Abstract
Based on a post-foundationalist, ‘weak’ theoretical framework, this chapter argues that an understanding of the strategic possibilities towards the production of alternative urban futures can be enhanced significantly if ‘the urban’ is reimagined as contested, cooperative, and cultivational terrains upon which urban politics unfold. To this end, an elaborate imagery is proposed with an outset in the metaphorical pairing of terrain and landscape to create a space of thought within which the complex intersectionality of urban politics can be grasped, explored, and analysed in novel and innovative ways. Use of the metaphorisation is exemplified by drawing on the well-researched case of the Argentinazo, an instance of contentious urban politics that played out in Buenos Aires in the beginning of the 2000s.
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Notes
- 1.
Ricoeur used neither of these terms but applied an array of term pairs drawn from previous literature to characterise different aspects of interaction in the metaphorical process. These include the focus-frame pair from Max Black, the tenor-vehicle pair from I.E. Richards, and the subject-modifier pair from Monroe Beardsley.
- 2.
By ‘methodological cityism’ Angelo and Wachsmuth (2015, p. 20) refer to “an analytical privileging, isolation and perhaps naturalization of the city in studies of urban processes where the non-city may also be significant”.
- 3.
They actually do more than this by proposing that their distinction be used as a key element in the foundations of a new epistemology of the urban. I prefer to use it simply as a useful heuristic device for teasing out a certain subset of urban processes and their interrelations. Elevating it to the status of a universal framework for urban studies would do unjustifiable violence to the multiplicity of other urban processes, which it is incapable of capturing.
- 4.
This can be demonstrated by reading across Gramsci’s work as a whole instead of focusing merely on the passages on wars of position. Such a reading reveals four distinct uses of ‘terrain’: (1) in military analogies, terrain is mobilised to discuss political strategy (i.e. wars of position); (2) as an agricultural metaphor, terrain is used to elucidate the ‘cultivation’ of intellectuals and hegemony; (3) as a habitual figure of speech, terrain functions as synonym for ‘aspect’, ‘level’, or ‘dimension’; and (4) as a non-metaphorical term, terrain refers to naturally given material conditions (fertile soils, mineral resources, etc.) of an array of socio-political situations in different countries and regions (e.g. the Italian South and North, the European East and West, France, America, etc.).
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Fisker, J.K. (2019). Terrains and Landscapes of Urban Politics. In: Fisker, J., Chiappini, L., Pugalis, L., Bruzzese, A. (eds) Enabling Urban Alternatives. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1531-2_3
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