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This article deals with the relationship between a sonic entanglement and its ruling in a weekly assembly. In doing so, material participation is foregrounded through focus on this specific entanglement and the ways in which it is enacted within the context of a weekly assembly of a citizen-led project. Based on ethnographic work developed in el Ca...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... article is about the negotiation of a noise complaint in the weekly assembly of a citizen-led project developed in a temporary urban site: el Campo de Cebada (see Figure 1). It is about how a controversy around noise and music emerges, develops and is negotiated, and how one specific assembly deals with it. Drawing on a socio-material approach -and particularly, on an ANT sensitivity -the article takes into consideration not only the role of humans, but also the role of several non-humans that affected and were affected by the course of events. Consequently, my focus foregrounds materiality, looking at the distinct actors, mechanisms and devices that played a role in and through the assembly. The aim of the paper is to investigate the ways in which an assembly dealt with a controversy of a particular socio-material entanglement, and to shed light into the political mechanisms and practices that were enacted to govern and manage such controversy. In the context of the present special issue -that proposes to work with the idea that Social Movements could be understood as Actor-Networks -I have taken the opportunity to delve into el Campo de Cebada (El Campo hereafter), where I conducted fieldwork during the spring and summer of 2015. My interest in el Campo rests in its hybrid nature: it is both an activist project and an open-air public space 2 . el Campo could be described as a citizen-led urban intervention, or, as some literature would frame it, a temporary use urban site (see for example Bishop & Williams, 2012;Ferreri, 2015;Oswalt, Overmeyer, & Misselwitz, 2013;SenStadt, 2007). El Campo's project began in 2010 as a result of the confluence of several situated events and circumstances in the specific socio-political context of ...
Context 2
... article is about the negotiation of a noise complaint in the weekly assembly of a citizen-led project developed in a temporary urban site: el Campo de Cebada (see Figure 1). It is about how a controversy around noise and music emerges, develops and is negotiated, and how one specific assembly deals with it. ...
Citations
... In this sense, there did exist just a few rules as a sort of internal regulation. These rules solely pretended to give a minimum level of order through the following bases: activities would only be approved in a general assembly; noise level would not disturb neighbours [104]; access would always be free of any charge; there would exist an opening schedule, cleanliness would be made after enjoying the space; no violence and no discrimination would be allowed within the premises. On the other hand, funding issue is also based in freedom, in order that the economic sustainability would never depend on institutions, administrations, or private companies. ...
Cities are complex systems requiring urban design models that balance order and disorder. Collective creativity initiatives engage citizens in these processes, empowering bottom-up approaches that prioritize people and social well-being within urban development. This paper investigates an 'Urban Laboratory' as a case study, examining the potential of collective creativity to address urban complexity. The successful and ongoing project 'El Campo de Cebada' in Madrid, Spain, demonstrates how a community transformed a vacant lot into a vibrant social hub. The phases of this study include case selection, data collection, data analysis, and presentation of the results. This study identifies key enabling factors, including agents, management, social dynamics, infrastructure, and actions. These insights offer a methodological framework for designing future collaborative, resilient, and inclusive urban spaces, addressing the complex needs of communities within our cities.
... In this sense, there existed just a few rules as a sort of internal regulation. These rules solely pretended to give a minimum level of order through the following bases: activities would only be approved in a general assembly; noise level would not disturb neighbours [106]; access would always be free of any charge; there would exist an opening schedule; cleanliness would be maintained after enjoying the space; no violence and no discrimination would be allowed within the premises. On the other hand, the funding issue was also based in freedom, in a way that the economic sustainability would never depend on institutions, administrations, or private companies. ...
Cities are complex systems requiring urban design models that balance order and disorder. Collective creativity initiatives engage citizens in these processes, empowering bottom-up approaches that prioritize people and social well-being within urban development. This paper investigates an 'Urban Laboratory' as a case study, examining the potential of collective creativity to address urban complexity. The successful and ongoing project 'El Campo de Cebada' in Madrid, Spain, demonstrates how a community transformed a vacant lot into a vibrant social hub. The phases of this study include case selection, data collection, data analysis, and presentation of the results. This study identifies key enabling factors, including agents, management, social dynamics, infrastructure, and actions. These insights offer a methodological framework for designing future collaborative, resilient, and inclusive urban spaces, addressing the complex needs of communities within our cities.
The article contributes to understanding of how collective life in post-socialist mass housing is ordered by discussing the ambiguous relations that exist between sound, privacy, and home. It demonstrates how residents of Severnaya Dolina, a large housing estate in St. Petersburg, Russia, experience certain neighborly sounds as nuisances and calls to action to react to and prevent sonic intrusions. Privacy at home is a collective achievement: Residents assemble complex combinations of materials, regulations, relationships, and practices to achieve privacy in their apartments. Analyses of sources, circulation, articulations, evaluations, and contestations of sound in Severnaya Dolina demonstrate how residents, who can hardly rely on the local authorities to create and regulate privacy, employ various sound politics. They define who and what is accountable for sound circulations and evoke various means to create privacy.
This research begins with a hypothesis: what if, rather than thinking about public participation as an instrument of planning and urban design, we consider it a socio-material performative phenomenon; in other words, what if, rather than trying to design, organize, devise or implement public participation, we understand it as something that already happens in everyday urban ordinary practices. To develop this dissertation from this point of departure, I focus on ‘eventual publics’, a concept that combines the idea of ‘eventual urbanism’—which accounts for practices developed in temporarily used urban sites—and the pragmatist understanding of a public as a ‘set of actors affected by an issue and organised around it in order to solve it’. In particular, the research analyses the case of El Campo de la Cebada—a publicly owned urban site in Madrid managed by a heterogeneous group of people—and concentrates at the specific relationship between temporality and materiality. Drawing on an STS perspective—and particularly using ANT—the argument is built around three questions: How are communities and collectives formed? How is conflict managed? And how are care practices deployed? Based on a five-month fieldwork developed in El Campo de la Cebada during the summer of 2015, a visual ethnography was performed to dwell into these questions. The ethnographic account emerging from that experience delves into three very specific and situated practices: (1) accessing the site, (2) dealing with a noise complaint, and (3) watering the plants; three very ordinary practices thickly described that allow me to show the fluid nature of socio-material collectives formed during the enactment of participation, the ways in which issues are governed in a welcoming and radical open manner, and the different relationships between heterogeneous entities materialised thought affective practices of care. Ultimately, the aim of this thesis is twofold: on one hand, to foreground the intimate, mutual and intertwined relationship between temporality and materiality, which shapes both urban theory and practice, and on the other hand, to consider how the incorporation of a socio-material enquiry into urban studies could have an impact in the development of urban thought.
