Streets: Spaces, Struggles, (Hi)Stories

Abstract

“What inexhaustible food for speculation, do the streets of London afford!”, Charles Dickens claims in Sketches By Boz. Similarly, the STREETS of Paris and Cairo as well as in Madrid, Vienna, Brussels, and Copenhagen afford food for speculation.

But how do they mediate the bodily, political and cultural practices in a city? How do they affect our understanding of life in an urban environment?

While squares often favor a certain theatrical performativity, STREETS especially promote complexity and mobility both of which are essential to urban modernity.

On the other hand, STREETS also frame the repetitivity of everyday life and all those habits that make the urban lifeworld possible. Wouldn’t most of us describe our urban home by some kind of STREET reference?

There are STREETS in the city centers and in the faubourgs (gentrified or not), but also in suburbia. In this way, the very term “street” bridges the differentiated forms which make up urban reality of the 20th and the 21st centuries.

This year’s 4Cities conference at the University of Copenhagen focuses on STREETS in this wide sense of the word. Titled STREETS: SPACES, STRUGGLES, (HI)STORIES, the conference addresses the socio-spatial entity of the street from all scholarly viewpoints represented in the interdisciplinary and trans-faculty intellectual collective of this Erasmus Mundus Master Course (4Cities.eu).

Programme

  • 'Streets: A Laboratory for Urban Speculation
    Martin Zerlang, University of Copenhagen

  • Revolving Shutters: Life and Death of an Urban Invention
    Walter Matznetter, Universität Wien

  • Streets versus Barricades
    Henrik Reeh, University of Copenhagen

  • Jogging in the Street: Michel de Certeau and Contemporary Urban Practices
    Wenque Yu & Fred Paxton, 4Cities – Erasmus Mundus Master Course

  • The Street as Stage for Post-Carbon Transition
    Joshua Grigsby, Universität Wien

  • Opposition to Open-Street CCTV: A Blind Spot
    Pauline Dekeersmaecker & Corentin Debailleul, Université Libre de Bruxelles

  • Street Names and the Battle of Historical Memories
    Rosa de la Fuente, Universidad Complutense, Madrid