Convenors
Cecilia Brazioli, University of Milano
cecilia.brazioli@unimi.it (corresponding scholar)
Federico La Bruna, Stray Urbanities
federico.labruna.work@gmail.com
Vertical or horizontal, smooth or rough, warm or cold, permeable or resistant, urban surfaces are among the most continuous yet taken-for-granted elements of everyday urban experience. Walls, pavements, façades, screens, benches, windows and street furniture are not simply backdrops to urban life: they are material interfaces through which bodies, machines and other species encounter the city. They are touched, walked upon, heard, smelled; in turn they warm, chill, resist, facilitate and slow the bodies that meet them. Weather, pollution, vegetation, human and non-human use, leave their mark, as paint, cracks, stains, posters, graffiti, signs, moss, ivy, accumulate, coexist and compete across them. Urban scholarship has largely treated surfaces as evidence of something else: a visible skin for the hidden flows, infrastructure and metabolism taken to constitute the real city (Kaika and Swyngedouw 2000). Recent work has begun to grant surfaces their own thickness, showing them as layered territories, sites of inscription, regulation, and contestation (Andron 2024; Brighenti and Kärrholm, 2018). This panel presses further, with a deliberate provocation. What if there is no hidden depth to recover? What if the city is available to us through these porous, sensitive surfaces that do not conceal relations but bring them within reach – to be seen, felt, and performed?
Taking up the invitation by Best and Marcus (2009) to stop treating the visible as a symptom—and surface as the opposite of depth—we approach surfaces in their sensory and affective register, as sites where urban knowledge is produced and as the contact zone where human and non-human inhabitants meet. Surfaces are neither inert skins nor autonomous agents: they are mediators that register, hold and transform what passes across them.
Sensory ethnography guides our approach (Pink 2015). Surfaces ask to be read through bodies, over time, and along atmospheres. We therefore welcome diverse methodological approaches, including, but not limited to, sensory and visual ethnography, mobile methods, material and multispecies approaches, sound and olfactory research, photography, video, mapping and experimental forms of ethnographic engagement.
Open questions
We invite empirical and methodological interventions engaging with questions such as:
- How might surface-oriented inquiry challenge established ways of producing knowledge about urban environments and their atmospheres?
- Which sensory, embodied and material methods make urban surfaces ethnographically knowable beyond the visual and the representational?
- What human, non-human and material relations become perceptible when surfaces are approached as interfaces rather than objects? And how?
- What happens to urban explanation if we suspend the assumption that the significance of cities lies beneath its surface?
- How do processes of weathering, decay, maintenance, repair, inscription and erasure produce temporal and affective layers? And who holds the legitimacy to govern these processes?
- How do sensors, screens, and coded surfaces change what the city’s interface can register?
- How do we compose an account of surface that does not fall back on the opposition between surface and depth, exterior and interior, skin and viscera?
Keywords
Public space, materiality, embodiment, urban conflict, urban inscriptions, governance, atmospheres
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Urban studies; Human geography; STS; Sociology of Senses; Multispecies studies
References
Andron, S. (2024). Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City. Routledge.
Best, S., & Marcus, S. (2009). Surface reading: An introduction. Representations, 108(1), 1-21.
Brighenti, A.M., & Kärrholm, M. (2018) (eds.), Urban Walls: Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces. Routledge.
Kaika, M., & Swyngedouw, E. (2000). Fetishizing the modern city: The phantasmagoria of urban technological networks. International journal of urban and regional research, 24(1), 120-138.
Pink, S. (2015). Doing Sensory Ethnography. 2nd ed. SAGE.
Convenors’ bio
Cecilia Brazioli (they/she) is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research (SOMET), a NASP doctoral program jointly offered by the University of Milan and the University of Turin. Their research explores the processes of value attribution to urban spaces through creative and expressive practices, at the intersection of urban studies, valuation studies, and human geography. They works primarily with qualitative and visual methods to investigate how individuals and collectives experience, interpret, and shape urban spaces. They co-authored “Atmospheres of degrado. Visibility and rhythms in Milan’s public transport” (with F. La Bruna, 2024, Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa).
Federico La Bruna (he/they) holds a PhD in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research (SOMET), a NASP doctoral school program jointly offered by the University of Milan and the University of Turin. His doctoral thesis, Making Up Urban Space. A Comparative Ethnography of Social Distancing on Public Transport, examined the spatial and social configurations of public mobility in Amsterdam, Milan, and New York City. His research interests include urban studies, ethnographic methods, senses and sensibilities. He co-authored the article Atmospheres of degrado. Visibility and rhythms in Milan’s public transport (with Brazioli C., 2024, in Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa).