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WIM-WHF05


Making and remaking the city / Faire et refaire la ville 
Convenors:
Martha Radice (Dalhousie University )
Nathalie Boucher (Université de Montréal)
Discussant:
Deborah Pellow (Syracuse University)
Stream:
Worlds in motion: Worlds, Hopes and Futures/Mondes en mouvement: Mondes, espoirs et futurs
Location:
FSS 14005
Start time:
3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
Session slots:
3

Short Abstract:

This panel deals with processes of urban transformation: material or social, official or vernacular, novel or nostalgic, strategic or tactical (as Michel de Certeau would say). All modes of manufacture are welcomed: technologies, infrastructure, craft, representations, etc.

Long Abstract:

How is the city made and remade? We will gather reflections on processes of urban transformation, whether they seek to make the city anew or to reconstruct it as it used to be. We are interested in both strategies and tactics of city-making, in de Certeau's terms - calculated actions deployed from a position of power (strategies) or more informal or even furtive 'poaching' actions made from the margins (tactics). We are thinking of all kinds of modes of fabrication (technologies, infrastructure, representations, craft, festivals, do-it-yourself movements, etc.), of official discourses and vernacular ones, of social and symbolic construction as much as material production.

Questions we raise include, but are not limited to these: Emerging models of urban planning based on a return to a city of proximity emphasize densification and the reenchantment of urban space, but how do these models bear up to reality when they are developed? When municipal governments ask for public consultations or even citizen interventions, do we end up with free, creative participation or does it instead burden citizens with more responsibility, while absolving political instances from it? What grassroots initiatives escape regulation or surveillance by official codes of manufacture? What city emerges from such actions and their interactions?

We seek to underline the movement between the individual and the collective, between private and political interests, between authenticity and the avant-garde. In these ways, our panel investigates the making and the remaking of the city.

Accepted papers:

Session 1