reimaginethecity

[reimaginethecity]

What are the infrastructures that bodies interact with in public spaces?

I am trying to do a thing where I just keep my life as simple as possible, and don’t start over thinking every conceptual element that I bring into my analysis. To answer this question, I will simply look at infrastructures as an unloaded term, a purely functional term describing things/entities/bodies that provide a materiality and/or urban service. 

So what are the infrastructures present in public spaces in Maputo?

The main key infrastructure is obviously roads, as this is the thing that I was most directly interacting with in my daily mobilities, and with which other bodies also interact on a daily, mundane basis. It is an infrastructure you do not think about, and yet you do. Like bemoaning the daily ritual of traffic jams on the Marginal into and out of the city. Laughing at the people who think they’re better than everyone else and therefore are entitled to using the parking/emergency lane and parking lots as extra driving space. The wonder that they don’t take it further and just take over the sidewalk. People forget, or perhaps don’t understand, that the entrance to the city is in any case a bottleneck, and having to change from 3/4 lanes to 2 once you hit Gloria Mall is in any case going to slow you down. The design of 2 lanes all the way is there, but disrespected due to individual hubris and priorities. 

The Marginal can be broken down into various parts. The central divider with two driving lanes on either side, which contains lighting poles and serves as a walkway for pedestrians attempting to cross the flow of vehicles. The two lanes themselves, with an extra lane on the seaside for extra parking space (and as an emergency lane perhaps? Who knows what it’s original purpose was...). Then the sidewalks, aiming to be a walking esplanade reminiscent of old colonial towns or the Havana malecón. 

Sidewalks no longer take a primal role when you leave the Marginal. Turning inland at the level of the Maritimo as a pedestrian you become aware of your footwork, breaking the rhythms of unconscious walking. You have to negotiate varying qualities of sidewalk, or non-existent pedestrian spaces. You have to cross over occasionally to find a safe space to walk, or you stop caring and just walk in the accumulated sand banks on the side of the road, a sidewalk de fortune. By slowing down the cars and reducing their road space, sand acts as a friend of pedestrians. 

Extract from my 1st thesis concerning sand:

Sand is an ever-present element of living in Mozambique. You cannot really talk of ‘earth’ when you live so close to the coast (though there are some more classical agricultural lands around Xai-Xai, as an example). Everything is sand. As such, dealing with sand shapes a lot of daily dwelling practices. For a housewife, sand is the struggle of keeping it out of the house (especially when it has rained), and the constant routine of sweeping. It is also the decision to pour cement in their courtyard in order to reduce their housekeeping tasks, and make it cleaner for their children to play: this is sand in its ‘dirt’ expressive role. Children most commonly play in the street, and the sand is a good play- companion to avoid injuries. In the cova – a depression on the side of the neighbourhood that was created during the 2000 floods – the steep sandy sides are dug out to make hideouts, or used to have a makeshift zipline. Sand is the thing that washes away entire communities when there are floods. In public spaces such as the street or the sides of the main avenues (e.g. Julius Nyerere, where the slopes have been cemented over in order to prevent more erosion onto this key throughway in the city), concrete comes to replace sand, because sand is deemed too dangerous to leave be. But sand is also constructive, as it is an essential part of making concrete, and thus can never truly disappear from the assemblage, and continues to territorialise it, though playing a completely different role when combined with construction materials.

Sand, as a key material aspect of dwellers’ environment, mediates how they dwell and the strategies they adopt to improve their dwelling space. Refusing to deal with sand, for example, may lead to cementing up a plot, reducing the material roles that the ground may have (e.g. can no longer grow anything on it, reducing infiltration of water). The material role of sand as something that is considered ‘dirty’ is linked to its expressive role as undesirable; it becomes a sign of improvement to not have to deal with sand, or not interact directly with sand e.g. by cementing or putting a capulana in between the human and sand, or the imperative to use chinelas (flip-flops). This constant struggle between sand and dwellers is a sign of a conflicting relationship that still stabilises the assemblage in its constancy. 

Sand and water interact to re-shape the materiality of the assemblage during high-intensity (weather) events. The first thing I think about when someone says “water” in the context of Mozambique is floods. Floods and torrential rains. I remember as a child the absurd hilarity of seeing the Marginal and the Baixa flood with water after heavy rains, and the cars that would float by aimlessly, incapable of resisting the strength of the water; I did not realise the damage that these floods caused. 

Memo on 6/05

Formalised places attempt to be sterile; the sand is their biggest enemy, concrete the weapon to combat it, and cleaners the footsoldiers in the war.

The road on the south side of Kayalethu is sleek, but only because there is someone there with a wheelbarrow clearning out the trash and sand that naturally accumulate in its corners. 

The natural state of public spaces is thus messy, and maintaining it in a pristine, ‘modern’ state requires great amounts of labour. But labour is cheap. 

Trees of course are another important element of the Marginal, as an aesthetic element contributing to this beach vibe that the esplanade should take on, but also as a functional element providing shade and therefore a certain level of comfort for remaining for more extended periods of time in certain spaces of the Marginal. 

Trees are a very dominant entity in terms of how they are used within Casa Minha’s marketing of the neighbourhood: they fit within a discourse of ‘green neighbourhoods’, sustainability, and quality of life. Although they are a ‘natural’ non-human, they are heavily involved in human manipulation.

Casa Minha often mentions the trees as a key distinctive feature of the neighbourhood and thus as a selling point; it is true that the more luxurious or older neighbourhoods of Maputo, such as Sommerschield, have a lot of trees that remain from the colonial period, as opposed to the newer neighbourhoods that are distinctly more barren and in part due to this, hotter, and with less public spaces for socialising or economic activities.

In addition to this, they have very material effects on dwellers’ lives: they provide fruit (most common are papaya, mango, and lemon) and shade against the hot sun. As such, they are part of food practices and socialisation, two key sets of practices in the neighbourhood. Having access to fruit through the trees also supplements family incomes, and thus the trees are also integrated in the economic practices of dwellers. Trees are rooted in the private space – literally – but serve many public functions, and thus another example of the fluidity of public and private space. Trees perform a series of public services, such as providing shade, regulating the temperature in the neighbourhood, as well as the water management.

The beach (and bay), alongside trees, is another symbolic element of the Marginal landscape. I remember growing up in Maputo and driving past the beach every morning to go to school and marvelling at how pretty the morning light reflecting on the calm sea was. 

I realise now that I’m not sure how to proceed with this or finish it... 

[reimaginethecity]

Working towards an argument...

I am trying to answer a deceptively simple question: what makes a space public? This question leads to endless research possibilities and lenses that can be taken to understand what it is that we assume and consider when we talk about public spaces. It can be answered conceptually by drawing on the huge literature body tackling this question, or by relying on my empirical observations from the field and relating these to theoretical observations.

There is an assumption that public spaces are inherently political, but also inherently open. Open to a variety of uses but also to a variety of people. Does this mean that they are inherently inclusive? I would argue that it does not. Public spaces, as with any space that is assigned meaning through place-making practices, have associated imaginaries that come with appropriate uses and users of space. Public spaces also vary largely based on context. But there seems to be a somewhat universal understanding of the ‘public’ nature of spaces.

A subsequent question then is, what makes a space public in Maputo? This gives us a certain amount of context specificity, but we can go even further. What makes a space public in the suburbs of Maputo? Now this is something I can answer based on my exploration of three different spatialities, or sites: Polana Caniço “A”, the Marginal, and Triumfo. I use these names as stand-ins for quite specific loci, which correspond to my research-based mobility (walking) in Maputo. It is a sort of transect between my house and the office of Casa Minha. A transect which gives me some insight into the changing relations between my body and infrastructures it interacts with. I have walked this route so often that my experience of it has become cyclical; a repetition of rhythms that make the embodied experience of place into something mundane.

In terms of the affordances that public spaces offer: sociality, political spaces for dialogue and the comingtogetherness of bodies to create new interactions and new spaces, the overarching thing that seems necessary is always shade. Shade because it relates to a certain embodied comfort in place, to a possibility to dwell in place. This is Maputo-specific, as it requires a context in which shade is what is seeked out by bodies naturally evolving in space, since it is so hot. Interactions with shade create rhythms in the city, and position bodies in certain spaces.

Shade is created by infrastructures, but could be considered an infrastructure in itself in that it provides an urban service.

[reimaginethecity]

I have made a mistake (again)

I found a new area of interest within planning that could work to frame my discussion of public spaces: insurgent planning. An article by Faranak Miraftab (2009) got me interested in this branch of planning theory by discussing counter-hegemonic (grassroots) planning practices. This feels like a fascinating line of thought that could be followed through in planning practice, so something to bear in mind maybe rather for my internship or future job...

[reimaginethecity]

I have finally begun productively writing and it makes me so happy.

Now I need to make sense of all the things that end up on paper.

[reimaginethecity]

Working at BC today, thinking about how I can make the crazy amount of downtime I have productive without a computer. I am wondering where I will be with my thesis in a week from now. What do I want to have achieved? It would be good to feel like I've written the beginnings of something analytical, or at least a serious have made a serious start on a thick descriptions chapter.

Iulian suggested that I also keep in mind the possibility of designing/fictioning some speculative prototypes. Obviously these would be normative, but the idea would be to at least open up the spaces of the future. Thus they would have to stay away from being prescriptive.

I'm so unused to thinking about the quality of my writing in a readability sense, I think academic writing tries to focus more so on clarity and the structure or argumentation rather than making the reading interesting for the reader (assuming perhaps that the subject should be inherently interesting?).

I was thinking of taking a creative writing course, but they're so damn expensive... It'll have to wait for another time. In the meantime, I'll have to trust I've read enough in my lifetime to figure out if what I'm saying sounds half decent.

[reimaginethecity]

exploring different urbanities

(disclaimer: just doing some rambling writing here, nothing very thought through, it will therefore need revision))

The idea that there can be just one ‘ideal’ city form is a bit preposterous. The idea that this ideal would be the supposedly homogeneous European post-industrial city even more so. It is unfortunate that so many people think that a ‘modern’ or ‘developed’ city has to look a certain way (usually involving cars, heavy road infrastructure, tall steel and glass buildings, and high end, elite bars). In a discussion with Jeanne Vivet, she commented that many Mozambican geographers and scholars of other disciplines she had met looked down upon endogenous modes of urbanisation and held a so-called European aesthetic of the city as an ideal to strive for. Let’s just say that the steel and glass city they might imagine is not an aesthetic I find particularly interesting or liveable (and probably most Europeans would think the same; the Dutch disinterest in the urban landscapes of Rotterdam comes to mind), especially if it becomes universal. 

Maputo demonstrates a wide variety of urbanities that yield interesting insights in how multiple the city can be. PCA, the Marginal, and Triumfo have different characteristics of urban form and the subsequent public spaces that are generated, as well as embodied experiences of public spaces in terms of comfort/discomfort and the enabling of specific modes of dwelling. 

PCA is an older suburb within cidade caniço, it had both pre-war and war settlements, and later evolved as the cimento expanded its urban form into what is now called ‘Sommerschield II’. It is densely built up, leaving very little open space. The post-independence period saw a lot of unregulated infill of spaces that had been left open for recreational or ecological purposes (e.g. flood zones and football fields), and over the years dwellers have expanded the boundaries of their talhões into the streets, making them narrower than the minimum required in urban plans for tertiary roads (6m?). This has created an intimate setting in which cars are not the dominant user, but pedestrians. Kids play freely on the street, and women have a wide range of informal (and often temporary) economic activities in improvised bancas or in a room attached to the house giving onto the street. An overhead view of the neighbourhood shows that it is very green, with many old trees dominating above the 1-floor houses. These trees were planted for their fruit/nuts and the shade that they bring onto the outdoor spaces of homes: the true centres of domestic life. It is a neighbourhood where everybody knows each other’s name and problems.

The Marginal is a transitory space overrun with speculative developments. It is the main gateway into and out of the city for commuters who decided they could have a better quality of life if they built their houses on a large quintal in the peripheries of Maputo, or even as far as Marracuene or Bobole. The morning and evening rush hours bring traffic to a standstill, with no alternate route connecting Triumfo/Costa do Sol with Sommerschield/PCA. The roadside of this sea-side boulevard is being sold off to foreign (or local elite) investors to build mall after mall and high-rise apartment/hotel block after block. Nobody lives in these or stays in the hotels. The malls are outcompeting each other for clientele and commerce. The other side, the beach side, is conversely the most democratic public space in Maputo. People from all walks of life come here on weekends to enjoy the pleasures of wind, sand and sea. It is becoming the symbol of Maputo as it is constantly reproduced in rituals of photo-taking (by wedding parties, women who want new photos for their social media and enlist ‘professional’ photographers, or tourists incited to take pictures with the newly installed “EuAmoMOZ” sign put up by 2M in a campaign stint). 

Triumfo is my neighbourhood. It emerged in the past 20 years once investors managed to reclaim land from the swamp/brackish waters that characterised this low point of the city. Some houses have been in construction since then, never getting the funds necessary to be finished. When I grew up there, it always felt like the far end of Maputo, and friends would always complain at having to go aaallll the way out there. Now it’s a comparatively close suburbs.  The Triumfo velho was built in a first round of ‘colonisation’ of this space by middle to upper income Mozambicans when terrains there were cheap. The houses are on average 2 floors in height, with space dedicated to gardens, and the width of streets respected (enough to park cars on both sides and still drive almost two cars side by side). Triumfo novo is a bit grander in scale, with houses on average 3 floors in height, and built much more recently. The presence of significantly more open spaces has meant the emergence little by little of ‘public’ gardens (privately managed). These gardens respond to a concern with the misuse of open spaces (e.g. for dumping trash) and desire to enhance the aesthetic of communal spaces and spaces for play for young children. One such garden, a square that was formed over the past ten years in front of our house, is a subject of hot debate, as it is rhythmically invaded by school children who go to the neighbourhood primary/secondary school next door. 

Thinking about these three different sites shows the variety of urban spaces already within a 5km radius, and the emerging meanings and uses of public spaces especially. There is so much to deconstruct that I could probably talk for hours about it (though typing/writing it is a bit more laborious). I will continue to write what I think and thought as I attempt to make sense of these spaces and the different urbanities they portray. 

[reimaginethecity]

I recently remembered the name of one of my favourite ethnographers I’ve ever read -- Loïc Wacquant -- a student of Bourdieu who did research on boxing in the US. I want to be able to write like him, I remember I finished his book ridiculously fast for what I was used to in academic writing. I think I can practice this by working on the autoethnographic part of my research, but this will require a lot of soul searching and time. 

[reimaginethecity]

Analysis of narratives or narrative research...?

So, subbing narratives with stories (I like that it is a less loaded term): analysis of stories, or story-based/storytelling analysis? 

I came across another chapter by Kim (2015) on narrative approaches, and have found it very enlightening in clarifying (again; this is a pretty cyclical process) my ideas about the kind of stories I am looking for, how to mobilise storytelling, and what in the world I will do for my analysis/writing phase. 

Assuming that I am looking at a variety of narrative ‘texts’ (not limited to written texts, but including visual, oral, etc. stories), it is important to consider texts at different points in the research: ‘field texts’, ‘interim texts’, and ‘research texts’ (texts produced in the field, texts produced in the analysis and de/re-construction of meaning phase, and texts produced to present knowledge to an audience. As I have already produced my field texts, I am now considering how to deal with my interim and research texts. Where does storytelling or a narrative approach come to play in these phases?

Kim presents different lenses for understanding how to do narrative research (as opposed to the analysis of narratives, which is the more standard thematic coding/qualitative research we are taught at university). Polkinghorne’s (1988) mode of analysis is summarised by Kim as follows:

It focuses on the events, actions, happenings, and other data elements to put them together in a plot;

It uses to-and-fro, recursive movement from parts to whole or from whole to parts;

It fills in the gaps between events and actions using a narrative smoothing process;

It maintains that narrative analysis is not merely a transcription of the data, but is a means of showing the significance of the lived experience in the final story;

It makes the range of disconnected data elements coherent in a way that it appeals to the reader.

Kim also presents Mishler’s (1995) mode of analysis, where he discusses a typology of narrative analysis:

Reference and temporal order: The “telling” and the “told”

Recapitulating the told in the telling (Labov’s model)

Reconstructing the told from the telling (Reordering a storyline)

Imposing a told on the telling (Identifying a story pattern)

Making a telling from the told (Inferring a story)

Textual coherence and structure: Narrative strategies

Textual poetics: Figuration, tropes, and style

Discourse linguistics: Oral narratives

Narrative functions: Contexts and consequences

Narrativization of experience: Cognition, memory, self

Narrative and culture: Myths, rituals, performance

Storytelling in interactional and institutional contexts

The politics of narrative: Power, conflict, and resistance

Of these types, I find the bolded point, making a telling from the told, most interesting for my own research, as it means that I can look at images I have captured of bodies in public spaces, and infer the embodied stories/narratives that are being told. 

Interestingly, the references Kim makes to Polkinghorne and Mishler are surprisingly old, I wonder that there is no more recent discussion of modes of narrative analysis to draw upon (or none, at least, that could surpass these two).

My conclusion is that I would like to do a narrative analysis rather than an analysis of narratives, and therefore draw on a different tradition of analytical techniques than what we are standardly taught (i.e. coding). This fills me with some dread, as did the dropping of interviews from my data collection methods. We’ll see how it goes... 

References

Kim, J. H. (2015). Understanding narrative inquiry: The crafting and analysis of stories as research. Sage publications.

Mishler, E. G. (1995). Models of narrative analysis: A typology. Journal of narrative and life history, 5(2), 87-123.

Polkinghorne, D. E. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Suny Press.

[reimaginethecity]

Cyclists of the Marginal

I get really excited when I see cyclists anywhere, but when I started seeing them in Maputo it became a bit of an obsession. It makes me so happy to see that it has increased as a mode of transport and of leisure/sport. Here I want to compile some of the pictures I have of these cyclists that made me smile.

This was the first peloton I saw!

Not captured in the picture above: the moment just afterwards where he allowed himself a long stretch of his arms above his head. It seemed so relaxed and leisurely, as if without a thought for the traffic conditions around him. 

Notes: I have tried my best not to capture faces in order to maintain some level of anonymity of these cyclists. If they are recognisable, I apologise. The pictures are unedited. 

[reimaginethecity]

Re-centring my research around stories

I have realised that although I have claimed speculative fiction as the ethos of my research, I have not thoroughly integrated stories and storytelling into every part of my proposal. This is probably because I have been tempted to include a wide variety of methods (including sensory + arts-based), and have thus diffused my focus somewhat. I also have realised that my diagram of the thesis space doesn’t even mention speculative fiction! I should fix that. 

I still think I am always thinking about stories and storytelling, but this has not come through consistently in what I have written. 

In particular, I need to think through how to mobilise storytelling in the analytical phase of my project. In general, I need to seriously consider what my analytical process will be, as this has a definite impact on the type of data I need to collect. 

[reimaginethecity]

Sitting in O.R. Tambo

I have fallen back into the ritual of sitting at M&B for some bottomless coffee. My feet are too hot in my boots, I knew I should have packed my sandals. But I wanted to feel badass walking around in the airports, so now I pay the price of sweaty feet. It’s always much hotter than I remember when I come back home. The a.c. is more wind than cool, which is good for avoiding temperature shocks when arriving back outside. I always hated overly air-conditioned spaces. Especially at school. 

I will arrive in Maputo in a couple of hours, and am feeling quite daunted by the whole prospect. I haven’t made any appointments yet, and I worry that this means I will feel stuck for steps to follow. But I think I will start with a very easy-going walk on the Marginal with my dog and mom and the camera. I need to start getting familiarised with it, so that my photographs don’t come across as too amateurish. And I need to start thinking about what kinds of photos I want to take. In the still of film, do I start with an establishing shot, and then move into specifics? What kind of choices do I make about the subjects that enter my photos? What about anonymity and asking permission from people in the streets? If I blur out their faces is it enough to not have to ask for permission? (probably not!) What if they ask me for money, as they do now in so many places that have become used to tourists? And should I pose as a tourist? Pretend that I am a casual photographer, not interested in engaging with the subjects I am capturing? 

There are many questions to figure out... But first, sleep. Although I must say that after this 3rd large mug of coffee I’m feeling pretty awake (to the point of being jittery). 

[reimaginethecity]

Thoughts on my pre-colloquium

I had my pre-colloquium today, a necessary rite of passage before going off into the big wide world of fieldwork. I had a lot of anticipated feedback: my research is still too broad, and the links between my theoretical framework and methodological approach are not very explicit (though they can be gleaned). 

I had not, however, anticipated a comment about a certain aspect of my normativity: that I was too prone to critiquing the municipality in their planning efforts. This is a view I have developed through exposure to strong personalities in the field, and my own thoughts on the corruption and inefficiency of the Mozambican government in general. But this is, to an extent, an unfair opinion. I have not developed it through my own systematic evaluation of their work and perspective. Thus, I am not entitled to uncritically presenting this normative standpoint. I must consider their rationale as a valid one, even if it is pragmatic and counter (or is it??) to what I (as an idealist European student) believe to be a just approach. 

I had also not realised that storytelling had become lost in both my TF and MF, and that my claims to using SF as an ethos were thus somewhat void. 

An interesting point that was raised also was to ‘re-colonise’ my research by considering how insights gained in my case study could be relevant in Europe. (I’m still not sure ‘re-colonising’ is the right term to use for this process.)

[reimaginethecity]

I am fitting my theoretical approach firmly within non-representational/more-than-representational theory, an approach foregrounded by Nigel Thrift (2008). This approach is epistemologically close to theories of affect and the body that have emerged from feminist scholarship, and I am borrowing this sensitivity to the gendered body for understanding place making. The focus of these approaches is on embodied experiences and practices, rather than on abstracted discourses. They “give primacy to the non-cognitive ways in which people move about their daily lives, arguing that the focus on representation in the post-modern era has led to a great lacuna in our understanding of the role of the physical body in social space” (Hayes-Conroy et al, 2010: 1275). It may seem strange to have a practice-based approach to narratives/stories, but I find that this helps to ground the narratives/stories in the everyday and the mundane. It highlights the importance that the mundane has in place making.

[reimaginethecity]

New narratives of urbanism

Dittmer highlights that “what is needed then are new narratives of urbanism that express the dynamism of the city, with agency distributed amongst a variety of elements and unfolding in a range of temporalities. These narratives can act back upon our own embodied sensibilities, enabling us to see the city anew” (2014: 478). Seeing the city anew also means being able to dwell anew, and thus create new futures for ourselves. Dittmer (2014) highlights the three implications identified by McFarlane of dwelling seen through an assemblage lens: “(1) the importance of making space through practices of dwelling; (2) the importance of ‘sociomaterialities of near and far, actual and virtual, the everyday and the long durée’ (McFarlane 2011a, p. 668); and (3) the need to interrogate who gets to direct the processes of assemblage” (Dittmer, 2014: 499).

This last point highlighted by Dittmer, the need to interrogate who gets to direct the processes of assemblage, is linked to what can be termed the ‘politics of assemblage’, or ‘politics of assembling’ (the latter linguistically implies more dynamism in the assemblage). Linked to these politics is the concept of the ‘right to the city’, a concept first proposed by Lefebvre, and later developed by Harvey in his article by the same name:

“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights” (Harvey, 2008).

[reimaginethecity]

Turning an interest in speculative fiction into a research approach

The approach to my thesis takes inspiration from the value I see in works of speculative fiction. They contribute to the ‘reservoir of futures’ of place, and help to reclaim stories about the present and future of places. Ivor Hartmann, in the introduction to his anthology of African Science Fiction, writes: “SciFi is the only genre that enables African writers to envision a future from our African perspective” (2012) . These are a key concerns in a postcolonial context where much of the narratives of the city have been dominated by European ideals of the desirable city and the legacy of injustice and racial domination embedded in colonial urbanism.

As dwellers and planners, we naturally turn to stories to make sense of the spaces we inhabit. This, according to Sandercock, translates the “unrepresentable space, life and languages of the city” into something legible, and these narratives in turn “becomes constitutive of urban reality, affecting the choices we make, the ways we then might act” (2003: 12). As reflexive elements of an ever-changing urban assemblage, the stories we tell about urban assemblages matter: “we become our stories” (ibid: 16). They directly affect the assembling of urban places. This is not limited to how we dwell, but in fact “stories are central to planning practice: to the knowledge it draws on from the social sciences and humanities; to the knowledge it produces about the city; and to ways of acting in the city. Planning is performed through story, in a myriad of ways” (ibid: 12).

This interest in the performance of stories leads me to an interest in observing bodily movements in spaces in Maputo. Specifically, Casa Minha Lda are organising on a regular basis community activities that use the ‘theatre of the oppressed’ to build interpersonal bonds. In addition to this, all human and more-than-human practices in public spaces can be examined through their performative dimension. Analytically, storytelling is interesting because it is a meaning-making practice. Anthropologists realised this when they began making visual ethnographic documentaries in order to build their analysis of cultures and translate these into stories. I draw inspiration from this.

Sandercock (2003) also argues that planners need to learn how to tell stories “skillfully enough to capture the imagination of a broader and more political audience than our colleagues alone” (20) because this allows us to have a greater impact on place making in the city. Sandercock also argues that “there are two notions of story at work here. One is functional/instrumental: bringing the findings of social research to life through weaving them into a good story. The other is more profound: storytelling, in the fullest sense, is not merely recounting events, but endowing them with meaning by commentary, interpretation and dramatic structure” (2003: 20). On a personal level, then, it is necessary for me to learn how to tell effective and engaging stories if I want to develop my capacity to impact place making. On an intervention level, engaging with dwellers’ stories and working with them to build their own capacity to tell stories about the spaces they live in, is important to give voice to those who perhaps suffer of epistemic or epistemological violence (see Spivak, 1988; Teo, 2010) and address the imbalance of power between researcher and researched.

References:

Sandercock, L. (2003). Out of the closet: The importance of stories and storytelling in planning practice. Planning Theory & Practice, 4(1), 11-28.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak?. Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an idea, 21-78.

Teo, T. (2010). What is epistemological violence in the empirical social sciences?. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4(5), 295-303.

[reimaginethecity]

Becoming a narrator

If my thesis is one big exercise in speculative fiction, I need to consider myself as the narrator or writer of this master narrative I am building. This means becoming fully aware of the decisions I make in furthering the plot and asking questions that will put in position my main characters. It also means becoming aware of my writing style and how I actually present my narrative. 

As Dan O’Sullivan (2015) shows, this also means a commitment to being reflexive about your ‘authorial stance’ and your role as interpreter in your interpretation of the world. The importance of reflexivity is not new to me, and I think I usually manage to incorporate it well enough in my research notes. But it will be interesting to also consider it more extensively when writing up the thesis itself, as it is easy to forget that when you are writing you are also interpreting and representing, and that this has a notable subjectivity. 

But the question also remains for me, how do I think of myself as narrator when I am in the field? What does this change about the way I interact with people and things?

References:

O'Sullivan, D. (2015). Voicing Others' Voices: Spotlighting the Researcher as Narrator. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 8(2), 211-222.

[reimaginethecity]

Speculative fiction as an ethos

Drawing on Anderson and McFarlane’s conceptualisation of assemblage as either ethos, methodology or ontology (if I remember correctly), I am beginning to see speculative fiction in the same light. As a methodology, it can of course be incorporated into a research design in a variety of ways (as data, method for data collection, analytical tool...), but it is interesting to consider how it would guide the research design as a whole. 

This is something that Iulian brought up in our last meeting: how do I make obvious and important that I started this project from the perspective of SF? What impact has this had on the way I ask my research questions, or frame my research interests and objectives?

I think the most interesting thing from both science and speculative fiction is that they answer a ‘basic’ “what if” question, and do this through world-building, and putting bodies into the world that they create. The interaction and relations of bodies in their world answers the “what if”. I think this is something that I find intriguing in both SFs. 

This world-building also implies some narratives of belonging (and exclusion) in said world. Who is present in the narrated futures? What are their affordances? These are questions that can relate quite directly back to the ‘right to the city’.