Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Anita Sujoldžić
(Institute for Anthropological Research)
Anja Iveković Martinis (Institute for Anthropological Research)
- Stream:
- Urban
- Location:
- A122
Short Abstract:
This panel will present papers that share a common concern with anxieties and creative tensions of cities in changing political, economic, social and cultural circumstances. Cities are seen as sites of plurality, while the overall focus is on how the co-existence of different perspectives and practices is shaped by and how it in turn shapes the physical and social space of the city.
Long Abstract:
This panel, set up ad hoc of individually received abstracts, will present papers that share a common concern with anxieties and creative tensions of cities in changing political, economic, social and cultural contexts. The papers examine and illuminate an array of urban circumstances, trajectories and issues, through case studies of different world cities seen as sites of a plurality of ideologies, communities, identities, spatial regimes and political subjects, implying also a plurality of ways of representing and engaging with the city itself. The overall focus is on how the co-existence of different perspectives and practices is shaped by and how it in turn shapes the physical and social space of the city. The theoretically quite diverse background informing the authors’ reflections is at the same time a challenge to and a promise of an informed discussion on issues related to contemporary regimes of city governmentality, the problematic tension between the city as a site of social progress as well as exclusion and injustice, as a site of tradition and heritage and futuristic visions or as a location of creative experimentation as well as destruction. The papers will analyze how contrasts, protests, movements and transformations result from social diversity and heterogeneity and how they reconfigure cities through spatial appropriation and social belonging.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Anita Sujoldžić (Institute for Anthropological Research) Anja Iveković Martinis (Institute for Anthropological Research)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines multiple temporal trajectories of the performance of multiculturalism in the city of Pula, a regional urban centre in Croatia, through the evolution of historical discourses and ideologies underlying observed both cosmopolitan and parochial practices and identities.
Paper long abstract:
This article examines spatial and multiple temporal trajectories of the performance of multiculturalism in the city of Pula, a major tourist resort and regional urban centre in Croatia. The city's discursive location, as part of the border region of Istria, with a significant population of Italian nationality and other ethnic groups from the Balkan area, and a social memory that is linked to the socialist Yugoslavia, Italian and Austro-Hungarian past, creates a complex social context of contested and changing cultural imaginaries embedded in relations of power. The paper studies the evolution of the historical discourses and ideologies underlying cultural and linguistic practices through reconfigurations of space and time at both 'popular' and 'official' levels. It explores to what extent the image of the city, with its spatial and social structure, as well as socio-economic and historic contexts determines present discourses on multiculturalism and the peaceful coexistence of various ethnic groups as well as the ways those images shape a sense of hybrid identity, and how these identities are affected by interpersonal and inter-group communication in everyday life. In the discussion historical versions of the urban imagery of cosmopolitanism are contrasted with observed contemporary forms of multicultural coexistence and the present-day construction and use of ethnic/cultural categories, emphasizing the paradoxical outcome that, while subverting the official nationalist ideologies through vernacular understandings and multilingual practices, hybrid urban identities, personalized and conceived in terms of the emotional appeal of autochthony, simultaneously create new borders shaped by exclusionary discourses.
Trude Renwick (Berkeley CED)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines malls as monumental and everyday spaces in order to explain recent protests centered on Bangkok’s economic center. Specifically, I connect the unique bond between the mall and street market to protestors harnessing pop culture to express dissent against the military government.
Paper long abstract:
The use of the salute found in the Hunger Games series by anti-military demonstrators in Bangkok, is just one protest amongst many worldwide that emerged around the "junkspace" of the mall. To better examine why these protests are occurring, I analyze the mall as a monument as well as an everyday space that is shaped by the specific way global and local conceptions of space interact in Thailand.
The mall, as a form of everyday urbanism, is not simply set as opposed to the "lower class" space of the street market, but encourages and at times incorporates such local economic activity. This paper therefore turns to the everyday spaces of the market in order to first demonstrate how the play and interaction between high and low classed spaces are not always a matter of removal or erasure of one over another through planning or architectural form. The mall, in fact, is an urban form particularly conducive to such engagement and play.
Unlike the ways in which previous protests have posed themselves as counter to this space of the mall in the past, the most recent demonstrations that take place around one of the key luxury malls reveals that urban spaces of insurgence can actually engage with the global language of the mall and global popular culture to make their demands. The mall is no longer solely a space that must be countered, even burned down, but in fact it is harnessed and engaged with through the act of protest.
Victoria Quintero Moron (Universidad Pablo Olavide) Antonio Luis Díaz-Aguilar (Universidad Pablo de Olavide)
Paper short abstract:
This paper develops an analysis around the urban gardening expansion in Europe and its relation with heritagization processes. Through a case study we reflect the role that the urban gardens develop as places of social contestation, and also as social and economic resources.
Paper long abstract:
This paper develops an analysis around the urban gardening expansion in Europe and its relation with heritagization processes. Through a case study -the city of Seville (Spain)-, we reflect concerning the role that the urban gardens develop as places of social contestation, and also as social and economic resources for the citizens. Within the neo-liberal logic, the city of Seville has as central themes of its local policy the aim of being in the map of global trade: tourism and the rehabilitation of the historic centre - accompanied by processes of gentrification- are the main instruments. Opposite the tourist destination, another face of the city is shown in the periphery and in the interstices of the historic centre. Initiatives that promote urban gardens are often connected with readings of the city beyond the neoliberal ideology. Urban horticulture is associated with the defence of the territory against urban speculation; with the demand of the public space as a citizen's right; with the demand for a food sovereignty and healthier practices... Our intention is to describe these phenomena of social contestation and to analyze in which particular contexts these processes are integrated in a heritage discourse. The data indicate that heritage interpretations occur when there are situations in which the conflict of interest has been clear. The heritagization process is also common when there are powerful ideological motivations and a leadership. Thus, social creativity adds the administrative and legislative possibilities offered by the current heritage laws to make these places authentic citizenship resources.
Gruia Badescu (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how the processes of urban reconstruction in Belgrade and Sarajevo on the one hand respond to the nature of conflict that affected the cities and on the other prolonge it in a framework of symbolic violence.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how in the process of urban post-war reconstruction city makers and communities express the legacy and the meaning of conflict through spatial interventions and practices. The paper discusses two urban situations reflecting different types of conflict- the reconstruction after a "classic" attack from the outside- Belgrade after the 1999 NATO bombing, and a reconstruction after what Mary Kaldor (1999) named the "new wars", which blend international and civil wars- Sarajevo after the siege (1992-1995). A first dimension of the paper aims to investigate how reconstruction could be seen in Dacia Viejo Rose (2013)'s framework of a symbolic continuation of war violence, by prolonging the conflict reshaping it through heritage. A second dimension of analysis is to explore how the different nature of war is reflected in the memorialization of conflict and the reshaping of urban space. The paper will namely discuss the difference between reconstruction where the "antagonic" group lives in the vicinity (the case of Sarajevo) versus the situation in Belgrade after the NATO attacks, where preserved ruins serve as sites of victimization by external others.
Eliza Hoxha (University of Prishtina/Faculty of Architecture)
Paper short abstract:
Prishtina changed her face and became a real city during socialist time, even though the project of modernism in Prishina from many is seen as being unfinished. Today, in post socialist conditions the city couldn't absorbe in the best way all the changes in political, economic and social aspect
Paper long abstract:
Since 1947 when Pristina gain the executing role of political and administrative center of Kosovo we all witnessed drastic changes in the name of progress, unity, fraternity and freedom, in the name of modernization. At the late ' 60s the construction of this new identity of socialist Pristina was seen vis a vis the construction of "the new socialist men" as a project which could hopefully lead to a successful solution of the national issues in Kosovo and Yugoslavia in general. After '99 Pristina again faced the same picture as after WWII. The destruction of the city in both cases was more after than during the wars. Different was only the approach and actors. After '45 the private turned into public and the destruction and development were done by the "state". Today, the people are doing both, demolishing and developing at the same time in a space where public is erasing and everything is privatizing more or less. The crises of economic sector and the political collapse of Yugoslavia created such conditions where no new architectural style was launched in 25 years. After the war, "Urgent architecture" produced in a kind of reconstruction phase by internationals in the city will be replaced very soon by "turbo architecture" phase, as no one wants to be affiliated with modern architecture, art and heroes of that time. Again new names of the streets with new landmarks will resplace the old ones
Tsvetomir Todorov (Institute for Balkan Studies with Centre of Thracology, Bulgarian Academy of Science)
Paper short abstract:
The revitalization of the parochial life, seen in changes in religious body and spaces, paradoxically has a potential for laicization of the Church life, by empowering priests against the Episcopate. But could the advance of the religion in the civil activism undermine the foundations of the faith?
Paper long abstract:
The article investigates the relatively new process of the revitalization of the classical Christian-orthodox parishes in Bulgaria, which powerfully questions the dominant discourse inherited by the time of the atheist regime that reduced the role of the Church to the ideological clichés for the historical heritage and national traditions.
The renaissance of the parochial life in the Bulgarian Church, marked by the rising number of actively practicing their religion citizens, opens the ground for an on-going process of rediscovery and/or invention of a new community identity, based more on the universalism of the Christianity, rather than on the narrow borders of the nationalism. Being a predominantly urban phenomenon, that process reflects in small but distinctive changes in the public spaces: temples are renewed; parish centers are established; holiday Church services are broadcasted outside by loudspeakers. The process also acts as a prerequisite for emancipation of parish priests, who backed up by influential laymen tends to question the authority of Episcopate and state authorities, bringing the parishes in the field of civil activism.
The research is based on a field data from Bulgaria and Romania. It also explores the historical and philosophical path of the parishes, from a mystical nucleus in the pre-modern Balkan Ecumene, through their instrumentalisation for the needs of nationalism in the 19th c., and the ideological crisis that followed the Bolshevik occupation of the Christian notion for catholicity (sabornost) under the term "collectivity", to its present day revitalization under the influences of the neo-hesychastic movement.
Margarita Kuzova (New Bulgarian University)
Paper short abstract:
The recreated reality in the postcards (”the City in the Future”) with the staging characteristic of it is a reflection of the visual perceptions and social utopian adjustments in the early 20th century
Paper long abstract:
The purpose of this text is to present postcards from the early 20th century, showing the town's development in the future: imaginary, utopian and the result of subjective artistic views. Bulgarian, German and Swiss images/views have been selected, which are on the borderline between the documentary and the artistic improvisation. This raises the question concerning "the truthfulness of the photographic image", which presents/offers a desired, idealized and fancied view of the urban environment. Flight from reality and changing of the reality depicted in the postcard aim to achieve a certain impact on society.
The swift reflection of the changing (even unfamiliar and fancied) reality in the realm of postcards is a fact. The presence of transport vehicles and imaginary flying machines in the city and in the mountain is hyperbolized and uniform. The artistic reality shown holds good for every modern town no matter in which part of the world it is located. The urban environment in the future is pictured in a uniform and unified way. Futuristic technical amenities are part of the idealized image of the town and stress the overbuilt and overpopulated spaces which, unlike today, had been liked in the past. Every motif/pattern has a specific message and calls for interpretation within broad art theory and anthropological boundaries.
The staged (fantastic) reality in the realm of the Bulgarian postcard is a visual means and strategy of cultural identity, which may have different interpretations within different context and depending on the point of view (province - capital, Bulgaria - Europe, etc.).