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- Convenors:
-
Bárbara Côrtes Loureiro
(Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP))
Lígia Ferro (University of Porto - Faculty of Arts and Humanities)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Urban Studies
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Epistemological issues concerning uses of space arise in the city, from common sense to planned uses and academic analyses, especially in terms of architecture functions: which are the ways of using city spaces? How are spaces transformed into places? We propose to discuss unforeseen possibilities.
Long Abstract:
Urban architecture appears in anthropological and sociological debates sometimes like a presumed representation of barriers, limits or even the fascination for extraordinary heights, sizes and symbols of power. However, practical resignifications are constantly found in the uses and relationships established by city dwellers within spaces, configuring insurgent citizenships (Holston, 1996) or performing city-making (Agier, 2015).
City-making studies involve some sensitive look at the dynamics of corporealities and their expressions by what we usually call "urban practices". Activities such as Parkour, vertical dance, urban abseiling, skateboarding, graffiti, pixo, or just sitting or walking where isn't expected/planned, can deliberately or unconsciously transform the meaning of places carefully designed by urbanists. Here we'd like to discuss ways in which the body movement in those practices and the marks left in space can reframe the intended uses of urban space, and its implications.
Starting with a panel session to share ethnographic research and make contributions to the debate, this activity should evolve to a workshop where unforeseen possibilities of using the space can be proposed, in a way that makes everyone present able to experience new meanings of the place. To do this, it will only be needed the place where the accepted papers are to be presented, and some tolerance for noisy dislocations in the room: exploring new ways of being in a space can involve unexpected movements. Ideally, a final discussion of the experience can take place in order to come back to the initial presentations discussion.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores processes of city-making through the study of the linguistic landscape of a linguistically heterogenous small-size city in Sweden. Using a mixed-methods approach, we study the place given to multilingualism as a way to examine urban practices enacted by the production of signs.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, we will explore processes of city-making through the study of the linguistic landscape (languages such as they materialize on signs, billboards, etc) of a small-size city in northern Sweden, Kramfors. Demographically, it is a culturally and linguistically heterogenous municipality: 13,1 percent (2018) of the population is born outside Sweden.
The documentation and analysis of the locations, authors, languages and purposes of signs are here used as a tool for examining urban practices enacted by the production of signs. While official signs reveal who is addressed, included and visible (or not) in the city, vernacular signs indicate who claims, uses and interacts with the urban space. All signs displayed in the city center were photographed during two days of ethnographic fieldwork in June 2019. Using a mixed methods approach, all signs were first analyzed quantitatively according to linguistic code (i.e. named language), space (e.g. on building, sign post etc.), and modality (e.g. sticker, poster). Secondly, multilingual signs were analyzed qualitatively regarding their function and purpose in relation to their contexts such as political, economic and technological structures.
Based on this analysis, we observe that the occurrence of multilingualism found in the socio-demographic data and in our fieldwork observations is not represented in the linguistic landscape. Rather, our results illustrate a city center with a strong presence of the Swedish language, in particular on non-movable and permanent signs. Multilingual signs, in contrast, target specific groups, are temporary and intended for information, advertisement, rules and regulations.
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws upon relatively recent activities of subcultural and postsubcultural actors in Zagreb, Croatia made as an answer to gentrification of the city's public spaces. This research is based on the ethnographic method of participant observation inside ultras, punk and graffiti subculture.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is about relatively recent activities of subcultural and postsubcultural actors in Zagreb, Croatia. The research is based on the ethnographic method of participant observation inside modern ultras, punk and graffiti subcultures and secondary resource analysis. Through David Harvey's "right to the city" we describe processes of institutionalization and gentrification of public spaces while quietly banishing youth subcultures from the city centre. Youth subcultures, not long ago in an urban war with each other, recreate the image of the city through their common visual and verbal expression all a while revealing the important structural problems that exist in the city.
Paper short abstract:
Walls are one of the main artifacts of urban management that operate through rules and binary conceptions. Despite this, some uses defy such standards. This paper aims to reflect on these uses and their effects based on São Paulo's graffiti ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
At least in the context of São Paulo, urban planning works, fundamentally, based on a series of binary rules, which aim at all times to establish a public and a private, a permitted and a prohibited. Walls are one of its main artifacts: they found physical separations and reinforce - while helping build - symbolic distances. Therefore, walls are one of the main signs of a borderizantion process, of which Achille Mbembe speaks, on the city's scale; that is, a process where groups in power transform spaces into insurmountable places for certain classes of people, defining an inside and an outside. Despite the rules that set an exclusive use of the owners' walls, there are other uses, multiple and microbial, that take place on its external face, challenging these norms daily. This paper aims to reflect on these other uses from the graffiti practices, specifically from the renovation of the wall process, as the writers of São Paulo call it. This painting situation includes the updating of agreements and alliances with the wall's owners and other agents that may be related to these spaces, based on a dynamic that cannot be framed in dichotomous notions such as those of public and private, highlighting other ways possible to use and share urban spaces. The proposed reflections are based on ethnographic research carried out in 2016 and 2017 in São Paulo, Brazil.
Paper short abstract:
Using a case of a flyover in São Paulo city, which is the only public place where vertical practices (abseiling, highlining, rope jump) happen daily and openly, despite regulations for decades, this paper intends to discuss possibilities of re-meaning over assumptions around urban architecture.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1990's, many vertical practices have been taking place over the Sumaré flyover, in São Paulo city (Brazil). These practices, which happen despite regulation, challenge assumptions around the possibilities of relating to the place. The configuration and permanence of the vertical practices there establish a particular phenomenon of use and occupation of the verticality itself, transforming the composition of the view and the meanings attributed to this type of structure. Based on the observation of these practices, making a case from a current research field, I'd like to discuss potential places reframing effects by its agents, with or without active intention or awareness, on the functionality institutionally considered about the architectural equipment - such as walls, bridges and flyovers. The main purpose of this discussion is to identify ways in which vertical spatialities can establish their own relational and symbolic arena for sociabilities and agency to be recognized as such, and what they reveal about the corporalized relations in/with the city and about city production. The subversive aspects of the autonomous permanence of vertical modalities practitioners, the tensions and negotiations that these subjects experience in relation to State agents can give clues to the place of the verticality in determining intended uses of space.