Human and post-human forms at the edge of the urban: an auto-ethnography of the suburbs around a ring road

Keywords: Suburban infrastructures, Interstitial spaces, Auto-ethnography, Hybrid urbanization
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 34

Abstract

Highways, especially suburban ones, can be read as boundaries that encircle the city while creating connections, orientation of flows, inclusion or exclusion (Addie 2016; Young, Keil 2010).
Yet, the spaces crossed by major roads, when considered as fields rather than lines, and beyond purely technical approaches, become a source of interstices, rendering possible unprecedented urban forms (Phelps, Silva 2018).

How to address the complexity of these interstitial spaces in which the hybrid nature of the urban is increasingly strong and self-evident (Swyngedouw 1996)?
Paradigms that counterpose city and countryside no longer seem adequate (Braun 2005), urban dynamics are so pervasive that the idea of city risks becoming an ideology (Wachsmuth 2014). Avoiding a single interpretive model in favor of freer explorations of the urban assemblages allows then to repoliticize these territories and read them beyond the idea of marginality often associated (Angelo, Wachsmuth 2015; Keil 2019).

The case study I present is located in Cagliari(IT), in the suburbs around the SS554 ring road. These are creative spaces that establish a new relationship with space and the non-human, while showing a strong tension between the infrastructure management and the needs of the inhabitants.
In order to build an awareness of these non-linear spaces I propose an embodied immersion, with few rules and not renouncing to any language, with the aim of telling single and different fragments of the more-than-human relationship with this space. The result is a creative and contemplative ethno-photographic narration of these edge urbanities made possible by the infrastructure.