Explore and Experience the Urban Field
Text by Carolin Genz & Diana Lucas-Drogan, first published in The Urban Transcript Journal, Berlin. One can observe a renaissance in architecture, art and urban anthropology as in other cross-disciplines, rethinking the concepts of maps and cartography to capture the perceptions of the urban everyday. Moreover, academic as well as non-academic disciplines with a research…
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As part of our skill-building approach, we integrate into our workshop and provide material and tools for urban ethnographic research. For a little exercise to start with the method approach of “mapping”, the participants had to REmap their morning trip – with a very creative and deep thinking outcome.
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The spaces we inhabit are structured by power structures and rules. In this dependency, our body, performances, and the way we navigate urban space interlink. In her works Diana Lucas-Drogan (re)draws and performs the cultural codes in counter-mappings and reflects on methods of representing the research field. Working as a freelance architect and artist, she…
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One can observe academics as well as non-academic disciplines with a research interest in urban settings facing methodological challenges when searching for ways to visualize and analyze the urban every day, its social and spatial connections, interactions, infrastructures and complexities. As ethnographers, geographers, artists and urban planners, our research methods must navigate multiple scales of…
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The first part of Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe’s presentation was concluded with a group exercise on sensory mapping through smellscapes. She offered a variety of scents to the participants, from environment to consumption goods (dirt, fresh grass, dust, pipe tobacco, rye bread). The task was not to guess the smell, but to discuss and define with a partner…
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If we walk through the city and try to capture its hidden symbolic logic and cultural codes we are all influenced by our very own attitudes and perceptions, as well as our professional and social education. We might see the same city, but we see it in very different ways, with a different mindset. What could…
Read MoreDAY II | MAPPING EXERCISE The Ethnography in Urban Settings workshop included two mapping exercises; one on each day. On day one the workshop participants went out to sense the city and to try to map what they experienced, what they imagined in urban space, focusing on using their bodies and their own subjectivities and…
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Cognitive Mapping Exercise | Day 1 Which spaces/places matter for you the most, and how are they spatially connected? Mapping (Cognitive Mapping) helps to get access to interpretations of symbolic structures of the city (Greverus 1972, 1994). One can understand a map as “legible notes”. Mapping helps to get access to the spatial and social…
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The exercise for the “fieldwork excursion” for day one was folded and conceptualized by Carolin Genz and Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe. The first part of the walk was an exercise in learning to observe and sense the city. Starting at the corner of College Street and Spadina Avenue, the participants were asked to walk South –…
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We are getting excited during the preparations for the upcoming workshop “Ethnography in Urban Settings”. For our mapping exercise we designed a fold-up mapping booklet with a focus on the question: “How to capture what you are sensing?” Walking through the city and trying to capture its hidden symbolic logic, cultural, social and spatial codes is…
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Urban Ethnography Lab 