Paper Short Abstract:

This collaboration between an ethnography-led architect-researcher and a documentalist photographer suggests that the multi-sensory aesthetics of urban peripheries in Spain can be read through a creative cultural perspective that makes the meaning of heritage less dogmatic and more inclusive.

Paper Abstract:

Over the third quarter of the 20th century, vast residential neighborhoods were built on the outskirts of Spanish cities to accommodate rural migrants, marking the most significant urban transformation in the country's history and often resulting in homogenous, mundane buildings that, though ubiquitous, remain largely unnoticed today. Informed by an online ethnography that treated the Facebook group ‘Amigos del Toldo Verde’ as a visual archive reviewed in multiple press releases, together with a series of urban walks during which fieldnotes and more than 20,000 pictures were taken by photographer Kike Carbajal, this collaborative research –a photo-book recently published (https://bit.ly/4fyS3MZ)– combines creative textual descriptions with uncanny images that disorient the viewer by elevating working-class architectures and strangely familiar urban scenes to the status of postcards. Here, we deploy the multimodal character of postcards (Gugganig and Schor 2020), offering fragmented micro-reflections open to diverse writing styles that embrace immediacy and speculation; paralleling this, we build on the assertion that “good pictures in anthropology are always relative, incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contradictory” (León-Quijano 2022). This presentation delves into said two-voiced, multi-sensory aesthetics to, ultimately, suggest a humble-yet-authentic heritage approach where the term ‘heritage’ is stripped of idealism to become a mirror that confronts us with the paradoxes of our imperfect but real cities. Thus, by oscillating between the advocacy of neighborhood culture and the questioning of the dysfunctionalities embedded in its spaces, our work evidences the role of visual anthropology experimentations to build a more critical and democratic image of heritage.