Maybe these questions hide a deeper issue that we have to ask ourselves about urbanity nowadays.
How are we, as citizens, able to produce culture in the city?
Public space today has lost his function of sublimation of the social conflict due to the increasing need of control and cleaning out of every form of disturb and risk from our shared spaces. The citizen as a consumer is not yet able to modify the public space but with tactics that leave no permanent trace.1)
So understanding where and how the cultural production and the negotiation of social conflict take place in the city is a matter of reading these small traces and finding out the spaces that, out from the "clean, intact and safe" 2), let these practices transform a blank ground to a community platform.
The hypothesis of the research is that conflict between identities is manifestly expressed and negotiated in the "waste" spaces of the city. These "waste" spaces are to be intended not simply as the voids which are around the city, but as every place that produce a boundary: all interruptions of the city flow 3).
As we can visualize the contemporary city as a complex pattern in which every community tends to close itself in an homogeneous space, then we can also imagine how boundaries are multiplying in the city as kind of "buffer zones" between fragments of communities.
Romolo Ottaviani - Stalker, “Planisferio of Rome”, 1995
This research would like to speak about ethnic and cultural integration through the visualization of the physical structure of the borders which these "voids" create inside the city, starting from the idea that the border is the place which gives hospitality to all that is undesirable and "out" of the predominant reality. This means that the border is the potential space for the manifestation of new political and cultural claims, and consequently represents the ground where minorities find their way of expression. The potential of the border lies in its in-betweeness, in its capacity of being nor one side neither the other, but the neutral space in which a different and spontaneous organization is needed and tolerated 4).
Rough representation of Ostrava through its voids.
Ostrava is a city in which the process of deindustrialization, after the boom of the Industrial Revolution, has left many wasted spaces near infrastructures and old factories inside the urban fabric. Nevertheless Ostrava is a city which has hosted lots of migrations, due to his industrial vocation, since the XIX century. This kind of migrations leaves now the place to a contraction and a change of identity of the city, which today is trying to propose itself as a city of culture. One more issue is brought by the big presence of Romani population that, as in many other european countries, lives a condition of cultural and spatial segregation.
The research would like to understand how the wasted spaces of Ostrava are absorbing and giving room to a free elaboration to all these changes and identities. The aim would be to choose one of the ex-industrial areas of the city, which presents a characteristic of being a void between residential districts, in order to map the footprints of spontaneous/illegal uses of it. The result would build a narration of the social claims of the cultural and ethnic minorities that live the city and use this kind of spaces. This would like to be a way to understand how these "uneconomic" devices can be functional for the integration and expression of the ethnicity in the city.
The representation of this research would produce three types of mapping:
One, of a virtual kind, by putting information on a google map.
Another one would be a common map where to collect histories and photos of the place as a collage.
The last one, as a second degree of interpretation, would be a representation of the place through an emotional map that will be probably detached from the geographical reality (non respecting the true distance and size of the elements) but will render the social thickness of the space (representing how the place is perceived from the people).
Öyvind Fählström, - "Section of World Map - A Puzzle," 1973
Notes:
1) Michel De Certeau, “L’invention du quotidien”, Gallimard, Paris, 1990
2) Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment.
3) Stalker Laboratorio d’arte Urbana, Manifesto. Stalker through the actual territories, URL:http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/manifesto/manifesting.htm
4) Piero Zanini, “Significati del confine. I limiti naturali,storici,mentali”, Bruno Mondadori, Milano 1997
Literature:
James Holston, “Cities and citizenship”, Duke University Press, Durham, 1999
Giorgio Agamben, “Stato di eccezione”, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2003
Giorgio Agamben, “Che cos’è un dispositivo?”, Nottetempo srl, Roma, 2006
Guy Debord, “La società dello spettacolo”, BCD editore, Milano, 2008.
Hakim Bey, “Temporary Autonomous Zone”, Autonomedia Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991
URL: http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html
Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubiò, "Presente y futuros. La arquitectura en las ciudades". In AA.VV., "Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en las grandes ciudades", Barcelona: Col.legi Oficial d'Arquitectes de Catalunya / Centre de Cultura contemporània, 1996, 10-23
Michel Foucault, “Antologia”, Feltrinelli editore, Milano, 2005
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