Spooky concepts and urban studies: Conceptual metaphor,narrative tension and explanatory power

Introduction

Dracula urbanism, oooh, sounds spooky, and conceptually exciting. In David Wilson and Elvin Wyly's (2023) Dialogues in Urban Research article they write about a ‘Dracula-esque politics’, ‘something distinctive, eerily reminiscent of Stoker's nineteenth-century world’, a monstrosity of lurking monsters that they use ‘to understand urban phenomena’ (Wilson and Wyly, 2023: p.2). They remind me of Friedrich Engels’ idea of ‘the vampire property-holding class’, and Karl Marx's development of this idea through a metaphor of vampire rule of the dead over the living (labour) (e.g. see Baldick, 1990: 128–129). Arguably, conceptual metaphors are a repeating theme in urban studies. Once you are alert to their presence, they seem to be everywhere, operating as key literary devices, productive interpretive tactics and critical discursive manoeuvres in the field. And if it is true that metaphor is an important conceptual device in urban studies then the field's use of conceptual metaphor deserves our critical attention (e.g., see Bok, 2019; Tuck & Yang, 2012).

Taking Wilson and Wyly's Dracula urbanism as a prompt – and in keeping with the Socratic mode of scholarly practice that the Dialogues series of journals enable – I offer some speculative reflections on conceptual metaphor in urban studies, before commenting on Dracula urbanism as a concept directly. This short foray into conceptual metaphor is organised around the narrative tension, explanatory power and discursive playfulness that conceptual metaphor affords in urban studies.

I have been interested in the explanatory and conceptual work that metaphor performs for a while now. Spooky conceptual metaphors permeate many culturally mediated imaginations around the world. Just think about the lyrics of American band The Smashing Pumpkin's 1995 classic song Bullet with Butterfly Wings, which read, ‘The world is a vampire/Sent to drain/Secret destroyers/Hold you up to the flames/And what do I get/For my pain?/Betrayed desires/And a piece of the game’ (Corgan, 1995). One interpretation of the lyrics of this song suggests ‘The song is about the impotence and futility of an individual's anger within a larger, more powerful system’ (Trevrichards, 2023).

Sin Yee Koh and I wrote recently about the ‘fabulous spatial metaphors and conceptual tools that are place-specific’ in urban studies (Rogers and Koh 2017: 10), including the alpha territories of the super-rich in London (Burrows et al., 2017), the safety deposit box metaphor in New York (Fernandez et al., 2016), or the tycoon city metaphor in Hong Kong (Wissink et al., 2017). We could add to this list Dobson and Sipe's (2008) Vampire index and Wilson and Wyly's metaphor-soaked Dracula urbanism, along with the conceptual metaphors Wilson and Wyly (2023) cite in their article, such as Frankenstein urbanism (Cugurullo, 2021), zombie neoliberalism (Peck, 2010), or the urban ghosts in the undead city (Drause and Roddy, 2016). Wilson and Wyly (2023) outline the conceptual stakes in their work by suggesting that conceptual metaphor

[…] shed light on previously undetected urban relations, forces, and processes. Most tellingly, Cugurullo's Frankenstein urbanism excavates the rise of visionary urban experiments to re-build cities that unleash neoliberalized-destructive, fitful behemoths. These experimental horrors lurch forward as loosely connected, patched together fragments that soon escape their maker's control and understanding. This work, iconoclastic and prophetic, shows that fictions and realities today can meld as indistinguishable wholes.

This ghostly language is deployed to focus our attention on the horrors of various urban processes and outcomes, and spooky conceptual metaphors are therefore easy to spot. Rowland Atkinson (2019) recently added to this ghostly conceptual vocabulary with the concept of necrotecture, the idea that in some suburbs in London the homes of the super-rich and the streets around them are empty or dead. We could add to these more obvious conceptual metaphors the idea of narcotecture (O’Neill, 2016), which describes the way narco-capital and violence – that is, laundered drug money, and the violence and death that underwrites it – is reshaping real estate landscapes.

If some conceptual metaphors are easy to spot due to their spooky vocabulary, other concepts are so commonplace that many scholars accepted them without too much reflection on their metaphorical qualities and the metaphorical work they perform. Think about the hard to pin down ideas of the fix (e.g. see Bok, 2019) or the gap (e.g. see Wyly, 2023 and Ley, 2023 in the 1st issue of this journal), which have perhaps always had a performative metaphorical dimension to them. Adding weight to this claim, Rachel Bok (2019: 1088) suggests, the fix is a ‘root metaphor of geographical political economy’, and yet it ‘is a pliable enough metaphor that encourages theoretical inventiveness’. Some neologisms seem to operate with metaphorical qualities too. Take the concept of ‘govern-mentality’, the Foucauldian term used to draw attention to the mentalities and rationalities of government. This concept links the idea of a subjective mentality with the collective actions and enlightenment rationalities of a complex set of actors inside this thing we call government. Or even the idea of ‘gentry-fication’ has, arguably, some metaphorical qualities to it (Lees et al., 2008). This concept takes a class-based social group – that is, an historical landed property class – and turns it into an urban-geographical process of territorial expansion and control that can be used as a conceptual device to identify, analyse and discursively reveal a set of contemporary urban dynamics in the present. As such, this ‘metaphor’ is operating across complex social group, geographical and historical categories and ideas, and yet it is widely accepted in urban studies and more broadly in the public domain in its metaphorical form. The ever-expanding use of the concept of gentrification has, in some cases, even drifted away from its initial definition by Ruth Glass (see, e.g. Slater, 2021: 53). This shows it can be hard to pin a conceptual metaphor down.

One way to get some purchase on the implicit politics, explanatory power and discursive playfulness of conceptual metaphor, including the spooky concepts we are interested in here, is to analyse their political, narrative and analytical functionality.

The conceptual and discursive work of metaphor

What work, then, are spooky concepts in urban studies doing through their metaphorical form? In the contemporary academic hunger games of citations, impact and attracting the attention of readers of the best urban studies journals, conceptual metaphors seem to hit the mark.

Social media platforms such as Twitter are an oft-cited example of the way the attention economy is suggested to be radically changing the way academics – and the audiences they seek to engage – share, find and interact with academic theory and research. The so-called attention economy treats human attention as an increasingly scarce resource. Social media companies talk about human attention as something that can be captured through a range of digital tricks and sleight-of-hand. Indeed, these companies have built teams of behavioural psychologists who are constantly dreaming up new ways to attract, retain and capture our attention. These digital attention tactics are drifting into the commercial publishing world. Major academic publishers are sharing webinar tips for ‘Making Your Research More Visible: Using Social Media to Popularise Your Research’ (Wiley, 2023: n.p.). Their aim is to draw attention to your recently published article to boost reads and citations by encouraging you to fine-tune your article title, keywords and abstract so they are more ‘socials-friendly’. This, of course, is good for business if you are a commercial academic publisher.

There is a perniciousness to the attention economy that we should be alert to, and yet I am not arguing against the use of social media per se. A cynical, utilitarian view – but one that is worth exploring – is that conceptual metaphors are at least partly developed to attract attention and chase citations. A good conceptual metaphor delivered to the right attention economy can be a citation producing machine. This is not to suggest that we should dispense with conceptual metaphor because of some assumed underhand social-friendly citation tactic. Certainly not. I love a good journal article title, a new conceptual name, or some fun wordplay in an abstract, and I use social media extensively to share my research. In fact, I recently developed a conceptual metaphor with Chris Gibson (Rogers and Gibson, 2021), the idea of Unsolicited Urbanism. This is a play on a formal urban planning policy called the Unsolicited Proposal. Yet, several scholars, including one in peer review and another in a public talk, asked about the appropriateness of the Unsolicited Urbanism metaphor for the work we are doing. They raised good points about the attention economy, chasing citations, and, importantly, the analytical function of metaphorical concepts.

The power of conceptual metaphor comes into play at the level of analytical acuity (Bok, 2019). A good conceptual metaphor has an explanatory power that moves our understanding of an urban process, issue, etc. forward. It opens new conceptual vistas, or it brings into focus new conceptual stakes, or it paths the way for new types of empirical investigation in the field. Put simply, a good conceptual metaphor allows for a good theoretical intervention. It has productive explanatory power; it takes urban scholars somewhere beyond their initial excitement about a fancy new name for a concept.

A spooky conceptual metaphor must be analytically powerful, otherwise it's just Halloween; an empty signifier dressed up as Frankenstein for a night, trick or treating for citations and attention. To think more carefully about the political, analytical and literary functions of metaphor we can turn to scholars who have used it well, for example, see Bok's (2019: 1089) ‘rich constellation of metaphors that have permeated the discipline over the past four decades’. Alyssa Battistoni (2023) argues,

Latour proved hugely popular in translation. He drew on rhetorical strategies from across the disciplines: from philosophy he took dialogues; from literature, narratives and metaphors; and from science itself diagrams, which often mystified as much as they clarified. He had a knack for turning phrases which became – to use one of them – ‘immutable mobiles’, circulating freely across fields. Perhaps most of all, Latour was fun to read. He peppered his bold, sometimes outrageous claims with jokes and illustrated them with memorable examples. Latour was if anything too readable, as liable to be misunderstood by his supporters as his critics. (Battistoni 2023: n.p.)

Whatever you think about the work of Bruno Latour, Alyssa Battistoni (2023) argues Latour's use of narrative tactic and conceptual metaphor serves him well. Thus, I turn next to the anatomy of the conceptual metaphor in urban studies, before returning to Dracula urbanism.

The anatomy of conceptual metaphor

In what ways, if at all, does a concept in urban studies operate as metaphor? In literary studies and philosophical understandings, some of the concepts discussed in the introduction might not be defined, in a strict literary and philosophical disciplinary sense, as metaphor.

You have blood on your hands! Is a commonly accepted spooky metaphor. In this turn of phrase, you do not literally have blood on your hands, rather you have done something that implicates you in a set of actions. The blood is metaphorical. As such, metaphor is a figure of speech that describes one thing by saying something else. It is not meant to be taken literally. Are the gap and the fix operating as metaphor in urban studies, as I suggested above? It's an open question. And yet, if we follow Bok's (2019) explication of the fix, or Wyly’s (2023) and Ley's (2023) discussion of the gap, these ideas certainly appear to have at least some metaphorical qualities to them, even if they might not be strictly defined as metaphor in a literary sense.

This literary notion of metaphor, ‘as a species of figurative language’, is seen as a problem of argumentation in some disciplines (Schön, 1993: 137; also see Tuck & Yang 2012 for a different type of conceptual “metaphorization” (p.1), and the problem of argumentation metaphor creates in decolonial studies). In philosophy, particularly in its analytical/logical form, metaphor is a type of language that needs to be interrogated, exposed as an anomaly, and ‘dispelled in order to clear the path for a general theory of reference or meaning’ (Schön, 1993: 137). In analytical philosophy and literary studies, metaphor is a problem of argumentation or narration respectively, which is getting in the way of a more rigorous analysis or cleaner articulation of ideas. While it is productive to work beyond these notions of metaphor, which are of interest to linguists and the philosophers of language, we need to heed the warning that metaphor can get in the way of a more rigorous analysis and a cleaner articulation of ideas (Schön, 1993; Tuck & Yang 2012).

In the social sciences, scholars such as Schön (1993) are working with ideas such as the ‘generative metaphor’ in their analyses of social and political worlds (also see Bok, 2019). Schön's notion of metaphor pushes beyond the literary and analytical philosophical traditions.

There is a very different tradition associated with the notion of metaphor, however – one which treats metaphor as central to the task of accounting for our perspectives on the world: how we think about things, make sense of reality, and set the problems we later try to solve. In this second sense, ‘metaphor’ refers both to a certain kind of product – a perspective or frame, a way of looking at things – and to a certain kind of process – a process by which new perspectives on the world come into existence. (Schön, 1993)

Thinking about the anatomy of the making of generative metaphor, Schön constitutes this second notion of metaphor around the question of hermeneutics. The focus is on making explicit ‘the kinds of inferences by which such interpretations are made, the sorts of evidence pertinent to them, and the criteria by which they should be judged and tested’, and it ‘is nothing less than the question of how we come to see things in new ways’, suggest Schön (1993: 138).

Thinking across the literary, philosophical and social sciences, three key takeaways emerge for thinking through the production, deployment and utility of conceptual metaphor in urban studies:

understanding the ways in which concepts are operating as metaphor;

Dracula urbanism

Does Wilson and Wyly's (2023) Dracula urbanism work as an analytical and explanatory tool in their work, and does it also provide a conceptual framework other urban scholars can borrow from? The short answer is yes, and yes.

On the first point, Dracula urbanism is clearly operating as conceptual metaphor, and there is a clear hermeneutic logic to this idea. Dracula urbanism draws on Stoker's fictitious Transylvanian nobleman-com-monster, whom they suggest is a ‘true “planetist”’, (p.4) because the vampire does not belong to a particular place. Rather, Dracula is a globally mobile monster ‘of the world and roots nowhere’ (p.4). Here they prompt a global spatial imaginary and politics that they symbolically associate with the planetary urbanisation thesis (Brenner, 2018); ‘Our Dracula urbanist notion locates in this now rich analytic tradition. It reveals a smart city building that, like Dracula, seeks to purify a socially contaminated world as a “planetized” process’ (p.2). Concealed beneath Dracula's appearance as a polite and charming aristocrat – a respectable man of Enlightenment science and history – resides a dark and cunning soul that is devious, calculating and deceitful. Wilson and Wyly use these ‘Dracula-esque tactics’ (p.2) as a metaphor to talk about a form of neoliberal urbanism and parasitic capitalism wherein the ‘real-estate states adopt a self-nourishing strategy’ (p.5), underwritten by public–private partnerships and the like; ‘nourish[ing] itself through a parasitic attaching to key hosts (institutions)’ (p.14-15). Dracula lives off the blood of unsuspecting victims, which he believes are culturally inferior and flawed; ‘Dracula believes that it is only through the imposition of death upon the undeserving – killing the culturally inferior and flawed – that re-birth and new life can begin’ (p.4). For the ‘undeserving’ in Wilson and Wyly's contemporary city there is no possibility for rehabilitation, much like the creative destruction that urban capitalist renewal vis-à-vis urban obsolescence require (Weber, 2002), these Dracula-esque tactics set out to ‘kill back the city to greatness’ (p.4).

On the second point, Wilson and Wyly provide some nice conceptual signposting throughout, which explicitly points to the key moving parts of their conceptual framework. They call these signposts ‘guiding principles’, and other urban scholars could readily borrow from and use them. Their first guiding principle relates to capitalist urbanisation by the real estate state (Shatkin, 2017), a process that destroys a suite of supposedly degenerate, undeserving populations, such as ‘culturally toxic’ recent migrants, the urban poor and the socially disobedient, as well as destroying a range of supposedly degenerate urban sites that are oft-described as being in urban decline or blighted (p.4); ‘In Dracula-like fashion, sense of brave and deft socio-class (Dracula's bloodlines) must eradicate what these actors so deeply demonize as counter civic: the ways and influences of the dirty, the disheveled, the decrepit’ (p.4). Their second guiding principle relates to the parasitic nature of the contemporary real estate state. Here the real estate state subsists by living off the human and financial capital of other organisations and business, such as large infrastructure companies and their public–private partnership contracts with them; ‘Just as Dracula draws nourishment from socially seducing and sucking the blood of taken-in victims, these states depend on their own mode of “blood” extraction [that] provides them the lifeblood of their existence’ (p.5). They suggest that this parasitic relationship effects the constitution and operation of the public and private sectors no less. Related to the second guiding principle, which exposes both social (i.e. populations) and material (i.e. urban sites) destruction, their third guiding principle focuses on urban obsolescence, creative destruction and urban capitalist renewal as a state-driven process (i.e. a set of actions and events); ‘Just as Dracula strategically uses decline to identify the venomous things in need of change (the genetic defective, culturally inferior stocks of people, socially backward communities in Transylvania and London) and politically seduce subjects (the attraction and mystique of gothic-decrepit castles and landscapes), real-estate states today operate similarly’ (p.5). And finally, their fourth guiding principle locates the previous three principles within the global spatiotemporal imaginary of planetary urbanisation; ‘we place these Dracula-esque real-estate states at the heart of what gives these formations their very existences, planetary urbanisation’ (p.6).