Abstract
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people circulate throughout the center of Belo Horizonte, the capital city of one of Brazil’s largest states. The physical space of this city changes constantly, and it is the site of conflicts with the government and among the population. Understanding the constant process of change is essential to performing appropriate ethnographic fieldwork. However, difficulties may occur when dealing with the temporal dimension of observation, when working with passersby, and with the current technological nature of recording artifacts. Traditional academic fieldwork has had trouble capturing this chameleonic city’s changing characteristics and its continuous expansion of urban images and representations. This chapter discusses the experiences related by The Urban Cartographies Research Project, a research group who dealt firsthand with such methodological difficulties. First, this research explores how temporality and spatiality are constructed in contemporary cities and tries to evidence the temporal mobility engendered by global capitalist fluxes, especially on developing countries and within the context of mega events, such as the FIFA World Cup. Next, this chapter describes and reviews the specific work of the research group, highlighting its methodological practices. Then it discusses some examples of urban interventions that focus on urban art experiences. Such experiences reveal ways of exploring and making academic findings visible, as well as inviting the city’s inhabitants to take part in participatory knowledge-based construction strategies. Finally, the research discusses the group’s recent experimental methodological procedures and outlines future actions that might allow for a better and more participatory understanding of an ever-changing and mobile city, thus allying the social sciences and various artistic practices.
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- 1.
Most of the industrial factories in Belo Horizonte are dedicated to automobile manufacturing, food production, and mining; the city is situated on the biggest iron reservoir in the country.
- 2.
The square’s name celebrates Brazilian Independence Day.
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This video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6-STW1_aqE. Last access: 4th of February, 2014.
- 4.
Some of these radio programs can be heard at: http://dajaneladomeuquarto.tumblr.com/post/3234283596/programacao-radio-le-1 and http://dajaneladomeuquarto.tumblr.com/post/4005368391/programacao-radio-le-2. Last access: 4th of February, 2014.
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Such features – the site-specific, the disruption of the social grid, and the value of participation – all have a performative lure that approximates such practices with the drift procedure so extensively used by the research group.
- 6.
Information on this work may be found at: http://www.haque.co.uk/evoke.php. Last visited on the 14th of February 2014.
- 7.
Information on this work may be found at: http://post.wokitoki.org/. Last visited on the 14th of February 2014.
- 8.
Information on this work may be found at: http://post.wokitoki.org/. Last visited on the 14th of February 2014. Cited translated by the author: “La propuesta indaga sobre la circulación, el valor de la información reconsiderando las nociones de identidad, territorio, frontera y ciudad.”
- 9.
Several projects focus on the potential of web map applications for developing people’s collaborations in the territory. Developed by the UNISINOS http://portoalegre.cc/, the main objective is to create “a space for citizen collaboration, where you can meet, discuss, inspire, and transform the city itself.”
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa em Minas Gerais, the CNPq, CAPES, and our colleagues from the Nucleurb who belong to the Centro de Convergência de Novas Mídias (New Media Convergence Center).
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Marra, P., Massera, C.A. (2015). Mobile Maps of Chameleonic Cities: Urban Cartographies and Methodological Procedures and Experiences. In: Marchese, F.T. (eds) Media Art and the Urban Environment. Future City, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15153-3_6
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