Zoom
Veranstalter:
Institute of Social Anthropology
ONLINE: Urbanity again: From experience to practice in urban theory
If you would like to join the Zoom session, please contact s.burri@clutterunibas.ch.
Since the beginning of urban theory in the late 19th century, two strands of conceiving the city and the urban emerged parallel to each other: On the one side, the city was conceived as an environment; a sensory, a social, a cultural, an economic, and not least a built environment. As such, the city acts upon its inhabitants, makes them what they are, shapes urbanites who may experience the city in different ways, but always within the limits of what that materiality and its sensory consequences allows them to experience. Simmel’s (in)famous blasé attitude of city dwellers is perhaps the best-known example, but the experiential dimension – the impact of the urban on actors – has been a recurrent theme in urban anthropology and urban studies more widely. On the other side, the urban is taken as a sort of product, that is, as an inventive and collective creation – as something that the actors make when interacting with each other. This focus on practice dissolves the boundaries between actors and object, between agency and structure. The two strands of theorising the urban have immediate consequences for empirical research and the findings that it yields. While one puts things, materiality and their sensory experience first, the other looks at practices and in particular their interrelatedness. The paper eventually outlines how the particularities of these two approaches shape our understanding of what a city is and what not.
Keywords: urban anthropology, urban theory, experience, intention, practice.
Veranstaltung übernehmen als
iCal