Paper short abstract:

Departing from a reflection on instruments, I explore migrants' relationships with urban space through play. We play instruments and we also play cities. Play engages us to look at the ways we incorporate urban resources and resort to them in order to juggle the demands of everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

Playing instruments, like using a city, is a highly complex activity, involving motor skills, perception and intuition from a human agent, and the physical affordances and (musical) possibilities of an instrument. Phenomenology, and the work of Merleau-Ponty in particular, has alluded to the blurring of boundaries between the player and her instrument. We play instruments and, I argue, we also play cities. As a heuristic, play engages us to look at the ways we incorporate urban resources and resort to them in order to juggle the demands of everyday life. We play the city to accomplish tasks, to get things done. Play is the skilled act of connecting needs to solutions, matching tasks to resources available in urban space. Play sheds light on the human capacity of raising locations and joining their spaces through gathering or assembly.

By recourse to ethnographic fieldwork undertaken with migrants in Lisbon, I explore participants' processes of learning to play the city and the extent to which these processes respond to the urgencies for settlement and emplacement. As I argue throughout the presentation, migration sharpens the process of learning to play. Although we all learn to play the cities where we live, experiencing migration exposes the urgencies of making do with an unfamiliar environment. The paper argues that whether migrants or not migrants, we live urban lives and we become equipped with the urban. Playing the city makes us look at how resourcefulness is practiced.