Paper short abstract:

Suburbia is usually considered as a terrain of closed shapes of cars and fixed forms of dwelling. My paper traces habitual Friday evening walks in Israeli suburbia as it creates a lexicon of consciousness-body-city assemblage ( Brian Morris, 2004), making a place for emergent aspects of dwelling.

Paper long abstract:

The Israeli suburb is geographically very close to the city, a part of it sometimes, and thus is in intense dialogue with it. This nearness, I show, sets the conditions for a spatial and material dialogue, mainly based on ornamental surroundings and affections, consistently experimenting the contemporary emergent aspects of several kinds of "structures of feelings" (Williams, 1977). As in a dialogue, these are not dialectical relations of the encounter of closed forms, as one might expect considering the nature of suburbia, but rather a place-making for a careful multiplicity, where every system is "affecting and being affected" (Wylie, 2005). Learning from the somewhat bourgeois city of Rishon LeZion and especially from the habitual Friday evening walks of its suburb's residents, I present a catalogue of consciousness-body-city assemblages (Morris, 2004) created in these walking practices. Through this catalogue of assemblages, I address the materials and traces of these walks, examining their part in the re-generation of the usually-perceived fixed forms of dwelling of suburbia.