miriam Paeslack; The grain of the image, Hadas A. Steiner; Thoughts on A, Gregory Halpern. Part III Future-Urban: Buffalo: a place in search of a brand, Mimi Zeiger; Nature resurged: Buffalo’s new pastoral, Aaron Bartley; Urban decodings from the inside out, Dorothea Braemer; The Tough stuff from the Buff film and video tour, Julie Perini and David Gracon; Mapping refugee urbanism. Visual languages of sensing, play and immigration policy, Jordan Geiger; Afterword, Mark Goldman; Index.

’Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo, challenges and complicates the usual imagery and discourse surrounding today’s shrinking cities. Here artists, designers, and activists as well as academics probe what remains unexpressed about Buffalo. Excavating the many lives and places nested within the city’s past and present, this collection imagines another kind of urbanity, at once complex yet sustainable, for the future.’ Mary N. Woods, Cornell University, USA ’A touching homage to the decaying grand metropolis on Lake Erie, this book’s stories, case studies and historic accounts could similarly be told about other American cities. Besides the devastating effects of industrial restructuring in the 20th Century, the much older American ambivalence towards the urban still casts its shadow. There are heart wrenching dramas of decay and loss and also - again and again - inspiring stories of new urban initiatives and creative beginnings, of works of art inspired by local space and territory.’ Dietrich Neumann, Brown University, USA '... Ineffably Urban: Imagining Buffalo, an extraordinary collection of essays on the city by 14 artists and thinkers ... These are all easy stories to tell and to repeat, and each one contains some grain of truth. Imagining Buffalo includes bits and pieces of each one. But its great and enduring value is in its inclusion of more nuanced reactions to those simple stories, each one beautifully flawed in its own way, and its insistence on encouraging readers to think in more critical and complex ways about this critical and complex place.' The Buffalo News