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    STUDIA SOCIOLOGIA - Issue no. 2 / 2014  
         
  Article:   SPATIAL TACTICS AS AESTHETIC URGE. A CASE STUDY ON TIMIȘOARA’S PARTIALLY FAILED URBAN ACTIVISM.

Authors:  .
 
       
         
  Abstract:  There is much talk today, especially in academic circles, around the need for a new paradigm in urban design policies. Participatory processes, guerrilla tactics, appropriations of liminal space, urban pioneering, all gathered under Lefebvre’s banner proclaiming “our” right to the city, seem to be today’s fashionable calls to arms for a generation of disgruntled young urban planners, architects, artists, urban geographers, sociologists, and with your permission anthropologists. And how can it not be so. The speculative, neoliberal - to use a much hated word - societal and spatial condition that we find ourselves in, especially in post-socialist Romania, has left a serious mark on an already dysfunctional public space. In this chaotic context, this call is by all means a necessary call. We do need to reconsider both our discourses and practice when it comes to public space. We do however live in a equally strange condition, that of post or late post-modernity, a time of flows of power and hyper-real places, where, as Castells (1996) notices, the structures themselves have become ubiquitous, where the militant, revolutionary urges of Lefebvre (1974) or Debord (1967) are sometimes nothing more but a fashionable simulacra devoid of power and meaning. In the age of trans-aesthetics everything can be turned into an aesthetic experience, into a fashion statement. Assuming the role of the much hated devil’s advocate, I will try to put forth just such examples, of so called do it yourself tactics that turn out to be nothing more than the aesthetic manifestation of these tribal fashions, as Bauman would call them. I am assuming this role as a self aware member of just one of these tribes, as a participant to some of these tactical appropriations in my own city of Timișoara, discussing their intentions, projections and ultimate failure within the greater societal spectrum.

Keywords: spatial tactics, situations, urban activism, aesthetic impulse
 
         
     
         
         
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