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- Convenors:
-
Brigitta Schmidt-Lauber
(Institut für Europäische Ethnologie Universität Wien)
Anna Eckert (University of Vienna)
Georg Wolfmayr (Department of European Ethnology, University of Vienna)
- Stream:
- Urban
- Location:
- A122
Short Abstract:
While it is often urban life in big cities which is at the centre of scientific, political and social attention, many urban realities "below" these metropolises are neglected despite the fact that most Europeans live in smaller cities. The panel aims to bring these urban realities back "on the map".
Long Abstract:
It is often the "culture of the metropolis" or a "cosmopolitan" and "metropolitan" habitus in the global and world cities in Europe like London, Paris, Berlin or Vienna which constitutes the centre of scientific, political and social attention. Many urban realities "below" these metropolises are neglected although most Europeans live in smaller cities. In this respect this panel aims to bring these urban realities, which are seldom part of urban theorizing and urban discourse, and which are perceived as less urban or displaying a deficient urbanity, back "on the map". We consider three approaches:
Knowledge Scapes of Urban Theorizing: Many cities in Europe are not represented within scientific research. How does the landscape of urban theorizing look like? Where are the focal points of the production of urban knowledge and which cities are studied the most/least? How does urban theory "move" across different urban realities?
Relations between Cities and the Sense of one's Place: Cities are embedded in relations to other cities, through which they are given certain symbolic-material positions, which in turn produce symbolic capital and are connected with urban practices and imaginary. How are these relations produced by different institutional actors and enacted and experienced by local residents?
Ethnographies of Smaller Cities: Still missing are ethnographies of daily lives, practices, pursuits, and modes of experience of people living in small- and medium-sized cities. The aim is to broaden urban studies with a systematic examination of small- and medium-sized urbanities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Simone Egger (Klagenfurt University)
Paper short abstract:
Doing ethnography of the urban means researching different kinds of cities and situations. Realities of diversity in a smaller city challenge daily life as well as cultural analysis.
Paper long abstract:
Diversity is one of the main characteristics of urbanism as considered by Georg Simmel in his famous article "The Metropolis and Mental Life" from 1903. With 125 000 people nowadays, the capital of the Tyrolean Alps is not a Global City but the highly frequented centre of a region related to a global network via the media and economic exchange. Edward Soja talks about Cosmopolis as an essential discourse of postmodern cities. Even in Innsbruck diversity of society is growing as well as the city's hinterland. More than a quarter of its population is counted with a so called migration background. Tourists from all over the world visit the city, people from all over the world do their businesses or work in Innsbruck and refugees from all over the world cross the city on their ways through Europe. But how does a comparatively small city like Innsbruck deal with diversity? In 2012 August Penz, owner of a hotel and local politician of Austria's right-wing party (FPÖ), started a poster campaign with the slogan: "Heimatliebe statt Marrokanerdiebe!" which means something like loving home is better than thieves from Morocco. Because of the following discussions and trouble with his guests Penz stopped the campaign. "Innsbruck celebrates its diversity", the local newspaper Tyroler Tageszeitung reported in September 2014. Doing ethnography of the urban means researching different kinds of cities and situations. Realities of diversity in a smaller city challenge daily life as well as cultural analysis.
Georg Wolfmayr (Department of European Ethnology, University of Vienna) Brigitta Schmidt-Lauber (Institut für Europäische Ethnologie Universität Wien) Anna Eckert (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes doing size and doing place in two European middletowns: Wels, Austria and Hildesheim, Germany. We demonstrate the interrelationship between certain urban practices and imaginaries and the symbolic-material positions of these cities.
Paper long abstract:
While in Europe it is often urban transformations in global and world cities like London, Paris, Berlin or Vienna which are the focus of academic, political, and social attention, various urban realities "below" these metropolises are neglected. Many contemporary planners, researchers, and politicians tend to be metrocentric and believe that small cities lack urbanity. Ethnographic case studies in two so-called middletowns ("Mittelstädte"), Wels in Upper Austria and Hildesheim in Lower Saxony, show insights into everyday practices and modes of experiences beyond the big metropolises.
Cities are embedded in relations to other cities and thus are given certain symbolic-material positions. We endeavor to understand how different actors produce these relations and how local residents experience them. We demonstrate the interrelationship between certain urban practices and imaginaries and the symbolic-material positions of these "second cities." Accordingly, we fill a gap in urban studies and investigate doing size and doing place in these cities.
Our proposal is based on the research project "Middletown Urbanities - Ethnographic Urban Studies in Wels and Hildesheim", which is located at the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. We aim to broaden urban studies with a systematic examination of middletowns and to critically appraise and supplement the conventional categorizations of cities.
Magdalena Elchinova (New Bulgarian University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents an ethnographic account of a small Bulgarian border town, focusing on specific survival strategies (related with economy, demography and migration) that have been developing there after the demise of local socialist enterprises and in the context of EU integration.
Paper long abstract:
The paper presents an ethnographic account of the town of Svilengrad - a small Bulgarian city, located at 3 km from the border with Greece and at 20 km from the border with Turkey. The focus of interest falls on specific survival practices developed by its inhabitants after the demise of local socialist-time economy and in the context of new opportunities opened with EU membership. What demographic changes shape up the local community at present? What kind of informal economic practices stimulated by the proximity of the border have been developing at the local level in recent years? How does migration influence local development? These and related questions will be tackled in order to show how processes in the small town influence and are shaped by politics and developments taking place in the big urban centers as well as at the national level. The town in discussion is representative of a whole range of similar settlements located at the southern Bulgarian border.
Irene Stengs (Meertens Institute)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation will focus on the city of Maastricht, the capital of the Dutch province of Limburg, in the specific setting of ‘André Rieu Vrijthof Concerts.’ These concerts transform the city annually from a local place to a global space, while affecting the cityscape and local city life.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation will focus on the city of Maastricht, the capital of the Dutch province of Limburg, in the specific setting of 'André Rieu Vrijthof Concerts.' In the Netherlands, stereotypical oppositions qualify 'Limburg', and hence Maastricht, as the nation's utmost periphery and the Randstad, the conurbation of Western Holland - with at its heart the nation's capital Amsterdam and its elite - as the financial, cultural and intellectual centre. André Rieu - 'the world's king of the Waltz' - is both a musician of world fame and a native inhabitant of Maastricht; the Vrijthof is Maastricht's central square. Rieu and his Johan Strauss Orchestra tour the world, but each summer they return 'home' to give a sequence of performances on the Vrijthof. Although regarded by the nation's elite as a commercial impresario producing 'classical music for those who do not like classical music', his success made Rieu also the embodiment of the cultural potential and grandeur of Maastricht.
The sheer magnitude of Rieu's global presence offers an excellent example of popular culture upsetting and altering taken-for-granted local-national-global power relations and hierarchies. Based on ethnographic research conducted during the 2013 and 2014 Vrijthof concerts, I will address Maastricht's annual transformation from a local place to a global space, distinctly present on the world map, and flesh out some of the impacts on the cityscape and life in the city.
Meta Kordiš (Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana)
Paper short abstract:
From the perspective of fine art museum, and its (non)public and (non)users I focus on art, museum and heritage related urban practices in transitional post-industrial town.
Paper long abstract:
Maribor is a former Yugoslav and Slovenian industrial center, an important traffic junction and border city, which is for more or less twenty-five years struggling with uncertainty of post-industrial and neoliberal transition, with quite high unemployment, occasional outburst of social unrest and as it seems no future vision of the development of the city by local authorities and the state.
Museums as such, and fine and visual art production, distribution and presentation are associated with the development of a modern city, and urban practices and imaginaries. It could be said that a museum is an urban entity and urban reflection. From the perspective of the fine art museum, and its (non)audience and (non)users I focus on various urban practices that are related to art, museum and heritage. I am interested in how museum encourages and shapes different urban practices, and how urban practices and people's habits and expectations shape museum's programs, agency and its space. Moreover, I am also concerned with how social, political and urban transformations and realities are reflected and imagined in and on museum, its program and collection.
Milena Benovska-Sabkova (New Bulgarian University/ South-West University of Blagoevgrad)
Paper short abstract:
It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate, in which way the transformation and invention of cultural heritage (tangible and intangible) transfigures urban space and it is used in the struggle of various social actors for control on social memory.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on field work in Zlatograd, a town in Central Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria: a small town, perceived and self-perceived as inhabited by Muslims and Christians. Since 2001, the existing local heritage of historic architecture has been transformed into "Areal Ethnographic Complex": a set of ethnographic exhibitions and tourist atractions. EU funded projects have largely contributed to vertual development of a cultural resource having significant impact onto local economy. Tourist interest in the Ethnographic complex contributed to reorganization of urban space and to formation of second urban center.
The hidden contradictions between various groups of memory have been manifested in the ambitious programme of obliterating Muslim heritage, and rebuilding four Christian chapels, planned to form of a cross in the vicinities of the town. A leading role in this project belongs to the most influential representatives of the local economic and political elite, who are Muslims by origin. Both projects aim to change the symbolic geography of the city and the adjacent area. The conviction has become firmly established among the local elite that cross-border cooperation with neighbouring Greece (from which economic advantages are anticipated) is possible only via emphasizing the Christian symbolism.
Norbert Petrovici (Babes-Bolyai University)
Paper short abstract:
Optimism came with the narrative of “portfolio worker” as the social structure of the CEE city accommodates an expansion of the professional positions. I focused on the employability narrative in a middle scale city in Romania, Cluj.
Paper long abstract:
Despite diminishing levels of European aggregate demand for
jobs and ”transitional unemployment”, many East European cities were able
to negotiated a new position of command and control in the global urban
hierarchy. The last two decades, for the major cities and some second tire
cities, meant major transformation in terms of connectivity to the global
flows of capital. Job creation was predicated in these cities on service
offshoring, consultancies and managing the sale of state assets. However,
the firm becomes increasingly unreliable in providing a stable position or
even the prospects of advancement, but may offer the necessary support to
enhance one’s employability. Employability promises the freedom to choose
between successive positions and transform them in learning experiences
within a career field. A new wave of optimism came with the narrative of
“portfolio worker” as the social structure of the city accommodates an
expansion of the professional positions at the expense of the blue collars
relocated in the suburbs and surrounding towns. In this paper I aim to
better understand the relation between the employee and the firm by
putting in doubt the classless imaginary of the employability discourse.
Focusing on the employability narrative among highly skilled, skilled and
unskilled workers in a middle scale city in Romania, Cluj, a second tire
city in the urban hierarchy of Central Europe, I will question the very
assumption that the whole issue of the employee-employer relation is a
one-to-one relation between a person and the firm, without political
consequences for the other employees.