The Dance of Maintenance and the Dynamics of Urban Assemblages: The Daily (Re)Assemblage of Paris Subway Signs

Denis, Jérôme; Pontille, David

doi:10.1007/978-981-13-2110-8_6

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Understood in this way, the street is replete with organizing. For street vendors (Bromley, 2000;Cross, 2000), buskers (Kaul, 2014;Richter, 2012), door-to-door salespeople (Harrison, Massi & Chalmers, 2014), taxi drivers (Faber, 2005;Monroe, 2016), police agents (Machin & Marie, 2011;Martin, 2018), postal workers (Geddes, 2005), employees of waste removal companies (Brinkmann & Tobin, 2001), homeless people (Balkin, 1992;Snow and Anderson, 1993), and maintenance workers (Denis & Pontille, 2018), the street is an integral part of their economic activity, and the ability to predict its rhythms is part of everyday organizing. Street-based work is associated with casual labour as well as with illegality and danger, for example, in the drug trade (Gootenberg, 2009;Ruggiero & South, 1997) and in sex work (Roche, Neaigus & Miller, 2005;Weitzer, 2009).…”

Section: The Street As a Site For Organizingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Street and Organization Studies

Cnossen

Vaujany

Haefliger

2020

Organization Studies

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Work and organization increasingly happen in transit. People meet in coffee shops and write emails from their phones while waiting for buses or sitting outdoors on benches. Business meetings are held in airports and projects are run from laptops during travel. We take the street as a place where organizing in transit accumulates. While the organization studies field has been catching up with various related phenomena, including co-working, digital nomadism, and mobile and online communities, we argue that it has overlooked what has historically been the most important site for organizational activity outside of organizations. The street has been both location and inspiration for organizing, whether political, social or governmental. It is a space of both planning and spontaneity, of silent co-existence and explicit conflict, and therefore offers abundant empirical and methodological opportunities. It is surprising that the street and the experiences it brings with it have remained largely outside the scope of organization studies. We suggest that organization scholars take to the street, and offer recommendations as to how to do so. Specifically, we explore the tensions that become apparent when organizing happens in and through the street.

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Section: The Street As a Site For Organizingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Street and Organization Studies

Cnossen

Vaujany

Haefliger

2020

Organization Studies

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“…Beyond this renewed attention to unsolicited inscriptions, which has been distributed between city residents and specialized workers, the maintenance of graffiti removal in Paris is also a matter of rhythm. It sets a very specific pace for the ‘dance of maintenance’ (Denis and Pontille, 2019).…”

Section: A Distributed Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maintenance epistemology and public order: Removing graffiti in Paris

Denis

Pontille

2020

Soc Stud Sci

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Taking part in the growing concern for repair and maintenance in STS, this article investigates epistemic dimensions of maintenance. Drawing on an ethnographic study of graffiti removal in Paris, it highlights the different objects of knowledge involved in this specific setting of urban maintenance and documents their relationships. It shows that, inspired by the ‘broken windows’ thesis, the anti-graffiti program that emerged in Paris at the turn of 2000 articulates three objects of knowledge – public order, graffiti and the city – whose intertwined definitions root a restorative maintenance epistemology. Such epistemology unfolds in an assemblage of policy documents, regulatory texts, contracts, technical specifications and procedures, information infrastructures and categories, removal techniques, tools and situated gestures, which take place in municipality’s offices, contractors’ workshops and during each intervention in the streets. The Paris graffiti removal program instantiates a preservationist approach which focuses on recurrent visual signs of disruption occurring on the façades and rests on both a distributed attention and a particular pace for interventions. It involves three main operations: measuring surfaces, identifying public expressions and composing with materials. None of these operations are neutral. Aimed at preserving a specific order, they also participate in the daily transformation of urban reality. The heterogeneous knowledge at play in maintenance practices intricately takes part in the becoming of the things whose stability it strives to ensure.

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“…So do the objects in museums where both traditional and contemporary artworks manifest their thingness and require a special artificial ‘object-sustaining environment’ to control the unrelenting process of physical degradation. While these studies acknowledged the mutability of objects and built form, they also examined how stabilization (or closure) happens through repair and in a continuous ‘dance of maintenance’ (Denis and Pontille, 2019) that reconfigures the relations among caretakers and broken things and thus reshuffles related sociomaterial networks. They reinstated the importance of tracing the invisible work behind the long and often never-ending trail of care and maintenance of fragile art objects and historical buildings needed to maintain their integrity over time.…”

Section: The Life Of Architectural Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Giants in the lab: Model conservation and the anaphoric progression of design

Yaneva

2020

Journal of Material Culture

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How is an architectural model consolidated and re-assembled in conservation to be able to continue to communicate a design concept? How does the work of care and preservation of models reveal knowledge about the often taken-for-granted dynamics of creative processes? To provide answers, this article draws on Etienne Souriau’s philosophy of creativity and follows how the ‘modes of existence’ of creative works are re-enacted in the anaphoric progression of conservation. Basing her findings on ethnography at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the author examines the epistemic complexity of specific situations of assessing, preserving and assembling large complex scale models. Unpacking the specificity of model conservation, it is argued, allows us to challenge two established beliefs on creativity: the myth of the stable ontology of historically valuable cultural objects and the myth of teleology of creative processes. Conservation-in-action demonstrates the subtle mechanics of crafting historiographic knowledge in the arts.

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The Dance of Maintenance and the Dynamics of Urban Assemblages: The Daily (Re)Assemblage of Paris Subway Signs

Cited by 3 publications

References 34 publications

The Street and Organization Studies

The Street and Organization Studies

Maintenance epistemology and public order: Removing graffiti in Paris

Giants in the lab: Model conservation and the anaphoric progression of design

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