Scenes from an urban outside

Abstract

This contribution to the Scenes & Sounds section of CITY reflects on the experience of feeling 'outside' the urban by focusing on urban absences. The argument is developed first through theoretical speculations on planetary urbanism, emotions and absences/presences. The paper then mobilises autobiographical accounts concerning the emotions that I experienced during a summer spent in an alpine village. The paper suggests that, in my emotional sphere, the village was a 'constitutive outside' of the urban, particularly through the manipulation of feelings of distance from, and proximity to, the urban. In this sense, the paper proposes that the village was not simply a 'negative other' of the urban; rather, it may be regarded as an outside which was relationally constructed in a position of continuity with the inside: the extra-urban may include and exceed the urban, and it may emotionally perform the role of a constitutive outside

Absence as an affordance: thinking with(out) water on the inland waterways

“…With the help of the geographies of ruins and hauntings 24 it is useful to consider material absences simultaneously tangible and intangible: meaningful, affective, embodied and experiential, not things in themselves, but relational and ever-emergent conditions. 25 Edensor defines these key notions of material absence as follows:…”

Towards a post-foundational geography: Spaces of negativity, contingency, and antagonism

“…4.Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek, just like other post-foundational political theorists, have thereby been inspired by Jacques Derrida’s (1988) notion of the “constitutive outside” (see also Marchart, 2007; see Derickson, 2016; Roskamm, 2015, 2019; Vanolo, 2019). …”