Introduction: Ineffably urban

Buffalo, New York, is a city fraught with preconceptions and rmly shaped assumptions about its character, culture, and identity. Such assumptions are generated and promoted in large part through images, or through “cultural texts.” Such texts, be they photographs, video works, actual texts, design, or any form of creative representation, are, according to British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, “‘rewritten’, if only unconsciously, by the societies, which read them; indeed there is no reading of a work which is not also a ‘re-writing’.”1 In an attempt to dene this urban imaginary, Andreas Huyssen writes: … no real city can ever be grasped in its present or past totality by any single person. That is why urban imaginaries differ depending on a multitude of perspectives and subject positions. All cities are palimpsests of real and diverse experiences and memories. They comprise a great variety of spatial practices, including architecture and planning, administration and business, labor and leisure, politics, culture, and everyday life.2.