From Momentary to Historic: Rhythms in the Social Production of Urban Space, the Case of CalÇAda De Sant'Ana, Lisbon

Abstract

This paper presents a study of one street, Calçada de Sant'Ana in Lisbon, Portugal. In 2007, the authors lived on that street for a month. The stay facilitated observations that together help to understand how the social and the spatial are woven together, and how seemingly very different processes, time-scales and types of actor, such as momentary human encounters and slow decay of buildings, produce a specific socio-spatial continuum, a ‘street-phenomenon’. Calçada de Sant'Ana can be characterized as a collective work, an oeuvre. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's notion of rhythmanalysis, the paper explores how form, use and meaning are co-constitutive. Building on Doreen Massey's notion of urban places as specific articulations of both local and global, Gernot Böhme's idea that urban atmospheres concern the style and manner of the unfolding urban life, and Walter Benjamin's discussion of the porosity of space, we explore in detail a variety of moments in the social production of urban space. The study shows that an attention to urban rhythms provides important new insights in the analysis of public urban space. Calçada de Sant'Ana turns out to be a very positive example of open and inclusive contemporary public space, providing a counter-example to the dominant discourse of ‘erosion’ of its public character. Aspects of the case might be generalized as new tools of analysis and activism to create differential urban spaces elsewhere.