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- Convenor:
-
Louise Todd
(Edinburgh Napier University)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Urban Space
- Sessions:
- Monday 14 September, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
As complex and dynamic phenomena, cities are understood through inhabitants' and visitors' embodied experiences and mental images. With growth in the density of cities, and impacts upon public urban space, this panel explores sensory and imaginary methods for mapping cities' public leisure spaces.
Long Abstract:
More than half of the world's population lives in urban areas and by 2050 this proportion is expected to rise to 68% (United Nations, 2018). Cities and their inhabitants are central to anthropological and geographic practices and tend to be understood in terms of spatial, material and social characteristics. Urban planning, design, and infrastructure are at the core of contemporary cities' development and growth, with emphasis upon economic activity, diversity and ecology. As cities become more densely populated, this panel considers inhabitants' and visitors' engagement with public urban space for cultural, physical, social and solitary leisure purposes. It will explore the use of sensory and imaginary methods in mapping such spaces. These may include psychogeographic approaches, peripatetic walking, interpretive tours, or visually recording spaces through drawing, photography; oral and aural approaches; alongside other forms of sensory and imaginary mapping. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective themes may include, but are not limited to:
-Engagement with public spaces in cities for leisure: parks, tourism, heritage, visitor attractions, festivals, events, sports, entertainment
-Methods of mapping cities' leisure spaces: ethnographies, interpreted tours, mythologies, psychogeography, activism, sensory walking, visual art, photography, sound, music, self-tracking data, etc.
-The senses in consuming or engaging with cities' public leisure spaces: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch.
-Sensory and imaginary public leisure spaces in cities: travelling/travelled, cityscapes, maps, panoramas, histories, presents, futures.
Reference: United Nations (2018) The 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects produced by the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 14 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Alternative Do-It-Yourself City-Walks are specific to different cities. By conversing with the locals and onsite walking, the artist maps-out hidden spaces significant to collective memory, leading to a narrative based on a mix of fantasy and reality. The narrative forms part of a DIY sound-walk.
Paper long abstract:
Alternative Do-It-Yourself City-Walks are specific to different cities. Starting off with a series of conversations with the locals, the artist gains knowledge about their day-to-day experience of their city. Gleaning information from these conversations, together with onsite-research walking, visual note-taking and drawn fieldnotes, the artist maps-out a number of hidden and/or neglected spaces, significant to personal and collective memory, so as to write a fictional-narrative.
The narrative forms basis for a sound-walk that takes the shape of a DIY walk, inviting the walker to enter a one-to-one relationship with the city. Through a combination of recorded ambience sounds and voiceover narration, one is guided through different neighbourhoods and streets. These walks purposefully move away from the touristic centre and focus on the outer districts/areas often neglected by authorities. During such one and a half to two-hour walks one passes through spaces and places that are not so popular, but are significant to the daily lives and memory of the local inhabitants. Each DIY walk is also complemented with a series of illustrated maps, which help indicate the way. From time to time the DIY walk invites the walker to get a live experience of the place here and now.
Through a mix of fantasy and reality it is up to the walker to decide how to interpret the experience, whether to take it as a fact, a metaphor or a dream.
The paper will focus on two walks in: Vienna in Austria and Haarlem in The Netherlands.
Paper short abstract:
Our research wants to understand how visitors shape their visit during a city-trip in Brussels. We investigate the relationship between travel project and tourist practices by means of a qualitative method which includes direct observation and semi-structured interviews.
Paper long abstract:
Urban tourism has been increasing in the past decades, and tourist practices constitute now an important challenge in contemporary cities. It's therefore of primary importance for researchers to investigate how visitors create their urban visit.The study case of this research is the Belgian capital. In the first instance we will discuss the travel project as an appropriate conceptual frame for describing the purposes of visitors. Tourist practices will then be taken into account as a central notion for this investigation. The gap between the travel project and tourist practices has proven to be crucial in establishing the key factors influencing the visitor's choice.
Our target of research are European visitors coming to Brussels for a self-organized city-trip. The work is based on in-field observation and semi-structured interviews, started in July 2019. The qualitative method resulted the best option to map the visitor's practices and identifying his profile. In addition, the semi-structured interview allows to give a relevant role to the visitor's perspective and to the tourist imaginary related to the urban tourism. Our results show that the gap between what is planned before a city-trip and the tourist practices chosen on the spot is influenced by the priority given to particular activities. Furthermore, we can identify different types of visitors in relation to their choices of activities. For example, we noticed that people who have experience in urban tourism tend to have a more standardized modus operandi, which can be influenced by other variables like educational level, etc.
Paper short abstract:
Edinburgh's annual festivals attract 4.5 million visitors to gaze upon and engage with the festivalised city. Using drawing as autoethnography, I will reflect upon Edinburgh's world's leading festival city status and discuss the use of visual art methods to map the festival city tourist gaze.
Paper long abstract:
Today, travel and tourism are increasingly becoming strategies for taking and sharing photographs. This is evidenced through the exponential growth of digital social media platforms as means of recording and displaying tourism settings and experiences on an instant basis. My presentation will discuss an evolving visual arts-based approach for inverting, extending and mapping today's digital and photo-normative tourist gaze (Urry, 1990). In the setting of Edinburgh, as Scotland's tourism capital, and its historic and expansive cultural festival portfolio, I use drawing as an autoethnographic method (Causey, 2017). As a strand of a larger study, my aim is to map the visual culture of Edinburgh in its self-recognised role as 'the world's leading festival city' (Festivals Edinburgh, 2019). I have visited selected sites and sights of a number of Edinburgh's festivals and recorded the act of gazing upon the festivalised city, as a researcher, an artist and a tourist. Through drawing-based methods, I have produced a series of work. This responds to the festival city and presents an inverted and extended tourist gaze of festival sites and sights. I will discuss a small selection of my work, which is currently in progress. Reflecting upon my research process as it continues to evolve, I will attempt to unpack my own understanding of Edinburgh as the festival city.
Paper short abstract:
East End Jam is a social practice artwork celebrating the unexpected fruitfulness of the urban environment. In this paper we argue that the project's outputs can be read as multi-sensory maps created through collaborative processes of participatory cartography.
Paper long abstract:
The jam made as part of East End Jam is an edible map of a London neighbourhood. The map is created in a collaborative process by the participants who walk, forage, pick, prepare and preserve the fruit. In this paper we will invite delegates to eat this map*, created in and of streets surrounding the Wilton Estate in London Fields, E8.
East End Jam engages groups of participants with the unusual activity of urban foraging. As an artwork it operates using real world activities to generate interactions between people and places. Foraging, picking and cooking engage multiple senses; we look up high for fruit in trees; we feel the scratch of a bramble as we lean into the bushes; we taste as we gather - sharp shock of the mahonia berry; we smell the apples before we see them - fallen in a carpet across the path.
Foraging changes the way an individual interacts with their environment. It functions in space/time generating new key features in a mind map of the local environment from which to navigate, describe and make sense of a place. Exploring the city through this lens of wild food, fruit, and edible plants is political and activist. It disrupts the binary thinking that cities are opposite to nature and generates new ways of visiting, being in, and living in a place.
As the conference will now be online we can post delegates preserves to taste during the talk (at cost). Please contact c.qualmann@uel.ac.uk to arrange.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine part of a 10-year ongoing art-based and research project that uses both quantitative and qualitative drawn maps, participatory walks, performances and interviews to engage residents in visioning and implementing urban agriculture (UA) within their neighbourhoods.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will examine part of a 10-year ongoing art-based and research project that uses both quantitative and qualitative drawn maps, participatory walks, performances and go-along interviews to engage residents in visioning and implementing urban agriculture (UA) within their neighbourhoods. Called the 'Edible Map Project', it has been run in several UK cities, including London, Peterborough, and Newcastle as well as internationally in Dallas and Northern Iraq.
The concept involves drawing a spatially accurate map of a city block, populated with imagined examples of UA. The map is used to lead daily walks with small groups of residents to discuss how multiple urban spaces might be repurposed for food production. Other art practices are also engaged such making ceramics for communal meals and costumes to simulate rituals and harvest ceremonies. The aim of the project is threefold. Firstly, to create a vision of UA at a walkable scale in the form of a map. Secondly, using go-along interviews, to capture the opinions of residents in situ. Thirdly, to create moments of implementation and change within neighbourhoods as a legacy of the project.
This paper reports principally on the Newcastle neighbourhood of Shieldfield (2018-2020), where residents have now begun to plant underused land with wheat for bread making. The project stands as an example of how academic and non-academic approaches through creative and participatory practices can create powerful moments of change for communities that can lead from an image to implementation.