domingo, 25 de setembro de 2016

On the daily life of metropolises.

"The daily existence of the metropolitan territory as an archipelago tends to generate a perceptive map of the metropolis which, for major population groups, results in an obfuscation or even obliteration of the spaces and territories that lie in between and beyond these 'islands'. There seems to be an organized (though not necessarily intentional) ignorance of the interstitial or extreme spaces of the 'islands', nodal points of functional mobility and urban productivity, now elevated to a legitimatizing ideology defining proper ways to organize and use the urban space. In the connectionist and binary language of networks, the islands represent the nodal points of a network, in between which circulates what's 'in' as opposed to what's 'out'. By way of Erving Goffman's old metaphor we might say that the new ways of organizing metropolitan space tend to produce many and diverse 'backstages' as opposed to the 'stages' of urban everyday life (...).
We are thus looking at an advent of the perception of metropolitan space as functional, in the face of the demands of global competition, which tends to reify certain uses of space by presenting them as self-evident and unquestionable. Even the frequent bouts of criticism by the city users tend to focus more one the system's 'malfunctions' (occasional failures on the system of public transportation, potholes on the road...) than on questioning the basic foundations of its construction. We're referring to an inevitably moral set of choices aggregated within a metropolitan society, in which [each collective entity] is unevely positioned to impress its own point of view and thus to build [urban space]. In this context, to criticize the mundane or 'naturalized' perception of the functional spaces of urban life might contribute towards an increased democratization of daily existence in contemporary metropolises".
Martins, A.C. & Mota, C. (2011). Metropolitan citizenship and critiques of everyday life. in MELE, V. (ed.). Sociology, Aesthetics and the City. Pisa: Pisa University Press.