A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
The void : Urban wasteland as political space
The rugged field and group of trees between housing estates or next to the railroad tracks, the left-over space of deserted industrial areas, the vacant demolition site of a central city block – they could all be termed ‘urban voids’. However, they are often anything but voids, in a literal sense, as they are not empty, or deserted. Yet they are ‘urban voids’, lacking an evident function, or a definition according to a plan. It is a category of urban space constructed as a nothingness, even though the very same space is often used for a variety of purposes. The aim of this thesis is to show how the urban void becomes as the constitutive outside of the City. It investigates the difference made between well-defined urban spaces (known by names such as ‘street’, ‘park’, ‘parking lot’, ‘housing block’) and the other kind of space. The production of the void – either it is made a no-space, devoid of any meaning, or a mesmerising rabbit- hole leading to another world – is here understood as fundamentally political. With a relational conception of space and an anti-essentialist conception of politics and the political, the author conducts a deconstruction- inspired analysis of the becoming of the urban void as another kind of space. The Derridean notion of an undecidable provides a figure of thought that hinges the analysis together with a particular way of under- standing how dominant discourses on the City and conceptualisations of the urban void interact to deter- mine each other. It does not present a “truer” version of the urban void, but aims to shake up the dominant modes of conceptualising the phenomenon. The analysis engages a variety of texts – whether in the shape of what one might call ‘theory’, or ‘empiri- cal material’, or a TV-series, or a novel – and the thoughts provoked by working with those texts, have been edited into a montage. Fieldwork – in Athens (Greece), Berlin (Germany), Brasília (Brazil), Malmö and Stockholm (Sweden) – interviews, analyses of policies and plans, and close readings of ...
The void : Urban wasteland as political space
The rugged field and group of trees between housing estates or next to the railroad tracks, the left-over space of deserted industrial areas, the vacant demolition site of a central city block – they could all be termed ‘urban voids’. However, they are often anything but voids, in a literal sense, as they are not empty, or deserted. Yet they are ‘urban voids’, lacking an evident function, or a definition according to a plan. It is a category of urban space constructed as a nothingness, even though the very same space is often used for a variety of purposes. The aim of this thesis is to show how the urban void becomes as the constitutive outside of the City. It investigates the difference made between well-defined urban spaces (known by names such as ‘street’, ‘park’, ‘parking lot’, ‘housing block’) and the other kind of space. The production of the void – either it is made a no-space, devoid of any meaning, or a mesmerising rabbit- hole leading to another world – is here understood as fundamentally political. With a relational conception of space and an anti-essentialist conception of politics and the political, the author conducts a deconstruction- inspired analysis of the becoming of the urban void as another kind of space. The Derridean notion of an undecidable provides a figure of thought that hinges the analysis together with a particular way of under- standing how dominant discourses on the City and conceptualisations of the urban void interact to deter- mine each other. It does not present a “truer” version of the urban void, but aims to shake up the dominant modes of conceptualising the phenomenon. The analysis engages a variety of texts – whether in the shape of what one might call ‘theory’, or ‘empiri- cal material’, or a TV-series, or a novel – and the thoughts provoked by working with those texts, have been edited into a montage. Fieldwork – in Athens (Greece), Berlin (Germany), Brasília (Brazil), Malmö and Stockholm (Sweden) – interviews, analyses of policies and plans, and close readings of ...
The void : Urban wasteland as political space
VON SCHÉELE, CECILIA (author)
2016-09-16
Lund Political Studies; (181) (2016) ; ISSN: 0460-0037
Theses
Electronic Resource
English
Political Science , urban void , urban wasteland , urban planning , urban politics , space , rhythm , undecidable , montage , Derrida , Massey
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