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POST-IT CITY
The Post-it City. Occasional urbanities concept designates
different forms of the temporary occupations of public space, be they
of a commercial, leisure, sexual or any other kind, that share the common
feature of barely leaving a trace and of self-managing their appearance
and disappearance.
By using the idea of Post-it City as the crux of this investigation
we are trying to underline considerations of two kinds: the political
potential the idea in itself has, and its methodological effectiveness
for studying very disparate social and urban contexts.
Post-it City phenomena emphasise the reality of the urban territory
as the place where distinctive uses and situations legitimately overlap,
in opposition to the growing pressures to homogenise public space. In
contrast to the ideals of the city as a place of consensus and consumption,
temporary occupations of space reaffirm use value, reveal different
needs and lacks that affect given collectives, and even promote creativity
and the subjective imagination. Behind the reality of Post-it City,
the metropolis reappears as a territory traversed by numerous dynamics
and processes, but also by numerous subjects with a genuine political
dimension thanks to the imaginative strategies of survival of their
licit actions?intrusive and parasitical ones that often involve recycling.
From another standpoint, the temporary activities that contaminate public
space with numerous para-architectural artefacts enable reflection on
urban experience to re
POST-IT City Network
The set of materials that go to form this Post-it
City. Occasional urbanities project derive from different sources as well
as from different work processes. Posited as an archive about different
case studies, the majority of them have been produced especially for the
project. In order to carry out the research, we proceeded to involve various
agents in different cities throughout the world, the idea being that they
would plan their contributions according to their closeness to and direct
knowledge of the location.
Up until now some twenty different cities have participated in the project.
The interlocutors in each of them have their own profile (organised collectives,
university nuclei, art centres, individual researchers, etcetera) and
as a result their characteristic ways of approaching the phenomenon, too.
There is not, then, the one register in the methodology that lies behind
the archive as a whole.
The project per se contains research on very disparate contexts that are
impossible to assimilate given the specific characteristic of each city
from a social, economic or political perspective. The project doesn’t
set out to promote a homogeneous reading of the mechanisms of appropriation
of public space on a planetary scale but, on the contrary, to suggest
an approximation to certain post-it cases, so as to accentuate the peculiarities
of each context and to start a common dialogue between different perspectives.
The greater part of the work teams consist of young researchers. This
characteristic is fundamental in the mindset of the project inasmuch as
it gives explicit backing to the absolute intersection between the processes
of the formation, production and circulation of ideas. |
direct its attention towards the minuscule, thus
correcting the arrogance of traditional architecture. |
