Workshop: Urban Comparison

With Manuel Herz, Maren Larsen, Lotte Nielsen and Silke Oldenburg

Inspired by increased scholarly attention to the notion of “making” (Ingold 2013) and “becoming,” (cf. Biehl and Locke, Deleuze), this workshop seeks to theorize the formation of urbanity and role of urbanization in the consolidation of an understanding of what makes a city. It simultaneously marks the end of the inter-disciplinary research project of the same title (SNSF grant NGK2161) and launches a longer discussion about how urban life unfolds and change occurs, and what generalizable notions we can draw from deep investigations of everyday life and specific changes to generate or revise theories of “the urban.”

Building on three years of project work, presentations from Goma (DRC), Johannesburg (RSA), and Cartagena (Columbia) will describe various processual characteristics of urbanity and urbanization through the analytical angles of: i) cultural and linguistic articulations, ii) conventions of social inclusion and exclusion,  and iii) architectural, structural, and institutional correspondences. These analytical views provide the framework through which to investigate sameness and difference in interactional ways of life (urbanity) and urban growth dynamics (urbanization) within each field site itself and across all field sites. 

In comparing different everyday practices in these seemingly disparate cities, we wish to overcome an impasse in current urban scholarship that fails to discuss the dialectical relationship between structure and agency beyond a single field or case. Through such a comparison of the ways in which urbanity is continuously “in the making,” we seek to connect the formation of urban social spaces (in their material, social, and cultural dimensions) to the imagination/conceptualisation of cities as wholes and multiples, constituted beyond any single field or city. 

The workshop will start with a presentation of five urban ethnographies of ‘making’ (Ingold 2013) - a concept we utilise to understand the ways the city comes into conceptual and material being. Closely linked to our mobilization of the concept of making is a focus on the agency of different actors in the urban arena the everyday practices of encounter and distanciation in the production of urbanity. Each ethnography presents different practices of encounter and distanciation that transform the imagined and actual city as both a social and material place. Social fields of leisure and security as they occur in urban settings as varied as an arts center (Nielsen) and a former refugee camp (Herz) provide some of the contexts in which these practices are discussed. The ethnographic accounts will be followed by a group discussion on models or theories of comparison by which each case can enter in a theoretically generative dialogue with the others.

Presentations from:
Making Cartagena (Silke Oldenburg)

Making Mugunga (Manuel Herz)

Making Johannesburg (Lotte Nielsen)

Making Goma (Maren Larsen)

Attendance is open to the public

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