Sensing Cities: Regenerating Public Life in Barcelona and Manchester

by Degen; Monica Montserrat

• ISBN13: 9780415397995
• ISBN10: 0415397995
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-07-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

As cities globally re-design their urban landscapes, they produce a different urban aesthetic and create new experiential milieus. Urban regeneration processes generate radical physical, social and cultural changes in neighbourhoods that demand new conceptual frameworks to address their impact upon daily urban life. Sensing Cities investigates the reconfiguration of contemporary public space and life through the prism of the senses. The book explores how the increased stylization of cityscapes requires an understanding of public life as a spatial-sensuous encounter. Degen examines how power relations in public spaces are embedded in, exercised and resisted through the sensuous geography of place. This sensory paradigm is then applied to compare two emblematic regeneration projects, namely el Raval in Barcelona and Castlefield in Manchester. By combining detailed ethnographic analysis and interviews with those involved in planning regeneration processes and those experiencing them, the book argues that achanging sensuous landscape is crucial in redefining people's social practices, attachments and experiences in places. Focusing on two European cities at the forefront of urban design, Barcelona and Manchester, Degen draws on sociology, geography, anthropology, cultural and architectural studies to provide a critical account of the politics of publicness in the entrepreneurial city. With numerous photographs and maps this book stresses the ongoing, embodied and active nature of regeneration as a lived social process rather than merely a physical or economic exercise. Ultimately, Sensing Cities examines how urban regeneration is made effective through the organisation of sensory experience. This book is essential reading for students and researchers of Architecture, Urban Studies and Human Geography.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. xi
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
List of abbreviations	p. xiv
	p. 1
Introduction: Sensing cities	p. 3
Urban redevelopment, the senses and public life	p. 7
Researching the senses	p. 12
Overview of the book	p. 13
Public life in late modernity	p. 16
Space as social process	p. 17
Sensing publicness	p. 20
A new urban aesthetic	p. 25
Commercial privatization and fortification of urban space	p. 30
Conclusion	p. 34
Sensing the city	p. 35
Towards a 'socially embedded aesthetics'	p. 36
The city of senses	p. 41
Place gestures	p. 47
Methodological discussion: rhythmanalysis	p. 50
Conclusion	p. 52
Sensuous powers	p. 54
Flows of power	p. 55
Control through pleasure	p. 59
Domination and resistance	p. 62
Sensuous planning ideologies	p. 65
Conclusion	p. 72
	p. 75
Castlefield and El Raval	p. 77
A sensuous history	p. 78
Castlefield: from industrial revolution to inner city cool	p. 83
El Raval: from 'Barrio Chino' to cultural quarter	p. 93
Conclusion	p. 103
Planning regeneration	p. 105
The spatialization of regeneration	p. 106
Formalizing public life in Castlefield	p. 120
Diluting public life in El Raval	p. 125
Conclusion	p. 130
Perceptions from 'down below'	p. 132
Castlefield: exclusive public spaces	p. 133
El Raval: invisible public spaces	p. 139
Castlefield: promoting selective histories	p. 144
El Raval: disrupting social lives	p. 151
Conclusion	p. 161
Living in regenerated worlds	p. 162
Rhythms of everyday life	p. 163
Sensuous mappings	p. 173
Castlefield's 'taste wars'	p. 176
El Raval's 'place wars'	p. 179
Conclusion	p. 191
Conclusion: Regenerating public life?	p. 194
Notes	p. 201
Bibliography	p. 206
Index	p. 220
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