Penelope Le trame emergenti del tessuto urbano

Buskers' uses of public space

Buskers' uses of public space.
A case to explore the fundamentals and by-products of administrative rationality

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We can think about the institutional political agenda as something written and discussed within institutional agencies and then translated into the everyday life through policies. But in many cases the institutions are overwhelmed by the unexpected representation of the society and should run after these. The planned way of policy making should left the place to an emergency logic, where what become visible and public should be tackled in order to be coherent with the institutional rationality. The responses to the solicitations are usually without a long term perspective and many times the products and by-products of those actions will be in the future the target for new policies.
The paper aims to explore both the mechanisms that inform urban policies and the effects and by-products of these policies. For this reason, it will present and discuss a case study dealing with the discipline of public spaces in relation to buskers' use of the city. The case of street performers shows that administrative measures are the consequence and the formalization of a way of conceptualizing the presence of these artists in a public space. For this reason, urban rationality turns out to be not only a set of regulations but, more widely, a way of thinking. Thus, our interest is to understand how is rationality made and what underlies a regulation aiming at defining time and spaces in which artists can perform. Furthermore, in the chain of action shaping the rationality of policy making, different actors are mobilized. In newpapers' account, street artists gain visibility distinguishing themselves from an undesirable and 'unsafe' other (i.e. beggers). On the other side, politicians supporting artists' cause blame their own city as old fashioned respect to more liberal cities. A double positioning is performed, the one of actors interdefining each other in the controversy, and the positioning of the image of the city compared to others. Focusing on those practices of differentiation can shed light on the way identity and alterity are produced and on the way domains of "safety" and "culture" in public policies are shaped. The discussion will provide interesting remarks about the performative power of urban rationality.

Dark portraits of a city

Dark portraits of a city: A noir approach to urban and organizational phenomena

The paper aims to trace connections between organizational and urban discourses. Despite the traditional assumption that public administration units are the locus of planning whereas urban space is the locus of intervention, both form an intertwined, hybrid and heterogeneous territory where different urban and administrative settings and visions are enacted and coexist.
There are practices in this hybrid territory that go unnoticed and belong both to the ordinary life of the city and to the routine public policies, such as public officials’ views, organizational values, political strategies, as well as dwellers' practices. They are embedded in linguistic and material artefacts such as procedures, protocols, cartographies, conversations, strategic guidelines, newspapers, and road signs.
This paper develops in two steps. First, we explain our methodological stance, which can be called a noir approach to organizational and urban phenomena, based on what has been called a “method of Zadig” (T.H. Huxley, 1880; Ginzburg, 1979) as an evidential paradigm. In contrast to classic crime stories, a noir has no murder to discover, nor does it follow linearity in telling events. Noir narratives work anti-strategically, contrasting unforeseen truths basing on ambiguous clues and witnesses.
Secondly, we apply this approach in our study arguing the importance of looking at urban-organizational network through collecting traces from various invisible urban enclaves, which wait for being recognised as part of the city. Specifically, we have followed the process of naming of suburban streets, in this way looking at the trivial aspects of urban and organizational practices. It shows that, starting from such forgotten enclaves, it is possible to reveal the shadow part of municipal administration, with its paradoxes and unresolved issues. The territory of our case study is characterized by pervasive and strong presence of public administration, but their apparent visibility can be misleading, as the presence of “dark places” reveal. Their presence can be better portrayed by a metaphor of a “sprawl” than of a traditional picture of an organizational pyramid. They reach far but irregularly, leaving many spaces in the darkness.
Drawing such “dark portraits” as study result offers a sort of “uchronic” (no time) view, where time-space and material dimension of organizations interfere but can be recombined through investigation in a style of Zadig. In this way, we can observe how new urban-organizational settings are enacted, and even observe suggestions for innovation in public policy, public management and for a symmetrical comprehension of urban and organizational phenomena.

Mapping cities through narratives

Mapping cities through narratives.
The performative eyes of media and institutions

The urban questions are often tackled considering the organization of space and the forms of urban life, but a city is also what it is told about it: the stories, the legends, the myths. Not only practices and policies affect and transform urban domain, but also narratives have a performative role, enacting practices of living the city and influencing the way inhabitants represents their own space and resources. City marketing represents just one of those narratives that have to do, more widely, with the city development itself not just with its promotion. This is the idea of episteme that Foucault proposes: knowledge that gets organized. It doesn’t matter then if stories do not correspond to the real practices embedded in the city or to its architecture, because knowledge creates other cities, other practices, other architectures. Moreover, knowledge itself is practice. Discourses are embodied in agency, they tend to produce reflexive accounts and wishful thinking, but also their performative power enacts different imaginery about what the city has been and might be. This suggests that there is a link between the organizational discourse and the urban texture. Institutional rationalities and local news are two discourses that perform different images of the city with dystopian and utopian ways of being. The analysis of these two rethorics may be a fruitful way to approach urban organization and to examine whether and how these stories affect urban practices, policies and everyday experience. Thus, media and institutional eye offers clues and trials to follow, to trace and to map city phenomena. In this respect the first step is to create a dialogue between these narrations. Their intersections offer an alternative representation of the city. Consequently, in this map the centre of the city may not coincide with the main square but with the events that take place in those narrations. The power of this representation deals with the capability of revealing the multiplicity of the urban texture, made of countless interstices, overlapping routes that embody different geographies of the city, as the encounter of narratives, practices and policies.