Paper short abstract:

This paper elaborates on the character and meaning of “the new” as it emerges in a broad range of areas of metropolitan life in Madrid City. Through nine situated ethnographies we relate this to contemporary processes of metropolitanisation.

Paper long abstract:

Since the work of Simmel and Park, the metropolis has been a privileged site for anthropology to think about novelty and the human response to it. Whether theorized today as world cities (Hannerz) metàpoles (Ascher), global cities (Sassen), megápolis (García Canclini), creative cities (Florida) or informational ones (Castells), today's major agglomerations are a key stage for the emergence of the trendy, the new and the unexpected.

This paper presents the collective, multisited ethnography in Madrid City by a team of ten anthropologists. Our goals are (a) to identify and document a broad range of emerging phenomena (new practices, structures and objects) that express the ongoing transformations of Madrid in the cultural realm; (b) to explain them in terms of the processes of metropolitanisation experienced from the last two decades by a capital city increasingly global; (c) to discuss the local meanings and uses of the novelty embedded in the practices considered.

Our fieldwork covers nine "ethnographic windows": (1) Network locality and redefinitions of space; (2) Metropolitan intimacies -invisible transformations of the private, domestic and intimate spheres; (3) Corporate changes issued by the New Economy, economies of knowledge and creative local policies; (4) Musical industry and changes in production/consumption of music; (5) Net-city and net-actors; (6) Expert systems and planning of urban risk management; (7) Esthetic and artistic irruptions in the public domain; (8) Cosmopolitan and ethnical restructuring of the city images; (9) Young tech-setters, cultural trendys and their use of TICs.