Urbanity has been a key concept to describe western cities since the beginning of the 20th century. But the importance of urbanity is no longer self-evident in global cities since the pivotal moment of 1980/90, when we witnessed the acceleration of flux, the emergence of megacities and the transformation of capitalism. At the same time, urban heritage became of greater interest. Then, as urbanity weakened, it began to be defended by public policies, local commitments and activists in a new way: as collective memories and palimpsest traces. In this article, I consider two examples in the French city of Saint-Etienne to illustrate the heritagization of urbanity: an exhibition about the memory of Algerian miners, and the dramatic demolition of a high-rise building that created a great stir because of its local symbolic significance. These two examples show that urbanity keeps a great place in the imaginary of urban dwellers, including the elites. From a general point of view, we try to preserve the values that we attach to cities, perhaps more than trying to preserve the cities themselves.

This article situates psychoanalysis, urbanity, and precarity apropos of the material, affective, and memory economy of the mutable metropolis marked by visuality, velocity, and violence. Responding to Ankhi Mukherjee’s Unseen City: The Psychic Lives of the Urban Poor, the article examines the interplay of visibility and invisibility in a metropolis and how that is in close and complex correspondence to the politics of precarity and privilege. Drawing on historical as well as recent research in psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive theory, and cultural studies across various geopolitical settings, this article, through a response to and reading of Mukherjee’s book, aims to articulate and illustrate the unique relevance of literature and aesthetic education in a study of mental health conditions in the (un)seen city. It argues that such psychic and social situations may be uniquely encoded and addressed with ethics and empathy through the cognitive interiority and symbolic instrumentality afforded by the affective and liminal framework of aesthetic activity and fiction.

This paper asks a methodological question: In what way can petitions written in the colonial period introduce us to the persona of the writers – that is, as against mainstream interpretation given to them as mere archival sources? Doesn’t the very nature of the petitions introduce us to the selfhood of those “caught up” in the often-mentioned “sophisticated” concepts of nationalism, politics, power, imperialism, urbanity, and colonialism? What, and how, do petitions tell us about the “interior version” of colonial society as seen in the individual? In an attempt at a deeper understanding of colonial Lagos, this paper examines an alternative feature of petitions as entry into the selfhood of colonial subjects rather than mainstream interpretations of the documents as qualitative exposition to “grand” historical phenomena. Selfhood as examined here is presented as it was constructed by petitions written in Lagos between 1940 and 1960 with a particular focus on three. Their deficiencies in “standards of grammar” notwithstanding, the words are also examined to allow for a demonstration of their qualities as texts: their meanings in singular and collaborative contexts, the gaps they exposed, the information they concealed, the disconnections in chronology they indicated, the “ethics” of grammar they “relegated” for more “substantial expose” of the self, the information they privileged the reader to hear, the identity they formed in the personas they constructed and the voice they generated. This paper suggests that these strands analyzed together affirm the textuality of petitions written by everyday people in colonial Lagos and that these point to the potentiality of such documents to further contribute to the substantial comprehension of the inner qualities of self-identity in Lagos and Nigeria’s colonial history.

Urban archaeology in Scandinavia has long been dominated by a processual understanding of medieval urban development. The author proposes that the concept of urbanity in the sense of ‘urban living’ should replace the processual and functionalist-oriented concept of ‘urbanization’, and that instead focus should be directed towards social processes, practices and materiality. He perceives the emergence of urbanity in the Middle Ages in the light of the formation of specific urban patterns of practice that can be analysed with the aid of theoretical tools from recent social-practice theory. Against this background, the potential of recent social-practice theory is examined as a possible analytical tool in an urban archaeological approach to medieval urban communities. Through concepts such as interaction, event, leakage and creativity, the medieval urban landscape can be reformulated as a dynamic social space in which diverse everyday routines were intertwined in patterns, bundles and complexes.