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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.

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 redirect its attention towards the minuscule, thus correcting the arrogance of traditional architecture.