Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware and Building Stories

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Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware andBuilding StoriesJason Dittmera

a Department of Geography, University College London, Pearson Building,Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK,Published online: 22 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Jason Dittmer (2014) Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware and Building Stories,Social & Cultural Geography, 15:5, 477-503, DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2014.908235

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The 2013 Social & Cultural Geography plenarylecture

Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware andBuilding Stories

Jason DittmerDepartment of Geography, University College London, Pearson Building, Gower Street,

London WC1E 6BT, UK, [email protected]

This article takes up the recent interest in assemblage theory in urban geography andconsiders the potential for art to contribute to our narrations of urban assemblages. Inparticular, it uses Chris Ware’s recent magnum opus, Building Stories, as not only anaccount of the urban as an assemblage, but to indicate more broadly the way in whichcomics might be used to narrate urban assemblages in ways that highlight theirmultiplicity and plurivocality. The article draws out three themes in its analysis ofBuilding Stories: more-than-human subjects, the various temporalities of the city, and theway memory and narrative are emergent from urban assemblages.

Key words: comics, graphic narrative, assemblage theory, memory, the city, dwelling.

Introduction

Howdowenarrate the city?Howdoweprovide

order to the flux and flow of the urban, giving

some sense of its life and vitality, unfolding at a

range of scales and temporalities? Questions

such as these have preoccupied social scientists

for some time, in some cases manifesting as

questions of research method and presentation

of findings (e.g., Latham 2003). Another

approach taken to the question has emphasized

specific media, especially cinema, and its

relation to the city (e.g., Clarke 1997; Farish

2005; Secor 2013; Shiel and Fitzmaurice 2011).

It is from this latter tradition that this article

derives inspiration, while hoping to work back

to the first set of concerns in its conclusion.

Rather than thinking about cinema and the city,

this article takes up the relation between comics

and the city, with a particular emphasis on the

work of Chris Ware (Ahrens and Meteling

2010b; Doel and Clarke 2010). This article

makes a contribution to the literature by

connecting with recent work on urban assem-

blages and offering comics as amedium through

which these can be narrated in ways that

enabling new potentials in us and in the city.

One of the contributions of assemblage

thinking to the study of urbanism has been to

highlight the city’s relationality, its flux, and its

Social & Cultural Geography, 2014Vol. 15, No. 5, 477–503, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.908235

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mailto:[email protected]

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.908235

movement. It is for this reason that I write here

about narrative rather than representation.

I consider narrative to require a temporal

dimension, whereas representation can be (but

of course need not be) static and enclosed.

Assemblage thinking instead points us toward a

range of intersecting temporalities, as well as the

open multiplicity of urbanisms inherent to the

city.While assemblages existwhetherwenarrate

them or not, the narratives we create impact the

assemblage because humans are reflexive

elements in urban assemblages. Narrating

urbanism-as-assemblage is a challenge because

most urbannarratives adopt theperspective, and

temporalities, associated with one or a limited

number of human protagonists, and they also

tend to be linear in form. While there is

something of the straw man in this argument,

it is nevertheless true that most narratives of the

city tend to dwell in topographical rather than

topological space. That is to say, they unfold in a

stable system, with human agency (of one form

or another) dominating events (but see Secor

2013, who analyzes films that are topological

but nonetheless center on a few human

protagonists). These processes of mediation

impact urban assemblages, inasmuch as they

reinforce notions of urbanism as static and

anthropocentric and thereby occlude the

ongoing becoming of the city. By foreclosing

these possibilities, these narratives mask the

fragility of current orderings such as neoliberal

capitalism, or the climate system. What is

needed then are new narratives of urbanism

that express the dynamism of the city, with

agency distributedamongst a variety of elements

and unfolding in a range of temporalities. These

narratives can act back upon our own embodied

sensibilities, enabling us to see the city anew.

Chris Ware (1967–) is an American comics

artist living in Chicago. He is generally

regarded as one of the best comics artists of

his generation and he has a collection of awards

to prove it, from the Guardian First Book

Award (for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid

on Earth) to 15 Eisner Awards (the comics

industry awards) for everything from excel-

lence in comics production to BestWriter/Artist

(for Acme Novelty Library). He is widely

appreciated outside the field of comics as well;

for instance he was the first comics artist ever

invited to participate in the Whitney Museum

of American Art’s biennale. A summary of his

work is of course a hazardous enterprise,

bound to irritate aficionados and fail to

communicate his oeuvre to newcomers. Never-

theless, I venture a brief description. Ware

deploys bright colors and geometric lines (some

of his comics resemble nothing so much as

diagrams) to evoke a nostalgic modernity,

which Ware contrasts ironically with the

narratives he weaves from these colors and

shapes, which tend to focus on alienation and

disappointment. He is particularly well known

for his experimentation with the form of

comics themselves, a point that will be

demonstrated later in this article. In 2012,

Ware released Building Stories, a collection of

already-published comics and new material

sold not as a volume but as a box of comics

printed in various formats, which is the subject

of this article’s analysis. The title Building

Stories speaks to my interest in the narration of

the urban; it signifies doubleness, being both a

story about buildings and a work that calls

attention to the effort that goes into the

production of narrative.

This article proceeds first through a review

of the literature. This review begins with a

discussion of individual works of art as

assemblages, using the example of Cornell

boxes to introduce the concept of assemblage

to readers for whom it is unfamiliar and

offering a way to consider art both through

their semiotics and in their materiality. This

sets up the larger claim of this article that

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comics can impact their readers via entering

into assemblage with them. The review then

draws on the ideas of Walter Benjamin to

show how the specific medium of comics co-

developed with assemblages of urban moder-

nity in ways that enable comics to effectively

produce new narrative relations within the

urban. The final portion of the review

considers the literature on urban assemblages

and dwelling, setting up this article’s analysis

of Building Stories, which consumes the

second half of the article with a threefold

focus on its more-than-human subjects, its

various temporalities, and the way it sees

memory and narrative as emergent from urban

assemblages. While some might see this

analysis as an artistic demonstration of how

urban assemblages might unfold (and this is a

fine outcome), my intention is to highlight the

ability of the comics form to inculcate new

sensitivities toward dwelling in assemblage

among readers. Indeed, in the conclusion,

I argue that Building Stories provides not only

an account of the urban as an assemblage, but

also indicates more broadly the way in which

comics might be used to narrate urban

assemblages in ways that highlight their

multiplicity and plurivocality.

Comics and the city

Art and assemblage

Joseph Cornell’s boxes were an idiosyncratic

part of themid-twentieth century American art

scene. Often described as part of the Surrealist

movement, he nevertheless worked with a

medium unconnected to Surrealism—the Vic-

torian shadow box. Shadow boxes ‘were

popular during the Victorian era for displaying

small paintings, sculptural vignettes,

ship models, ladies’ handiwork, and memen-

toes’ (Hartigan 2007: 59). Most of the boxes

that Cornell used were partitioned within to

create boxes within boxes. By juxtaposing a

range of objects found withinManhattan’s flea

markets and thrift stores in these boxes,

Cornell recycled ephemera in ways that both

invoked nostalgia (one of the dominant modes

through which his work has been understood)

and whimsy (see also Anderson and Larson

2013). These objects were often designed as

gifts, either for specific people (Cornell often

gave them to ballerinas orHollywood actresses

that caught his attention) or just as ‘tokens of

affection’ for people to whom Cornell wrote

letters or whom he encountered in his day-to-

day life (Tashjian 1992).

Cornell’s boxes have been lumped into the

larger artistic category of ‘assemblage’ art, in

which found materials are variously re-used

and montaged into either two-dimensional

collages or three-dimensional ‘objects’ (as

Cornell himself referred to his works). It

would be easy to make a facile link between

the usage of this term in visual art and its use in

social theory, where it refers to a diverse body

of theory broadly derived from the work of

Deleuze and Guattari (2001). In this work,

assemblages are understood as heterogeneous

collections of objects, discourses, and bodies

that are brought into relation with one

another; in this the two types of assemblage

are similar. However, according to DeLanda

(2006: 10), assemblages are additionally

‘wholes characterized by relations of exter-

iority.’ This means that elements are not

reducible to their function within an assem-

blage; rather, they are enmeshed in multiple

assemblages at any time and are both affected

by and affecting all in which they participate.

Therefore, I do not wish to collapse these

terms; rather, I wish to point to the ways in

which Cornell’s boxes are also an assemblage

in the social theory sense, in order to sketch a

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relationship between art and assemblage that

will be productive through this article.

A Cornell box is an assemblage in that it is a

range of heterogeneous objects juxtaposed in

generative ways; however, that is of course not

all. The material design of a Cornell box is

shaped by a wider set of relations in which the

Cornell box is already enmeshed even prior to

its creation. That is, Cornell created many of

his boxes with someone in mind, especially

someone that he wanted to meet.

Cornell himself was very sensitive to the

implications of giving gifts. First and foremost, he

viewed gifts as a way of connecting with other

people. This social transaction was fraught with

significance for the meaning of his work. Beyond

rational exchange, Cornell sensed that a gift had the

power to join donor and recipient together in

mutual desire. By making gifts of his work, he was

presenting a part of himself, as his time, effort, and

care were integral to the assemblage passed into the

hands of his recipients. His pleasures in the making

were reiterated by a recipient’s tactile manipulation

of a box’s contents. (Tashjian 1992: 18)

In short, each ‘object’ was speculative—it

imagined another yet-to-be-created assem-

blage (the relation between Cornell and the

recipient) and was assembled in a way that

might enable that potential to come into being,

if only for a short time. Avirtual future shaped

the material production of the object, which

was itself a time-intensive part of performing

that virtual relationship into actuality. The

past obviously loomed large as well in these

objects, with bric-a-brac designed with one

purpose being given another. Similarly, the

objects brought Cornell and his recipients into

relation across space. He was known to use

distancing techniques such as posting his gift,

or using an intermediary to deliver it. By

entering into assemblage with one of Cornell’s

boxes, the recipient was changed—time and

space were folded upon themselves to produce

new topological spaces and the capacities to

perceive them. Therefore, the assemblage of a

Cornell box is the crux of temporal and spatial

relations that go well beyond the box itself.

The box is both a performance and something

to enable new potentials and performances.

Of course, many forms of art might be

considered through the lens of assemblage.

I raise Cornell and his boxes specifically

because Chris Ware himself cited them as an

inspiration for Building Stories in that he

hoped to create ‘affection’ between himself

and the reader, launching new lines of flight:

I think anybody who sees Joseph Cornell’s artwork

is immediately inspired in some way towards

making art. He inspires instant affection in the

viewer and I wanted hopefully to impart some small

shred of that. And there’s something about the

vulnerability of a box of things and the promise

contained in it which seems a little less masculine

than a solid tome. (quoted in Jamieson 2012: n.p.)

Beyond that, of course, Building Stories can

be understood as—like much of Cornell’s

work—boxes subdivided into boxes. Building

Stories is a box filled with comics, and of

course a comic is a fragmentation of the space

of the page into framed panels, or put

colloquially—boxes. And it could be argued

that the visual sensibility which brings such

boxes into montage is one that emerges from a

specifically urban milieu.

At the risk of over-discussing Cornell in an

article that is primarily about Ware, it is

perhaps a fruitful starting place to discuss the

interrelation between the material form of

Cornell boxes and the urban. Hartigan notes

that Cornell, while working in the Manhattan

garment industry in the 1920s, would have

been surrounded by the first skyscrapers, with

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their towering banks of windows in a grid-like

structure that mimics a Cornell box (or a

comic). Further,

Riding the elevated trains, especially the Third and

Sixth Avenue lines, provided a very different

experience. Since the last quarter of the nineteenth

century, the elevated trains that serviced

Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx clattered

and screeched past buildings that closely flanked the

tracks. Passengers had bird’s eye views of the streets

below and eye-level glimpses of people living and

working in the upper stories. (Hartigan 2007,

pp. 31–32)

These competing visualities—the panoptic

and the glimpse into the domestic—were

central to the development of Cornell’s artistic

sensibility. ‘Cornell’s wellspring of curiosity

and empathy for “city-dwellers” emerged

while he rode the trains, as did his storehouse

of images [ . . . ]’ (Hartigan 2007: 32).

Similarly, comics have their origins in the

early twentieth-century metropolis. While

cartoons emerged in late nineteenth-century

magazines such as Punch and Life, comic

strips such as Hogan’s Alley, The Katzenjam-

mer Kids, and Krazy Kat found their place in

turn-of-the-century New York newspapers

such as the New York Herald. ‘Common to

all these comic strips is that the characters are

influenced by the incredible speed of life in

the New York City metropolis and that speed

determines the rhythm of the city’s newspapers

and comic strips,’ (Ahrens and Meteling

2010a, p. 4). Comic books—that is, comics

not published in newspapers—emerge in the

North American context from the urban

assemblage via a unique confluence of

temporalities and spatial flows. First, the

daily publication of comic strips in news-

papers very quickly built up an immense

backlog of material. Second, the rise of

Prohibition in the United States produced an

intense black market for alcoholic beverages in

New York and other urban areas. Smugglers

needing to import something bulky and

cheap in which they could hide illicit booze

from Canada soon fell upon pulp paper, the

low quality leftovers from paper processing

north of the border. With every shipment of

hooch bringing in a boatload of pulp,

smugglers looking to extend their licit activi-

ties (and in doing so provide a viable cover for

all these imports) soon started re-publishing

older comic strips (Jones 2004). When these

proved popular, they soon started seeking new

material. Still, the confluence of flows might

have dissipated with the end of Prohibition

had successes such as Superman not territor-

ialized the comic book assemblage for the near

future.

Given that these early comics creators had

all been born and raised in New York, it is

perhaps unsurprising that the city loomed

large, if tacitly, in early comics.

Aspects of New York appear in Will Eisner’s

stylized Central City in The Spirit, in Batman’s

Gotham City wrapped around letters and right

angles, in ScroogeMcDuck’s Duckberg, dotted with

oversized typewriters and billboards, in Flash’s

Central City, Green Lantern’s Coast City, and

Superman’s Metropolis; indeed as has been

attributed to everyone from Frank Miller to John

Byrne, Metropolis is often referred to as New York

by day and Gotham City as New York by night.

(Bainbridge 2010: 163)

The city of modernity was a valuable space

for superhero narrative, as it both introduced a

vertical element to human settlement that was

particularly valuable for the visual medium

(can you imagine how Spider-man would look

battling crime in exurban shopping centers?)

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introducing a density of inhabitants vulnerable

to villainy (Bukatman 2003). Thus, comic

books both emerge from a specific urban

assemblage and then immediately become part

of that assemblage as circulating images of

danger and vigilante justice.

Art does not subsist in another dimension (least of

all a “higher” dimension), awaiting its deployment

within urban space, perhaps for ethicopolitical

effect. Rather than being held in reserve, art is

always already at work and at play in and as cities.

(Doel and Clarke 2010: n.p.)

Comics become yet another circulation of

the city, remaking both the city and the spatial

and temporal sensibilities of those who read

them.

Narrating the urban

The modern city is, as DeLanda (2000) notes,

the mineralized exoskeleton of human activi-

ties (see also Edensor 2011). Like fossils,

another kind of material residue of the past,

cities are archives of the way things used to be.

the city is not only a place where people convene to

live and trade, but also a place which commemorates

a more or less glorified past. Temples, palaces,

archives, and museums are all thoroughly urban

institutions, and they are all considered storage

houses of former times. Architecture deals not only

with the ordering of space, but also with the

preservation of time [.] (Quiring 2010: 199)

The history thus composed is by and large

the history of the dominant and powerful.

Liberating the hidden histories of the city was

a fundamental aim of Walter Benjamin, for

example in his Arcades Project (Benjamin

1999). As Enns (2010) notes, there is a

fundamental connection between Benjamin’s

project of liberating hidden pasts and his claim

that writers need to ‘transcend [ . . . ] the

barrier between writing and image’ (Benjamin

1978: 230). His hope for the image to be

injected alongside the written word was a

desire to excise elements of urban assem-

blages—fragmenting the whole in favor of a

single piece. Benjamin is here calling for

individual elements of urban assemblages—

people, buildings, and intersections—to be

highlighted in hopes of dislodging them

from the hegemonic narratives produced by

historians.

Instead of isolating these historical events and

arranging them in a coherent narrative sequence, in

other words, materialist historiography reaffirms

the possibility that every historical event retains its

own immanent past and future, and its goal is not to

provide an account of the past but rather to rekindle

a sense of hope. (Enns 2010: 47)

Understood through the lens of assemblage,

elements of the urban can be incorporated into

new assemblages (such as historical narratives)

that then act back upon the dominant history.

The notion of assemblages as constantly

becoming embeds exactly this sense of

dynamism within. The point is not specifically

to create a revisionist history, but rather to

bring elements of the urban archive into the

present to create new lines of flight and new

potentialities.

Comics too can be considered an archive

(Venezia 2010), with images in a sequence that

commemorates the author’s intended narrative

(McCloud 1993). That notion of sequence,

however, is inherently problematic for comics

(Doel 2014). As I have argued elsewhere,

comics should be understood as a topological

space in which panels are woven together with

relations of various intensities by the practices

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of readers, withmeaning and affect as emergent

outcomes. The material elements of the comic

are mineralizations of artist’s efforts, which

enter into assemblage with audiences who

attempt to make sense of that archive (see

Zebracki 2012). Any particular sequencing is

contingent, no matter how well signaled by the

artist. It is this potential that makes comics such

a compelling medium for Benjamin’s task. Not

only do they combine text and image as he

desired (see Gallacher 2011), but ‘[t]he static

grid-like structure of the comic form thus

allows for alternative ways of apprehending

time, which potentially subverts the very notion

of narrative succession,’ (Enns 2010: 46).

The work of Chris Ware is particularly

relevant to this Benjaminian project. First, he

is one of the most formally innovative comics

artists of his time. Note, for instance, how

Ware weaves together a linear notion of time

with a more topological, three-dimensional

notion of space-time in the following:

In comics you can make the strip come alive by

reading it, by experiencing it beat by beat as you

would playing music. So that’s one way to

aesthetically experience comics. Another way to is

to pull back and consider the composition all at

once, as you would the facade of a building. You

can look at a comic as you would look at a structure

that you could turn around in your mind and see all

sides of at once. (quoted in Raeburn 2004: 25)

Second, as hinted at by his chosen simile in

this quote, his work—even prior to Building

Stories—is highly attuned to the urban archive

(on setting and literary geography, see Hones

2011). For instance, in Jimmy Corrigan Ware

charts three generations of the Corrigan

family, but does so with frequent reference to

the city of Chicago (particularly the 1893

Columbian Exhibition, which was part-

designed by Frederick Law Olmstead) and

the specific built spaces in which the Corrigans

live (some of which even interrupt the

narrative with a cut-out-and-fold model; see

Bredehoft 2006). By visually interweaving the

story of the early Jimmy Corrigan with the

later Jimmy Corrigan (his grandson)—both in

the city of Chicago—‘Ware’s portrayal of a

city qua multiplicity discloses something

about the nature of the pictorial language it

deploys, and about the nature of language per

se,’ (Doel and Clarke 2010: n.p.; see Figure 1).

Comics, dwelling, and assemblage

I have used the term ‘urban assemblages’

throughout this review with very little

qualification, excepting a passing reference to

DeLanda’s notion of cities as the mineraliz-

ation of urban practices. I have generally

argued for a parallel between cities and comics

which is the result of historical co-evolution

in the early twentieth century but which is

contemporarily relevant because both can be

understood as media/archives with the poten-

tial to be read transversally (Manovich 1999).

As McFarlane (2011b, pp. 23–24) puts it

regarding urban assemblages,

I am [ . . . ] thinking of assemblage as broadly

political—as a way of thinking about not just how

learning is produced, but how cities might be learnt

differently, i.e., assemblage as a means of continually

thinking the play between the actual and the possible.

McFarlane’s aims might therefore be seen as

broadly congruent with Benjamin’s project to

re-narrate the urban, as sketched out earlier.

As McFarlane notes elsewhere (2011a),

there are some overlaps between the notion

of urban assemblages and the concept of

‘dwelling’. Dwelling occurs as humans become

enmeshed over time in assemblages of place.


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The concept serves to draw attention to

the urban practices of humans without

abandoning the more-than-human ethos of

assemblage:

[W]hile there is in the concept of dwelling, even

despite its transhuman framing, a tendency to

return to the centrality of the individual,

assemblage more closely orientates attention

towards agentic distributions. It is not that

assemblage necessarily decentres the human, but

that it necessarily draws attention to the

constitutive human-nonhuman multiplicity of

relations. At the same time, however, dwelling

brings to assemblage a means for thinking through

how assemblage actually takes place: i.e., the

processual everyday practicalities of dwelling

highlight the very acts of assembling themselves.

(McFarlane 2011a, p. 651)

While I might dispute the notion that

‘assembling’ in its broadest sense requires

humans, by interpreting this statement within

McFarlane’s larger interest in cities it becomes

possible to think about dwelling as a key lens

through which to interpret Building Stories.

Indeed, McFarlane’s (2011a, p. 667) sum-

mary of dwelling as ‘an education of attention,

an attunement of perception to what urban-

ism—in conditions of often extreme inequality

of different sorts—might enable and delimit

and to how people might negotiate it,’

resonates with Ware’s stated aim, which is

similarly about producing new sensibilities

that are less cinematic (this quote of Ware, and

the next, are from Jamieson 2012: n.p.):

I think early on I decided rightly or wrongly that

comics sort of froze up as an artistic medium

Figure 1 An example ofWare’s portrayal of urban space-time asmultiplicity from JimmyCorrigan.

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approximately with the advent of sound motion

pictures in 1930s and 1940s. [ . . . ] There are other

ways of getting at a sense of reality that had more to

do with comics than the idea of a camera. Because

comics are an inwardly turned thing. It’s really a

way of getting your memories out on the page. It’s

almost a way of making dreams real.

Ware here makes the case for difference, and

consequently for a set of potentials unique to

comics. While I think that comics and cinema

are too often framed in opposition to one

another (a legacy of some scholars’ anxiety over

the marginal position of comics studies in the

academy and a desire to generate status from

the comparison), I argue here in parallel to

Ware that the historical development of comics

as an industry and a visual language, with its

topological form and fusion of text and image,

resonates with urban assemblages in a way that

bears fruit for those attempting to narrate

urban assemblages. Indeed, Ware’s nostalgia,

often noted in reviews of his work, is not a

desire to go back to a previous world, but to

bring aspects of it—embodied sensibilities that

heighten our attentiveness to the intersection of

temporalities and forces—here into the present.

I think people 100 years ago saw the world better

than we see the world. We’re so used to not really

looking at anything any more. We get out of the

way of things heading towards us but that’s really

about all we do. We look but we don’t see. I think

100 years ago people saw the texture of life that

muchmore finely. You look at newspapers from 100

years ago, and the type is so small it’s almost

unreadable to our eyes.

Ware’s concern, as we will see, is to ‘educate

our attention’ to the human–nonhuman

interactions that are continually unfolding all

around us in the processes of dwelling, as well

as the various competing temporalities of

urban life and the way that they intersect in the

unfolding of the present. It is to his work that

I now turn.

Building Stories . . .

It is worthwhile to spend a moment discussing

the material form of Building Stories, which

does not resemble a conventional comic book.

Rather, it arrives as a large box which, when

opened, is revealed as full of a range of comics

in various formats (Figure 2). Some are fairly

traditionally sized comic books with three

staples in the spine, while others are small

folded booklets shaped as if for a comic

strip. Two are bound books—one distinctly

made to look like a child’s ‘Little Golden Book’,

the other like a prestige-hardcover book. One

comic is printed onto the folded surface of what

could be a board game. Several are printed in

broadsheet format, including one in the actual

style of a newspaper. In truth, these individual

elements (there are 14 parts to Building Stories

in total) are difficult to generalize about as

they are all quite distinct. Crucially, these 14

elements are not numbered; upon opening the

box the reader is confronted with no obvious

starting point. In keeping with the topological

basis of comics, Ware has produced a narrative

space with many possible points of entry and

consequently, each reader’s engagement with

Building Stories is a distinct event that brings

into being a new assemblage (Hones 2008).

Building Stories is best understood as a

dense topology of overlapping narratives.

Events primarily unfold in and around two

buildings; when the narratives take place

elsewhere they remain linked to those build-

ings by focusing on the urban routines of their

inhabitants. One building is in Humboldt

Park, Chicago, and has been subdivided into

three apartments, occupied by a young single


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woman, an unhappy couple, and an old

woman (the owner of the building). The

other building is in a suburban location (Oak

Park), and is inhabited by the young woman

from the first building (now married, and

eventually a mother). Of course, as might be

gathered from the early discussion of the

narrative’s form, the rhizomatic density of the

narrative exceeds any such quick description.

Further, as shall be seen later, the narratives

cannot be completely reconciled with one

another into a coherent whole.

. . . and the stories of buildings and othermore-than-human sites

Ware’s affection for old buildings is well

documented (Worden 2010). A moment of

seeming whimsy in Building Stories—and one

which sets up the double entendre of the title—

is when the building is itself revealed as a

character, one that remembers its past and is

aware of its tenants (Figure 3). This moment of

emergent subjectivity is temporary but serves

to frame the narratives unfolding at the scale

of the building; readers are made aware of the

way that tenants and people on the street

nearby contribute to the liveliness of the

building without being reduced to its parts (on

walking and urban assemblages, see Middle-

ton 2010). Godbey (2010, p. 121) notes that

‘Ware’s personification of the building suggests

that he is just as interested in its life as he is in

the actions of his characters.’ By locating ‘the

cut’ around the building itself (Doel and

Clarke 2007), and thereby locating it as the

scale at which narrative will emerge (at least

for a time), Ware manages to decenter the

individuals living within, literally filling the

page with the building. Indeed, the parallels

between the building and the spatial structure

of a comic are manifest:

[T]he building, until it is finally demolished, remains

through the generations, a fixed point on a city block

Figure 2 Building Stories, arrayed.

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that is transformed around it. Reinforcing this sense

of the building as a fixed, more permanent structure

are the many isometric representations that populate

Building Stories. Frequently depicting the building as

a cross section, rendering interior space as a series of

isometric schematics, Ware highlights how, on a daily

basis, the characters play out their lives in spaces that

order and provide structure, in direct opposition to

the messiness outside. (Godbey 2012: n.p.)

Crucially, the structure of the building is

not absolute partition, but like comics panels

the apartments/rooms must be understood as

shot through with interconnections, whether

actual (encounters between tenants, sounds

passing through walls) or virtual (dreams of

one tenant about another). These intercon-

nections are not uniform, but are of varying

intensity (Figure 4); for instance, there are a

relatively large number of connections

between the unhappy couple and the young

single woman, while the old lady—who in

fact owns the building—remains less

connected.

Figure 3 Ware portrays the urban from the perspective of a building/subject.


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Figure

4(a)Interconnectionsand

(b)divisionsbetween

buildingresidents,highlightingthevariable

intensities

composing

topologicalspace.

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Making the building the relevant unit of

narrative is not only accomplished by literally

ensconcing the house in a page (with its

interior walls delineating panels), but also by

making one day in the house (23 September

2000) the subject of a comic (the aforemen-

tioned Little Golden Book). With each page

representing the events in one apartment or

the other in a given hour, and with narration

by the building itself, the Little Golden Book

highlights the building as an indwelt site, with

the common inhabitation affecting the lives of

the occupants and producing the totality. One

telling image highlights the interchangeable

nature of the tenants themselves—the house

prefers some tenants over others, but necess-

arily has to take the long view (Figure 5).

However, the building should not be under-

stood as the meta-frame of the entire story.

Indeed when the young single woman (she is

never named) moves out to Oak Park, the

scope of the narrative widens to enfold the

wider city, showing how not only individuals/

families circulate and become part of new

building-assemblages but how those buildings

are themselves enmeshed and constitutive of

wider forces and circulations.

Ware’s concern with the more-than-human is

not limited to the indwelling of buildings by

humans. Rather, a parallel story to those of the

human inhabitants in Building Stories is that of

Branford the Bee, who is both the protagonist of

a children’s book read by the main protagonist’s

eventual daughter and an actual beewho lives in

Humboldt Park and whose life (tragically)

intersects with the inhabitants of the building

over the span of two comics within Building

Stories. His understanding of the urban is

limited by his tiny bee-brains. Bee cosmology

links round colorful shapes into various aspects

of God—the flowers that provide nourishment

are the ‘eyes of God’, meant to be kissed and

licked (pollinated) while the sun is the ‘eye that

none may lick’. Glass windows are ‘hard air’

that prevent Branford from reaching the eyes of

God. Nevertheless, Branford is part of the urban

ecosystem, pollinating flowers and bringing

sustenance home to his family, and his narrative

is interwoven with that of the other human

characters in the city, although they are

indistinct to his bee-eyes (‘giant pink land

whales’) and they are equally unaware of him.

In many ways, his lack of understanding of the

urban is the best example of urban assemblage

in Building Stories as his agency—without

‘urban’ intentions—nevertheless co-produces

the city. It is perhaps noteworthy that the

unnamed protagonist works, as a young

woman, in a neighborhood flower shop—her

livelihood indirectly linked to the everyday lives

of Branford and his ilk. Just as the urban

narrative can be reframed at the scale of the

building rather than the individual, it can be cast

‘below’ the scale of the individual (human), into

the worlds of urban fauna, always unfolding

alongside the ‘traditional’ human narratives

that are commonly told (Philo 1995).

Ware’s anthropomorphism of Branford the

Bee might be understood as an erasure of

difference, the casting of non-human life into

the category of ‘strange persons’ rather than a

reflection of its proper beastliness (Whatmore

and Thorne 1998). Of course, Ware’s decision

to provide Branford with language, a range of

human social situations, and other trappings

of human subjecthood is not meant to be a

representation of actual bees; it is the

cooptation of the ‘funny animal’ genre of

comics toWare’s own narrative purposes. Still,

in various ways Ware foregrounds the evol-

utionary differences that shape Branford’s

experience of the urban in ways distinct from

that of its human inhabitants. For instance, in

one ‘note of scientific explanation’ by the

narrator, it is noted that ‘while the male bee’s

eyes, brain and antennae are especially


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designed for locating, perusing, and finally

mating with a queen, they are not necessarily

well-adapted to navigating great distances or

remembering important facts.’ Johnston

(2008: 643) notes that dwelling, in the sense

of practical performances in and of place, is

something that is available to both animals

and humans: ‘It is through these practical,

situational understandings that [Tim] Ingold

argues we might gesture toward the power of

an intuitive, sentient ecology, one which is

open to the understandings which come from

Figure 5 Temporality of the Humboldt Park building, with humans as interchangeable.

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direct experience within relational environ-

ments.’ Emphasizing the parallel ways in

which humans and non-humans dwell in

place is therefore an ethical stance toward

the animal other; Ware builds on this common

instinctive phenomenology of place, in that he

appears to be juxtaposing Branford’s repeti-

tive release from crippling doubt via immer-

sion in everyday practices (pollination, home

making, etc.) with a similar pattern in the life

of the unnamed young female protagonist

(which, to be clear, emerges over a more

elaborated narrative). Therefore, we can see

that Ware’s portrayal of urban assemblages

manifests a concern with narratives of both

human and non-human dwelling, at scales

from the bee to the building (or even the city).

In the next section, I consider the intersection

between the temporalities of comics and of the

urban.

. . . and the multiple temporalitiesof the urban

Just as urban assemblages can be considered at

various scales by isolating elements of an

assemblage—a bee, a human, a building—the

becoming of the urban must be understood via

the various temporalities that unfold simul-

taneously but at different timescales. This

multiplicity of presents can come together, or

not, to produce events that ripple through the

larger assemblage(s). Connolly (2010) refers

to these temporalities as force fields, a slightly

confusing phrasing but one that captures the

ways in which these temporalities enable

agencies to emerge and affects to ripple

through assemblages.

Ware’s disdain for the speed of modernity

and his nostalgia for a slower, more con-

templative past—much commented on in the

literature (e.g., Banita 2010)—has inspired

him to experiment with ways to both slow

down reading practices among his audiences

and also to portray events unfolding at various

paces within the narrative of his comics.

Duration refers to the subjective sense of

time’s passing, which can bear little resem-

blance to the passage of clock-time (Bergson

2001). In keeping with the de-centering of

the individual when considering urban assem-

blages described in the previous section,

however, no single subject’s experience of

duration is allowed to dominate in Ware’s

work. As Doel and Clarke (2010: n.p.) note

about a page from Building Stories (first

published in Acme Novelty Library):

One of the great insights revealed by such an

assemblage of frames is that the world qua

multiplicity is not arrayed from the perspective of

a subject. The subject sees, to be sure. But so too

does the tulip, the vase, the till, the trolley, and the

clock. Ordinarily, one tends to think of the world as

a depth of field that is held together and fixed into

place by the point of view of an observer. What is

striking about this assemblage of frames is not only

the surfeit of perspectives, all of which elude one

another, but also the absence of depth. It is as if the

world qua multiplicity were simply a juxtaposition

of surfaces, and perspective merely an optical

illusion arising from their tilting and tipping, and

their folding and unfolding.

In short, what Ware manages to do in

Building Stories is deny a single temporality

(linked to a singular point of view) but instead

portray the urban in a range of temporalities

associated with different urban processes and

the subjects enrolled in them—with the

conjuncture and resonance of these temporal-

ities central to the dynamism and flux of urban

life.

Indeed, the topological nature of comics as

a form and the rhizomatic structure of


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Building Stories in particular enable these

temporalities to slide past one another with-

out any fixity, until Ware decides to do

otherwise. For instance, while dates are often

identified with particular moments in the

narrative (thus lending them a veneer of

calendar time), the non-human elements of

the narrative are necessarily disjointed from

this. For instance, we are privy to Branford

the Bee’s entire life story, which at one point

Ware (in a narrator’s aside) specifies is limited

to a few human weeks. Within his narrative,

however, we perceive time’s passage from

Branford’s perspective—a radically different

temporality than our own. Indeed, Ware

(again in his narrator’s voice) is clear that

these times are incommensurate: ‘After many

hours of this scenario repeating itself (or is it

days? Or weeks? Or years? Bee-time is

impossible to quantify) our hero’s stimulus-

and-response consciousness is suddenly re-

directed to something at once strange,

yet also oddly familiar.’ Note how Ware

connects duration (the unquantifiable) with

dwelling (the everyday).

Unfolding at a different timescale, but

equally linked to evolutionary potential of a

species-body, is the story of the unnamed

protagonist, whose changing of residences

(from childhood home to the Humboldt Park

building to the Oak Park single family home)

are always based on the achievement of

particular life-stages (minority, young adult-

hood, and motherhood). At even longer

timescales can be found the temporalities of

the building and the city itself. Given the earlier

invocation of the city as the archive of the past,

a mineralized exoskeleton of urban assem-

blages, it is worth highlighting the role of larger

processes of capital in the cyclical production

and destruction of urban space. Indeed, the

unnamed protagonist is briefly criticized for

being part of a neighborhood gentrification and

the Humboldt Park building is eventually

demolished to make way for a new develop-

ment. However, these processes, because they

unfold at timescales largely disconnected from

the experiences of dwelling, only appear briefly

within the narrative (Figure 6).

The lack of fixity with regard to the

temporalities of the city is paralleled by the

lack of order to the elements in the assemblage

of Building Stories itself. The fragmentation of

the narrative, not only among subjects but also

into elements without order, is indicative of

the temporalities of urban assemblages. There

is no beginning or ending to the narrative,

despite efforts to affix them. Rather, there are

beginnings and endings of specific elements in

the assemblage—a multiplicity of narratives

that are overlaid and interconnected with one

another. This is particularly demonstrated in

one of the ‘comic strip’ elements of Building

Stories; it is unclear which ‘side’ of the

strip goes first, and indeed either could follow

from the other, casting a different light on the

events portrayed. The narrative space of urban

assemblages is not coherent, but neither is it

without connections; it is constantly in a

process of territorialization and deterritoriali-

zation, with new connections being formed

between elements and old ones being for-

gotten. All of which begs the question: whose

narratives are these?

. . . and the formulation of narrative

An obvious answer to that question is that it is

the narrative of the subjects—the nameless

protagonist, the building, the bee, etc.—that

compose urban assemblages. However, even

that answer is too simple because acts of self-

narration rely on embodied memory for their

composition and re-telling. This assumes a

coherent subject that has a specific experience

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of the past which can be told. This of course is

as untrue for humans as it is for buildings and

bees, in that we are all the emergent product of

a range of forces and elements (Leyshon and

Bull 2011). Leaving aside for the moment bees

and buildings (although keeping in mind their

distinctive contributions to urban assem-

blages), human memory can be understood

as a medium in which narratives are inscribed.

It may seem odd to speak of memory as a medium,

but the term seems appropriate in a number of

senses. Since antiquity, memory has been figured

not just as a disembodied, invisible power, but as a

specific technology, a mechanism, a material and

semiotic process subject to artifice and alteration.

(Mitchell 1994, pp. 191–192)

The questions of who remembers, and what

is remembered, are crucial to the narration of

urban assemblages. In small ways, this occurs

all the time. This author rather notoriously

organizes domestic space as a mnemonic

device to excess; my keys and wallet always

in the same place, the errand that needs to be

run hanging on the inside doorknob of the

front door. These are minor versions of what

happens everyday in the city, with the spatial

configurations of urban assemblages of all

scales triggering memories, either personal or

collective (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004).

Crucially, we can understand memory through

the lens of assemblage as not a purely internal

mental activity; rather, memories are distrib-

uted throughout the material landscape and

emerge in certain contexts and not in others.

Urban assemblages (of which authors are only

one part) can be understood to have memories,

memories which become narratives when they

are mineralized on paper, film, digital files (or

Figure 6 (a) Gentrification and (b) demolition of the Humboldt Park building, highlighting

wider processes of urban assemblage.


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whatever) and then brought into assemblage

with an audience.

Sattler argues that Ware is not primarily

concerned with the empirical accuracy of

memory, but rather is interested in the

experience of remembrance as a process in

the present. To Ware, part of this ‘lived

experience of remembering’ (2010: 207) is

the reconciliation (or not) of conflicting

memories that stem from our interaction

with various elements of urban assemblages.

There is a link here to Bergson’s notion of

time as duration, in that he considered

memory to be virtual pasts called forth to

our present consciousness. But memory is not

the only virtual that can be conjured thus—

our imaginations enable us to produce all

kinds of things in the present, but particularly

so when aided by various material contexts or

triggers from urban assemblages.

Sattler illustrates his points with reference to

a page in which the old woman who owns the

Humboldt Park building remembers her child-

hood there in a sequence triggered by the

experience of the stairwell (see Figure 7). In a

more psychogeographical iteration of the

idea, in a two-page spread Ware imagines the

Chicago of 2156, in which people can ‘read’

the memory fragments that are embedded in

place by using futuristic full-body Google

Glass-like devices (Figure 8). Ware seems to

imagine memory as a movement between a

material context (a place or a thing) and the

imagination of the individual. For example,

Brogan (2012: n.p.) notes Ware’s frequent use

of central images on two page spreads as the

basis for a layout that ignores traditional

notions of comics as the sequencing of images

in time (Figure 9):

Building Stories often forces us to instead

consider the thematic relations between the

various sequences that make up each of these

spreads, as well as their mutual bond to the

central image that holds them together. Instead

of making historicity visible as comics typically

do, these sequences model something more like

the contingencies of mnemonic reflection,

wherein a particular experience or idea will

summon up unbidden a host of others that came

before.

We can go further and note that this

perspective on memory and materiality is

reflected in Ware’s creative choices regard-

ing the form of Building Stories itself.

Several of the elements are in material

forms associated with bypassed times: the

‘Little Golden Book’, the broadsheet

newspaper. The act of reading Building

Stories is itself intended to evoke remem-

brance of the past.

Ware uses the fragmentation of Building

Stories to highlight the multiple virtuals that

can be co-present in our memory:

One volume relates the heart-rending tale of a funeral

and the protagonist’s participation therein, while a

separate volume, closing with the death of Miss Kitty

[the protagonist’s cat], casts doubt on whether that

earlier story existed anywhere other than in the

narrator’s pained imagination. (Sattler 2012: n.p.)

As Bredehoft notes regarding the three-

dimensional models of Jimmy Corrigan’s

house in the eponymous graphic novel, Ware

introduces doubt regarding their represen-

tational accuracy via the language of memory,

fragmentation, and multiplicity:

Any student of the history of the neighborhood in

question will note that the reconstruction presented

here is not without its inconsistencies; based, as it is,

on reminiscence and fragmentary recollection, some

details may possibly contradict and/or overlap one

another. (Ware, quoted in Bredehoft 2006: 883)

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Figure 7 Material spaces as a trigger for memory; note how the convention of space-as-time

enables this storytelling.


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Indeed, Ware takes the notion of ‘overlap-

ping’ details literally by printing two schemata

on either side of a single page—were you to cut

out the page and try to make one model, you

would be unable to make the other. Both

models of reality cannot simultaneously exist.

This also plays out in Building Stories—in one

‘comic strip’ element of the larger narrative,

we witness a moment when the unnamed

protagonist’s daughter, visiting her grand-

mother’s house, finds her mother’s childhood

teddy bear and gives it to her. On the flip side

of the strip (in a completely different context),

the protagonist remembers this exchange,

and asks her daughter about it; she does not

remember it. But is this a simple case of a child

Figure 8 Memory as a material element of place.

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not remembering events? Or is it saying

something more fundamental about memory,

and therefore narrative?

Much of Building Stories is told via the

interior monologue of the unnamed protago-

nist; even the stories of other characters are

often linked to her imagination or narration

(excepting Branford the Bee—although at one

point the protagonist’s daughter speculates as

to whether or not bees have families, which is

the basis for Branford’s tale). For example,

Sattler (2012) notes that the unnamed prota-

gonist (while living in the Humboldt Park

building) attempts to write about her landlady

for her creative writing class; the monologue

she writes for the landlady is replicated

elsewhere in Building Stories as the landlady’s

actual monologue. Links such as this imply

that Building Stories is produced from the

imagination and memory of the protagonist

herself, whom it should be noted, is a

frustrated artist and writer.

Contrary to this understanding though, at

various points in the narrative her own

memories are corrected by editorial comments

(e.g., Figure 10), a move that resembles similar

interventions in superhero comics by editors

who provide the bibliographical information

for events referred to in the current issue.

However, whereas those efforts attempt to

weave together a cohesive narrative for all of

that company’s superheroes (a concept called

‘continuity’; see Dittmer 2007), Ware is using

the same device to undermine it. Indeed,

Ware’s intervention into the narrative is

foregrounded on one page—possibly the latest

Figure 9 Ware’s use of a central element of a page (or pages) as a trigger for memories works to

highlight the process of remembering over sequential narrative.


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chronologically of all the elements in Building

Stories, based on the age of the protagonist’s

daughter—in which the protagonist dreams of

an illustrated book that includes all her

forgotten stories and unpublished stories, but

one that has been organized and drawn by

someone else:

All of the illustrations (and there were a lot of

them—there seemed to be more and more the more

I looked) were so precise and clean. It was like an

architect had drawn them . . . they were so colorful

and intricate . . . And it wasn’t—I dunno—it wasn’t

really a book, either . . . It was in . . . pieces. Like,

books falling apart out of a carton, maybe. But it

was . . . beautiful . . . it made sense . . .

Therefore, with Building Stories we have a

relentless displacement of the act of narra-

tion—often seeming to come from certain

places but always also coming from some-

where else. And those narratives—pastiches of

fragments of imagination and memory—

require assembly by readers, a constant

process of Building Stories, about buildings

and the people who live in them. In short,

narratives of the urban are the emergent effect

of an artistic assemblage that then acts back

Figure 10 Ware’s editorial rejection of his own fictional character’s memories.

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upon wider urban assemblages, us among

them.

Conclusion

McFarlane’s linkage of dwelling to urban

assemblages, as described in the earlier review

of the literature, concludes with three impli-

cations of dwelling through assemblage: (1)

the importance of making space through

practices of dwelling; (2) the importance of

‘sociomaterialities of near and far, actual and

virtual, the everyday and the long duree’

(McFarlane 2011a, p. 668); and (3) the need to

interrogate who gets to direct the processes of

assemblage. In this article, I have tried to show

how Building Stories speaks to all three of

these implications.

With regard to the first implication, I have

shown how the fragmentation of space in

comics parallels the division of space associ-

ated with dwelling places. However, just as

practices of reading comics resolve the

fragmented panels on the page into a

topological space, practices of dwelling also

entail the assembling of connections between

people, objects, and sites in the city. Processes

of territorialization and deterritorialization

work to both intensify these connections

within (comic/urban) assemblages and to let

old connections lapse. With regard to the

second implication, Building Stories has

shown that urban assemblages both incorpor-

ate a more-than-human range of elements at a

wide array of scales and also at a wide array of

temporalities. Indeed, a wide array of (some-

times contradictory) pasts features in Building

Stories via Ware’s concern for processes of

remembering.

The third implication directs our attention

to the power to excise and interweave various

elements of the urban. We have now returned

to the concerns of Benjamin and McFarlane,

and those of Ware as well. Joseph Cornell’s

artistic sensibility was formed by both the

panoptic view of the urban grid (either

the map or the side of the skyscraper) and

the intimate view through the window into

everyday life afforded by the elevated train.

Both visualities offer a different iteration of

the urban, and the notion of urban assem-

blages encompasses both perspectives through

its disruption of hierarchical notions of scale.

Ultimately though Ware makes the decision to

primarily portray the urban as it is dwelt—by

people, by bees, and by buildings—thereby

highlighting the micropolitics and processes

that enable emergence. The way that Ware

narrates the urban is resolutely (post)humane

and pluralist. The form and content of

Building Stories indicate just such a world,

one of multiplicity and connection:

Indeed, one of the most striking features of Ware’s

comic strips is their flattening of perspective, which

can all too easily be mistaken for a dulling. It is

important, however, to appreciate that while optical

depth sets the world at a distance, haptical flatness

puts the world in touch. Hence, the beauty and

the seduction of Ware’s images. They foreground

sensation over sense, and matter over meaning.

Unlike optical space, which continuously recentres

the world from the point of view of the observer,

haptical space continuously de-centres the world,

putting one in touch with the void. What was

previously taken as something that holds together is

revealed to be something that is splayed out. (Doel

and Clarke 2010: n.p.)

Indeed, such a perspective on urban life is

necessarily political. To reveal the city as

multiplicity, to highlight the imperfection of

memory and narrative, to bring forth narrative

elements that would otherwise be ignored—

these are political actions in that they are


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efforts to ‘educate our attention’ to new (or

old) ways of being in the city.

Just as a virtual future was present in the

production of Joseph Cornell’s boxes (the

hoped-for relationships enabled by his gift),

Ware too is imagining the world as it might

have been (he is, as we have seen, skeptical of

memory even as it preoccupies him) and as it

might be yet. Building Stories then is not only

an account of dwelling and urban assemblage,

but also an intervention into those assem-

blages. The ways in which we narrate the

urban are a crucial site of intervention in

which we as geographers can work to enable

greater awareness of urban assemblages and

the complex processes that sustain them.

William Connolly (2013: 402) has argued

that with the juxtaposition of assemblage

thinking and

an account of the intensification, acceleration and

globalisation of neoliberal capitalism, we are

brought face to face with the fragility of things

today—that is, with the growing tensions between

the demands neoliberalism makes on both human

life and nonhuman force-fields and the boomerang

effects that arise as these demands and morphings

escalate together.

Rather than being pessimistic about the

fragility of all that is good and holy, Connolly

reminds us that neoliberal capitalism is itself a

‘fragile thing’. And crucially, his formula for

political change specifically entails working on

our own sensibilities in order to better perceive

its workings.

The intuition is that we must simultaneously slow

down at key points, to enhance modes of perception

and curtail pressure upon several nonhuman

systems, and also speed up a series of changes in

contemporary role definitions, identities, economic

priorities, state policies and international

organisations. (Connolly 2013: 403, emphasis

mine)

The parallel with Ware’s own project—to

slow down reading practices via ornate,

detailed drawings and tiny writing and recall

bygone sensibilities of vision and temporality

(see again, Figure 8 or almost any of the

others)—is clear. As any reading of complexity

and assemblage thought indicates, small

differences such as this can potentially have

large consequences.

In the beginning of this article, I indicated

that the article was about the relation-

ship between comics and the city, but that

I also wanted to address the way that

geographers narrate the city. I will go out on

a limb and say that no geographer will match

the complexity and artistry of Building

Stories; nevertheless, it is exciting to imagine

what the pairing of comics artists and human

geographers might be able to achieve with

regard to new narrations and new lines of

flight. Given the recent prevalence of artist-

in-residence programs and similar creative

collaborations (Foster and Lorimer 2007;

Marston and De Leeuw 2013; Wilson and

Jacot 2013), as well as the theoretical

confluence of comics and urban assemblages,

it appears an idea whose time has come. Such

collaborations could potentially enable new

high-quality, academically informed narra-

tions of urban assemblages to enter into

circulation, producing praxis and public

engagement with audiences that might be

turned off by academic treatises on assem-

blage thought (like this one). We should carry

the ethos of hope advocated for (albeit

differently) by Connolly and Ware out into

the world, working to generate new futures

not only through our academic work but

through its materialization as art.

500 Jason Dittmer

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to both Colin McFarlane

and Marcus Doel for their kind consider-

ation of an earlier draft of this article.

Similarly, I am grateful to Michael Brown

and the other editors of Social and Cultural

Geography for their invitation to deliver

this article as a keynote at the 2013 annual

meeting of the Royal Geographical Society.

Chris Ware’s willingness to have his art

reproduced in this paper is also greatly

appreciated. However, I am most grateful

to my wife Stephanie Dittmer, whose labor

began on the morning I was meant to give

that keynote, forcing its cancellation. The

birth of our daughter Florence shortly

thereafter quickly eclipsed my disappoint-

ment in not being able to deliver this

article. My apologies to those who tried to

attend the keynote that was not; I am afraid

I was rather joyously detained.

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Abstract translationsConference pleniere de geographie culturelleet sociale de 2013: raconter les assemblagesurbains—Chris Ware et Building Stories

Cet article reprend l’interet recent dans la theoried’assemblage en geographie urbaine et examine lescapacites de l’art a contribuer a nos narrationsd’assemblages urbains. En particulier, il utilisel’œuvremaıtresse recente de Chris Ware, BuildingStories, non seulement en tant que compte rendude l’urbain comme assemblage, mais aussi pourillustrer plus amplement la fac�on dont les bandesdessinees pourraient servir a raconter les assem-blages urbains de maniere a souligner leur multi-plicite et leurs expressions plurielles. L’article mettrois themes en evidence dans son analyse deBuilding Stories: les sujets extrahumains, lesdifferentes temporalites de la ville et la maniere

dont la memoire et le recit emergent des assem-blages urbains.

Mots-clefs: Bandes dessinees, recit graphique,theorie de l’assemblage, memoire, la ville,habitation.

Conferencia plenaria de geografıa cultural 2013:narrando ensamblajes urbanos—Chris Ware yBuilding Stories

Este artıculo retoma el reciente interes en la teorıade ensamblaje en la geografıa urbana y considerala posibilidad de que el arte contribuya a nuestrasnarrativas de ensamblajes urbanos. En particular,se utiliza el reciente magnum opus de Chris Ware,Building Stories, no solo como un relato de lourbano como ensamblaje, pero para indicar demanera mas amplia la forma en que los comicspueden ser utilizados para narrar los conjuntosurbanos de maneras que ponen de relieve sumultiplicidad y voces varias. El documento con-sidera tres temas en su analisis de Building Stories:sujetos mas alla de lo humano, las diferentestemporalidades de la ciudad, y la forma en que lamemoria y la narracion emergen de conjuntosurbanos.

Palabras claves: Comics, narrativa grafica,Teorıa de ensamblaje, Memoria, la Ciudad,Vivienda.


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Documents

Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware and Building Stories