De zachtheid van steden. Academisch stadsonderzoek en de schone letteren

Samenvatting

Soft City. The relationship between scholarly work and literary writing is ambivalent, to say the least. Academic writers from certain disciplines are sometimes inclined to use literary means in order to improve their texts. Novelists and poets often complain about the fact that scholars miss the essence of human existence because of their preoccupation with phenomena which can be counted and measured. In this contribution the English writer Jonathan Raban is taken as an enlightened representative of the latter attitude. For his Soft City he studied an impressive amount of scholarly exercises on cities in order to lend some weight to his opinion. He simply didn’t recognize the urban world as described by the likes of Mumford, Wirth or Park. What I have tried to do in this essay is to compare the ideals of literature and sociology in general. Whereas novelists have no single condition to meet in order to write their work, sociologists should conform to relative strict criteria. The results of their research should at least be precise, systematic, and relevant for the discipline as well as for the world. Nevertheless, there is no reason to consider scholarly work and literary writing as worlds apart that will never meet. As sociologists we can try to learn much more from poems and novels than just good writing. On the basis of my own recent research in Glasgow and Bombay I show the different and varied ways in which I have allowed myself to get inspired by literary works in order to get to know these cities better. Literary work is often capable of providing the scholar with both the geographical map and the mental map of the city concerned.