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Urban Rhythms

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Abstract

From the observation of personal activities, recurring patterns can vaguely be identified. It is more a feeling and a habit, rather than a conscious decision, to approach a task in a similar manner every time. Embedded in a string of decisions, buried under constant adjustments to external demands, there seems to be an operational compass guiding individual actions attached to a much larger sociocultural field of interlinked conditions.

Is it then possible to describe such individual routines in terms of conditions reflecting time and space? And to what extent does this have significance in an urban setting? These questions have led to the research discussed in the following text and will be examined in detail on various levels of scale and connectedness. To do so, various different perspectives are adopted to test and explore the concept of repetition and its implications spatially and socially in an urban context.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The concept reaches back to Aristotle who used it as hexis translated as state or habitus, implying the duration both in space and time (Urmson 1973; Malikail 2003).

  2. 2.

    Bourdieu refers to Emile Durkheim in the case of the history reference. He quotes him as: “In each one of us, in different degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed, in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the presence is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today. It is just that we don’t directly feel the influence of these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us. They constitute the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently we have a strong tendency not to recognise their existence and to ignore their legitimate demands. By contrast, with the most recent acquisitions of civilisation we are vividly aware of them just because they are recent and consequently have not had time to be assimilated into our collective unconscious” (Durkheim, 1977. p. 11, as cited in Bourdieu 1990, p. 56).

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Neuhaus, F. (2015). Urban Rhythms. In: Emergent Spatio-temporal Dimensions of the City. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09849-4_1

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