Someday I will be a Tourist in my Own City

Authors

  • José Machado Pais ICS-UL

Keywords:

urban life, city, temporalities, imaginary, cultural policies

Abstract

This contribution supported a paper recently presented in the thematic panel "Society, Urbanism and Cultural Policies" of the 10th Luso-Afro-Brazilian Congress of Social Sciences, held in Braga. The justification for maintaining the written approach of the oral intervention has one purpose: to show that, in the perspective of a phenomenological methodology, it is also possible to discover and problematize the city when we combine sociological sensibility and theoretical questioning with spontaneous observations: setbacks, messages in sugar packets, commercials, linguistic and behavioral expressions... ways for the city to act and to speak. From this methodological positioning, cultural models of urban life are questioned, whose supports vary from routine (metro-boulot-dodo) to avoidance (desires of hindering achievement that are recreated at the imaginary level). Taking the city as an object for thought, the hypothesis of dissension between the ciphered world of cultural policies, the world of real constraints and the imaginary world (of desires to be fulfilled, including dreams of consumption) is raised. To what extent can cultural policies contribute to a participatory citizenship, since the reconquest of the city's meaning?

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Published

2009-06-01

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Article