Urban crystallization and the morphogenesis of urban territories

We develop the perspective of crystallization as a way to shed a light on the morphogenesis and stabilization of urban territories. We start by describing crystallization as a consolidation of a visible and singular order that establishes certain privileged directions of growth and breaks spatial and temporal symmetries. We then illuminate how crystallization processes unfold at different scales, going through a series of historical cases, from the stabilization of urban regions, to iconic places such as Times Square, New York, and on to large scale linear or path crystals, such the Turia Riverbed Park in Valencia. Building on thesecases, we then discuss crystallization as a phenomenon requiring metastability, and how this metastability relates to different ways and forms of territorial stabilization. Finally, we discuss how crystallization, by making certain figures and directions more salient than others, also plays an important part in the emergence of new scales and in the processes of urban rescaling, that is, how crystallization also contributes to a hierarchical segmentation of the urban environment

artveillance at the crossroads of art and surveillance

In this article I review a series of artworks, artistic performances and installations that deal with the topic of surveillance. My aim is twofold. On the one hand, I want to look comparatively at how different artists interrogate, question, quote, or critise surveillance society. On the other hand, I take these artistic actions as themselves symptomatic of the ways in which surveillance interrogates contemporary society. In other words, my claim is that surveillance does not simply produce substantive social control and social triage, it also contributes to the formation of an ideoscape and a collective imagery about what security, insecurity, and control are ultimately about, as well as the landscape of moods a surveillance society like ours expresses

Apocalypso Disco: La rave-o-luzione della post techno (Riccardo Balli)

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Introdução: Explorando os interstícios urbanos

Os artigos reunidos neste número da revista Forum Sociológico são provenientes de um encontro científico internacional organizado pelo grupo de pesquisa On Walls e realizado em 2009 na cidade de Lisboa. On Walls é um colectivo multidisciplinar composto por investigadores que têm desenvolvido pesquisa em torno da definição e apropriação social dos suportes urbanos por parte de diferentes agentes (designers, arquitectos, publicitários, muralistas, graffiti writers, planificadores urbanos, etc.)..

Digital methods for ethnography: analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments

The aim of this article is to introduce some analytical concepts suitable for ethnographers dealing with social media environments. As a result of the growth of social media, the Internet structure has become a very complex, fluid, and fragmented space. Within this space, it is not always possible to consider the 'classical' online community as the privileged field site for the ethnographer, in which s/he immerses him/herself. Differently, taking inspiration from some methodological principles of the Digital Methods paradigm, I suggest that the main task for the ethnographer moving across social media environments should not be exclusively that of identifying an online community to delve into but of mapping the practices through which Internet users and digital devices structure social formations around a focal object (e.g., a brand). In order to support the ethnographer in the mapping of social formations within social media environments, I propose five analytical concepts: community, public, crowd, self-presentation as a tool, and user as a device

Democracy and Its Visibilities

The paper explores the democratic regime as a specific visibility regime. It takes as its starting point the idea that visibility is a complex sociological category. The field of visibility interweaves aesthetic and semiotic relations, in other words it crosscuts the domains of the perceptual and the symbolic. Visibility can be described as a relational, strategic and processual feature that characterises human relations. More specifically, contemporary society is arranged into regimes of visibility that concur in the definition and management of power, representation, public opinon, violence and social control. Whereas potential ambivalences are inherent to all visibility effects, regimes contribute to specify and activate contextual determinations of the visible. Norberto Bobbio defined democracy as the exercise of 'power in public', while Jürgen Habermas characterized the public sphere as an open and accessible discoursive space. But what is properly public in the public sphere and how can it be conceptualized in terms of visibility? What are the specific consequences of visible as opposed to invisible power? The paper provides an attempt at answering these questions by conceptualising and understanding the democratic visibility regime from a transdisciplinary perspective, joining together contributions from interactionism, cultural studies and political science

Preliminary remarks for a study of urban motilities

We could conceive a sociology of urban motilities associated to the act of going to work as composed of: 1. a dromology of displacements. This includes the study of speeds of material and immaterial (informational) transfers, kinetic energy in relation to the type of propulsion or fuel (animal, mechanic, fossil, electric etc.) and the type of medium (earth, water, air, wires, aether); average and instantaneous speed of transport, coefficients of velocity (= speed + directional vector, thus considering movements of entrance, exit, turning, etc.), accelerations, decelerations, queues, jams, accidents, collisions, and their consequences; the study of transfer vectors, i.e. means of displacement (in relation to the different speeds each type of vehicle ensures, be it private, public, or hybrid transport) and the infrastructures for displacement (in relation to the different speeds they ensure, impose or invite); description of distances and travel durations, daily and weekly overall time spent on travelling et

The wall and the city

Walls are material artifacts designed to attain some goals. In most cases, these are spatial goals, such as enclosure and separation. Using a Foucaultian terminology, walls can be described as governmental objects. This means they are part of the larger activity known as government of the population, and – as Foucault (1978/1991: 95) remarked – ‘with government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things’. Governmentality works by defining positions inside a relational field, which is essentially a territorial field (see lo Squaderno, no. 3)

The Visible: Element of the Social

In the context of a social-theoretical take on the link between social life and visibility, this paper invites to shift the focus from visibility phenomena to “the visible”. A theory of visibility, it is submitted, must be constructed as a theory of the medium. In opposition to visibility as a set of formal relations, what the visible brings to the fore is the existence of a mid-term, a connective tissue. Also, if a theory is a prelude to a science, then a theory is needed that makes possible to measure the visible in itself. The development of an “intrinsic” theory of the visible, one capable of generating its own variables and constants, along with the conceptual space for their articulation, is retrieved through the joint contributions of surface theories (Simmel, Goffman, Portmann) and intensity theories (Deleuze, Thom). The piece presents a set of notions that could be of use to analyze the fiber of the visible and the trajectories occurring in the visible, in view of laying out a series of laws of the visible