Scale alignment

New article in Urban Design International

Abstract: Globalisation has led to the transformation and proliferation of urban borders. Old hierarchies and relations between centres and sub-centres and centres and peripheries are challenged, and new alliances between different places and districts are formed. How can urban design and urban design research meet the challenges of a complex and quickly transforming multi-scalar society? In this article I make three arguments. First, I argue for a territorial perspective that would allow us to better acknowledge how actors of different scales come together and have effects on the level of urban design. Second, I argue that we need to better acknowledge the role of material culture in research on urban design; whereas urban design often benefits from the large-scale perspective of urban morphology, it seldom incorporates the roles of small-scale objects into studies. Finally, I argue that an important task for researchers in urban design is to see how actors of different scales are aligned, and through this alignment produce effects and changes in the ways in which our cities are used.

Keywords: Scale  Urban design  Material culture 

Seminar in Trento

Upcoming event in Padua

Beyond rhythmanalysis

Beyond rhythmanalysis: towards a territoriology of rhythms and melodies in everyday spatial activities

Article in City, Territory and Architecture, written together with Andrea Mubi Brighenti.

Abstract: The recent, rich scholarship on rhythms, following in the wake of Lefebvre’s book Éléments de rythmanalyse (1992), proves that rhythmanalysis is an important sensitising notion and research technique. Despite its increasing recognition, however, rhythmanalysis has not yet become a proper science as its proponents had hoped. In this article, we argue that rhythmanalysis could benefit from being further developed and integrated into a wider science of territories. What research must attain is, we suggest, not simply a recording, description or analysis of rhythms; instead, the goal is to capture the life of rhythms as they enter territorial formations. A neo-vitalistic conception, in other words, could enrich the standard social-scientific understanding of the relation between rhythms and territories. More specifically, we submit that the notion of rhythm could be explored not only in terms of the recurrent patterns of association it defines, but also with essential reference to the intensive situations and moments it generates and, in the end, territorialises.

Fernand Deligny, Lignes d’erre [Wander Lines]. Courtesy Maison d'édition l’Arachnéen, Paris

Atmospheres of retail and the asceticism of civilized consumption

Article in Geographica Helvetica, written together with Andrea Mubi Brighenti

Abstract. During recent decades, consumption-oriented spaces of comfort and hospitality have proliferated – including, for instance, lounge shopping malls, food court plazas, spas, entertainment retail, visitor centres, and the development of ever larger pedestrian precincts. In this article we explore shopping malls as capitalist domes in Sloterdijk's sense. We observe atmospheric production, atmospheric management and atmospheric culture (which we propose to call atmoculture) inside such domes. Processes of retailization and mallification – whereby shopping malls and retail spaces absorb increasing economic and societal energies – can be regarded as correlative to the rise of an atmoculture of civilized consumption. Such atmoculture is visible for instance in stress-avoidance strategies and the production of a pleasurable experience in consumption-oriented public zones. The design of contemporary retail spaces seems to pivot around specific atmospheric strategies developed to promote and sustain civilized consumption. In this piece, we describe four different strategies of atmospheric production, identifying their possible shortcomings and failings. Finally, we advance the hypothesis that the atmospheric production of retail can also be analyzed with reference to Sloterdijk's theorization of asceticism as self-disciplination.

Nicosia

At the AESOP Public Spaces and Urban Cultures Conference on Cyprus. The conference was held in the buffer zone splitting Nicosia into two parts.

(Photo by MK)

Urban Walls. Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces

Edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti & Mattias Kärrholm. Contracted by Routledge (Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series). Forthcoming in 2018.

Cover image, artwork “POST NO DREAMS” by John Fenker 1978.

Description

In recent years, an increasing number of separation walls have been built around the world. Walls built in urban areas are particularly striking in that they have exacted a heavy toll in terms of human suffering. As territorialising devices, walls can be protective, but the protection they grant is never straightforward. This collection invites inquiry into the complexities of the social life of walls, observing urban spaces as veritable laboratories of wall-making – places where their consequences become most visible. A study of the relationship between walls and politics, the cultural meaning of walls and their visibility, whether as barriers or as legible – sometimes spectacular – surfaces, and their importance for social processes, Urban Walls shows how walls extend into media spaces, thus drawing a multidimensional geography of separation, connection, control and resistance. As such, the collection will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture and politics with interests in urban studies and social theory.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Introduction: The Life of Walls – In Urban, Spatial and Political Theory (Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm)

1. On Walls in the Open City (Alison Young)

2. Dismantling Belfast Peace Walls: New material arrangements for improving community relations (Florine Ballif)

3. Walling Through Seas: The Indian Ocean, Australian border security, and the political present (Peter Chambers)

4. Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative (Claudio Minca and Alexandra Rijke)

5. Screening Brazil: Footnotes on a Wall (Pedro Victor Brandão and Andrea Pavoni)

6. Warsaw Afterimages: Of Walls and Memories (Ella Chmielewska)

7. Wall Terrains. Architecture, body culture and parkour (Emma Nilsson)

8. Gating housing in Sweden: Walling in the privileged, walling out the public (Karin Grundström)

9. The Right to the City Is the Right to the Surface: A Case for a Surface Commons (in 8 Arguments, 34 Images and some Legal Provisions) (Sabina Andron)

10. The Multiple Walls of Graffiti Removal. Maintenance and Urban Assemblage in Paris (Jérôme Denis and David Pontille)

11. Walls as Fleeting Surfaces. From Bricks to Pixels, Trains to Instagram (Lachlan MacDowall)

Index

Reviews

"Walls and cities have long been partners, but their relationship has been understudied. This creative and important collection takes the social and political work of the urban wall seriously. Rather than a self-evident object, the wall becomes lively, talkative, mobile, and ambivalent, dividing yet also connecting. A valuable and original contribution."

Nicholas Blomley, Professor, Geography, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.

"It is a remarkable feat for an edited volume to read as cohesively and with such strong focus as Urban Walls. The walls included here (violent walls, but also vulnerable ones; aquatic, immunising, yet totally exposed and medialised walls; affective and playful, immaterial and palimpsestic walls) are marked by the wounds of history, geography and politics that surround them but also that are generated by them. These walls feel as material and fleshy as if we were placing our hand on their surface."

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Professor, Law & Theory, University of Westminster, London.

"An instructive and compelling examination of walls in their multiple present forms. The emphasis on the material and vertical puts this at the heart of contemporary debates. Historically situated, richly illustrated, and with a view to wider themes as much as empirical detail, this is an important contribution to politics, geography and urban studies."

Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick.

Morphogenesis and animistic moments: On social formation and territorial production

Article written with Andrea Mubi Brighenti, now published in Social Science Information.

Abstract: This article explores the issue of morphogenesis and metamorphosis in socio-spatial formations. The specific key is what we propose to call the ‘animistic moment’ in form-taking processes. We believe that a conceptualisation of animistic moments might help us to focus better not simply on the coming about of new forms, but also on the power forms are endowed with. The general social-theoretical horizon for the essay is an approach to social collectives as forms of territorialisation and territorial stabilisation. We suggest that an inquiry into the genesis and the transformation of forms through animistic moments might also be employed in the study of an array of processes of social territorialisation. In this article, we look in particular at two examples of the materialisation and animation of social-territorial boundaries: the first relates to the architectural construction of brick arches and walls, while the second relates to urban warfare and the demolition of urban walls.

Rhythmanalysing the urban runner: Pildammsparken, Malmö

This article is written together with Tim Edensor and Johan Wirdelöv, and is published in Applied Mobilities. 

Abstract: In this article we discuss the development of urbanized running culture by exploring how the embodied rhythms of running interact with other urban rhythms in a park. The analysis focuses on the timings, sensations and materialities produced through running, and how the rhythms of running intersect with the materialities and rhythms of others. The investigation draws on interviews, observations and a running diary undertaken at Pildammsparken in central Malmö. Our research shows that while the runner, in endeavouring to align with the rhythms of others, may becoming a more disciplined figure, running in the park is more concerned with practising a sharing of space than moving on auto-pilot. Consequently, running is largely a mobile rhythmic practice that negotiates and adapts to co-produce eurhythmic choreographies in this particular urban location.

Pildammsparken, Malmö (map by Johan Wirdelöv)

MAKING EFFECT - Symposium and exhibition

The Making Effect symposium & exhibition was held at 14–17 September 2017, at ArkDes, The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design and KTH School of Architecture. There are some videos from the event. Here is the session about "MaterialConditions" with the following presenters: Mattias Kärrholm, Albena Yaneva, Alberto Altés, Catharina Gabrielsson, Jennifer Mack, Emma Nilsson, Paulina Prieto de la Fuente and Jilly Traganou.

Domestic Territories and the Little Humans: Understanding the Animation of Domesticity

Article written together with Andrea Mubi Brighenti published in Space and Culture.

Abstract: Domesticity is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. In this piece, we approach it from the point of view of a general theory of territories. To do so, we attempt to tackle simultaneously the ecological and spiritual dimensions of home by attending the expressive dimension of domesticity. We emphasize that the expressiveness of home inherently includes the register of the familiar as well as that of the unfamiliar (Freud’s unheimlich). The constant negotiations between these two registers can be appreciated as carried out at the limits of control. To highlight this fact, we focus on the case of the “little humans,” miniature humanoid creatures well attested in traditional mythologies and folk tales across different civilizations. Drawing from anthropological and ethnographic literature, yet with a leading interest in social–spatial theorizing, we seek to untangle the relations between humans and the little humans—these “elusive others” living with us—in order to clarify the deep meanings ingrained in domestic territories.