“Transforming Urban Waterfronts – Dreams, Schemes and Unruly Realities” at TALES OF TRANSFORMATION, Chemnitz (5-6 June 2025)

Back in Chemnitz! I’m here to participate in the workshop “TALES OF TRANSFORMATION: WORKSHOP ON POSTSOCIALIST AND POSTCOLONIAL CITIES AS LABORATORIES OF CHANGE” (5 – 6 JUNE 2025), at the Industrial Museum Chemnitz. The event is part of the program of Chemnitz 2025 – European Capital of Culture.

My own keynote was on the subject of “Transforming Urban Waterfronts – Dreams, Schemes and Unruly Realities”, and drew on my research on twenty-first cities on the water.

Thanks to Cecile Sandten and everyone here at Chemnitz for inviting me and for putting the program together! Good to see the participation of students, a.o. through group presentations.

As part of the workshop program, we visited the current exhibition in the Industrial Museum, which was organized around European “Manchesters”, including Manchester, Chemnitz, Gabrovo, Łódź, Mulhouse – and Tampere.

The workshop provided a number of fascinating insights into current discussions regarding industrial heritage, postindustrial urban transformation, and competing visison for future urbanity. One of the most interesting thematic threats is the dialogue between postcolonial and postsocialist approaches to the city – how can perspectives on the postsocialist city be questioned or further developed by juxtaposing these with perspectives on the postcolonial city – and vice versa?

New Publication: “Narrative Approaches for Twenty-first Century Planning” in Critical Planning Futures

Out now: my article “Narrative Approaches for Twenty-first Century Planning”, in Critical Planning Futures: New Directions in Planning Theory, edited by Philip Allmendinger, Mark Tewdwr-Jones, and Matthew Wargent.

The volume Planning Futures from 2002 (edited by Philip Allmendinger and Mark Tewdwr-Jones) is a classic in planning studies, and I’m delighted to be included in this successor volume .

Book description:

“Planning lies at the heart of successful and sustainable places, yet planning scholarship often appears stuck in routinised patterns of thought. Critical Planning Futures brings together an international range of voices from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to explore new directions in planning theory, interrogate planning’s orthodoxy, and push the boundaries of contemporary theory using ideas both from within planning and beyond. Contributors draw on examples from across the globe, considering the applicability of concepts and theories across traditional divides. In this way, Critical Planning Futures continues planning’s rich tradition of borrowing ideas from elsewhere and using those ideas to shine a light back onto well-rehearsed theoretical debates to set out new ways forward for planning in the twenty-first century. This book will be a vital resource for planning specialists, though the breadth of ideas will be of interest to academics and researchers in a wide range of disciplines, including urban studies, geography, political science, and sociology.”

Article abstract:

“This chapter considers planning as rhetorical activity, in which competing voices and storylines come together in ways that transpose narratives into the material urban environment. Drawing on narrative and literary theory, it looks at the implications of a rhetorical understanding of planning for future planning practices, and proposes polyphony and open-ended storytelling as two productive approaches. The chapter examines one longer illustrative case study from recent planning in Antwerp, Belgium.”

Thanks to the editors for inviting me to contribute – thanks in particular Mark Tewdwr-Jones, whose work on narrative in the context of planning has been an interesting point of dialogue for my own work, especially as it developed in my book The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning.

Below, the elegant cover of the 2002 precursor to the present volume:

“Infrastructures of Loss – Infrastructures of Redemption” – at the Lifelines conference, Braunschweig, 23-24 May 2025

In Braunschweig, Germany, for the conference Lifelines: Re-Imagining Infrastructures between Culture and Construction. I have collaborated a number of times with TU Braunschweig, among others in the context of the online course “Vulnerabilities and Resilience: Urban Spaces – Dys/Utopian Spaces” (academic year 2024-25). Wonderful to meet colleagues in person and to hear more about a range of research and art projects dealing with infrastructures.

Thanks to Eckart Voigts and everyone at TU Braunschweig for the invitation and for the excellent organization!

Some of the highlights so far include Oliver Ressler on documenting climate activism and Nora Plesske on cultural spaces of knowledge in the Magdeburg harbor redevelopment. Looking forward today o.a. to Irmtraud Huber’s talk on the relationship between detective fiction and artificial illumination, and Nitin Bathla’s talk on infrastructural ruins.

The site for the conference today (24 May) is the Institute of Architecture Related Art at the TU Braunschweig, located in a 1930s concrete building in the middle of the Querumer Forst. Incredible location to think of and with space, and an inspiring practice to have an on-site conference.

Below, the abstract of my talk “Infrastructures of Loss – Infrastructures of Redemption”

Abstract

“To think of possible futures in contemporary literature is also to consider how alternative infrastructures may be narrated. In my talk, I look at two forms of imagined infrastructures as they take shape in a selection of contemporary future-oriented literature: infrastructures of loss, and infrastructures of redemption. Infrastructures of loss describe forms that are disrupted and transmogrified by crisis, forms that appear as a measure of what has been lost – materially and immaterially – between the moment of publication and the projected future. While these are well-attested in the study of post-apocalyptic fiction, less attention has been paid to infrastructures of redemption: the subtle forms that gesture towards the possibility that new infrastructures (social, moral, and communal) may emerge to redeem the fault-lines of the past. Both are crucial, I argue, for reflecting what is deemed vulnerable or worth preserving in the contemporary moment.”

Some of these thoughts were developed in my article “Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction”, published in Markku Salmela, Lieven Ameel & Jason Finch (eds.): Literatures of Urban Possibility. London: Palgrave, 2021, 45-64.

“Urban Culture in the Twenty-first Century” – A Karoli-Yonsei Graduate Conference – 23 May 2025

Interesting intercontinental collaboration today, when I presented a virtual keynote lecture today at the graduated conference “Urban Culture in the Twenty-first Century”, co-organized by Karoli (Hungary), and Yonsei (South Korea). My talk focused on the genre of the city novel, and developed thoughts that had first been published in my article “The city novel: measuring referential, spatial, linguistic, and temporal distances”.

Thanks to Patkós Gábor and the organizers for inviting me, to the graduate students for brilliant questions and discussion, and to Ágnes Györke for chairing the plenary!

Full reference: Ameel, Lieven. “The city novel: measuring referential, spatial, linguistic, and temporal distances.” In Tally, Robert T. Jr. (ed.): The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space. London: Routledge, 2017, 233-241.

Keynote on the “Narrated City”, Urban Studies Days, May 2025

I was honored (and also a bit intimated) to act as keynote speaker at the Urban Studies Days in Helsinki (15-16 May 2025). The Urban Studies have long been one of my favorite yearly conferences – an inspiring event where urban sociologists, geographers, planners, urban historians, architects, literary scholars (and more) congregate to share new and ongoing work in urban studies.

In my talk, I outlined some of my earlier work that applied concepts from literary and narrative studies to urban planning (e.g. in Narrative in Urban Planning, with Jens Gurr and Barbara Buchenau), and presented new research on literary texts and practices that engage with urban civic communities, from classical tragedy and the Medieval urban encomium to the recent boom in city poets in the Netherlands and Belgium.

(Image: Antwerpen city poets. Source: stadsdichters.be)

(Petrarch as poet laureatus. Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

The other keynote speakers were Henriette Steiner (architecture) and Les Back (sociology).

Some of the interesting topics in the sessions today and yesterday: liminal spaces in the movies of Aki Kaursimäki, urban landscapes in children’s crime novels, multispecies narratives for a co-livable cities, narrative conflicts in planning…

Thanks to the organizers for the invitation and for excellent practical arrangements, thanks to all presenters and participants!

Review of Fuchs: Civic Storytelling

The latest issue of Modernism/Modernity features my review of Florian Fuchs’s book Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature (2023).

Fuchs’s book is wonderfully insightful and it has been an inspiration for me for coming to grips with how literature can be thought of as practice.

From my review:

“In Civic Storytelling, Florian Fuchs examines the gradual emergence of short prose forms around 1800. Fuchs sees the pragmatic role of these short forms as rooted in the ars topica of antiquity, the technique for structuring arguments first identified by Aristotle and defined here as the civic forms and skills available for “arguing dynamically and in brief among citizens” (15). […] The book’s greatest strength is its clear, erudite, and engaging archeology of the ars topica, which Fuchs makes not only accessible but also applicable to contemporary and future literary debates, and the extensive case studies of specific short prose forms that re-emerged in modernity: fable, novella, proverb, fairy tale, epiphany. In these fine-grained studies, the reader gains insight into the genealogy, development, and functioning of these forms, but also into how the emergence of short prose genres collaborated in discussions of what literature is and could be […]”

“Fuchs concludes his study with an invitation to readers to “think through the problem of topical storytelling in our time and to identify undiscovered strands of short narrative forms of fiction to apply topical speech to everyday problems” (249). […] it is one of the achievements of Civic Storytelling that it provides future scholars with a rigorous genealogy of the short form and with a compelling analytical template to dissect how new and emerging short forms can interact with the reader and the world.”

One final thought – Im so glad I have read the book as a physical copy – Zone Books create beautiful books, with great attention to detail and texture.

TURNS Workshop “Civic Cities – Sustainable Cities” in Oodi, Helsinki

Tampere University’s “Urban Research Perspectives” blog published my blogpost on the workshop “Civic Cities – Sustainable Cities” which I organized last November in Helsinki.

Blogpost, link below:

https://blogs.tuni.fi/urbanresearch/event/turns-workshop-civic-cities-sustainable-cities-in-oodi-helsinki

TURNS Workshop “Civic Cities – Sustainable Cities” in Oodi, Helsinki

This workshop funded by TURNS was organized in the Helsinki city library on 22 November with the aim to discuss how the humanities can contribute to more civic and more sustainable cities. The workshop also contributed to the development of an ERC bid on the topic.

TURNS-funding enabled the organization of the workshop “Civic Cities – Sustainable Cities” on 22 November 2024, in Helsinki’s new central city library Oodi. The aim of the workshop was to bring together scholars from different backgrounds and think together about how approaches from the humanities – and from literary studies, in particular – can contribute to our knowledge of how civic interaction takes place in contemporary urban communities, and how literary and narrative forms of dialogue can inform the necessary work to move towards more sustainable cities. The workshop was organized by Lieven Ameel, senior lecturer in comparative literature at Tampere University. The discussions were structured in such a way that they also contributed to his ERC bid, which touched on several of these themes.

Image of Oodi building in Helsinki
Oodi, Helsinki city’s central library. Image by Leonhard Lenz. Wikimedia commons.

The workshop began informally on the previous day, 21 November, with a visit to “Puistokatu 4”. Puistokatu 4 is an inspiring example of a civic “third place”: it is an environment that operates on the level of community of researchers, artists, and more, and also as a convener for everyone “interested in participating in a more ecologically sustainable future”.

On 22 November, we began our workshop with a brief tour of Oodi. The morning session was kicked off with research presentations. Dr. Dominic Davies from City, University of London, presented recent work in the field of the “infrastructure humanities”, and his ongoing collaborations with activists, politicians, and urban communities. These include the recently founded “Thinking Through Infrastructure Network”, as well as collaborations with graphic artists in community engagement, in the context of energy shifts towards more sustainable cities. Dr. Irène Langlet from the University Gustave Eiffel, Paris, presented her work as head of PARVIS an interdisciplinary project that consisted in ‘studying representations of the future city, in order to identify the multifaceted futuristic urban imaginaries, particularly in terms of climate change’, with a research team of ‘a multidisciplinary group of researchers (literature, arts, social sciences, architecture, digital humanities) and civil society actors (NGOs working on climate framing)’. Langlet also introduced her current work on emerging literary genres such as climate fiction, and their relevance for thinking about more sustainable futures.

During lunch, two other participants briefly presented their work: Anna Kuutsa from Tampere University talked about her work (see more here) on literary dialogue and Natalya Bekhta, Academy research fellow at Tampere University, discussed her recent work (see more here) on topics including we-narratives, utopia, and world literature theory.

After lunch and a walk in the vicinity to give the visitors the opportunity to get a sense of the city, the workshop continued with a brainstorm on the basis of the ERC-COG research proposal presented by Lieven Ameel. Central to the discussion were questions around the methods and theory available to literary studies to examine the civic practices of contemporary urban communities towards more sustainable cities. At the background of this focus are several new and emerging research fields, including “literary urban studies”, the “infrastructural humanities”, but also the re-emergence of the “public humanities”, based “at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life” (see more here).

The final part of the workshop considered concrete ways to cement the discussion of the day into concrete collaboration in the years to come.

The day ended with an invigorating sauna at Löyly, on the shore of the Baltic Sea.

Image of the workshop activity.
Workshop in full swing. Image by Lieven Ameel

All in all, a hugely productive day. The schedule was kept light on purpose, with the aim to provide maximum time for open discussions and space for considering new perspectives and unexpected outcomes.

Many thanks to TURNS for making this workshop possible, and to all participants for donating one of the most precious resources in academic life: time!

Lieven Ameel is a senior lecturer in comparative literature at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University. He has published widely on experiences of space, narrative planning, and urban futures. His recent books include The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning (2020), and the Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies (2022). He is one of the editors of the Palgrave Series in Literary Urban Studies.

Tampere University Research Network on Sustainability

“Redeeming the Post-Industrial City?” Hong Kong 5-6 Dec

In Hong Kong to participate in the conference “Urban Mediations” (5-6 Dec). A wonderfully rich conference with colleagues from a range of different backgrounds and disciplines (including literary studies, theatre studies, architecture, urban studies, visual and media studies, ethnomusicology…), in the most stunning urban setting.

I had the honor to give a keynote talk in the opening panel of the conference, with as title: “Redeeming the Post-Industrial City? Literary Perspectives on Cities on the Water”. My talk drew on my recently completed research project about future visions of cities on the water across literary genres, which focused on New York City, Helsinki, and coastal cities in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Summarizing the conclusions of my talk, in brief: contemporary literary representations of future cities on the water constitute an important repository of painful losses (material, communal, social) but also of hopeful and redemptive infrastructure. Redemptive plots provide one complex and overlooked narrative form to think of future cities; such redemptive plots tend to be resonant and empowering, but can also be seen as hiding from sight exclusionary or silencing mechanisms, and as ignoring the impossibility of full restoration or atonement, especially in the context of climate catastrophe, species collapse and rising sea waters.

On the second day of the conference, I will lead a workshop on “Literary and Cultural Approaches to Place-based City Knowledge” (in association with the Association for Literary Urban Studies). Looking forward to the papers and to what promises to be a lively discussion!

Thanks to Klaudia Lee and to all other conference conveners and everyone at City University Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong for putting together this brilliant conference! Thanks also to fellow panelists Nishat Awan and Jasmine Nadua Trice for our inspiring discussion!

And happy to be able the visit at last the landscape on the cover of my edited Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies

More on redemptive plots here ->

Lieven Ameel: “Redemptive Scripts in the City Novel.” In Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma (eds.): City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2023. OA link

Public examination of Tero Tähtinen’s PhD dissertation on the relationship human and nature in classical Chinese poetry


In Tampere to attend the public examination of Tero Tähtinen’s PhD dissertation, entitled “Empty Mountain, Empty Mind. The Relationship between Human and Nature in Classical Chinese Poetry”.

I’ve had the honor to act as one of the two supervisor’s in Tero Tähtinen’s PhD, wonderful to see this fascinating project reach completion.

Anna Hollsten, of the University of Helsinki, will act as opponent, and Sari Kivistö acts as custos.

Link to the PhD (in Finnish) here.

Tampere University press release (in Finnish) here.

Abstract in English:

“My article-based dissertation discusses the relationship between human and nature
in classical Chinese poetry. It focuses especially on the so-called Six dynasties
period (220–589 CE) and the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Chinese landscape
poetry in its present-day sense came into being during the fourth and the fifth
centuries. Metrical shi poetry reached its maturity during the Tang which is widely
known as the golden era of Chinese poetry.
The object of my study is a group of classical Chinese poems which illustrate
the basic principles of Chinese nature philosophy and simultaneously demonstrate
the variety and richness of the Chinese poetic tradition. I pay special attention to
the poetry of Wang Wei, Wei Yingwu and Tao Qian through which different
conceptual dimensions of the Chinese landscape become apparent. Wang is known
particularly for his quatrains depicting the realm of wild nature. Wei wrote poems
in which the landscape emerges out of the imagination while, in his verses, Tao
described the Chinese agrarian milieu and the way of life associated with it.”

Image: Lige Sun

“Rethinking Epiphany – Perspectives from the Fringes” – Tampere 13 September 2024

Wide-ranging set of topics today at Tampere University as part of the symposium “Rethinking Epiphany – Perspectives from the Fringes”, from medieval mysticism and epiphany in Belgo-French rap to epiphany in Kierkegaard. My own talk considered “chain epiphanies” in a miscellaneous set of texts, including Sherlock Holmes, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and the work of Riku Korhonen.

Thanks to my co-organizers Riikka Pirinen and Laura Oulanne for putting this symposium together, and to Narrare and the Fringe Network – Patricia Garcia in particular!

Full program here; keynotes by Päivi Mehtonen and Nigel Fabb.

Conference abstract:

In literature, epiphany is considered as the moment of revelation, illumination, or enlightenment of a fictional character. Epiphany has been associated particularly with modernist literature, and with the foregrounding of powerful moments of heightened significance in the works of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and their contemporaries. This symposium considers the legacy of such “moments of being” (Woolf 1939) and proposes new perspectives to challenge or enrich our understanding of modernist forms of epiphany. It is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of epiphanies, as well as in how perspectives from the fringes add to our understanding of epiphany.

Symposium in collaboration with Fringe Network, University of Alcalá, Narrare research center

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