Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2020

During the Peronist years (1943–55), architect Jorge Sabaté designed several exhibitions and ephemeral installations to be erected in the central streets of Buenos Aires. These interventions were aimed at transforming the face of the city, repurposing its spaces for unprecedented uses and expressing the right ‘the people’ had gained to free time, outings and leisure. In this article, I examine the architectural illustrations that Sabaté appended to the rest of his plans. The incorporation into his drawings of the social practices of metropolitan strolling is one of the ways in which the Peronist exhibitions designed by Sabaté relate to urban culture. By staging the masses in these materials, Sabaté proposes a whole new form of conviviality in public space and depicts the popular sectors aspiring to a new lifestyle made possible by the intersection of technological progress and expanded access to consumer goods.

Art subcultures, and music scenes in particular, have featured prominently in academic discourse on gentrification in the neo-liberal city. Although scholarly accounts have done much to clarify the process through which music scenes become implicated and entangled within wider patterns of urban transformation and redevelopment, these studies often leave us with a flattened and undertheorized picture of the scenes themselves. Departing from David Ley’s conception of the ‘cultural field of gentrification’, I sketch out an analytical framework for understanding the heterogenous and contested character of music scenes in the face of urban change, focusing on a case study of the underground music scene in Rome’s Pigneto neighbourhood in 2017. As variegated waves of scene participants drift into new spaces, scenes coalesce into distinct territories, administered by venues and delineated by ‘scene ideologies’ – matrices of ethical and aesthetic values and judgements constituting a collective scene habitus. This complicates any facile conception of artistic communities as either unwitting agents of gentrification or isolated underground enclaves; rather, premised on collective rituals of aesthetic judgement and differentiation, music scenes constitute a continuum of cultural production whose spatial practices both generate and subvert conditions for their eventual appropriation by market forces.

Instagram is a virtual, multi-authored platform that symbolizes geographic realities by allowing its users to capture time-and-space-specific characteristics through photographs or videos. As opposed to the selective reproduction of dominant discourses, Instagram users collaboratively produce multiple truths based on their own personal perceptions and experiences. Considering that favelas in Brazil are some of the most stigmatized, misrepresented and misunderstood places in the world, this article follows the term ‘favela’ (#favela) to better understand how it is being used by the masses in 2019. Ultimately, this article analyses the space and identity of ‘favelas’ in urban Brazil by dividing our findings into three separate categories: (1) ‘hashtag favela as advertising’, (2) ‘hashtag favela as tourism’ and (3) ‘hashtag favela as everyday’. We found that although Instagram promotes the ability of favela residents to represent themselves, #favela continues to be co-opted by outsiders. Interestingly, when the term is co-opted by outsiders, its meaning is transformed from a physical space or neighbourhood into one of the many types of commodities to be bought and sold.

This article analyses the way Horem Pádem (Up and Down, 2004) registers the neo-liberalizing effects of the post-socialist transition on urban space and urban sociality in its representation of Prague. The transition involved an ideological and ethical reorientation that challenged definitions of value and worth. Moreover, through the remaking of the urban environment, neo-liberalization is a contextually embedded process that restructures the conditions of the everyday. Post-transition, Prague was claimed by the logic of post-industrial capital accumulation, with investment in retail and tourist facilities transforming the urban core into a new consumption landscape. I argue that the film’s exploration of the relationship between urban space and identity maps the dislocations produced by the insertion of the periphery of Europe into the neo-liberal space of flows, and the serial displacements that are its effects. Rebordering, de-territorialization and displacement are the key metaphors through which the film captures the emotional horizons of the characters caught up in the multi-scalar reconfiguration of economy, society and space. The narrative presents itself as an allegory of Czech nationhood, whose insertion into a rescaled, capitalist Europe the ‘little people’ populating Hrejbek’s film meet with an admixture of opportunism, disaffection, tribalism and defensive localism.